Who Was The First African-American Transwoman?

By Guest Contributor Monica, originally published at TransGriot

In 1906 Kelly Miller stated, “All great people glorify their history and look back upon their early attainments with a spiritual vision.”

Because the half century of transgender history so far has been predominately written by people who don’t share my ethnic heritage, it has only covered one facet of the story.

morejet We know for example that Lili Elbe was the first person to undergo gender transition in the 1930’s, that Christine Jorgensen in 1953 was the first post-war one that garnered huge media attention, and about the exploits of other transwomen from Coccinelle to Renee Richards to Dana International.

But it’s only in the last few years that the stories of pioneering non-white transpeople have been coming to the forefront. Fortunately, some of those stories were recorded in the pages of our iconic magazines JET, EBONY and Sepia. Thanks to the Johnson Publishing Company agreement with Google that resulted in JET and EBONY being digitized and placed online in their book search feature to peruse, some of those stories are now coming to light.

As a transperson of African descent who comes from a family of historians, I want to know and revel in my history. Just as I’m keenly aware of the varied historical accomplishments of my people, I want to know the same things about Black transpeople as well.

I am one of three African-Americans who has won the IFGE Trinity Award. Dr. Marisa Richmond is the first African-American transperson to be elected as a major party convention delegate for her state. I know that Avon Wilson was the first African-American and first person to go through Johns Hopkins gender program in 1966.

But what irritates me at times is that I don’t definitively know (yet) who was the first African-American person to transition.

I’ve been encouraged lately to see some tantalizing clues surface pointing to an answer to that question.

About the same time that the media was fixated on Christine Jorgensen, an article appeared in the June 18, 1953 issue of JET magazine.

It began following the story across several JET issues of Pittsburgh’s Carlett Brown. Because Denmark’s laws restricted the surgery to Danish nationals, Carlett took the drastic step of renouncing her US citizenship in order to be able to have SRS done in Denmark and have her HRT supervised by Dr. Christian Hamburger, Christine Jorgensen’s endocrinologist.

I’ll have to write up her fascinating story in another post since I’m still reading through more than a few issues of JET to find out how the story ended.

A Sepia magazine article and two 1965 National Insider tabloid articles claim New Orleans born Delisa Newton, who was 31 when she transitioned is that person.

Sepia magazine was a Fort Worth, TX based competitor of EBONY/JET similar in style to Look magazine that published from 1948-1983. The African-American Museum in Dallas, TX has the picture files of Sepia Magazine in its archives. sepia

It seems appropriate that one of the contenders was born in New Orleans. Delisa was billed as ‘The First Negro Sex Change’ in that 1966 article, but they probably weren’t aware of Avon Wilson yet. I’d also have to check with what’s left of the New Orleans transgender community to see if Delisa is still alive.

These are the articles in question pointing to Delisa Newton. I have yet to find those Sepia magazine articles online or see them.

* Delisa Newton. “My lover beat me”. National Insider, June 20, 1965: 4-5.
* Delisa Newton. “Why I could never marry a white man!”. National Insider July 18, 1965: 17.
* Delisa Newton. “From Man to Woman”. Sepia. 1966.

jet JET also had a small blurb in its March 16, 1967 issue about 28 year old Philadelphian Carole Small. She was working as a female illusionist-singer in Germany and was reported to be in Denmark getting SRS. Assuming she’s still alive, she’d be approaching her 70th birthday.

Carole was quoted as saying in that article, “Black women in America are among the luckiest on the face of the earth and it will be marvelous to be one.”

Your late 20th century-early 21st century sisters echo those sentiments as well. It would be nice for us to know exactly who was our first and hear about how their lives progressed post surgery.

In order to continue progressing toward our glorious future, we must know about our past in order to get a better understanding of our present.

As I keep perusing these older issues of EBONY/JET, I’m discovering they did a much better job of covering gender issues back in the day than I’d been aware of.

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Comments

trooper6 wrote:

I love your work Transgriot, so I hate to have to correct you. But you are propagating an error that is frequently put out there.

The first transwoman to undergo SRS that we can name was Lili Elbe in 1930, but she was not the the first trans person to undergo SRS. ( Magnus Hirschfeldt’s houskeeper underwent SRS earlier than Lili Elbe, but her identity is unknown)

However the first person to undergo SRS that we know of was transman Karl Baer in 1906. He also got his birth certificate changed to reflect his new gender as well. There is also American Alan Hart who underwent his SRS in 1917-18. When it comes to trans history, far too often when people say trans, they mean transwomen only, and transmen remain invisible. I just want to put that out there.

As for who was the first African American transwoman to transition…that is tricky…because if you transitioned and were stealth–which I suspect most transfolk did…then we may not know about you. And do you have to undergo surgery for one’s transition to count, or is HRT enough…because HRT becomes available in the 1930s so we could have any number of stealth sisters running around since then.

I met a wonderful African American transwoman while doing some interviews that never ended up airing on Logo. She told me that she had danced in the background in one of the first James Bond films…which start in 1962.

The Pearl Box Revue starts in 1960 or so…and while some of the women of the review were drag queens…the identity of others is a bit difficult to ascertain. When you take estrogen and live life always female…what does that make you? Dorian Corey (who was in Paris is Burning) started working in the Pearl Box Revue circa 1960…and seemed only always to be Dorian Corey. Maybe she never had genital surgery…but she did take hormones.

Many black and Latina women couldn’t afford genital surgery, but they got breast augementation and HRT…so do we count them? Or do we exclude them? If we only count genital reconstructive surgery as the marker of a real transexual, then most transmen will be excluded from their identities.

Anyway, there is a rich history out there, and thanks for pointing out those great stories from Jet/Ebony/Sepia!

Posted 13 Jul 2009 at 2:25 pm ¶
susan wrote:

Monica,

Thanks for writing the article. Wwill be sharing the link in my regular Little Lov’n Monday feature, created to spotlight articles of note.

If you’ve read anything from me, you know I approach culture, race and social critique using literature as my platform.

I promote and review YA literature that features positive images of LBGTQ characters. It’s a stretch especially for transgendered, but I think we can find what we’re genuienly interested in. I look, read and promote.

I’d love to get any recommendations you could share so I can promote them at Color Online and look to acquire them for the library I run for young people.

I can list a few titles if anyone is interested. For a great character of color, I highly recommend the bookBurn by Black Artemis. While Felicidad is a secondary character, she is one of the sanest, well-rounded characters in the story.

Again thanks for an informative piece.

Posted 13 Jul 2009 at 3:50 pm ¶
Adrianna wrote:

Great post !!Historical research are so much fun . I hope you find what you’re looking for.

Posted 13 Jul 2009 at 5:47 pm ¶
Daniel wrote:

Can someone help me out with the terminology? Is a woman who was born male not considered a transwoman until the sex reassignment surgery? If that’s so, what’s the preferred term for people who identify as a woman, born male, and has not had SRS?

The title doesn’t mention SRS but the article seems to be a history of SRS. SRS is relatively new (compared to human sexuality), but I imagine women being born male is as old as the hills.

Posted 14 Jul 2009 at 9:21 am ¶
homeBiscuitsAndGravy wrote:

freaking loved this post . To Daniel: a woman born male who has not had SRS is properly referred to as pre-op transgendered. a transgendered person does not have to undergo SRS to be considered female or male. in fact, one’s gender is different than one’s “sex” (referring to the organs one was born with), and also different from one’s sexual orientation. in that light, an individual could be born male, be a pre-op female, whose sexual orientation is lesbian. there are many variations of what it means to be transgendered. in my experience, it’s helpful to ask a person how they identify themselves. if they tell you they identify as a particular gender, then that’s how you identify them. i personally choose to think whether a person is pre-op or post-op is none of my business, unless a transgendered person cares to share that with me.

Posted 14 Jul 2009 at 10:27 am ¶
trooper6 wrote:

Hey Daniel,

A distinction tends to be made between transexual and transgender. Transgender being the umbrella term for all sorts of people who have exciting gender/sex stuff going on. Transexual tends to be used for people who have had or would like to have some sort of medical/physical intervention on their bodies.

So. A person who was assigned male at birth, but identifies as a woman (or as both male and female, or as third gendered, or genderqueer, or any number of things), but who desired no body modification…we would tend to call just transgendered.

A person who was assigned male at birth, but who wants to get physical modification we tend to call transexual. (pre-op or post-op). Though it gets a bit complicated because I do know people who identify as non-op transexuals. But generally transexuality tends to be connected with the ability to be able to fix the dysphoria medically. Whereas transgender is a more general term encompasing lots of different and fluid identities.

I am part of the transgender community–so I am transgender, and I am transexual. A good pal of mine is part of the transgender community as well…but is not transexual. Instead ze is genderqueer. Hir identity can not be fit into either male or female. We are both transgender, but I am transexual, ze is genderqueer.

So…there have been transgendered people all throughout history, but there haven’t really been transexuals until the 20th Century. There were undoubtedly people who would have been had the technology been there…but we can’t really know.

And to expand on what homebuscuits and gravy said.

Sex isn’t just the organs you were born with. The medical community looks at five things to determine sex: Hormones, Chromosomes, Genitals, Gonads, and Self Identification. Not all of those five elements line up…and they all exist on a conintuum. (See Anne Fausto-Sterling’s brilliant Sexing the Body on the social constructions of sex). When they don’t line up the way we want them to the person gets labeled intersex.

Gender, I divide into two different categories (most people don’t). Gender Presentation: which has to do with which gender markers we present to the world…masculine/feminine. All of that is completely socially constructed and varies by age/race/region/class/etc. Gender Identity: which I (and some others) define as body ego/brain sex…the sense you have of your body. You know your body’s boundaries and contours. If you go through a growth spurt you may have a body on the outside that does not match your body ego…and then you trip and bump into things. Gender Identity (which I don’t think is a very good name for it…I like Body Ego…even if it does come from Freud…but it comes from his work on phantom limb syndrome in wounded soldiers from WW1 and is good stuff) is the internal sense of your sexed body. Current research notes that fetuses go through two hormone washes in the womb. One shapes the body, one the brain. The theory is that transgender people have differences in those two washes…so you get a brain that says one thing, a body that says another. When your Body and your Body Ego don’t match…then you get Body Dysphoria.

But Daniel…you are right to question the emphasis on SRS in the definition of transgender identity. There are many, many surgeries a person could have. Or some. Or none. A person could take hormones or not or some. That doesn’t make that person any more or less legitimate as a transperson.

Posted 14 Jul 2009 at 12:22 pm ¶
Monica Roberts wrote:

As far as I’m concerned, the second you start taking hormones is the second you begin transition to the opposite gender.

And trooper6, it’s not an error on my part if everything I’ve read at the time I wrote the piece pointed to Lili Elbe at the first transperson.

There were supposedly trans people in the Institute’s staff. But until there’s concrete proof of Magnus Hirschfeld’s secretary or her name pops up being trans, then it’s speculative at best.

The Nazis May 6, 1933 burning of the books, journals and images of Hirschfeld’s Berlin based sexology institute along with the seizing by the Nazi’s of the names list complicates that task.

Once again, the post was focused on discussing African-American transpeople, and who was our first, not who was the first White person to have SRS..

This quibbling and nitpicking my post is an example of the vanilla-centric mentality that leads to the whitewashing of GLBT people of color from GLBT history.

Posted 17 Jul 2009 at 2:45 pm ¶
trooper6 wrote:

All of my genderqueer friends would find your assertion that the minute your start taking hormones you begin transition to the opposite gender very problematic. That is very binary, and not all of the transcommunity is that binary. Also there is a long tradition of male identified gay men (including lots of gay men of color) taking estrogen in order to be more effective drag artists. Pepper LaBeija from Paris is Burning was one such person.

As for accusing me of having a vanilla-centric mentality (aside from you not knowing me), please note that my responses to you is about queer history of color–bringing up the Pearl Box Review and Dorian Corey.

But lastly, as for the situation about Lili Elbe. Not counting Magnus Hirschfeldt’s maid, I named you two people who are confirmed to have had SRS well before Lili Elbe. Or do you not care about transmen in your version of transhistory? If all the research you’ve done has neglected to bring up the name Alan Hart at least, you need to do better research. I’m sorry you think my bringing up the erasure of transmen from transhistory is nitpicking or quibbling. Pointing out your grievous erasure of one half of transhistory is not vanilla-centric mentality…it is pointing out your transwoman-centric mentality that erases transmen (of color or otherwise) from LGBT history.

I don’t think you should be using the term transperson when you really only mean transwoman. You could have called Lili Elbe the first transwoman to have SRS. But rather you choose to erase transmen.

Now you say you aren’t all that interested in Vanilla-centric LGBT history. Okay. How about this? When Carlett Brown was interviewing about her struggles in 1953 (and how great is it that that information is out there). Willmer Broadnax had already been living as a man and successful entertainer for a decade. Willmer Broadnax being an African American transman.

Posted 20 Jul 2009 at 11:49 am ¶