two other modern example are Pauli Murray, a Black feminist legal scholar and the coiner of the term "Jane Crow" (from a biography of the same name by Rosalind Rosenberg):
Although Murray always denied being a lesbian, she occasionally admitted to âhomosexual tendenciesâ as the only available descriptor that people would accept. As for the report that she was taking hormones, nothing in her correspondence with doctors supports that claim. She wanted testosterone badly enough, however, that she may well have told the corrections officer that doctors had agreed to give it to her. Barry did not arrest Murray for hitchhiking but rather escorted her to the New York City Police Department, where officers decided to take her to Bellevue Hospital. There, Murray poured out her story to a psychiatrist, who gave her a diagnosis of âschizophrenia.â In the doctorâs view, she suffered from a delusion: she believed that she was a man.
Permitted to call a family member, Murray contacted her âcousinâ Mac. The next day, Mac checked her out of Bellevue and, probably on the recommendation of Dr. Chinn, took her to a private psychiatric facility, Dr. Rogersâs Hospital, at 345 Edgecombe Avenue, on the corner of 150th Street. Murray was lucky. If Mac had not come to her rescue, Bellevue psychiatrists were prepared to seek her commitment to one of the vast, overcrowded state hospitals for the mentally ill.
On the typewriter Mac brought to her, Murray itemized the causes of her ânervous collapseâ: overwork; lack of desire to either eat or sleep; anxiety over parental responsibilities; and the âtemporary disappearance of a friend.â All of these factors played a part; however, Murray believed that the principal source of her emotional crisis was the same problem with which she had wrestled for a decade: the fact that she repeatedly fell in love with women without having any âopportunity to express such an attraction in normal ways,â that is, as a heterosexual male in love with a heterosexual female. The only people who seemed to accept her for who she was were âthe unsophisticated people in the environmentâ [people like her aunts and the ever-loyal Mac] who âaccept me pretty much as one of natureâs experiments; a girl who should have been a boy, and react to me as if I were a boy.â Doctors at the Rogers hospital proved no more willing to cooperate in Murrayâs efforts to become the man she knew herself to be than those elsewhere. When they released her in mid-March, she had nothing to show for her stay beyond a medical bill for $80, which she could not pay.
As well as Dylan Scholinski, who wrote a memoir called "The Last Time I Wore A Dress" about their experience being institutionalized from ages 15 to 18 in the 80s for being a gender non-conforming girl. They recently re-released the memoir under their chosen name and with a new foreword; I recommend reading it but massive TW for all kinds of child abuse, sanism, and queerphobia. From this interview:
Alison Stewart: You were able to access your medical records and you put them actually in the memoir.
Dylan Scholinski: Right.
Alison Stewart: What did the medical records reveal to you about how the medical establishment was thinking about you and then they were thinking about your treatment?
Dylan Scholinski: Well, some of it was very diagnose-based. Like I said, I think they saw the cure for my depression if I would just learn how to be more feminine. That was the treatment that I was supposed to learn about what boys like. They actually put me in some really unsafe situations, hoping to inspire sexual behavior in order for me to be more feminine. They were putting me in situations that seem really unreasonable and unsafe.
Alison Stewart: Could you share a few?
Dylan Scholinski: When I was put into my third hospital, they put me on an all-male unit. I was the only girl on an all-male unit. I was the first girl to be. That's when it switched to not being an all-male unit. That in and of itself, you're like a little piece of meat there in the middle of 20 young men. That would be an example, or having me in four-point restraints and having male patients sneak into my room while I had no way of defending myself.
Alison Stewart: At one point, you had to start wearing makeup in order to gain good points for good behavior.
Dylan Scholinski: Right.
Alison Stewart: What did it feel like when you wore makeup?
Dylan Scholinski: Oh, my God, you feel dead. It causes a separation from your body. That is kind of hard to explain. I was on a point system. I would receive points for good behavior and lose points for bad behavior. My treatment was I was supposed to learn how to apply makeup and then say something nice about myself. Nice not being like I'm really good at baseball or I can really hit the ball or I can run really fast or any of these other things, or I can draw things that I was really proud of. Instead, I had to say things like, "I love looking pretty." I would feel like such a liar that I was performing and deceiving. I think they were hoping if I repeated it enough that it would change who I was going to become.
You cannot understand the history of (anti-)transmasculinity without seeing how massive a role sanism, medical trans/misogyny, and institutionalization has played.
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