Hart Recognized as a Transgender Man

Physician and novelist Alan Hart, who was assigned female at birth, was one of the first individuals to transition through surgical means, inspiring transgender activists in the late twentieth century to fight for Hart to be posthumously recognized as transgender. In 1995, Oregon activists demanded that a local political action committee stop using Hart's deadname as part of the name of its annual awards event and to recognize Hart’s chosen gender identity instead.

Date 1996

Locale Portland, Oregon

Key Figures

• Alan L. Hart (1890–1962), physician and novelist
• Joshua Allen Gilbert (1867–1948), psychiatrist who treated and wrote about Hart

Summary of Event

Alan Hart’s story became known to the LGBTQ community with the publication of historian Jonathan Ned Katz’s seminal work Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. In this 1976 book, Katz unearthed Hart's story, referring to Hart as a lesbian who donned male apparel and worked in traditionally male jobs. Others later identified Hart as transsexual (a term that some now consider offensive) or transgender.

Hart was born Alberta Lucille Hart in Hall’s Summit, Kansas, on October 4, 1890. As a child, he enjoyed boys’ chores and disliked girls’ amusements. Hart later recalled that he always regarded himself as a boy and believed he could live as a boy if his family let him cut his hair and wear trousers. From his teen years onward, he preferred tailored men’s clothing and had a succession of emotionally and physically intimate relationships with women, in which he always took on a role defined as masculine.

After attending Albany College and Stanford University, Hart obtained a medical degree from the University of Oregon in 1917. That same year, feeling conflicted about his identity and having contemplated suicide, Hart consulted psychiatrist Joshua Allen Gilbert. After attempting various forms of therapy without success, Hart asked Gilbert to help him obtain a hysterectomy and to adopt a male role permanently. In 1917, Hart underwent the surgery, changed his name, and married a schoolteacher, Inez Stark.

Hart started a medical practice in Oregon, but before long he was recognized by a former associate, forcing him to embark on a life of attempts to outrun his past by frequently relocating. Nevertheless, he built a successful medical career, obtaining master’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University and becoming a pioneer in tuberculosis (TB) detection using chest x-rays. He also published a medical text on radiology as well as four novels. After Stark left Hart in 1925, he soon married Edna Ruddick, with whom he remained until his death from heart disease on July 1, 1962.

In the October 1920, issue of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Gilbert wrote a case report about Hart (referred to as “H”) entitled “Homosexuality and Its Treatment.” Historian Katz discovered Gilbert’s report while researching his pioneering book on gay and lesbian history. Katz surmised that, “Despite the confusion of Dr. Gilbert and 'H’ herself about her sexual nature, 'H’ is clearly a Lesbian.” As Katz saw it, Hart wanted to live a man’s life—not possess a male body—and had a hysterectomy only to “legitimize for herself her socially unsanctioned relations.”

However, in the early 1990s, the burgeoning transgender movement began to reclaim historical figures believed to have been wrongly considered gay or lesbian, including Hart. In Portland, Oregon, a debate ensued between the transgender community and a gay and lesbian political action committee called Right to Privacy (RTP), which had named its long-running fundraising awards dinner after “Lucille” Hart. Candace Hellen Brown, a transgender advocate, wrote in a letter to the editor published in the October 7, 1994, issue of Just Out that “Alan Hart is one of our heroes. Please don’t let him be taken away from us.” The following spring, transgender activists organized the Ad Hoc Committee of Transsexuals to Recognize Alan Hart. On October 14, 1995, the committee and the activist group Lesbian Avengers—wearing buttons proclaiming “His Name Was Alan”—protested at the Portland convention center during the annual RTP awards dinner. “Rather than a lesbian unable to bear life as a woman, Hart should be recognized for what he was, a transsexual man who had the courage to be true to himself,” read the ad hoc group’s flier.

In January 1996, RTP leaders met with transgender activists to discuss the matter. Later that year, RTP dropped Hart’s name from its event. After RTP dissolved in 1999, some former members joined another LGBTQ advocacy group called Basic Rights Oregon (BRO). In September 2000, BRO revived the tradition of hosting a fundraising dinner named after Hart, but they called it the Hart Dinner—with no first name—and referred to Hart as “her/him.”

Significance

Alan Hart’s story illustrates the changing understanding of queer identities over time. Neither Hart nor Gilbert used the term transgender. Yet at a time when hormone therapy was not readily available, Hart took all the measures available to him—including one of the first-ever gender-affirming surgeries—to live the gender of his choice. The steps he took to reconcile the gender assigned to him at birth with his own gender identity place Hart firmly under the transgender identity. Ascribing modern identities to individuals from the past remains problematic, however.

Historian Susan Stryker wrote that she had reservations about using a contemporary word like transgender to describe people who lived or flourished before the mid-twentieth century, and in a 1998 article, scholar and transgender activist C. Jacob Hale described Hart as a key figure in the “butch/FTM border wars” in which different groups each seek to claim revered historical figures as their own.

Although the “border wars” continue, the transgender community has made great strides during the early twenty-first century in organizing as a distinct movement, and also in educating the rest of the LGBTQ community, as well as society at large, about gender and sexual identity, and the blurred and fluid boundaries of gender, sex, and sexuality.

Bibliography

DeLuca, Leo. "Trailblazing Transgender Doctor Saved Countless Lives." Scientific American, 10 June 2021, www.scientificamerican.com/article/trailblazing-transgender-doctor-saved-countless-lives/. Accessed 16 May 2023.

Gilbert, J. Allen. “Homosexuality and Its Treatment.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 52, no. 4 (October, 1920): 297-332.

Hansen, Bert. “Public Careers and Private Sexuality: Some Gay and Lesbian Lives in the History of Medicine and Public Health.” American Journal of Public Health 92, no. 1 (January, 2002).

Katz, Jonathan Ned. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A., a Documentary History. 1976. Reprint. New York: Meridian, 1992.

Lauderdale, Thomas, and Tom Cook. “The Incredible Life and Loves of the Legendary Lucille Hart.” Alternative Connection 2, nos. 12-13 (September/October, 1993).

O’Hartigan, Margaret Deirdre. “Alan Hart.” In The Phallus Palace: Female to Male Transsexuals, edited by Dean Kotula and William Parker. Los Angeles: Alyson, 2002.