Richard Docter wrote a very interesting book about the Prince of many names. He was born Arnold Lowman and took the pseudonym Charles Prince in the 1950s. By the 1960s that had become Charles “Virginia” Prince.
It was during the 1960s that he wrote the highly misogynistic “The Transvestite and His Wife” and what later became the ideological under pinnings of the ideology of transgender “How to be a Woman though Male”.
If that were the end of the evil that Lowman/Prince did transsexuals would hardly find him wort considering problematic. But during the 1960s he went to weekly “therapy” sessions with Dr. Robert Stoller, author of Sex and Gender vol I & II. Stoller taped these and it doesn’t take a great deal of cross referencing to see the influential role Prince played in the pathologizing of people with transsexualism.
Now… I came out pretty much in isolation. I lived in Berkeley and was part of the radical left rather than a part of the San Francisco Tenderloin transsexual/queen scene of 1967-70. But in 1969 and 70 I met people who were part of that. Some of us were transsexuals and were bound and determined to move heaven and earth to get our “operations”. We called ourselves, “transsexuals”. Others, whom we called queens did pretty much exactly what we did when it came to everything but getting a sex change operation.
I was friends with a number of people who met this description. Hell.. To be honest I considered them my sisters and never felt uncomfortable sharing a bathroom, changing room or even bed with them (In a non sexual way. I have kaikaied with a few of these same sisters but this is not where I am going with this). Sex work was one of the few fields open to pre-ops in those days, since one could not really get ID that said female or legally change name until later in the 1970s, so we were sisters in the sex industry.
After I got my sex change operation I remained friends with a few non-ops but I lived in a different part of LA by then and moved in different circles so getting together took conscious effort.
Then in the mid 1970s I met Carol Katz (Sister Mary Elizabeth) and Jude Patton. They had this great new term, transgender. I thought this was a great mid-point term because considering friends who were never going to get surgery “pre-op” was stretching the concept of “pre”.
What I didn’t realize was that these two were mainstreaming Prince’s malignant ideology.
At about that point I met this person Prince at a party and thought, “Who is that loathsome man in a dress?”
My opinion of her went downhill from there. I was still under 30, some 4 years post-op and Shane of L-Word cute. I was also a militant lesbian feminist with a hot girl friend, who was both WBW and taller than me. We got paid to go to parties of the rich and famous and make out, act out what ever. So neither my girl friend nor I took kindly to this ugly shrivelled toad of a man in a dress telling me that I couldn’t be transsexual since I liked women. Or her telling me I made a mistake and should have kept my dick if I liked women instead of having it inverted into a man made artificial vagina.
S/he was lucky we didn’t kick the shit out her. But it was a cheesy party anyhow so we split and went clubbing.
Every time you see the term “artificial vagina” think Lowman/Prince, same for inverted penis. He was the Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead of most of the negative psychological crap regarding transsexualism as well as the source of most of the misogynistic ideology of transgender.
Her philosophy permeates the debates. Every negative thing transgender activists say regarding transsexuals can be traced back to his/her writings.
Now you may ask what happened to those non-ops that I knew back in the late 1960s or for that matter the sisters who got their operations? Why wasn’t a counter argument mounted?
The reality is that before the early 1960s many of us never made it through high school. The queens I knew were lumpen proletariat with 8th grade educations at best. Often they had great native intelligence and yet they were so oppressed that they self destructed with substance abuse. AIDS was devastating.
The straight TVs had educations and male jobs. They could fund propaganda organs such as Tapestry. Who has more credibility? A trannie sex worker or a married engineer with an advanced degree and a job at a major corporation?
Even when the sex worker is living it 24/7 and is actually subjected to all the socil abuse the engineer is colonizing and claiming as his own.
The straight TVs have also denigrated the queens who were part of the gay and lesbian culture when only the too obvious were actually considered to really be gay.
It is the queens , those non-op or really everything but SRS folks who have paid the price to earn the term of respect that transgender should and could be. Instead their lives get erased.
Women Born Transsexual 