I’ve officially arrived in London for my on-site research!
I flew out on Sunday morning from Brooklyn and arrived at Heathrow Airport that evening. After catching up on sleep and settling into my Airbnb in Hammersmith & Fulham, I made my way to the Women’s Library at the London School of Economics to view the elusive Urania. I had already been able to access the digitized versions of the periodical through the LSE’s digital archives, so I spent Tuesday afternoon checking the scans for accuracy and re-scanning documents where necessary.
Pub in Poplar, London at sunset.
In my previous post, I mentioned I had begun transcribing entire issues of Urania for textual analysis, but I quickly realized that this was a mountainous goal that would end in a lot of useless data, so I spent the next few weeks skimming through all 72 issues on offer and marking articles that mentioned or discussed trans surgeries, intersex surgeries, cross-dressing, and desires to do away with what Urania editors call “the duality of sex”. I narrowed the articles down from over 860 to 132, and proceeded to transcribe those for textual analysis and categorization. After double-checking accuracy at LSE, I proceeded to transcribe these articles over Tuesday through Friday night and found myself with nearly a nearly 100-page Google doc of 1919-1940 discussions of transness and feminism.
My analysis isn’t explosive, but it is meaningful to me as a trans person in an increasingly, outwardly transphobic world. Touching text type-written by well-known transfeminine lawyer Irene Clyde and anti-war activist/suffragist Eva Gore-Booth feels like touching a family home to me. I see so much of myself in the words, and find myself having inner conversations about the limitations of language the editors had at the time and how anti-trans feminists might skew this lack into “proving” that transness is not real. Urania’s editors made it clear in every issue that this periodical was an “affirmation of a belief in the essential oneness of humanity, duality of sex being possibly a mere passing phase in the evolution of the race” (Urania No 14, 1919.) They believed that the “duality of sex” was the “the greatest cause of misery in this sorrowful world”. They sought out proof that sex was not fixed, noting countless examples of “sex-change” surgeries, social transition, and ‘hermaphroditism’/spontaneous sex change in the natural world.
As the deadline approaches and the summer ends, I will continue this analysis and work on my paper. While I am in London, I will stop by to view the building that used to house Irene Clyde’s law office that was noted in the periodicals as a place to send correspondence. I am also stopping in queer bookstores to purchase trans zines for contrasting analysis to the historical text to see how the discussion of British trans philosophy has changed over the last century – I’ve already found several!
