A Look at African-American Trans Trailblazers

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http://www.ebony.com/news-views/trans-trailblazers

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Transgender African Americans have been active contributors to history, even though they have often been overlooked. Their presence and contributions are not a recent development, but can be traced back through the centuries. Consider the story of Lucy Hicks Anderson, who was born in 1886 in Waddy, KY. She made it quite clear that she was a girl and insisted on wearing dresses to school. The term “transgender” didn't exist at that time, but the doctor who examined her advised Lucy's mother to raise her as a girl.

As an adult, Lucy eventually got married and divorced twice while en route to Ventura, CA via Pecos, TX. Her second marriage-to soldier Reuben Anderson in 1944-introduced legal complications that led the Ventura County district attorney to prosecute her for perjury after it was discovered that she was born biologically male. He asserted that Anderson committed perjury when she signed the marriage license application and swore that there were 'no legal objections' to the marriage. Lucy expressed her conviction in her gender identity to reporters during the trial. "I defy any doctor in the world to prove that I am not a woman,” Anderson said. “I have lived, dressed, acted just what I am, a woman.” The jury convicted her of the perjury charge, but the judge sentenced her to ten years’ probation rather than send her to prison.

In 1953, while much of America focused on the story of Christine Jorgensen (a White woman who was the first person widely known to have undergone sex reassignment surgery) JET Magazine readers learned about Carlett Brown's attempt to become the "First Negro Sex Change." Transgender African Americans actively participated in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, incorporating tactics from those efforts into their own work toward liberation. The gender non-conforming African American youth in Philadelphia, PA who kick-started the Dewey's Lunch Counter Sit In and Protest in April and May of 1965 were a prime example of such involvement. It was the first protest specifically organized around and concerning trans issues, and preceded both the 1966 Compton's Cafeteria Riots and the better known 1969 Stonewall Riots in which African American transgender advocates such as Miss Major and Marsha P. Johnson (pictured) were involved.

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