The Philanthropist and the Gym Teacher

A rich lesbian changed the world. An ordinary lesbian followed in her footsteps.

The gym teacher, Steve Dain

If you picked up a law review article or news story about “transsexuals” in the 70s, it probably distinguished them from “transvestites” (fetishists) and “homosexuals.” Here’s a typical graf from Time Magazine in 1974:

“Transexuals, of whom there are perhaps 10,000 in the U.S., are not to be confused with homosexuals and transvestites. Classic transexuals are born with the anatomy of one sex but suffer from a total, lifelong identification with the other, perhaps influenced by prenatal hormone disturbances. Transexuals generally disdain association with professed homosexuals. Unlike transvestites, they do not dress in clothes of the opposite gender for erotic stimulation, but simply because they feel more comfortable that way.”

This was misinformation – soon the sexologist Ray Blanchard would find practically all individuals seeking sex reassignment surgery were fetishists or gay; there was no third category of “classic transsexuals.” The false trichotomy was dreamed up in the 1960s by the gender entrepreneur Harry Benjamin. It was planted in media outlets and courtrooms in the 1970s by an heiress named Reed Erickson.

Erickson lived as a lesbian in the 1950s, then underwent surgery in the 1960s and began identifying as a man. Through her nonprofit, the Erickson Educational Foundation, she bankrolled the Johns Hopkins’ Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) from its opening in 1966. That was America’s first “sex reassignment” center. Over the next decade EEF was a driving force in the gender industry, funding more clinics, research, advocacy, and propaganda.

In the early days of the GIC most patients who sought “transsexual surgery” were male, but by 1980, about half of patients seeking “sex reassignment surgery” (SRS) nationwide were female. One of these women was a high school gym teacher in suburban California who wound up suing her employer for firing her after the surgery. This woman, who went by Steve Dain, led a very different post-transition life than Reed Erickson.

The philanthropist’s pet leopard, Henry

Note on Sourcing

Historians of “LGBTQ” issues tend to assume that (1) opposite-sex identity develops organically in people who “are trans” and (2) gender medicine helps people with opposite-sex identities. These unfounded premises blind them to the sneaky behavior of gender doctors and other market participants. So normally I start my research for each post with old court decisions, not secondary sources.

But most 1970s cases I found were about male transsexuals and their male doctors. To see how female transsexuals were engaging with the legal system, I had to break my rule and start with secondary sources. 

Bob Ostertag’s Sex Science Self (2016) is an investigation of big pharma’s influence on gender culture. Bernice Hausman’s Changing Sex (1995) is solicitous of trans identity but skeptical of the medical industry. Joanne Meyerowitz’s How Sex Changed (2004) has a risible editorial slant but I don’t think it makes stuff up. 

My favorite: a gorgeous 1985 documentary called What Sex Am I? Watching it, I contemplated how if Leni Riefenstahl were alive today she’d have a lot of friends in the healthcare industry.

Reed Erickson Educates America

Born in 1917 to wealthy parents, Erickson “defied gender stereotypes.” Meyerowtiz hammers home Erickson’s trans masc bona fides:

“As a teenager he attended a girls’ high school in Philadelphia, where he played the trumpet, an instrument more often played by boys. In the late 1930s he attended Temple University, where he fared poorly in the secretarial courses intended for women. In the early 1940s he studied engineering, a traditionally masculine pursuit …”

Erickson’s “faith in science” (Meyerowitz’ words) led her to focus most of her money and attention on transsexuality. She also funded, through EEF, research on “mystical states induced by hypnosis,” medicinal herbs, lunar cycles, and telepathy.

EEF monopolized the public narrative on transsexualism in the 1970s. Meyerowitz:

“[EEF] sponsored medical research, conferences, and symposia on transsexuality, and subsidized scholarly publications. It worked with journalists on newspaper and magazine articles on transsexuality, scheduled television and radio interviews, and arranged educational presentations at medical schools, hospitals, colleges, and churches.”

Meyerowitz links two law review articles to EEF: John P. Holloway’s “Trans-sexuals–Their Legal Sex” (1968) and Douglas K. Smith’s “Transsexualism, Sex Reassignment Surgery, and the Law” (1971). These two pieces were frequently cited by judges. A third oft-cited tract, “Transsexuals in Limbo,” was published in the Maryland Law Review in 1971 – GIC’s backyard.¹ 

These articles repeated talking points about what transsexualism was, argued that it hurt no one to recognize transsexuals as their desired sex post-surgery, and highlighted ways the law could help them. For example, Smith states: “The guidepost of legal decision-making in this area should always be what is in the best interests of the transsexual[.]” 

I think judges used these articles as a crutch. By citing pieces that seemed to bridge the medical and legal worlds, they could avoid doing much analysis themselves.

Here’s EEF’s Winter 1975 newsletter, touting its influence over NBC:

EEF also claimed to be assisting behind the scenes in major cases like MT v. JT, in which a New Jersey appeals court found that two men could marry if one were a post-operative transsexual. Medical witnesses in trans lawsuits were often linked to GIC.

For years, Erickson was in the thick of it, regularly meeting with clinicians she funded like Harry Benjamin and John Money. But, Meyerowitz reports, by “the early 1970s he spent much of his time in Mexico, where he lived with his wife, two children, and pet leopard. He kept himself out of the limelight, but he made the ultimate decisions about whom and what he funded.”

Reed Erickson

Female Transsexualism in the 1970s

Erickson was one of the first American women to “change sex,” scoring a hysterectomy and mastectomy by 1965. 

Transsexual patients were overwhelmingly male then, according to gender doctors, perhaps because the first famous American transsexuals were both male – Christine Jorgenson, publicized in 1952, and Avon Wilson, 1966. As Meyerowitz documents, many gay men were enthralled by them. By the late 1950s, “hair fairies” and “street queens” were experimenting with estrogen to get pretty, falling into transsexual subcultures, and ending up on a path to surgery. 

Female transsexualism was covered less in the media for decades. But then through the 1970s, according to Meyerowitz:

“[T]he rising visibility of FTMs provided the social setting in which more transgendered FTMs decided to pursue transsexual surgery. Once they could read about, see, meet, and talk to postoperative FTMs, surgery came to seem a more realistic option and a more attractive goal.”

Social contagion? Gosh no, just social influence.

A lot of trans people are gay. Sexologist-kings like Harry Benjamin bent over backwards to distinguish male transsexuals from homosexuals, all while projecting they’d marry men in fairy tale weddings post-surgery. But the gender doctors forthrightly acknowledged that female transsexuals were into girls. Benjamin:

“Sexually, female transsexuals can be ardent lovers, wooing their women as men do, but not as lesbians, whom they often dislike intensely.”

Of course, disliking lesbians intensely is also a symptom of being a lesbian.

The psychiatrist Robert Stoller, in Meyerowitz’ telling, “distinguished butch lesbians from FTMs by their attitudes toward men. ‘Female transsexuals’ had ‘good’ relations with men ‘as with colleagues,’ while many butch lesbians … evinced ‘barely disguised hatred.’” Later Stoller wondered whether female transsexualism was simply “an ultimate form of homosexuality.”

Two genital surgeries were offered to female transsexuals. Metoidioplasty involved “freeing the clitoris from its connective tissue” after it was bulked up by testosterone. (More on clits next week; please hold off on liberating yours until then.)

Then there was phalloplasty, a risky operation that inevitably leads to complications. Today, it’s the only operation that WPATH recommends not be performed on minors – and WPATH does not urge caution lightly. These graft-ons permanently damage the urethra, don’t have feeling, don’t get erect, are prone to infection, and often can’t even carry urine.

Hausman describes the ordeal faced by a female transsexual writer named Mario Martino, whose doctors formed a flap out of her thigh tissue with the goal of turning it into a pseudo-penis. The flap turned into a “shriveling … disintegrating suitcase handle.” The next time they attempted phalloplasty, the skin grafts were “excruciatingly painful,” and soon the tip of the organ turned necrotic and “foul-smelling.” Every night Martino would sit in the tub and “very slowly, cut away the dead tissue.” Martino published her account in 1977; for more recent accounts of long-term pain and disability caused by phalloplasty, check out Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage.

The media of the 1970s, presumably influenced by EEF, sanitized female “transsexual surgery.” That line about “freeing” the clitoris? I’ve come across it in a variety of materials (including from the 1990s). As to phalloplasty, two New York Times stories published in 1977 were balls-out propaganda. They covered:

“the first female-to-male transsexual operation in which the patient was given a penis capable of erection. The doctors said the penis contained a tiny hydraulic system that permitted a fluid to be pumped from a reservoir in the abdomen into the penis to cause erection.”

The patient was a student at the University of Missouri, where the operation was performed. The surgeon said he’d seen her “around town several times”:

“and he always seems to be with reasonably attractive young ladies. What can I say? It looks like he’s doing fine. The thing is working well. We’re very pleased with how it’s working.” 

In general, the NYT’s coverage of transsexual surgery was boosterish. Reporters (typically Jane E. Brody) seemed to get all their intel from gender doctors, who appeared to be speaking anecdotally. For example, here’s a 1972 story:

“In reviewing the results of their efforts, the [gender] centers are finding that life has taken a decided turn for the better for most patients. Many married for the first time after surgery; some are raising children obtained through marriage, adoption or artificial insemination.

“In most cases, the partners of sex‐reassigned transsexuals appear to be normal hetero sexuals. The typical couple reports that sexual relations— however they are achieved— are satisfying physically and emotionally, and most patients say that they are capable of reaching orgasm.”

Meyerowitz describes media representation of female transsexuals in the early 70s: two post-ops making the rounds with their doctors; a Good Housekeeping essay by a transsexual’s mother (“I … saw that she was indeed a perfect little girl. But I was wrong. Disastrously wrong.”). Puff pieces.

Steve Dain

Doris Richards taught phys ed at Emery High, in a town just south of Berkeley, California (scroll through that link to find an embedded article from 1976). Her closet was “jammed with bright, frilly mini-dresses” and her bathroom was full of makeup, hair sprays and perfumes. “She’d eaten so much yogurt and lettuce, just to keep her muscles from bulging, that she was practically starving.”

As a kid Richards was a tomboy, she didn’t like other girls, blah blah blah, all that stuff that proves a woman is gay – excuse me, transsexual.

She might also have had a disorder of sex development. Articles mention she had to shave her face every day and was mistaken for a man even back when she was trying to appear feminine. 

In 1975, at age 36, Stanford University turned Doris Richards into Steve Dain. As she understood it:

“I wasn’t female gendered, I was female sexed. It’s the gender that lets you be who you are. So if I’m male gendered, I gotta line the body up. Now I’m a whole person.”

Many of her colleagues were dazed:

“‘Christ,’ exclaims one administrator. ‘When she took sick leave, we all just figured she had some kind of, well, female problem.’ He grins at the irony of it. ‘But we sure as hell never figured she was having a problem being a female!’”

The kids supported her, she said, but a superintendent was out to get her. He spread rumors that she exposed herself to kids, referred to her as “it” to a reporter, and fired her for “immoral conduct” and abusing paid sick leave (because wanting to change sex wasn’t a medical illness).

Dain fought her firing. I don’t have any of the court records, but the ordeal apparently dragged on for four years and drained her finances. Though the literature hints at transsexual mutual aid networks, and EEF certainly knew how to influence a court, I don’t see any signs of trans community in Dain’s case. She missed teaching and said she was fighting for justice, but she ultimately wound up caving because she was tapped out. 

Linkages

Around the time Dain transitioned, Erickson checked into the psych ward at Johns Hopkins with “psychosis with drug intoxication.” She sank into addiction and madness and died in 1992.

Dain worked in construction, then as a chiropractor. She died of breast cancer in 2007, survived by a wife and step-kids.

After reading those old articles about Dain, I figured I’d portray her as a victim of gender, both the conservative and trans liturgies. It was so poignant, a butch gym teacher putting her body on the line to get out of wearing eye shadow.

But then I watched What Sex Am I, which features Dain as she battles the school district, laments her lost career, and exercises without a shirt. She tells a story about a stranger at a hot tub pitying her for having a small penis – he didn’t realize it was actually an elephantine clit because the surgery was, in Dain’s words, “beautifully done.”

Dain wasn’t a victim. She was a link in a chain of transmission. 

Reed Erickson had a vision of transsexual wonder. She used the media to spread it throughout the country, which is likely how Dain got the idea. Dain encouraged other women to transition, even though it destroyed a career she loved, by starring in an artsy documentary and advising younger activists like Jamison Green and Lou Sullivan. She should have faded into irrelevance when America stopped forcing gym teachers to wear dresses; women don’t face the Hobson’s choice that she did anymore. But her voice still carries in Emeryville, California, because the town renamed a street after her in 2021.

This post was lightly edited on Sept. 29, 2024.

1. Read my other posts about the 1970s for summaries and links to these cases.