Been There, Done That!

But this time I mean being persecuted. What we are facing with Trump we have faced before in the Lavender Scare. We have faced it many times including in some states that are liberal now.

Lucy Hicks [Tobias Lawson] Anderson (1886-1954)

Black Past

June 27, 2007 

Contributed By: Kevin Leonard

Lucy Hicks Anderson, American socialite and chef, lived the first 59 years of her life as a woman until 1945, when it was discovered that she was biologically male. Today she would be described as a transgender person, but that term did not exist during her lifetime. Throughout her life she insisted publicly that a person could appear to be of one sex but actually belong to the other.

Lucy Hicks Anderson was born Tobias Lawson in Waddy, Kentucky sometime in 1886. When Lawson entered public school she insisted on wearing dresses and began calling herself Lucy. Her mother took her to a physician, and the doctor advised her mother to rear Lucy as a girl. She did and Lucy wore girl’s clothing through her childhood before leaving school at the age of fifteen to work as a domestic. When she was in her twenties, Lucy moved west, settling in Pecos, Texas, where she worked in a hotel for a decade. In 1920 Lucy married Clarence Hicks in Silver City, New Mexico, and then moved to Oxnard, California. In Oxnard she continued to work as a domestic, but she also saved her money, purchased property near the center of town where she operated a brothel and sold illegal liquor during Prohibition.  During that time she also emerged as a socialite and hostess in the city, known among the elite as an excellent baker and chef.  When she was arrested for owning a brothel, she was bailed out of jail by the town’s leading banker.

But she had a secret! That only her husband knew… or so she thought!

Anderson challenged the authority of physicians who insisted that she was male. “I defy any doctor in the world to prove that I am not a woman,” Anderson told reporters in the midst of her perjury trial. “I have lived, dressed, acted just what I am, a woman.” Nonetheless, a jury convicted her and her marriage was declared invalid since only a man and woman could legally marry. The judge however declined to send her to prison.

But she did get sent to prison! For what will show how vindictive the government was. She was arrested for collecting VA benefits meant for widows.