Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/29/that-time-charlton-comics-publ.html
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Ooooh this is delicious! “I’m stranded alone in a crash site only with myself and bored out of my skull, I think I gonna change my gender just for funsies because Science!”
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1953 was also the year that Theodore Sturgeon’s gay-themed story The World Well Lost was published, in the first issue of Universe magazine.
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Thank you for the detail and the link on the comic book dealing with gender-minority experiences, @thomdunn.
However, I want to encourage you to think carefully about the use of the words “transgender” “trans” and similar to describe all gender minorities. Current use of the word in the advocacy, clinical and research settings lands solidly on the idea that only an individual can determine whether they are transgender or not. Given that the word was not widely deployed within the community without lots of argument over its inclusivity vs exclusivity, etc. until the late 90s (PM me if you want my insights from early and mid-90s usenet discussion groups :), when it settled on its current use, and as Christine died in 1989, “transgender” seems an inappropriate label.*
Another example of where retroactively labeling people “transgender” is problematic crops up in your post. Christine was the first widely known “transsexual”: a label compassing those of us who opt for medical interventions like hormone therapy, hormone suppression, and top-surgeries or bottom surgeries (e.g., “post-op”), but also those of us who anticipate opting for such interventions (“pre-op”), and finally including those of us who will not opt for any that currently exist (for reasons ranging from the economic, to contraindications due to some health condition, to simple dissatisfaction with the state of the art, etc.), but would were circumstances to change (“non-op”). However, many gender minority individuals who today might self-identify as transgender are invisible: those of us who make no transitions across, who make no transgressions against genders, including famous folks. So the notion of “first widely-known trans person” (she was the first widely known transsexual) is somewhat erasing of gender minority history, both because Americans did not know Christine as “transgender” and because Americans knew other gender minorities (whether or not they knew them as gender minorities, and whether or not those individuals ever had the chance to claim the word “transgender”). For example, at the time this comic was published most Americans knew of Joan of Arc: was Joan transgender? On the one hand absolutely not. On the other hand, pretty hard core gender minority.
Finally, only this decade has “transgender” (and “gender identity disorder”) been de-listed in the DSM and ICD as a pathology. So when we choose to take it upon ourselves to label other people as transgender—as opposed to honoring the labels they have shared about themselves—we are smack up against retroactive diagnosis of what was at the time labeled a mental disorder by the major health professional organizations. (Aside: this website has a policy against doing exactly that in the present tense.)
Anywho: thank you again for the comic, and for the thought provocation.
* If anyone reading this has quotes from Christine using the word “transgender” I would love to hear!
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Thanks for that clarification, Lexicat. I think I was trying to both touch on the fact that it did involve gender transitioning (or sex reassignment, as the comic says itself), while also acknowledging that it wasn’t quite a trans issue, or certainly one that would pass muster with our understandings of such issues today. But I think in my attempt to do both, I ended up half-assing my language in a way that may have came off as reductive. Which was certainly not my intention, but I can see how it was the impact! I apologize for that, and I thank you for this careful and insightful perspective. 
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EC did it first…“There’ll be some changes made!” Weird science 14 1952
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You aren’t the only one grappling with the complexity of language here! Let me flip the argument I laid out: if we need to label others as transgender (irrespective of the so-identified individual’s agreement or not), what are the rules for doing so? What are the consequences in legal, moral, ethical, and institutional senses?
I want to include Joan of Arc, Billy Tipton, Christine Jorgenson, Wendy Carlos, Ru Paul, Les Feinberg, the histories of two-spirit folks, of hijra, ancient Scythian Effeminates, etc. with a language wide enough to hold all of them as doing really interesting stuff with gender, without over-writing the actual language they use for themselves.
PS You are nothing but respectful.
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And I do (Tip!). OMG if anyone reads the Maguire reboots have I ever got takes on both Elphaba, and Rain.
Of course, ancient religions were all over folks doing interesting stuff with gender.
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At roughly the same period, there was a horror comic with a double gender change. A biologist studying hormones decided he didn’t like his daughter’s fiance and dosed him with a sex-change potion. When the daughter found out she took a sex-change potion. The last panel of the story was at their wedding, with the scientist noting that his daughter made a handsome groom.
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I would absolutely love to hear them!
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Not to ignore the conversation about gender labeling but I was surprised in the comic the first advert was on help to quit smoking. I guess intellectually I knew people had trouble quitting in any era but the idea there was an industry (albeit probably a small snakeoil version) in the 1950s is interesting.
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It all goes back to Tiresias.
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