Rejected text for a primary source set on trans men

This week, I made a primary source set about trans men for my day job at the GLBT Historical Society. It was difficult to write a three-paragraph introduction to my entire community. I submit the following as the product of the fits that happened.

[YES]

Trans men were invented by Lou Sullivan in 1979. Before this, the shape of each human being was completely round, with back and sides in a circle; they had four hands each, as many legs as hands, and two faces, exactly alike, on a rounded neck. Between the two faces, which were on opposite sides, was one head with four ears. There were two sets of sexual organs, and everything else was the way you’d imagine it from what I’ve told you

[NO]

The Goose from Untitled Goose Game is a good example of a trans man. Small, vengeful, with a hard-won love for its ass, it desires only to humiliate cis men. The Goose is fastidious, and loves bullet journaling

[NO]

Reed Erickson, through his work with the Erickson Educational Foundation, laid the groundwork for many transmasculine people to understand themselves and explore transition. The author of this source set maintains a very public vendetta against Reed Erickson, however, for seizing the title of Trans Howard Hughes, through the extremely dubious method of being born in 1917 — sixty-five years before Isaac Fellman was assigned female at birth — and dying in 1992, ten years after Isaac Fellman was AFAB, thus ensuring that Isaac Fellman can’t even claim to be his reincarnation.

The title of Trans Howard Hughes rightfully belongs to Isaac Fellman and every other trans man with OCD, which is all of them. Reed Erickson needs to give it back. Isaac Fellman will not rest until he has invented a time machine and sent his own parents back in it, to make him born in 1916, during the war

[NO]

Honestly, can we pause for a moment to contemplate how good a trans name “Reed” is? He tried out “Eric” at school, and while there’s a bratty purity to “Eric Erickson,” Reed Erickson could be the guy who invented the hairpin leg; he could be the guy who invented putting brass foliage on your wall. This name is midcentury modern to its core. It’s not only a subtle riff on Erickson’s birth name, but also an update, a reboot, to signal that Erickson may have been born in the 1910s, but he was designed in 1963.

[NO]

Fox Robin Hood once hid underwater and breathed through a reed,

[NO]

[NO]

Many people assume that trans men date their transition from a medical landmark, such as top surgery (mastectomy) or the use of hormones. In fact, many trans men never use surgery or hormones at all; they achieve physical masculinization by writing personal essays, and they often date their transition from the first publication, either in The Believer or their friend’s blog

[NO]

[NO]

[NO]

Erickson’s wikipedia page says that at one point, he “gained a leopard,” as if a leopard were ten pounds of weight, or fame, or the upper hand. This is remarkable.

[NO]

The leopard was named “Henry,” a worse name than “Reed,” presumably to express the fact that however much Erickson may have seen the leopard as a friend, he still felt strongly that Henry was of a lower order — the order of animals — and that he should know his place.

[NO]

How does a historical figure become “a badass”? Why do we assign the traits of a badass so often to trans men who are trying to flail forward through trauma and fear? I think of Michael Dillon as a badass (a word I hate, by the way but there’s no better term for the general phenomenon of a tough, stoic, daring person) for becoming a doctor and then a sailor and then a monk. But Dillon endured a public outing, a series of devastating setbacks on his spiritual path, and then a lonely and confusing early death which I privately suspect was a suicide. He wasn’t Indiana Jones. He was just a person who was very good at running, which is different from Indiana Jones in that Indiana Jones is a tenured professor with a stable life who chooses to get chased by swordsmen, Nazis, and rocks.

Alan Hart got outed too, and also had to run. The secrecy of living stealth broke his first marriage. He had a more interesting and colorful career because of it, and he got back on his feet in a way Dillon didn’t, because his outing was only local in scale, but I’m sure he was afraid for much of his life. I just recently read a well-regarded scholarly book that misgendered Hart with the pronoun “they” and suggested that there is a lesbian interpretation for his actions, as if you’d bother to do all the things Hart did (including a hysterectomy that he negotiated by using a eugenic argument against himself; including starting testosterone in the forties) to disguise at all costs the fact of being that unheard-of type of person, a lesbian. We hounded these men until they didn’t exist, and then we argued that they never existed.

Reed Erickson died a fugitive from justice. Lou Sullivan got ten good years. Jack Garland went to the hospital only when he was dying, and somehow evaded any examination that would reveal his secret until he was dead.

I respect and revere these men, and I joke about them too — not their deaths, but their exploits, because it’s easier to be impressed that someone would stow away on a troopship to the Philippines than to think about what would drive someone to do that (in Garland’s case, being outed and forcibly made into a lovable local kook after trying to make a new life as a journalist in Stockton).

I repeat: Garland actually just wanted to be a journalist in Stockton. Dillon wanted to be a Buddhist doctor on a boat. I think Erickson had broader goals, but I don’t think he wanted to die on the run in Mexico, which I expect was no joke for a 74-year-old. They were flat-out ballers because they had to be, because they were running, and I don’t know why we celebrate the feats that people were driven to, rather than condemning the mocking crowds who drove them to it.

[NO]

Trans men

[NO]