Life’s A Drag

I came across this article about trans people from the “Days of Old.”

54 Rare Historical Photos Of Drag Queens Before It Was Safe To Be Out!
Because of our forefathers, we in the LGBTQ community are fortunate enough to live in a more tolerant world.
Little Things
By Todd Briscoe

“Queens,” or men who defy gender norms and dress as women, have always been present in the LGBTQ community and pop culture: Straight men like Flip Wilson and Milton Berle used them as punch lines in their humor; Divine created a media sensation when she burst onto the scene; and RuPaul began to break down barriers with her mainstream pop hit, “Supermodel (Of the World),” and a cheeky VH1 talk show.

RuPaul’s popular reality competition show RuPaul’s Drag Race helped bring drag queens further into the mainstream consciousness.
[…]
We acknowledge that not every person in the photos below is a “drag queen,” and that there’s a big difference between a transgender person, a transvestite, and a drag queen: A transgender person is someone who does not identify with their assigned sex and would most likely not want to be referred to as a “drag queen.” A transvestite is a cisgender male who enjoys wearing women’s clothing. A drag queen tends to be someone who dresses in women’s clothing more so for performance or entertainment purposes.

Yikes! Transvestite… does the author know that is now considered a derogatory term for a crossdresser?

Matthew's Island of Misfit Toys

Retronaut

Retronaut

F Yeah Queer Vintage/Tumblr

I have to wonder back before Cross-gender Hormone Therapy and Gender Confirming Surgery how many of these people would have transitioned? And I also wonder how many trans people were there back “Good old days” that we don't know about. Trans women would have had a harder time to transition because there would have been no way to remove a beard while a trans had a slightly easier time since they could have been “clean shaven.” Also it is hard to give labels to people who lived back then because we don’t how they thought about themselves, did they question their gender identify or did they just like crossdressing, or maybe they just crossdressed as a lark.

One of the first trans person that we can say definitively that they were trans was a trans men was Dr. Alan Hart.

We know pretty certain that he was a trans man because he had a hysterectomy and gonadectomy and synthetic hormones were discovered in the 1920s, we know that he took them them in the 1940s.

And later still, when grasshoppers croon from the moonlit Hartford meadowsweet and his wife sits up in bed reading Dickens, he’ll be at his desk, testosterone syringe clutched in hands. The needle will sink into cleaned, exposed skin: sharp pinch in the thigh, push of the plunger, synthetic hormones oozing into the muscle. Evidence, like the hysterectomy scar on his abdomen, of how far he journeyed to build in himself this river-swell of confidence. (Dr. Alan L. Hart, Connecticut State Tuberculosis Commission, 1955 | Keaton St. James)

He lived in Connecticut and he pioneered the use of x-ray technology to detect tuberculosis and he served as the director of hospitalization and rehabilitation at the Connecticut State Tuberculosis Commission. (Oregon Encyclopedia: Alan Hart (1890-1962))