The Sunday Story: All The Only Ones

I'm Aisha Roscoe and this is a Sunday story. So here at NPR, there's always a lot going on breaking news, investigative reporting, tiny desk concerts and deeply reported podcast.

Series.

I've been listening to this three-part series that finds meaning by weaving together the past and the present. It's out of Embedded, our long-form documentary unit, and I'm so excited for you to hear some of it. So I'll hand it over to embedded host Kelly McEvers and let her take it from here.

Hey, I'm Kelly McEvers and I'm here with reporter Lane Kaplan-Levinson. They are the host of our new series, All the Only ones. Hey Lane, Hey Kelly, how's it going?

This week, a whole new slate of anti-trans bills passed in states across the country.

This year, 2023 broke a record for the number of these bills, and that's the fourth year in a row. A lot of them target trans kids, in particular, banning them from bathrooms or sports teams, or gender-affirming health care. There will be a ban on gender-affirming care for kids in Louisiana. Texas will stop at nothing to continue to protect women's sports for women.

We are in a new dawn of gender and sex complexity.

How young is too young for a child to transition?

On a daily basis, we're reading new headlines about gender, about gender non-conforming people.

The subject of transgender kids has moved into the mainstream.

Already, by this era, if you go to any major city in the United States, there are whole neighborhoods that are full of people that we would recognize today as trans.

This is Jules Gill Peterson.

I am a historian of trans people, trans medicine, and trans life.

She teaches at Johns Hopkins University.

So by the 20s and 30s, there's this really vibrant world of its own set of rules that has been functioning for many, many, many decades. Some might call themselves inverts, some people might have identified as homosexual, which is still a relatively new term, or a few might have even called themselves gay.

So, even though people wouldn't use the term transgender in a widespread way until the 1990s, trans people were very much around living full trans lives more than a hundred years ago.

There are whole sections of American cities, but they're also often segregated in Chicago. The North Loop is a notorious queer kind of neighborhood in the early 20th century, but the south side has its own Black queer and Black trans neighborhood as well. In New York City, you can see a similar thing happening. Greenwich Village is the heart of a vibrant lesbian, gay and trans social world for white.

People, whereas the heart of the black, queer and trans world was Harlem. And if you were part of that scene, you could probably be found at the Hamilton Lodge Ball. It was an annual social event that drew huge crowds. I know a fool that blows a horn.

The Hamilton Lodge ball was located at the Rockland Palace in Harlem and began in the late 19th century. But then kind of came into itself really in the Harlem Renaissance era during the 1920s and 30s.

This is Marquise Bay, professor of African-American studies, Black Feminist theory, and transgender studies at Northwestern University.

It was an event that drew thousands of people to dance and to perform and to spectate, and it was characterized by what many would call drag balls.

And it wasn't just the Hamilton Lodge balls. You could go to the Eubangee Club and see Gladys Bentley, who performed in full tuxedos, backed by a chorus of men in drag. Here she is singing Boogie in my Woogie.

I was in the army. Now the war is through. Look out, pretty mama, I'm coming home to you.

I wonder, who's boogie, my woogie now? Hey doc, Hey doc, hey Doc.

These places really birthed a new sense of what was possible for Black life, and in particular, Black queer life. There was a kind of search for freeness, and freeness in expression included gender expression. And in fact, to express myself in this way is quite seriously me living to my fullest.

So, gender nonconformity fully existed back in the 1920s and 30s, but one thing was very different medical care.

We didn't need medicine to exist. Trans people have existed in different forms and different cultures everywhere for thousands of years, for as long as there is recorded human history.

But going to the doctor about your gender, to try to get hormones or surgery, that wasn't initially on most people's radar. It wasn't an option. But it's at this moment, the 20s and 30s, between the two world wars, that science and medicine make it possible to medically transition.

And so it's a profound moment of change for trans people, and it becomes really fascinating to see which people will become interested in that. Bernard is one of those first people.

Bernard is one of the first trans patients on record at Johns Hopkins trying to get what today we would call gender affirmation surgery. We don't know Bernard's real name because it was redacted from his medical records.

So Bernard is a pseudonym that I invented for him. You have to treat people's medical records like you would treat them today, and so you can't use any personally identifying information, even to conduct corroborating research.

By the time the science rolls out, Bernard was in his 20s and he was ready to take advantage of medical treatments to transition. But he had been living as himself way before that, since he was a kid.

I have always liked boyish things such as games, books and clothes. I wear my haircut, short and tailored clothes all the time. I feel much more...

This is from a letter Bernard wrote As a young man. I discovered it while reading Jules Gil Peterson's book, Histories of the Transgender Child. Jules dug through archives and found all sorts of records. She used them to tell the stories of trans youth in the U..S. over the last century, including Bernard's.

So Bernard is this remarkable little boy growing up in small-town Alabama in the 19-teens.

It's basically impossible to kiss your elbow. That's what makes the challenge so cruel. But every day, Bernard tries and tries.

Hundreds of times hoping that it would finally come true. And really, from a very young age. He's transgressing that line between genders. He is figuring out how to steal his younger brother's overalls, her trousers, put them on. Dress up as a boy. And as he's starting to grow up, people in his family and community are starting to mistake him for his father sometimes. And you know, this really, really, really made Bernard very happy.

By the time he's in his 20s, Bernard's dreams have only gotten him so far. He has privileges, he identifies as white, and he comes from a well-respected family with money. His father's a doctor, and he wants to be one himself.

And he's sort of feeling pretty, kind of frustrated, like his life is sort of stalled out where he would want it to be.

He's got something going for him, though he's in love.

He wants to marry her, he really wants to marry her, but he's worried.

Because recently, an evangelist came to town and basically told her to leave, Bernard saying.

You're a woman, well, you're not going to be marrying another woman.

So he's determined to find a way for others to see him for who he is, a man.

And it's around this time in the 1930s that he first starts to hear about people who are like him prior to this era. When he was growing up. He really felt like he was the only person in the world with this issue. Where he felt himself to be a man but didn't have the body to match it.

For years, I have thought I was the only person in the world like that, and I have only lately heard that there are other people with the same feelings.

But then suddenly he starts to hear about sex changes.

He reads a story about an English track and field athlete who was declared a man after two surgeries. Bernard's mind is blown, and he writes to the editor of Sexology magazine, asking for more info. The editor writes back and says.

You ought to go to Johns Hopkins Hospital. And so that plants the idea in Bernard's head, and he's like, OK, fine, I've got to get myself to Johns Hopkins and I've got to find this. Surgeon, Hugh Hampton Young. Because if I go there either, he can confirm that I'm a man and give me the kind of certification that I need. To get married to my sweetheart. Or maybe he can make me physically into the man that I know myself to be, and then I can come back and marry her.

We'll get back to Bernard's story, but first, I want to introduce you to another young person trying to navigate their transness, about 100 years after Bernard.

Oh, I fucking love Mardi Gras so much, like, I'm sorry, but I just, I just love Mardi Gras so much. Because I think it's like, when you're costuming like, it feels like you feel so free, like, and you could just like, really be yourself.

This is Zen Castro. I'm in their living room in New Orleans 7th Ward, and they're showing me something super coveted in this city.

I have a musa shoe. what um, a musa shoe during Mardi Gras is kind of like one of the Holy Grail throws, so....

If you're not familiar with Mardi Gras, a Musa shoe is like a bedazzled high-heeled pump. They're thrown from floats at parades, and that's a really cool one.

Yeah, I really like it. It's um, very colorful, very fun. yeah, very glittery too. It's getting all over my hands.

Getting glitter all over your hands, and really all over your body is very New Orleans. It's pretty much unavoidable, especially during Mardi Gras. I used to live there, and you really never rid yourself of glitter year-round. It's in your bed, it's on your sink.

Over my brother, if he did not do that stuff, then it was like, whatever, he's a boy.

But then Zen discovered the social media site Tumblr, which was their portal to lots of things, including grunge fashion.

I liked wearing flannel and I had these ribbed jeans that I'd always wear. Crop tops were starting to be a thing.

And transness.

After I see these words like gender fluid on Tumblr, I'm searching them up. And it feels so like me that I'm just like, Wow, this makes sense. This is the missing piece of the puzzle.

The missing piece of the puzzle that they kept to themselves? Zen spent a lot of middle school hiding. They kept exploring their transness on the internet, but not out in the world.

I got bullied a lot.

For what?

I don't know, I guess, for just being me.

They thought they might be able to come out once they got to high school, especially when they got into their dream school. Benjamin Franklin.

Which here is a pretty big deal, because people see it as the smart school or whatever. And in my head, I thought, Oh, there's going to be other people like me. It's going to be okay for me to express myself and to talk to other people, because they'll know what I have experienced, I guess.

Which may have been true. There probably were other trans and non-binary students at Franklin, but when Zen got there, they had trouble fitting in.

A lot of the demographics of Ben Franklin are people who are upper class, middle class. People who have always had like these supportive people around them and resources.

Zen had a much different upbringing. When they were 10 years old. Their dad was deported to Mexico. Zen's dad managed to get back into the U.S and to Zen's family, but a few years later, he was deported a second time.

I knew that I would probably never see him again.

Zen was right. They haven't seen their dad since.

So it was even hard to like, relate to most people in a school that I initially thought.

I would fit in.

That's when I started to kind of be like, over feminine.

After the break, we learn how Zen started to live as zen out in the world, beyond their Tumblr feed. But first, we'll return to Bernard, who's trying to transition a century before Zen was born.

I feel much more at ease in men's clothes than in women's.

As I understand it, a person may have secondary sexual organs, which control his mental and emotional life while the primary organs.

He knows how to change sex through surgery, he's done it before.

But he wasn't doing surgeries for trans people at their request.

He wasn't doing it in a gender-affirming way.

He was working with a different group of people.

With intersex patients to force them into a binary sex.

This is Hill Malatino.

Assistant Professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies and Philosophy at Penn State University.

As Hill was saying, intersex is an umbrella term used to describe a variety of conditions where a person's reproductive or sexual anatomy doesn't align perfectly with what is traditionally thought of as female or male. We don't know exactly how many people live with intersex conditions. Some estimates say. It may be as common as having red hair or green eyes. But parents often don't see it that way, and definitely, in Bernard's time, parents treated it as a crisis.

The fact that their kid wasn't sort of normatively male or female, at least not in the strict conception that we have of biological sex.

Medicine was coming to solve what was supposedly a problem.

To sort of normalize intersex bodies, I use scare quotes when I say that.

Which is exactly what Hugh Hampton Young was doing at Hopkins.

These were surgeries forced on children who were born with genitals that didn't look obviously male or female. A lot of these kids were too young to consent, couldn't talk yet, so there was just a lot of incredible medical abuse being done in the name of social conformity. And the techniques that those doctors were developing were the same techniques that were being used to treat trans adults in most instances. That's why trans kids and intersex kids traveled together throughout the 20th century.

Trans and intersex kids in this period were treated in completely opposite ways. Young and other surgeons operated on intersex kids, but refused to operate on trans kids and adults who asked for the very same procedures. In both cases, the power was in the doctor's hands, not the kids.

So Bernard sits down to write this letter to Hugh Hampton Young, over in Baltimore and says that he's writing to him. Quote concerning What is to me a most vital subject?

If this can be done, I would like to know about what the cost would be and the time required. I have read that most of these operations would get in the experimental stage. But I am perfectly willing to become a part of any experiment that might be of any aid to the thousands of other persons affected as I am.

This letter must have been pretty convincing, because Hugh Hampton Young replies and says, Come to Baltimore for an appointment.

So Bernard packs his bags and.

Makes this trip all the way up to Baltimore, he shows up, meets Hugh Hampton. Young Young was very charmed by him.

So Bernard shows up and says, I know I'm a man. My body just has these female body parts, but I have male body parts too.

He says, You know, I can feel that I have a penis, but I think it might be sort of submerged or lodged inside my body somehow. So it needs to sort of be freed. I know I have testicles, but I think they're internal, I think that they failed to, you know, descend from inside the body.

Young is apparently convinced after just two meetings, he's basically prepared to give Bernard the surgery he wants.

But is a little nervous about it.

Nervous because of what happened after Young's colleague examined Bernard, this physician issued a report that said.

This person is not intersex.

So now Bernard has to go through one more gate to get his medical transition, a gate named Dr. Thomas Rennie.

He goes through, and, you know, interviews Bernard about his childhood. Hears about this longstanding wish to be a boy, feeling himself to be a boy, dressing as a boy, being mistaken for his father.

Dr. Rennie took detailed notes during the interview and heads up, he uses female pronouns for Bernard, she has a very interesting problem. She has come to Johns Hopkins because she feels that she is really a man. In spite of her female body build, and because she wishes to have an operation to give her male organs.

Rennie isn't really buying it.

She says she must have this done because she has been in love with a young lady in her hometown for the past five years and now wishes to marry her.

Rennie basically is like, you're a homosexual, you're a woman in a relationship with a woman, and that's a psychiatric illness.

It was merely suggested to the patient that, in view of her own history, there might have been strong psychological influences which led her to wish to be a man.

It's really hard to me, from reading the larger body of his work as a psychiatrist, to think that he sincerely believed this. It was more that he was alarmed that Bernard wasn't intersex, and so he was just grasping for a psychological explanation to block his request for medical transition. And homosexuality was really the only one in circulation in the United States at that time.

This was a time when medicine conflated sexual orientation and gender identity, even though in society a clear distinction of those two things was starting to emerge. Which makes it hard to claim that Bernard was a lesbian.

We're talking here about the late 1930s. And pretty clear distinctions between butch lesbians and trans men. Between lesbians who want to be known as butches because they want to be known as masculine. In the context of a lesbian social world that has its own bars and has its own courtship rituals. And then groups of people who were assigned female at birth but lived full-time as men and didn't necessarily socialize in that gay world. But were more likely to be found at the bar with all the other workers in an industrial plant, and there they passed for men. So we can place Bernard in that context.

And Jewel says there's Bernard's life, as he tells it.

The fact that he's always felt himself to be a boy, the fact that he works in a manual labor setting and really resented being kept out of medical school. These aren't really the kinds of life narratives that Butch lesbians would be presenting about themselves in the 1930s.

But despite what Bernard was saying, Dr. Rennie concluded that he was a lesbian. Because of the fact that the patient wanted to return home at once, and because she was not interested at all in any psychotherapy, but merely in the matter of surgical intervention, not much could be undertaken.

And that was it. That's the end of Bernard's medical record, no doubt. After hearing that he wasn't going to get what he wanted, he decided to get up, turn around and walk out that door. Returning to Alabama and disappearing ultimately from the historical record.

Bernard's medical record may have ended there, but Jewell says the response Bernard got from his doctors was among the first of its kind in the United States.

Young is actually one of the first people to use the pretense of. There's nothing different about your body from a so-called normal person, you're not intersex. So if there's nothing wrong with your body, then the only way I could imagine saying that you're disordered is to find something wrong with your mind. Bernard is kind of this fateful person who shows a lot of what is going to come. And what is going to define trans people's experiences with medicine decades later.

When we come back, Zen meets Bernard.

It was kind of like a spur-of-the-moment thing.

We're talking about the time they dug up, the confidence to do something they weren't sure they'd ever do come out to their mom.

There was one point where I was like, I don't think I would ever tell her, because I just had this feeling that I was going to have to tell her. I had this expectation that she wouldn't understand, or, at the worst, that she would say that my identity isn't real, or just react negatively. I don't know. I was kind of preparing for the worst.

So the strategy was to have a little distance, a phone call.

I told her in English, I'm non-binary and my brother was on speaker. And at first, my brother was trying to explain to her what that meant. She didn't understand at all. She thought I was trying to say I was lesbian.

But Zen needed backup, they needed Spanish CNN.

I saw this news segment and I looked over and I'm like, Oh my god, this is perfect.

Muy bien, a ver. ¿¿qué significa ser una persona que se identifica con el género no binario, como es el caso de Demi Lovato?

I sent it to her, I think she watched it and you know, she was like, very accepting. Maybe for like, a couple days, but then she reverted back to my dead name.

The name she gave Zen when Zen was born.

And to she her pronouns. The only person who's really on top of that stuff is my brother, who I'm closest to in my family. And I'm really appreciative of that because I feel like I have some support. But it always does make me cringe when I do end up calling her, or she messages me and she uses my dead name. Because it's almost like, on some level.

Zen's out to everyone in their life today, at home, at school, at work, but they still deal with insecurity around claiming their transness.

Because mainstream ideas float around about what that means.

Around what transness means, and, in Zen's case, what non-binary means, too.

It feels like that pressure to represent myself as gender neutral is there. Otherwise, being misgendered is a common occurrence. So it's kind of a lose-lose situation, I don't know.

Professor Hill Malatino writes about what Zen's experiencing. He and others say these feelings are a product of something called transnormativity.

This idea that there's one right way to be a trans guy, a trans woman, a non-binary person, I think that that's always violent, it's always limiting. I certainly experienced that as a trans youth, and I, too, didn't entirely know where those messages came from.

I really wanted Zen to meet Bernard as best they could. So one day, while we were driving around New Orleans together, I told them his story about trying to kiss his elbow, about falling in love, about his letters to doctors, and about how, after being denied surgery, he just completely disappears from the historical record.

I like the history about Bernard so much, but also it makes me so sad. It just feels disappointing that we don't know the conclusion, I guess.

What do you like to think was the rest of his life?

That he found another way to cope with his body, not matching his gender identity.

He loved wearing overalls, he loved wearing trouser pants.

Very on brand with being queer.

I don't know what happened to Bernard after he left Johns Hopkins. Because the only reason I could reconstruct all of this about his life is because I was able to read his medical files. But I like to imagine that Bernard kind of got the last laugh, gave up on that nonsense from psychiatry and went back home and lived the life that he wanted to.

Back at Zen's house, I see their high school diploma on the wall, something they're really proud of.

It does have my dead name on it, but this was before I came out entirely. So I mean, it's a moment in time.

Now, Zen's thinking about their future.

I'm jealous of future Zen because I'm sure they have it all figured out.

Describe the future zen that you're jealous of. Who are you?

I don't know who am I, I just I can't.

It's a thought experiment.

Someone who is confident, able to express themselves, comfortable being vulnerable, is so kind to themselves, so patient with themselves, and is able to take care of themselves. How they take care of others.

On the next two episodes, of All the only ones we hear from trans youth who need gender-affirming care to feel fully themselves. We learn what happens when trans kids trying to get this care are told they have to wait.

I can't wait six years, if I have to wait that long, I'll go crazy.

And what happens when they get the care they want? The end goal isn't to be a girl, being a girl is where I feel like I can finally begin. That's coming up on all the only ones from NPR.