Previous articleNext article FreeChallenging Dissemblance in Pauli Murray Historiography, Sketching a History of the Trans New NegroSimon D. Elin FisherSimon D. Elin Fisher Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn 1940, Pauli Murray and Adelene “Mac” McBean were the first African Americans to use nonviolent direct action to challenge Jim Crow segregation, protesting their placement in the back seat on a Greyhound bus traveling to visit Murray’s aunts in Durham, North Carolina. Just three years earlier, before Murray had met Mac through their work in Harlem, Murray was hospitalized after a mental health crisis. Her doctor, famous African American physician May E. Chinn, arranged for Murray to stay at the Long Island Rest Home, where she would meet with doctors Chinn thought could help get to the root of what Murray called “my conflict.”1 The term “conflict” captured the tension between Murray’s masculine sense of self and gender expression, attraction to “extremely feminine and heterosexual women,” and her female sex, a strain that would reach a breaking point “after each love affair that had become unsuccessful.”2 This was frequently the case, it seems, since she desired “monogamous married life,” but the women who might, as Murray later wrote, “admit attraction … feel unable to handle it, [and] usually suggest hospitalization and psychiatric care.”3 Murray penned those comments, among almost fifty other questions, in just that environment.4Murray was treated well at the hospital—she was gaining weight and the nightly sedatives did help her sleep. But the doctors she met with did not offer the solutions she needed to fully address her “conflict.” Most people believed that she was a woman attracted to other women, a homosexual, which, by 1937, was largely regarded by the medical community as a problem of the psyche. Murray instead asked doctors at the hospital about what caused an “inverted sex instinct,” which she defined as “wearing pants, wanting to be one of the men, doing things that fellows do, hating to be dominated by women unless I like them.” Next to the question, likely written during or after the appointment with the doctor, were the words “Answer – Glandular.”5The notion that an “inverted sex instinct” might be a “glandular” issue was not new to Murray. In the mid-1930s, she had been researching medical science from earlier decades that defined sex inversion as a kind of complete sex and gender reversal that included sexual attraction but forefronted the aspect of cross-gender expression. Although some sexologists continued to search for biological causes of same-sex desire, it was gender inversion that most were sure was rooted in the body, not the psyche. British sexologist Havelock Ellis was, according to biographer Rosalind Rosenberg, “most helpful” to Murray because he clearly differentiated between homosexuality, a pathological condition he believed was acquired, and gender inversion, a biological condition caused by illness or birth defect.6 Later sexologists would use this theory to propose the possibility of gender transition through sex organ transplant and, later, hormone therapy. However, other scientists saw a cure for gender nonnormative individuals in that testosterone could make an effeminate man more masculine, and estrogen could transform a masculine woman into a more feminine one.7One of the medical terms that Murray gravitated toward, “pseudo-hermaphrodite,” was Ellis’s term.8 He proposed that in a case of pseudo-hermaphroditism, a condition that would now fall under the term “intersexed,” a woman’s femininity, determined by the presence of female sex glands and hormones (ovaries and estrogen), was inhibited by the invisible yet powerful presence of a male sex gland (teste), that secreted its own masculine hormone (testosterone) and overrode her supposedly natural feminine disposition. (The opposite was proposed for a male-assigned patient.) Over the several documents Murray wrote in the late 1930s concerning her “conflict,” she regularly raised the question about “whether or not [she was] a pseudo-hermaphrodite.”9 She also asks if perhaps “one of [my] ‘genitals’ is male in composition,” although she later renders it an “impossibility,” written perhaps after meeting with the doctor or conducting further research on her own.10Since 2002, several scholars have taken up the archive containing Murray’s questions regarding her gender and sexuality during this period. In each case, most notably Rosenberg’s Jane Crow: The Life and Times of Pauli Murray and the chapter on Murray in Brittney Cooper’s Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, both published in 2017, Murray’s quest for information has been narrated as her own private mission, conducted largely through engagement with early twentieth-century sexology and endocrinology. For example, Rosenberg paints an image of Murray conducting this research in 1935, before her hospitalization: “Pauli repaired to the New York Public Library, where she spent her days in the American History Room, a quiet antechamber to the much larger central Reading Room. The library, with its vast holdings, well-organized card catalogue, and helpful reference librarians, was an ideal place to expand her knowledge. … She wanted to know more about her ‘boy-girl’ self.”11I love this image of Pauli Murray, alone in that quiet beautiful room, piles of scientific journals and textbooks surrounding her. Rosenberg’s list of Murray’s chosen authors includes Ellis, as well as Magnus Hirschfeld, the German Jewish sexologist who advocated for compassion and rights for sexual minorities in the face of ethnocentric nationalism in the 1920s. Gregorio Marañón, a Spanish physician, drew a direct connection between the endocrine system and one’s psychology. Interspersed within the European sexologists was American anthropologist Ruth Benedict, who had published about the “Berdache” [sic], the “she-men” of various American Indian tribes.12 According to Rosenberg, Murray kept her reading to herself, sharing what she learned only with her girlfriend at the time, Peggie Holmes. At the library, Murray was “lonely” but “better read.”13However, Murray could have gained more contemporary information regarding sexology and glandular science from other sources, although they are not mentioned in her archive nor histories written about her. In Joanne Meyerowitz’s foundational study of the history of transsexuality in the United States, she notes that in the 1930s, the information of this kind most readily available to American readers was the sensationalized accounts of sex change surgeries coming from Magnus Hirschfeld’s clinic in Germany.14 Most famously, Danish artist Lili Elbe had received an undisclosed form of surgery, likely the removal of the testes and an ovarian transplant, that had transformed her from a man to a woman.15 Her story was first published in the United States in 1933. Details of her treatment were sparse, but the articles that circulated described Elbe as a “hermaphrodite” with both testicles and ovaries.16 Meyerowitz argues that this was likely untrue, but it bolstered the prevailing theory that the presence of both testes and ovaries created a bigendered hormonal composition within the patient. Removal of one set of these sex glands allowed the other to fully dominate the endocrinological landscape and make the patient either fully male or fully female, rather than sex inverted.17A 1932 Baltimore Afro-American article, titled “Are Pansies People?,” briefly mentions an even more vague account of “an artist” who received treatment for “a painful condition” from a Swiss scientist that transformed him into a woman.18 Again, there are no details, but the reference to the kinds of treatment offered at Hirschfeld’s clinic is clear: “Doctors decided to operate, and the result was that he developed into a perfectly normal woman.” This article, which I discuss in detail below, demonstrates that at least some information regarding sex inversion, glandular conditions, “hermaphroditism,” and sex change were circulating in the African American press at the same time Murray was contemplating these issues for herself.Two documents in Murray’s personal archive point to the possibility that she gained this kind of knowledge not only from her personal research at the library but also from regularly reading the local black newspaper. After the handwritten lists of questions, there is a yellowed clipping from the front page of the November 11, 1939, issue of the New York Amsterdam News, the most widely read African American newspaper in the city. Titled “Sex Tablets Stir Medics,” the article excitedly reports that “a synthetic white tablet is being hailed today in medical circles as the magic formula that transforms effeminate males into normal men, strong and virile.”19 At the Post Graduate Medical School at nearby Columbia University, endocrinologists had organized an event revealing the results from experiments conducted on “shrill-voiced” men using “pure crystalline testosterone” to masculinize their bodies, voices, sexual behavior, and overall temperament. The doctor and—judging by the congratulatory tone of the article—the article’s author hailed the drug’s ability to transform the “human guinea pigs” into “husky, solidly built” young men. According to the experiment’s lead endocrinologist, Dr. Joseph Eidelsberg, the young men arrived at his clinic with their “male characteristics … suppressed to the point where they had almost disappeared.” The subjects were significantly lacking in “the hormones that normally are excreted by the male sex gland,” but they were effectively masculinized through the testosterone tablets. Two hundred doctors gathered to witness the experiment’s success. Murray clipped the article and, within weeks, marched to the endocrinology clinic to ask if the doctors would be willing to include her in their testosterone experiments.20At the time, Murray was living with Mac, a Harlem-born West Indian woman. The day after the Amsterdam News published the “sex tablet” research, Mac and Murray penned a letter to the editor, thanking them for the article and taking seriously “the problems arising from sexual maladjustments in the individual.”21 African Americans facing these issues were the “minority of minorities,” and due to “racial prejudice coupled with economic difficulties,” black scientists and physicians had no ability to conduct similar experiments. “The sex problem,” she concluded, “must be discussed openly and frankly, and with great humility,” and the Amsterdam News article served as an eloquent model. This typed letter, signed A. McBean, is also included in the archive folder.Rosenberg’s vignette describing Murray alone in the quiet library is quite different from the idea of Murray and Mac reading the Amsterdam News article together and talking it over with friends, as Doreen Drury postulates. I like to imagine the couple reading it over breakfast like thousands of other black Harlemites did that morning, nearly spitting out their oatmeal as they saw the headline and realized the possibilities entailed within what they read. In Rosenberg’s narration, Murray is by herself and only talks to her girlfriend about what she is reading, suggesting that the quest for information about gender nonnormativity is a solitary one, conducted outside and away from one’s so-called regular life—in Murray’s case, away from her racial and economic justice work and the African American network of activists she was connected to. But in the second narrative regarding the publication of the testosterone experiment and the subsequent letter to the editor, Murray gains her information from within a broad African American circuit of information that likely included the activists she worked with on a daily basis. Given that the Amsterdam News was so widely read, and the story ran on the front page, Murray’s colleagues, friends, and just about everyone else she encountered that day had probably seen the same headline.The contrast between the account of Murray’s research into gender nonnormativity as a private engagement with sexology experts and the notion of a transgender discourse circulating within an African American public raises some important questions about the way we understand Murray’s archived documents and tell the story of her gender nonnormativity during this period. Since 2002, Murray scholars have been using the term “transgender” to describe Murray’s gender identity but have not contextualized it nor her archive within the social history of American transsexuality or the African American history of (trans)sexuality of the period. While this history is situated before the more modern identity categories “transgender” or “transsexual” had become available for general usage in the United States, historical work on gender variant African Americans, black trans cultural production, and discourses of gender inversion in the first half of the twentieth century provides useful components of trans history during this period.22While this historiography might be slim in comparison with that of African American gay and lesbian history, it is crucial that it is evoked when writing about a figure who is now frequently held up in popular history as a black transgender trailblazer.23 Historicizing Murray’s archived list of questions regarding gender nonnormativity and her wish to participate in the testosterone experiment in this way illuminates the unique cultural context in which she decided not only how she would disclose (or not) her gendered sense of self but also what courses of action she could pursue to relieve her “conflict.” Absenting this specific historical framework and letting Murray’s research and questions stand as a unique and lonely project perpetuates the bifurcation of Murray’s life during this period into, on one hand, her private transgender struggle and, on the other, her public black activism.Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s is well known for its African American queer and gender nonconforming cultural icons, such as Bruce Nugent and Gladys Bentley, and its plethora of spaces where queer and trans expression was accepted, such as speakeasies, rent parties, and drag balls. But we do not have any evidence that Pauli Murray participated in Harlem’s queer underground directly. Whether because of her efforts to maintain expectations of individual respectability during this time, as Doreen Drury has argued, or her later attempt to protect the African American historical record from the threat of queerness and transness, as I have argued elsewhere, it is not possible to reconstruct or recover Murray’s personal black trans Harlem history. Instead, I propose that we work with what we have: Murray’s own record of her trans expression and desires; histories of the New Negro movement in which Murray proudly participated; and evidence of a black trans Harlem found outside Murray’s archive, both figuratively and literally, since queer Harlem was very much taking place all around her.24To help in the construction of a context that brings these disparate yet proximate histories together, I first use Darlene Clark Hine’s “culture of dissemblance” to analyze the documents found in Murray’s archive and also to demonstrate how dissemblance has perpetuated the separation of this archive from the African American trans historical context that I believe is crucial to its understanding.25 Then, I discuss one aspect of this history—the tension between the militant New Negro movement of the 1930s and the largely working-class black queer and trans presence popularized by, but not limited to, the cultural legacy of the Harlem Renaissance. In line with Murray’s consideration of glandular science regarding her “conflict,” I focus on the use of what Michael Pettit calls “glandular psychology” in the efforts by black reformers to transform working-class migrants into respectable New Negroes.26 I ground the historical discussion in a reframing of the glitz and glamor of the gender nonconformity resplendent in this time and place as a queer facet of the New Negro movement itself. These cultural formations found within black Harlem were often at odds, but they were also, as I will demonstrate, two sides of the same coin.Pauli Murray’s Archive, DissembledMurray did not openly discuss her trans desires nor her queer sexuality with her activist friends and colleagues, but it would be wrong to say that she hid them. Throughout her adult life, Murray kept her hair short, wore slacks in public, and in the early 1930s, changed her birth name to the androgynous “Pauli.” At that time, while driving, train hopping, and hitchhiking across the country on various trips, she created a photo album of self-portraits, dressed as different male archetypes, such as “The Acrobat,” “The Imp!,” “The Vagabond,” and “Peter Pan” (fig. 1).27 Murray’s transness was also largely accepted by her family. Letters home openly discuss the difficulty she had moving through the world as gender nonconforming, which her adopted mother Pauline Dame affectionately named her “boy-girl personality.”28 However, in the works from the first decades of scholarship on Murray that generally focus on her founding contributions to black feminism, her nonnormative gender and sexuality are simply not mentioned. As I discuss elsewhere, in this work, generally written before 2000, Murray’s identity was often labeled uncomplicatedly as “a black woman,” without regard to the trans material readily available in her archive.29 While this language may not be altogether incorrect, as Murray did become more comfortable with female identity later in life, excluding a queer or trans perspective or the homo- and transphobia she faced negates the possibility that Murray’s sexual and gender nonnormativity informed her black feminist thinking and activism.30Figure 1. Pauli Murray. Harvard University, Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, 20001573_1. View Large ImageDownload PowerPointAs Darlene Clark Hine notes, race women—that is, African American women who individually and collectively worked toward the self-preservation and uplift of the race—often separated their outward persona of “openness” from their “interior” psyche and emotions.31 While protecting themselves from the charge of sexual excess from whites and of gender inferiority from black men, race women also portrayed themselves as adhering to conservative mainstream norms distancing work from feelings, public actions from the private home, and the rational mind from the supposedly unruly body. As Hine notes, this was a common practice at the time for the historical actors, and unfortunately the culture of dissemblance continues to negatively shape the writing of their histories. Evelynn Hammonds and Matt Richardson both use Hine’s analysis to explain the absence of black queer women and gender nonconforming people from the historical record. Dissemblance closets sexual and gender nonconformity, as it not only maintains secrecy about any interior, affective, embodied sense of selfhood but also erases perceived threats against public efforts to construct and maintain African American respectability for white or mainstream consumption.32Richardson discusses how dissemblance is used, not altogether successfully, to silence sexual and gender nonconformity in African American historical writing. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, following social, political, and academic trends toward rendering visible and acceptable transgender people and histories, scholarship on Murray has increasingly featured her trans self-expression. Rosalind Rosenberg wrote in her first essay discussing Murray’s gender in 2002 that Murray’s masculine comportment and choice of dress “hinted” at her transgender desires, which, at least for Rosenberg, were confirmed by Murray’s research into gender nonnormativity and her pursuit of testosterone.33 Trans-authored scholarship exploring female-to-male transgender and transsexual life was first published in the late 1990s, but it was not until 2008 that other Murray scholars would begin to use the term as well. Glenda Gilmore published new evidence that Murray was dressed as a man when she and McBean were arrested on the southbound Greyhound bus in 1940, just as Murray was also attempting to obtain testosterone, which confirmed the suitability of the term. Not incidentally, by 2008, transgender studies had claimed a foothold in academia, and theories and methods from the field were picked up across the humanities and social sciences. Since then, most writing about Murray features some version of the suggestion that Murray may have identified as transgender if the term had been available.34Rosenberg’s Jane Crow and Cooper’s Beyond Respectability fully reject the closeting power of dissemblance in their writing on Murray. Building on previous work from Kenneth Mack, Sarah Azaransky, and Doreen Drury that explores the impact of Murray’s queerness and transness on her political work, Rosenberg identifies the role of gender nonnormativity in Murray’s entire life, not just in her youth when she engaged with the issues most directly. Cooper instead focuses on this specific period, arguing Murray was not given the opportunity to make external the male identity she felt internally, compelling her to instead challenge head-on the sexism she faced within the masculine legal profession where she hoped to serve the race. In these texts, Murray’s transness is not just included as a biographical note but is treated as an identity as intrinsic to her public life and works as is her pride “in [her] Negro blood.”35However, even though Murray’s transness is made visible and essential in these texts, it is still “dissembled” away from the African American history in which the rest of her biography is contextualized. Murray’s gender nonconformity is most thoroughly archived in her own collection from the late 1920s through the mid-1940s. At this point, she spent most of her time and efforts within local Harlem organizations, challenging racism, poverty, violence, and inequality in New York and across the country. Because Murray’s archive is flush with documentation regarding her participation in New York’s African American political world, scholars generally use the historical backdrop of the New Negro movement of the 1930s to give dimension to her personal actions and interactions of this period. For example, Rosenberg writes that during the 1935 Harlem Riot, protestors “raged” over the “discrimination that limited [African Americans’] opportunities for work” and reliance on government assistance.36 Murray was on the road with Peggie Holmes at the time, but the riot was such a momentous symbol for black Harlemites’ overall anger about their condition and such an important historical event that, even without Murray’s direct participation, it must have had an impact on her.37In a slightly different yet proximate Harlem historiography, the famed annual Hamilton Lodge Ball hosted thousands of performers and spectators, and, as George Chauncey remarks, “nowhere were more men willing to venture out in public in drag than in Harlem.”38 Furthermore, as Thaddeus Russell argues, drag balls, and the plenteous rent parties that formed the more private counterpart to the balls’ confrontational publicness, were primarily spaces that signaled queerness and gender nonconformity as “a central part of working class culture.”39 Although many of the queer African Americans who were part of the widely popular Harlem Renaissance arts movement were quiet about their nonnormative sexuality, the broader black public of Harlem was, according to Russell, “stunningly open” about their desires.40 Trans people, not just in entertainment venues but also in the public sphere, were a visible presence in everyday Harlem just as gender nonconforming celebrities graced the pages of the gossip columns. It should not be inconceivable that the black working-class culture that made tuxedo-donning, woman-marrying, blues-singing bulldagger Gladys Bentley a celebrated “figure in the community” was the same culture that rioted and raged over housing shortages, discrimination in federal relief policies, and racial violence in Harlem and around the world.41Locating Pauli Murray’s black transgender history away from the black transgender community that surrounded her is the culture of dissemblance at work. Murray is not closeted in the recent histories mentioned above, but the history of African American race work is still protected from the potentially sullying effects of queerness and transness. The same holds true for the separation of the New Negro movement, the protest culture in which Murray belonged during this period, from its queer and trans people and places. Denying that the activism that formed the direct predecessor to the Civil Rights Movement concretely overlapped with the most prominent queer and transgender community in contemporary African American history reinforces the notion that queer and trans black subjects and their history do not have a place in stories celebrating civil rights history more broadly.Murray arrived in New York in 1928, and throughout the Great Depression she went to school, worked as many odd jobs as she could acquire, and lived on the cheap. In 1930, she moved to Harlem and rented a room at the Emma Ransom House at the YWCA. Segregation, migration, and the resulting severe housing shortage meant that Murray boarded at the “Y” with experienced activists like Mary Church Terrell, who had already garnered recognition and respect as a formidable race woman. The Harlem YWCA was a hub of gender, race, and class consciousness, and young women like Ella Baker and Maida Springer, together with Murray, created an “informal network” of activists that lasted well through the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.42 Through the mid-1930s, Murray engaged in Harlem’s broader African American political scene alongside the women at the “Y,” and she would discuss the events with those from different classes, educational backgrounds, employment, and membership in communist, socialist, and religious organizations.Like its men’s counterpart, the YWCA housed women who were largely unencumbered by familial or parenting responsibilities and were freer to pursue other kinds of passions. Segregated by gender, the “Y” gave shelter to same-sex relationships that could be friendly, romantic, and sexual in nature. According to her own records, Murray’s relationships within the YMCA stayed platonic, and she kept her feelings about her gender and sexuality away from her Harlem friendships, activist circles, and work life. Maida Springer stayed close with Murray for decades, but when asked about Murray’s concerns regarding homosexuality or gender crossing, Springer said Murray mentioned one time that she “felt more male than female” and was “attracted to feminine, heterosexual women.” Springer responded that the whole idea was “ridiculous” and, unsurprisingly, the topic never came up again.43Murray spent the better part of the 1930s throwing herself into black Harlem’s revolutionary politics. Struggles with her “conflict,” the hospitalizations, and frantic lists of questions about glands and hormone experiments only took her away from her work in the local organizations that cooperated with New Negro organizations and coalitions. In the summer of 1935, with Ella Baker and others at the YWCA, Murray worked at the Workers Education Project (WEP), which supported the organizing efforts of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Murray was introduced to what she described as “young, radical intellectuals of that period, young Communists, young Socialists, young Trotskyites,” all working toward alleviating poverty through mass mobilization and protest.44 Murray joined the Communist Party (Opposition) and was arrested supporting automotive workers who orchestrated the first sit-down strikes, a technique used by Murray a decade later when she helped organize a sit-in to desegregate a Washington, DC, cafeteria. During this period, she witnessed a tremendous generational shift in tactical approaches to radical social change. Across groups of activists—religious and secular, black and white, local and international, racial and labor—protestors demanded a more vigorous, direct, embodied course of action to force the powerful to relinquish their stranglehold on political and economic resources.45As mentioned above, Murray did not leave evidence attesting to her participation in the kinds of events or spaces that historians associate with queer and trans Harlem of this period. Instead, her archive is full of documents from her work for New Negro efforts, only a few which are listed above. In the following section, instead of staying so close to Murray’s archive, following her footsteps that somehow stepped around the colossal sexual and gender nonconforming presence within her city, I leave Murray behind to join the throngs carousing within Harlem’s queer nightlife. But moving away from Murray’s biography does not force a distancing from the New Negro protest culture altogether. Rather, in what follows, I offer a consideration of these queer and trans Harlem subcultures as part and parcel of the larger New Negro movement.46Harlem in TransitionMany histories attribute the aforementioned turn toward direct-action tactics to a confluence of returning African American veterans who had fought against European fascism in segregated units in the first World War, internationalist communism that encouraged class-based revolutiona