Beyond the Binaries

Destiny:
My name is Destiny [inaudible 00:37:26] and I live in Columbia, South Carolina. And this is my favorite Pauli Murray poem, Mr. Roosevelt Regrets (Detroit Riot, 1943) by Pauli Murray.

Destiny:
“Upon reading PM newspaper’s account of Mr. Roosevelt statement on the recent race clashes: ‘I share your feeling that the recent outbreaks of violence in widely spread parts of the country endanger our national unity and comfort our enemies. I am sure that every time American regrets this.’

Destiny:
What’d you get, black boy, when they knocked you down in the gutter and they kicked your teeth out, and they broke your skull with clubs and they bashed your stomach in?

Destiny:
What’d you get when the police shot you in the back, and they chained you to the beds by they wiped the blood off?

Destiny:
What’d you get when you cried out to the Top Man? When you called on the man next to God, so you thought, and asked him to speak out to save you? What’d the Top Man say, black boy? ‘Mr. Roosevelt regrets……'”

Destiny:
I think this Pauli Murray poem really poignantly puts a finger on how inadequate the state is in addressing, much less redressing, the physical and metaphysical manifestations of anti-black violence and the rhetorical questions that that poem poses. I really feel an urgency to look beyond the mechanisms of the state in order to redress and address those manifestations of violence.

Joanne Freeman:
As you’ve heard on today’s show, Pauli Murray was an extremely accomplished person, and that continued to be the case even into Murray’s golden years. In 1977, Murray became the first African American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest. One month later, Murray celebrated Eucharist at the church in Chapel Hill, where Murray’s grandmother and great aunt had attended. Producer Ramona Martinez picks up the story from there.

Simon Fisher:
Once I opened the folder and just saw these photographs and these personal diaries, I felt like I was seeing something very familiar.

Ed Ayers:
For years, Simon Fisher has been researching the history of LGBTQ activism. He’s been looking specifically at its presence in the early civil rights movement.

Simon Fisher:
I read about Pauli Murray kind of on the side and didn’t really think that much about it. But then I got the opportunity to go to Pauli Murray’s personal papers.

Ed Ayers:
And when he did, Simon found himself tapping into a whole new perspective on Pauli Murray’s life, and more specifically, Murray’s gender identity.

Simon Fisher:
I identify as transgender myself, and just the expressions of masculinity in the pictures and these consternations and worries about gender and identity and medical treatments and things like that, I really saw something that spoke to me. And it’s not to say that the same things are happening then as are happening now, but there was a resonance and I felt like I just had to keep learning.

Ed Ayers:
As you heard earlier in the episode, Pauli Murray’s gender and sexual identity were fluid, but Pauli didn’t really talk about this in public or write about it in memoirs. So to fill in the blanks, historians like Simon have relied more on Murray’s private archive and they’ve used resources like a collection of photographs that Murray took in the late 1920s and early ’30s when Murray was a young adult.

Simon Fisher:
What we see is this very queer, I like to say joy and pleasure in that self documentation. Murray took pictures of themselves as male, masculine, really, really happy person out in the woods, climbing trees, playing sports, dressing up, grinning with their partner, and to include that in one’s archive is really rare. So historians put a lot of pieces together because those very stock images are often not held on to and not made public, but it made it through. And so it’s a very rare find and it helps historians draw a lot of very clear conclusions, I think, about what was going on for them.

Ed Ayers:
Even from an early age, Pauli knew something was different, and some say that was okay with Pauli’s family. In fact, Pauli’s uniqueness was welcomed with open arms.

Simon Fisher:
Both of their aunts who they grew up with were schoolteachers. Pauli Murray excelled at school when they were young, but then also played sports, but then also wanted to write, but then also really wanted to read. And so the way that Pauli Murray tells this, the story about their gender as a young person, is also wrapped up in this they wanted to wear boys’ clothes, but also wear it with these weird dresses. The story is wrapped up in a larger feeling of being really supported, which I really… It’s kind of like a sweet spot in their story that I really love.

Ed Ayers:
So, Pauli Murray grows up in this kind of surprisingly supportive environment, and yet still goes to Harlem. What’s that migration like? What does that mean for Pauli Murray?

Simon Fisher:
I think for me, and my kind of “what I do” with Pauli Murray’s story is I really try to locate it in a larger African American history of sexuality, gender history. And for me the answer the question is, well, everybody went to Harlem. The going to Harlem was such a norm by this period, by the mid 1920s. Young African American educated kids who were too smart for “their own good”, meaning that their displeasure with Jim Crow racial norms was going to get them in trouble with the white establishment, be that violence, economic reprisal, lack of opportunity. Many, many, many educated African Americans left the South.

Simon Fisher:
We never hear from Murray saying, “Oh, I’d love to migrate to Harlem because it’s like the biggest queer thing happening in the hole of American history,” but I can’t help but wonder if there was a bit of a draw, you know? We’ll never know, but I believe that we can’t forget about what was going on in Harlem at that time when we look at Murray’s choice to migrate.

Ed Ayers:
But it was in the ’30s, right? That Murray’s gender identity and sexuality began to cause some intense emotional distress, right?

Simon Fisher:
Yeah, in the early ’30s. The photographs from that period and their writing in their diaries really exude a youthful sense of possibility with the gender and sexuality stuff. And then my hypothesis is that they start to really get more involved in activism. What I think might be happening is that they start to get that pushback from the standards of respectability, and they start to feel like their honest expression isn’t going to really do them any favors if they want to get ahead as a race leader.

Ed Ayers:
And Murray resist the label of homosexual, right?

Simon Fisher:
Yeah. There’s a bit of a history of sexuality lesson in this because I think what happens is people see in their archive and in their history that they resisted the label of homosexual, so therefore, they must be internally homophobic just… and then it kind of like reels out to like, oh, the church, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I totally disagree with that interpretation because in this historical moment, what we’re starting to get in a broader American history of sexuality is the splitting off between homosexuality as issue of sexual desire that’s seen as a psychological “problem” or a psychological deviancy. We’re seeing to see that separated from gender or like cross-gender identification or what we would now call transgender, right? Which was seen at the time, especially in the black intellectual community as being a problem of the body of actually a glandular disorder. Now that we think about testosterone and estrogen, those are hormones.

Simon Fisher:
And so the making of a medical understanding of transgender is happening right at this moment. And so when we look at Murray’s archive, there’s all of these handwritten questions for these doctors, and so many of them revolve around these questions of glands. When I was doing my research, I looked at that and I was like, “Why is Pauli Murray so obsessed with glands?” And one of the historians that has just written Rosalind Rosenberg, who recently wrote an amazing biography of Pauli Murray sees that this discussion of gender variants as a glandular disorder is science that’s in like the 1910s and 1920s. But if you look at the black press, the newspapers that are written and read within the black community in Harlem, in Philadelphia, in Baltimore, gender nonconformity is still being seen as a glandular issue.

Simon Fisher:
And so, my interpretation of this Murray didn’t want to be called a homosexual, is because prior to the splicing of homosexuality and gender nonconformity, the idea of the invert, this is like an old fashioned term but still had a lot of salience for a lot of people, not medical people, but for a lot of other folks, where one’s same sex desire was part and parcel of one’s cross-gender identity. So, well, Murray identified as someone who is really masculine, so of course it made sense that they were attracted to feminine women because that was part of the identity package. And so I think that Murray’s distaste for the label of homosexuality was because that invert identity really worked for them. And so to splice off homosexuality and then call it a psychological disorder really did not resonate with them.

Ed Ayers:
As you pointed out, Murray wrote a lot of memos to doctors and was hospitalized quite often. Tell us about that.

Simon Fisher:
It’s pretty much like every time a relationship crashes and burns, they really lose it, they’re really challenged, really devastated. And what seems to happen is that they’re not taking care of themselves, they’re not eating enough and not sleeping enough, they’re overworked. It’s the depression, right? It’s a stressful time to be a black young person in Harlem. But their distress seems to stem from what they call “my conflict”, which my understanding of it is that it’s a conflict between their desire for feminine women, their female assigned sex, and their masculine gender identity, and then the conflict of that package against social norms, both within and outside of the black community.

Simon Fisher:
But yeah, they keep talking about my conflict, like what’s the source of my conflict? What’s the way out? What’s going to ease my conflict? And so a lot of the things that they asked are, “Well, what medical interventions will ease my conflict? Can you do some surgical investigation? What if I have an undescended testis? What if I have like a glandular disorder?” And so all of these questions are pointing to an understanding of “this conflict” within a discourse or a conversation around glands, a glandular problem as the cause of cross-gender identification.

Ed Ayers:
That’s clear that Murray thought a lot about this and researched it a lot, and to have so many questions and even suggestions of what the diagnosis should be, right?

Simon Fisher:
Yeah. And it also points to the fact… And so what I did when I saw these lines of questions, I started looking at newspapers, black newspapers that everybody in Harlem kind of read in public was consuming. Because in Pauli Murray’s archive, and I think this is the key document that really to me was like, okay, I need to apply a sort of transgender understanding, a cross-gender identification is going on here.

Simon Fisher:
So what drew that conclusion for me was there’s an article clipped in Murray’s archive, right? So you’re flipping through the folder and here’s this yellowed newspaper. I’m a historian, I love this stuff, right? It’s basically a headline that appeared on the front page of the New York Amsterdam News. Her front page is basically about one of the first testosterone trials-

Ed Ayers:
Wow.

Simon Fisher:
… where these little white pills. And I did all the research on the doctor and what the experiments were, and they took these little crystalline testosterone tablets and they actually sewed them under the skin surfaces of these “effeminate men”, and lo and behold, they got muscles and they got facial hair. So Murray clips the newspaper, and then Pauli Murray takes the information about the testosterone trial, goes to the clinic where they’re holding the testosterone trial and is like, “Okay, how do I get in?”

Simon Fisher:
Pauli Murray is not the only person thinking about this. It’s on the front page of the largest read black newspaper in Harlem. This is a big issue on people’s minds, not just marginalized, queer and gender nonconforming people, but it’s an issue to the general public. And I think that that’s so interesting and a really, really overlooked part of their story. We get a lot of stories about lonely transsexuals trying to figure themselves out. I don’t think that that’s the case. There’s a lot of evidence that they were really distressed in a lot of ways, but the conversation around gender nonconformity in especially big urban northern black neighborhoods is not unique, it’s not rare, it’s not it’s not a lonely project.

Ed Ayers:
So later in life, it seems that Murray identified more closely with being female in terms of gender identity. Was that the case?

Simon Fisher:
I take my cue from Brittany Cooper’s work on Pauli Murray here. And I think what Cooper documents really well is in this 1943, ’44 era, two things, two really big things happen. One is that Murray’s three year effort to get into this testosterone trial to provide an answer for this conflict. So I think what’s happening is Murray sees these testosterone trials as a resolution to “my conflict”, and they try and try and try and try, and effectively, all of the medical experts say, basically, “Can’t you just accept that you’re a homosexual? You’re a woman. You’re attracted to women. We have a word for that. You can get help in these other ways, or you could try female hormones that might help you feel less conflicted as well.”

Simon Fisher:
Murray totally rejects both of those options, and I think, in a large way, moves on, figures out that they just have to move on. And at the same time, they start to go to law school, and the sexism they experience just seems to really change the way they think about themselves, the race, the way that black activism should happen. And I think it makes a lot of sense for them to, I don’t want to say identify with, but join the project of black women’s empowerment within racial activism. I don’t know if it means that they started identifying as the recipient of that work, but they definitely that was how they did all of their activism from there on out. This mid ’40s moment is when they start beginning to understand gender as a social construction and race as a social construction, and where Jane Crow, the term, becomes the way that they see things, their social analysis.

Ed Ayers:
So, issues of pronouns come up in Pauli Murray’s life, and I’d be curious how you think about that and choices that you’ve made and why you think people make other choices.

Simon Fisher:
Yeah, I’ve published two academic articles on Pauli Murray, and the first one, I use this very awkward s/he in every instance of pronouns in that paper. And in between publishing that paper and publishing the last paper I did two years ago, Rosalind Rosenberg came out with this biography and has this beautiful introduction about her own journey of how to use Pauli Murray pronouns, because it’s important to really balance contemporary notions of trans awareness and respect with historical accuracy, right? And it’s a balance. I mean, it’s definitely, I don’t know what’s right.

Simon Fisher:
What I do as a transperson in my community, which is not representative but is my experience, you kind of use the most recent pronoun available. So if someone goes by ‘he’ until they’re 40 and then goes by she, you call them she even if you’re talking about their childhood.

Ed Ayers:
I see.

Simon Fisher:
And so if one were to apply that to Murray’s life, the last pronoun that Murray went by, and as we understand, the closest thing they came to an identification of a singular gender was being a woman and using she and her pronouns. And so out of respect for that last choice, I switched and I used she for the last article, and I’ve gotten some questions and some pushback about whether that was right, and I’m not sure. The jury is out about how to do this. I think that as more trans history is written, there will become a sort of academic or social norm about what we do with pronouns for people who didn’t have access to gender variant pronouns or to trans identity. How are we going to use pronouns for them? Are we going to call everybody be “they”? How are we going to do this?

Simon Fisher:
So I think the normalcy will be established as more and more histories get written. But for now, I feel comfortable calling Murray she for… oh, gosh, now it even sounds awkward if I use it… for their whole life, her whole life. I mean, I’m a trans person and this still feels really awkward. I think that out of respect for the last pronouns, I use she, but I don’t know if I’m right. I just don’t know.

Ed Ayers:
Simon Fisher is the doctoral candidate in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.