I think I should start this post with some back-and-forth arguing between one of the organizers of the first International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy (ICTLEP, 1992), Virginia Prince and her supporter:

“Said another way, you trashed [Virginia Prince]! You stole her linguistic contribution to the community from the community and ran down the road laughing. Lordy, lordy, lordy, you incorrigible Texans. Shame, shame shame.”

– Billie Jean Jones, Publisher of TV Guise, 1991

Tere Frederickson, co-organizer of ICTLEP responds:

“We only used the terms ‘transgender’ and ‘transgendered’ as they are most commonly used (yup, they really are etymologically correct) today, despite the reservations and acknowledgement of the term ‘transgenderist’ to coinage by Virginia. You will find those terms used in the same manner as we used them in just about all publications in our community.”

– Tere Frederickson, 1991

And Prince steps in:

“I hope neither of you will take offense if grandma raises some points about your ‘transgender behavior’ article in the Sept issue of Euphoria. To begin with, I coined the term ‘transgenderist’ as a name for the specific behavior of living full time but without SRS. It is a noun not an adjective. ‘Transgender behavior’ could properly only refer to behavior of a transgenderist not to the general behavior of people who express both genders at different times.”

– Virginia Prince, 1991

There’s a reason so many think that Virginia Prince coined the term transgender. I think that reason is that Prince (and her supporters) pushed that grandiose narrative.

“The term transgenderist was first introduced into the English language by trans warrior Virginia Prince. Virginia told me, ‘I coined the noun transgenderist in 1987 or ’88. There had to be some name for people like myself who trans the gender barrier – meaning somebody who lives full time in the gender opposite to their anatomy. I have not transed the sex barrier.’”

– Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg, 1996, page X of introduction

In fact, I think she worked hard to create that narrative.

I think Prince knew that she didn’t create the term “transgender” or “transgenderist.” She claimed to have coined “transgenderist” in her 1978 article (or 1987 or 88, if you go by what she told Feinberg) and yet, the term was fairly common back in 1975. I think it’s doubtful that she, in the national position she held, never once heard someone else say “transgenderist” in the years before she used it. The first national trans survey used the term:

Other regional and national leaders like Phyllis Frye and Ariadne Kane were using it before Prince. By the time Prince finally got around to using the term, the book McCary’s Human Sexuality was already using it!

I’ve never found a statement from Prince wherein she claims to have coined transgender on the basis of her one single 12/1969 usage (and immediate abandonment) of transgenderal. Everything I’ve come across quoting her claims that she coined transgender because she coined transgenderist. Also, let’s be clear; her one single use of the trans+gender lexical compound was not the first usage. Years before her, the medical community was advocating that the trans+gender lexical compound replace transsexual because, they claimed, -sexual made people think that being transsexual was about satisfying a sexuality need.

I’ve just posted a 2-part review of the now ubiquitous Prince Fountainhead Narrative as it relates to trans discourse:

Part 1: The Ubiquity of the Prince Fountainhead Narrative

Part 2: Colonization, Enslavement and Forced Assimilation: Narratives Built Upon the Virginia Prince Fountainhead Myth

While I won’t say that Prince lied (because I don’t have a statement wherein she admits it and so I therefore can’t definitively prove it), I will go as far to say that I think it’s improbable that she didn’t know that the credit for the coinage of the term didn’t truly belong to her.

The sad thing is that real author of the term has never been recognized.

Who authored this term?

The clue is that 1975 trans newspaper article I linked above. Sussie Collins (a transsexual) was the editor of that newspaper. She also ran this organization:

This very same 1975 newspaper featuring a two-page article on a word that Prince supposedly hadn’t invented yet also had an article on “transgenderism.” The author that particular article was Sandy Mesics – a transsexual who was (at the time) publishing a trans magazine called Image (note the use of a proto-trans symbol on the cover of the magazine):

Sandy told me that Image was a…

… magazine for the “transvestite and transsexuals” community. We formed a company called Third World Communications… because we felt that trans folk we a third world: not gay or lesbian… We thought that what Virginia Prince was doing was hopelessly stuck in the 1950s: very closeted, heterosexually-oriented material. We also didn’t think there was a great publication out there for transsexuals. We liked what Lee Brewster was doing with Drag, but we thought we could fill a needed niche…

Image also caught the attention of Neptune Productions and the UTTS. Sussie Collins invited me to one of their monthly gatherings, where I met Jack O’Brien, owner of Neptune Productions. Jack was helping Sussie get UTTS off the ground. Sussie and I both believed in unifying the trans community, rather than just appealing to one aspect of it…

For me, it was an awesome time: I got to meet folks like John Waters and Elizabeth Coffey, Holly Woodlawn, Ariadne Kane, Garrett Oppenheim, and Lee Brewster, Pudgy Roberts, Kenny Kerr, among others.”

I think the evidence clearly reveals that “transgenderist” didn’t come from Prince, but from the trans community itself. Clearly those who were using the term – years before Prince supposedly coined the term – were those who felt “transvestites and transsexuals” should work toward a unity of common purpose. The folks who were actually using this language explicitly rejected Prince’s vision as being dated and “hopelessly stuck in the 1950s.”

And yet, (to add insult to injury) if a student cracks open a trans history book, what will they find?

Transgender Health And HIV Prevention, 2005, Page 55
Since Virginia Prince coined the term transgender in the mid-1970s to define people like herself who cross-lived full time, but who did not want a surgical sex change (Green & Brinkin, 1994), language that represents the diversity of gender…

Local violence, global media: feminist analyses of gendered representations, 2009, Page 101:
Transgender is a term derived from the term “transgenderist,” coined by Virginia Prince to refer to a person cross-living full time with no plan to have sex reassignment surgery (SRS). In the 1990s it was used as an umbrella term…

Encyclopedia of gender and society, 2009, Volume 2, Page 849:
In addition, the dominant meaning associated with the term transgender changed. Originally coined in the 1970s by full-time heterosexual cross-dresser Virginia Prince, transgerderist had originally meant someone who took on the social role of the “opposite” gender without any surgical or other bodily intervention…

Sex, gender, and sexuality: the new basics : an anthology, 2008, Page 528:
“Transgender” is a relatively new word. It was originally coined by Virginia Prince in the early 1970s to refer to people who lived full-time in a gender that was not the one that usually went with their genirals (Prince, personal communication). In the 1990s, the word was taken up by a variety of people who, in their own ways, transgressed usual sex and gender expectations.

Special populations in college counseling, 2006, Page 60:
Transgenderist: Coined by Virginia Prince, this category refers to an individual who disidentifies with his or her assigned birth sex and lives full-time in congruence with his or her gender identity.

“So what?” you might ask. Why does it matter if Prince, in a seeming act of stunning self-promotion, stole the coinage credit away from others? It’s just a stupid word, right? I mean, what would happen if this myth was allowed to continue? She’s a ‘trans warrior’ after all – let her have this, right?

Wrong.

Here’s the price the community of trans folk pays for this myth:

Radical Bitch @ January 3, 2010, 6:40 PM, Commenting on Should We Scrap the Word “Transgender”?, January 3, 2010

Finally let’s consider that “transgender” was based on terminology that was extremely transsexual-phobic (the transsexual hating Charlie Prince) in the first place and “gender” being malleable is based on the single John Money John-Joan case exposed as a total fraud but still seems to inform those who promote this mistaken idea.

So, a term that began as an insulting separation to those who now reject it that has no scientific reality (gender identity is fixed at almost the same moment of pre-natal development as sexual orientation) is the preferred term?

As Agent K said in Men in Black II “This is a clear case of go home and do it over again”.

Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia, (2000) Volume 2, pp 888 – 890

Transgender… The term is said to derive from transgenderist, coined in the 1960s be male-to-female cross-dresser and early transgender researcher Virginia Prince as an alternative to the stigmatizing and objectifying medical category of “transvestite…”

Bolin, Bornstein, Feinberg, and other clearly view transgender as both the cause and the effect of a renewed fender and sexual revolution. Not everyone shared their view, however. Some transsexuals are proud of having changed sexes, rather that confounding them, and reject the transgender identity for erasing their own, “Every application of the term transgender to me is an attempt to mask what I’ve done and as such co-opts my life, denies my experience, violates my very soul. I changed my sex… and provide that anatomy is not destiny,” Margaret Deidre O’Hartigan has emphatically asserted.”

NOTE: O’Hartigan made these statements in 1993

May 12th, 2011 at 12:25 pm Comment on In Community, Genitalia & Socialization Essentialism Has Been Around For Awhile, Thursday May 12, 2011 5:00 am

These trans people who can never forgive Daly, apologize all over the place for the single most transsexual phobic person to ever roam the earth, Virgina Prince, who coined the term transgender which is now applied to those Prince most hated as part of a forced umbrella inclusion that essentially denies the womanhood of those female bodied, fully woman identified women with transsexed or intersexed histories.

Go figure…

The Prince Fountainhead Narrative MYTH poisons trans discourse. Worse, it misrepresents the reality of community so that it appears to be a top-down oligarchy wherein leaders make identity pronouncements and we, their dutiful  followers (for some inexplicable reason), collectively throw out our old group and personal identifiers in favor of the new identities given to us by our leaders. I discuss the detestable price this myth exacts upon the trans community more here.

Much can be said about Prince. However, what must never again be said as fact is that Virginia Prince coined “transgender.” She didn’t – the trans community itself did -and the price the trans community pays for supporting the Prince Fountainhead Narrative is too great to bear.