Mid-Century Surgery Narratives and the Search for Trans Lineage
“I’m like you.”
It was 1958 and the French cabaret star Coccinelle was walking down a wide Casablanca boulevard when a young woman on a motorcycle swung in front of her, stopping the singer in her tracks.
“I’m like you,” the woman said, then, “do you recognize me?” Coccinelle scoured her memory for the woman, but nothing came up.
“You have to understand, I meet a lot of people,” the star demurred. But rather than looking dismayed, the young woman clapped her hands in delight. She explained her name was Jenny, and that she was the same timid sound engineer who had approached Coccinelle outside the star’s dressing room in Nice the year before, selling records. Seeing Coccinelle perform, Jenny told the star, had inspired Jenny herself to start living as a woman, and when she read in the newspaper that estrogen had given Coccinelle her iconic feminine shape, Jenny decided to start the hormone too.
How did Jenny deliver it, the news she shared next? Did she place her hand on Coccinelle’s shoulder and whisper, her lips almost close enough to brush the singer’s ear? Or was the street busy enough, and Jenny bold enough, that she kept her feet planted, the crowd buckling around them as Jenny announced, not in the language the newspapers would later use—that there was a surgeon in Casablanca who could “turn men into women”—but something richer, more intimate, and more true: “I’ve convinced someone to give us what we want”?
Coccinelle had, by that point, been searching for years for a surgeon to perform her vaginoplasty, a procedure then illegal in her native France. Hearing the news from Jenny, Coccinelle felt her future open up. “All that I had dreamed of felt suddenly possible,” she wrote of the encounter in her 1987 autobiography, Coccinelle par Coccinelle.
What astounds me about Coccinelle and Jenny’s meeting is not just its chance nature—the possibility that, had Jenny ridden her motorcycle down a different street, transgender history might not have unfolded as it did—but the knowledge that it is only one of two such meetings to have profoundly shaped Coccinelle’s life, and the lives of the hundreds of trans women around the world whom the cabaret star’s public transsexuality inspired and emboldened. These encounters echo one another down to the word.
When Coccinelle was around eighteen years old, she was riding in a train compartment outside Paris when an older woman sitting directly opposite stared at her and proclaimed, “I’m like you.” The woman on the train, a former German prisoner of war named Marie-André Schwindenhammer, led Coccinelle to the compartment bathroom, where she lifted her shirt to show an ample bosom and lowered her skirt to show the penis beneath. Coccinelle was astonished. She had already been dressing as a woman, but hadn’t known she could grow breasts, too. Coccinelle left the encounter with a new tool with which to build the body and the life she wanted.
If the links between these women have begun to feel confusing, it’s because they are recursive. Jenny could tell Coccinelle about a surgeon who performed vaginoplasties only because she’d been inspired by Coccinelle’s transition, a transition in turn aided by Marie-Andre. I think of these women, and the others who feature in this narrative, as having passed the future back and forth, like a gift.
Corinne van Tongerloo first learned about the clinic in Casablanca in the late 1950s, when she read a newspaper account about the “sex change operation” of the Paris cabaret star Coccinelle. On vacation in Casablanca with a friend a few years before her surgery, Corinne felt drawn to the clinic’s entrance. She stood between the two potted palms flanking the clinic’s iron grate, pressed her hands to the brass plaque set into pink marble beside the door and thumbed the raised letters, “Dr. Georges Burou, gynécologue et obstétricien.” She began to cry. “I knew then that I would have my operation there, at Clinique du Parc,” Corinne told me.
When I tell people about how I discovered the clinic, I tell them that I stumbled across Georges Burou’s Wikipedia page the semester I took leave from college and taught English at a language school in Casablanca. During that time, I was reading ferociously about the history of gender, trying to find mine. I was sitting at my favorite café when I read that, for trans women across the world, the bulk of “sex reassignment surgeries” between 1956 and the late 1970s happened in Morocco. I clicked the hyperlinked source and Morocco shrank to Casablanca, shrank to Burou’s first clinic on Boulevard de la Gare (present-day Boulevard Hassan II). I tell them that I leaned back, eyes wide, knees trembling—because I was staying five doors down.
I shoved my chair into the café table and half jogged to the clinic’s former entrance, where I stopped and stared up at the faded letters still announcing its name. Chills cascaded down through my shoulders to my fingertips, which reached, almost mystically, for the brass plaque beside the door. As I imagined the spirits of the women who’d sojourned there slipping over me, I felt what queer people, and trans people in particular, are so often denied: the power of knowing our own history.
But that’s not how it really happened. I tell the story that way when I don’t think people would otherwise understand the intrinsic connection I felt to the women who traveled to Clinique du Parc, or how cinematic and fated that connection felt.
Before I discovered the clinic, I had spent the better part of a week writing, stitching anecdotes from my young adulthood together with the feeling that my body could not be described by the language I’d been given, and starting to develop a new understanding of myself as nonbinary. That day in the café, my heart lurched when I read one fact about Clinique du Parc in particular: In mid-twentieth century trans women’s circles, the clinic was so well known that “going to Casablanca” became a community shorthand for vaginoplasty itself. The truth is that I never actually visited the clinic’s threshold. I didn’t have to. To feel myself standing in the women’s footsteps, it was enough to know that Casablanca was where I had reshaped the terms of gender as they had been dictated to me, and that it had been important to hundreds of trans elders in much the same way. In the very same place where my understanding of myself as trans had crystallized, I had also stumbled into a kind of lineage, and I had never felt so raw or so free.
I never dreamed that I’d actually meet the women who traveled to Clinique du Parc, partly because I could find so little information about them. For years, all I could dig up was a 2011 Dutch documentary called I am a Woman Now. The documentary follows five former patients’ lives after their surgeries with Burou. In one scene, the camera cuts back and forth between shots of an elderly Corinne van Tongerloo bustling around her studio apartment in Antwerp and film shot of her in her twenties by a boyfriend, Jacques. In the film, she’s drenched in sunlight, wearing a yellow dress, beaming. In a voiceover, Corinne explains that she “couldn’t wait for the operation to make her a real woman,” and I balked. As the screen flashed back and forth between her young, open face and her soft, kind wizened one, I found it hard to believe we thought so differently about gender, that she had just said a vagina is what makes a woman real.
Burou’s first operation took place barely twenty years after the earliest documented gender-affirming surgeries, which were divided into four stages—two for removal of the penis and testicles and two for reconstruction of a vagina. Trans women in the 1950s existed within a complex legal matrix, with the first steps of surgery illegal in some countries and the two later steps outlawed in countries that permitted the first. Surgeries were banned in France under an 1850s law barring “castration” and in the U.S. following a 1949 court case that deemed genital reconstruction an act of public mayhem. Christine Jorgensen, the first American to undergo a widely-publicized “sex change,” traveled to Denmark for her operation in 1952. After Jorgensen’s surgery sparked a worldwide media storm, hospital boards in Denmark received warnings from the police to halt operations. The premiere destination for surgery thus shifted to the Netherlands––until a similar sequence of events shut that option down.
When Morocco won independence from France in 1956, the French statute barring castration fell away there, opening a Moroccan route. Jenny must have studied her options closely, because she approached Burou about attempting the operation the same year.
The women went to Burou because he did not make them wait, often performing surgery the very same day a patient arrived at the clinic. Unlike in the U.S., Denmark, and the Netherlands, there was no barrage of psychiatric tests, no requirement to be on hormones for a year pre-op, though Burou performed the surgeries at his discretion, refusing people under eighteen and, like most surgeons operating on trans people at the time, women he did not think would have “successful” results (i.e. pass).
By the 1970s, taxi drivers at the airport knew where the women wanted to be taken as soon as they arrived. “Clinique du Parc! Clinique du Parc!” Belgian actress Vanessa van Durme was one such woman, and as she exited the airport she found a line of cabbies calling to her, leaning against their cars.
Within the ruddy pink walls of Burou’s waiting room, the women could peruse copies of Elle and Paris Match, in which Burou’s 1973 profile resulted in his dismissal from the French Medical Association. They could hear the muffled questions of expectant mothers and what one patient deemed the “anxious pacing of paternity,” along with occasional bursts of Darija and heavy silences.
But there is also the waiting that happens before that waiting has a container, a name. For example: in 1952, when Corinne van Tongerloo was fourteen, she went to the grocery store every morning before school to get the paper. She told me, “I went, and I saw a big poster, and on one side, there was a picture of a soldier, and on the other, a woman, a sort of Marilyn. And it was Christine Jorgensen. And there it was written, ‘American GI Becomes a woman by sexual operation.’ And I saw this. And I started trembling. I said, ‘Is that about us they’re talking?’”
“After that, I didn’t worry,” Corinne leaned back in her kitchen chair, eyes shining. “I said, my time will come.”
The moment Corinne encountered Christine Jorgensen’s story, she transformed. The way she articulated the memory—“is that about us they’re talking?”—illustrates her shift from someone with desires she didn’t understand to a member of a community shaped around those desires. Realizing there were others like her gave Corinne hope. Like Coccinelle’s encounter with Jenny on the street, Corinne’s discovery of Jorgensen provided her with a path forward.
But Jorgensen also played a more complicated role in the formation of trans identity. In “Constructing the Good Transsexual: Christine Jorgensen, Whiteness, and Heteronormativity in the Mid-Twentieth Century Press,” scholar Emily Skidmore explores how Jorgensen earned mainstream acceptance by appealing to white, middle class notions of respectability. In interviews, Jorgensen distanced herself from other groups considered “sexually deviant,” at a time when, as Skidmore notes, “sexual deviance [was] often articulated through racialized tropes.” In interviews, Jorgensen expressed disdain for homosexuals and cross-dressers. She told reporters that “prostitutes made [her] sick,” and that she had vomited after receiving homosexual advances during her time in the army. Even after her operation, Jorgensen didn’t start dressing as a woman until the U.S. government changed the sex on her passport, conveying an investment in legitimization by the state.
Jorgensen described herself as a “shy and sensitive youngster” who preferred reading to street games, suggesting that she had always been really a woman. The vision of womanhood she articulated centered on domesticity and her desire for a family and husband. Profiles on Jorgensen often appeared beside photographs of her puttering around the kitchen. In “Constructing the Good Transsexual,” Skidmore notes that the mainstream press often allowed Jorgensen to tell her story in her own words, since those words did not challenge the prevailing logics of gender.
Jorgensen’s acceptance as a woman hinged not just on the narrative strategies she deployed but also on her physique. “Ex-G.I. Becomes Blond Beauty,” described as “a sort of Marilyn,” Jorgensen’s body conformed to her era’s dominant standards of feminine beauty. Other women who transitioned in the U.S. in the 1950s weren’t so lucky, even other white women. Tamara Rees’ larger frame and darker hair led to more questionable press. For women of color like Laverne Peterson, expressing a longing to paint their nails or cook family dinner did not protect them from press treatment as scandals, even as the publicity surrounding their transitions may still have provided a sense of possibility to other trans women.
After the wide silences of their first days at Burou’s clinic post-surgery, some of the women began to hear bells summoning nurses down the hallways, and the distant chatter of other patients. When they had recovered sufficiently to have their dressings changed outside their rooms, they saw that they were not, after all, alone. There were trans patients assembled from all over the world—“others like me” one patient wrote in her autobiography—who felt kinship with one another, and a brief, sprawling happiness.
For many women who visited Casablanca, surgery represented a narrative unburdening as well as a physical one. When the customs agent at the airport asked his perennial question, Vanessa Van Durme thought to herself, “That which I had to declare, I’d left behind.” For Van Durme, there was no longer an incongruence between her body and her self that would require confession.
But then she was led into a separate room and the agent asked something else. “How much did the surgery cost?” Van Durme felt the invasion immediately, that he had clocked her and was treating her less respectfully as a result. This moment of border crossing proved revelatory for van Durme: “This question … forced me to understand that I would always be a phenomenon.” The woman behind her in line was asked no questions.
Van Durme’s anecdote surfaces the tension between a desire to pass and the reality of being clocked anyway. In her 1987 essay “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto,” artist and theorist Sandy Stone examines exactly this tension. “Passing means to live successfully in the gender of choice, to be accepted as a ‘natural’ member of that gender”; “Passing means a denial of mixture,” an imperative to be either masculine or feminine, not both.
To understand the mechanisms of passing, Stone surveys the dominant narrative structures in the autobiographies of trans women, from the early days of gender-affirming surgery in the 1930s to the essay’s publication in 1987. The essay opens with a critique of the memoir of a Burou patient, British travel writer Jan Morris. In her 1974 book Conundrum, Morris’s last act before she’s wheeled into the operating room is to “say goodbye to myself in the mirror. We would never meet again, and I wanted to give that other self a long last look in the eye, and a wink for luck … Flights of angels, I said to myself, and so staggered back to my bed, and oblivion.” By Morris’s account, to undergo a “sex change operation” is to become a different person entirely. Her invocation of “flights of angels” even suggests the death and ascendance to heaven of a former self.
Morris’s description of surgery as death and rebirth recurs across most trans autobiographies of the twentieth century. In some accounts, a trans woman awakens from the operation with a higher pitched voice, or different handwriting—neither of which is a scientifically-observed result of bottom surgery.
There are a few reasons why trans women of the mid-twentieth century might have told their stories using these particular conventions. To some, the idea of a complete transformation from “man” to woman and an end to the former self probably felt true. But like the desire for heterosexual domesticity Christine Jorgensen expressed to newspapers, these stories were also strategic, especially when it came to accessing gender-affirming care.
Hesitant to assume the “professional risks involved in performing experimental surgeries” on a population already considered deviant, mid-century doctors needed a firm set of diagnostic criteria to legitimize performing these operations. In 1966, sexologist Harry Benjamin published The Transsexual Phenomenon, which became “the researchers’ standard reference,” as Stone notes. Benjamin’s book argued that across his case studies of transsexuals, the most consistent factors were their sense of having been born in the wrong body and the agony that caused. Doctors welcomed this narration of trans identity, which offers as minimal a challenge to gender norms as possible. It doesn’t suggest that the system of gender is flawed, only that trans people are, and that in changing trans people’s physical anatomy, this problem can be corrected.
Whether or not mid-century trans women understood their problems in this way, when they interacted with doctors, “their behavior matched up gratifyingly with Benjamin’s criteria.” In fact, “It took a surprisingly long time… for the researchers to realize that the reason the candidates’ behavioral profiles matched Benjamin’s so well was that the candidates, too, had read Benjamin’s book, which was passed from hand to hand within the transsexual community, and they were only too happy to provide the behavior that led to acceptance for surgery.” Burou’s patients, too, plied strategic narratives to get the results they wanted, beginning with Burou’s first trans patient, Jenny.
In a 1974 interview with Paris Match, Burou describes their initial encounter.
A beautiful woman came to see me,” Burou told the reporter. “Really it was a man. I didn’t know until afterwards… [he was] comporting [himself] like a woman, with a ravishing chest that he had obtained thanks to hormone shots, very little [facial and body] hair, and a feminine figure. He spoke to me of his problems. He wanted to kill himself, having the profound conviction that his masculine body was a tragic, irremediable accident of nature … Faced with this problem completely new to me and that interested me enormously, I studied male and female anatomy for several months and hospitalized [Jenny] [at my clinic] just beside my office and my own apartment. The operation lasted three hours. The “sick person” stayed one month convalescing. She was satisfied in every sense. I had made her into a real woman.
In this anecdote, Jenny performs Burou’s expectations of womanhood on physical and behavioral levels, with her “ravishing chest” and feminine “comportment.” Her description of her body as a “tragic accident of nature” positions her as a woman born into the wrong body, rather than someone in whom masculine and feminine traits, to borrow Stone’s term, “mix.” Jenny’s ability to pass convinces Burou of the appropriateness of her gender choice, and her account of suffering enables him to see himself as her deliverer.
Perhaps most striking is not Jenny’s story itself but the way its key narrative elements were echoed by the women who contacted Burou in her wake. “Every day, I receive numerous letters from people in distress. Suicide is evoked like blackmail,” Burou told Paris Match. Comparing the evocation of suicide to “blackmail” suggests Burou didn’t think these pleas were authentic. I suspect they both were and weren’t. But as Stone suggests, this wielding of narrative is a testament to the whisper network that allowed trans women coming of age in the twentieth century to invent the lives they dreamed were possible.
I picture Jenny standing on the street in that initial encounter with Coccinelle, not only telling the star that she had convinced Burou to perform their long sought-after operation, but dictating, too, the exact phrases that would unlock his willingness to do so.
After her serendipitous meeting with Jenny, Coccinelle returned to Paris, where she performed as the star of the Carrousel, an understated but elegant club located just minutes from Paris’ famous Champs Elysées Boulevard, and the world’s first and—to date—only cabaret troupe composed entirely of trans women. At the height of the club’s prestige, musical numbers played with and on the audience’s shock that these women, whose voluptuous figures and delicate features newspapers compared to those of Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn Monroe, “could really be men.” That was the club’s central gimmick: the incongruity between how things were and how they seemed to be, to everyone but the performers.
Backstage, the women didn’t have to explain themselves, they simply existed. In the dressing room, the performers clustered by the languages they spoke, forty of them from all over the world adjusting one another’s costumes and dabbing on makeup in vanities ringed with lightbulbs. Who knows how it happened exactly, whether Coccinelle burst into the dressing room at call time and summoned the whole troupe around her to deliver the news, or whether it passed from one show girl to another in a cascade of whispers, but one night around 1958 Coccinelle arrived with les grandes bonnes nouvelles: She had been on vacation in Casablanca when a young woman named Jenny stopped her on the street and said she had convinced a surgeon there to perform an operation then illegal in France. Despite being Jenny’s age, Carrousel performer Marie-Pierre Pruvot, who also traveled to Dr. Burou for an operation, said she considers Jenny un ancêtre: an ancestor. Coccinelle would be traveling to his clinic, she announced to the others, and when several protested that she would die within the year, that the surgeon hadn’t performed enough operations to confirm it was safe, Coccinelle said, “Maybe I will. But if I do, it will be worth it.”
News of the clinic spread via the Carrousel’s touring performances. A decade after Coccinelle and Jenny’s serendipitous meeting, on the other side of the world, a sixteen year-old named Jill Pattirawadjme attended a performance of the Carrousel at a theater in Indonesia. Most of the people in Jill’s life did not yet know that she was not a boy, but when she stepped into the aisle to greet one of the performers between numbers, the show girl recognized something in Jill and scrawled a name onto a slip of paper: Dr. Georges Burou.
As a young trans person today, so many of my own connections to trans community have happened online. It shocks and delights me to imagine women sharing this information in the same physical spaces, the same breaths. Before there was Lex, before I could open a green blob on my phone to see that someone in my neighborhood was out of T and arrange to pass off my own gel packets, before there were Queer Exchange Facebook groups for us to compare notes on surgeons and masseuses, barbers and boxing gyms, before the marches and leaflets and LGBTQ centers—before all that, there was the Carrousel de Paris. When I think about how the Carrousel performers cared for one another by sharing information, I feel both awe and recognition, distance and kinship.
After their operations, many Burou patients relied on passing to build lives they found safe and sustainable. Marie-Pierre Pruvot danced alongside Coccinelle at the Carrousel under the stage name “Bambi” for two decades before embarking on a thirty-year career as a middle school teacher. “I didn’t want to be ‘Bambi’ anymore,” she told me when I interviewed her in her Paris apartment. “I just wanted to be ‘Madame Pruvot.’” I asked if any of her students had known about her past when she was teaching. “God no. I would never have been able to keep my job.”
“I wanted to be seen as a woman just like everybody else,” another woman who transitioned in the 1970s told me. “I didn’t want to be some other, in-between thing.”
But the social acceptance gained through passing comes at a cost, Stone argues in “The Empire Strikes Back.” Part of the “process [of passing] is known as constructing a plausible history, learning to lie effectively about one’s past,” she writes. “What is lost is the ability to authentically represent the complexities and ambiguities of lived experience.” This loss is individual––obscuring one’s past “forecloses the possibility of authentic [personal] relationships”––but also societal. Stone contends that “in the transsexual’s erased history, we can find a story disruptive to the accepted discourses of gender.” In other words, the contradictions and ambivalences of lived experience contain vital information about how unstable oppressive gender norms are. Speaking openly about these contradictions––working through them together––could create systems of gender in which a wider range of expressions is celebrated, not just for trans people but for everyone.
Stone calls this way of conceptualizing gender as messy and multiple “posttranssexual.” While she doesn’t use the particular language of “gender queer” “gender fluid,” or “nonbinary,” trans thinkers today credit Stone with laying the groundwork for these contemporary understandings.
On an emotional level, I feel drawn to one phrase in Stone’s text in particular, her welcoming of “transsexuals for whom gender identity is something different from and perhaps irrelevant to physical genitalia.” I think of my own gender this way. I have to, in order to embrace the fits and starts of my medicalization and still be able to see myself as authentically trans.
Stories about who and what and how trans people could be proliferated in the decades after Stone’s essay was published and on the early internet. But as a kid growing up in the 2000s and 2010s, stories like Christine Jorgensen’s still structured the ways the people in my life spoke about trans people. A trans person was someone who had always felt they were born into the wrong body (so I couldn’t be one). As a consequence of death and rebirth narratives like Jan Morris’, I thought for years that if I didn’t “figure out” my gender immediately, I would be lying to people about who I was, that my real life wouldn’t yet have started.
I don’t feel particularly mad at any of the women who narrativized trans identity as movement from one fixed pole to another. They faced challenges I can’t comprehend. What interests me more is my own impulse, in light of those challenges, to staunchly defend them from anyone who would dare critique their legacies. “They were doing the best they could. Didn’t you even hear Marie-Pierre talk about keeping her job?” I want to shout back at Stone, who came of age in the same generation and whose “best” was arguably better, having contested rather than reified notions of gender rooted in binarism, respectability, and whiteness. I want to yell at Stone not to criticize these other women, but I also want to hold her hands and weep while thanking her profusely for making space for multiplicity in ways they did not.
In December 2022, I traveled to France, Belgium, and the Netherlands to meet some of the women whose stories I’d been tracking down for years, starting with Marie-Pierre Pruvot. As I stood on her doorstep in Paris, I fretted that I hadn’t had time to iron my navy button down, which would’ve looked more masculine than the purple cardigan I’d ended up wearing. I was so scared she wouldn’t see me as trans, but when she opened the door, her smile melted my fears.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said, eyes shining. “I’ve spoken to so many reporters but almost none of them have been my descendants.”
That is not how it actually happened, despite being the most cinematic way this story could end. The truth is that Marie-Pierre didn’t recognize me as trans at all. None of the women I interviewed did, I suspect because their own understandings of trans identity are intimately tied to medicalization, and I’ve been off T for a long time. Marie-Pierre did provide context around some women’s use of the word “real,” clarifying that her own approach to surgery had been both desire-based and strategic. Burou’s operation was something she’d dreamt of her whole life, Marie-Pierre said, even though she knew she was a woman without it. “But you have to understand,” she told me. “People were never going to accept that I was a real woman, so I would do everything I could to convince them I was real, use every tool available to me at the time.”
For Marie-Pierre, medicalization was an authentic desire, but also a way to be seen by others the way she saw herself. That’s still true, and it’s frustrating. I wish I didn’t have to change my body for people to stop assuming I’m a woman. At a bar a few months ago, one of my friends told the table they were so excited to be starting T. I felt compelled to announce that I’d once been on it, too, as if to insist that I was just as trans as they were. I was scared the rest of our friends, despite their commitment to expansive understandings of gender, would place my transmasc friend and I in different categories because only one of us was pursuing medicalization.
These fears were the ruminations of a deeply neurotic person, but they also say something about the ways mid-century discourses still hold us hostage. Despite everything I’ve done to unlearn binary notions of gender, part of me still thinks about transition in terms of “forward” and “back.” This language implies teleology, an old version of the story in which an ex-GI becomes a blond beauty.
While I wait for the tension between my body, how others see me, and how I see myself to resolve, knowing that the resolution might never come, I ask language to carry part of the burden for me. I try different names, ask my friends to sometimes call me “he” instead of “they,” for my girlfriend to imagine she’s holding, then tell me she loves the feeling of my dick. Language allows me to create realities without committing to them, and in this way, to find the ones that fit.
Marie-Pierre and the other women I interviewed expressed a deep sense of alienation from and even contempt towards young queer communities today, feelings that erupted around questions of visibility and language. “I don’t understand why young people need to be so loud about it,” Jill Pattirawadjme told me. At the end of our interview, I asked Marie-Pierre if it was okay for me to use the French word “travestie”—translated as transvestite, a word often considered pejorative today—to describe her and the other women who danced at the Carrousel.
She nodded but then grew agitated. “It’s such a battle today, a war in words. We didn’t care what people called us. We just wanted to live our lives.” The same woman who told me she didn’t want to be seen as some “other, in-between thing,” also said that she had attended transgender conferences and gatherings through the 1990s, but that eventually, the language people used to discuss their identities had become so different from the way she understood her own experiences that she stopped going. I grieve the fact that shifts in language and understanding have made some trans elders feel the desire to distance themselves from queer spaces; it’s also interesting that they don’t seem to see that the ways communities navigate language today is equally as strategic, equally a negotiation between internal and external realities.
These profound generational differences beg the question, where does the truth of trans identity live—in who recognizes us, in our language, or in our bodies? What is it that trans people actually have in common? Searching for some fundamental truth of trans identity is just as futile as searching for an essential, irreducible self. We are who we claim and who claims us. We are our relationships to our bodies and the language we use to understand ourselves. We are none of these things exclusively, all of them in different proportions at different times.
When I returned to the U.S., I grappled with how to understand myself in relationship to these women’s legacies. Did I still have the right to see them as ancestors, even though they hadn’t embraced me as a descendant? When the women in this narrative came of age, changing one’s gender was virtually unheard of, an impossibility. The women’s journeys from “one sex to the other,” though fraught, shaped a world in which gender was, if not exactly fluid, also not fixed. A friend convinced me I could claim the women as ancestors, but then another question arose: given the complicated ways many of them told their stories, did I still want to?
Not everyone who could assert a connection to the women who visited Clinique du Parc chooses to do so. In 2020, members of the queer Moroccan collective Nassawiyat voted to exclude the clinic from a zine on queer Moroccan history. Because Burou was a white French doctor, and because the women who traveled to his clinic were predominantly white from Western countries, contemporary queer Moroccans disidentify with the clinic’s history.
Reckoning with the legacies of the trans elders in this narrative requires holding multiple truths, looking critically at both the oppressive systems the women benefited from and their impact on trans communities around the world.
Christine Jorgensen, Coccinelle, Marie-André, Jenny, Marie-Pierre Pruvot, and Corinne van Tongerloo each held racial privilege, but they invested in white middle class norms in different ways, to different degrees, and with different consequences. Christine Jorgensen emphatically distanced herself from sex workers and other “sexual deviants,” and embraced white heterosexual domesticity in public, calculated ways. Marie-Pierre Pruvot also wanted and could access a version of white middle class domesticity, but espoused no such public positions. In her choice to quietly pass after life as a performer, Marie-Pierre played less of a role in constructing a public image of what a “good transsexual” should look like. At the same time, in choosing to pass, she also gave up one form of solidarity with those for whom it is always more difficult to pass because of the ways gender norms are constructed around race.
Alongside the privileged status of the women who went to Burou and the imperialist system that allowed him to practice where he did, on whom he did, I can’t ignore the impact these women had on trans people around the world. Jenny, Coccinelle, Marie-Pierre, and the Carrousel’s touring performances provided a vision of possibility, and a path to surgery, for thousands of trans women. Without them, I would not have had the sense, in the café in Casablanca, that how I had come to understand myself was right in a way that was so much bigger and older than me.
As I claim this fractured lineage, I reach back into the past for what stretches across generations and buoys me: the ways our various self-discoveries are made possible by one another, how we pass the future back and forth, in whispers and online. I picture Coccinelle and Marie-André Schwindenhammer sitting opposite one another in the train compartment, Jill Pattirawadjme approaching a Carrousel performer in the theater aisle in Jakarta, Corinne reading the headline about Christine Jorgensen’s transition, Jenny spotting Coccinelle from down the street, my own eyes widening as I discover the clinic’s Wikipedia page. The train compartment rattles, the music swells, the motorcycle grumbles to a halt. One person, looking at the other, says or thinks, “You’re like me,” and a dreamt-of future opens up.
Clare Boyle
© 2023 Majuscule Lit LLC
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