Jennie June (autobiographer)

Jennie June wrote that they were born into a Puritan family^[1] in 1874 in Connecticut.^[6] They were assigned male at birth. At the time of their birth, their mother was 28 (born circa 1846), and their father 32 (born circa 1842). June was their fourth child out of eleven children.^[6] Their family was middle-class and wealthy.

June became very shy and introverted when their parents sent them off to a boys' school.^[7] The other students had been sent to boarding school because of being especially boisterous and needing strict discipline.

June graduated with honors from a university in uptown New York that may have been Columbia University.^[8]

Then, June went on to graduate study, where their physician notified the university president that June was a sexual invert. As a result, June "was expelled from the university for being an androgyne", which caused them to suffer neurasthenia (depression), and they came close to suicide.^[6][8] Because of June's ordeal with being expelled for his difference, they wrote this plea in their third book, in capitals:^[6]

I BEG ALL ADULTS, PARTICULARLY SCHOOL OFFICIALS, TO BE EXTRAORDINARILY CHARITABLE AND SYMPATHETIC WITH GIRL-BOYS AND OTHERS SEXUALLY ABNORMAL BY BIRTH WHO MAY SEEM TO HAVE LOST THEIR SENSES. GUARD AGAINST DOING ANYTHING THAT WOULD LEAD THE DISGRACED TO COMMIT SUICIDE, WHICH EVENT IS FAIRLY COMMON AMONG THESE "STEPCHILDREN OF NATURE."

In their professional life, June presented as a man. They had a reputation for being an innocent who was startled and uncomfortable when men around them made sexual talk. As a result, most people did not suspect another aspect to their life. They were known for being very studious and hard-working.^[6][9]

June was a law clerk for Clark Bell, who was the editor of The Medico-Legal Journal and its publishing company. The same company published June's autobiographies. June likely used this personal contact with Bell in order to get the books into print.^[10]

During the Victorian and Edwardian eras, people did not yet use words like transgender, transsexual, gay, or non-binary gender. June described themself with all of these contemporary words for his gender and sexual variance:

• androgyne, an ancient word meaning one who has a combination of masculine and feminine qualities.
• invert, a contemporary word from psychiatry and sexology for all kinds of people who would in the 20th and 21st century be called lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT).^[11]
• urning, a new contemporary word meaning someone assigned male at birth who is attracted to men. This word was created by urnings themselves who advocated for their rights. It was often Anglicized as "Uranian", but June used the original Germanic version "urning" for themself. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895) developed this theory in which men who are attracted to men and women who are attracted to women are thus because they are members of a third sex, a mixture of both male and female, and with the psyche or essence of the "opposite" sex, even though their bodies may not look like a mixture of male and female. The overall phenomenon he called Uranismus (in the original German, Urningtum), gay men were uranians (German urnings), lesbians were uraniads (German urningin, as -in is the feminine suffix) whereas heterosexuals were Dionings, so bisexual men were uranodionings, and so on, all of which were distinct from zwitter (intersex). Ulrichs based this naming system on Plato's Symposium, where two different kinds of love [are] ruled by two different goddesses of love—Aphrodite, daughter of Uranus, and Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus and Dione. Aphrodite rules those who love the opposite sex.^[12] Ulrichs argued that their condition was as natural and healthy as that of what we now call heterosexual people, and he started the movement fighting for their equal legal rights to express their love "between consenting adults, with the free consent of both parties", in his words from 1870, and that they should not be pathologized nor criminalized for doing so.^[13] Although Uranismus was generally addressed in terms of orientation, Ulrichs specifically described various categories of uranians in terms of their gender nonconformity and gender variance. For example, in regard to feminine gay men or queens (who he called Weiblings), Ulrichs wrote in 1879, "The Weibling is a total mixture of male and female, in which the female element is even predominant, a thoroughly hermaphroditically organized being. Despite his male sexual organs, he is more woman than man. He is a woman with male sexual organs. He is a neutral sex. He is a neuter. He is the hermaphrodite of the ancients."^[14] June compares themself to this ancient deity Hermaphroditus in their own self-portrait photography.
• bisexual, in the sense of being both male and female, as June said they were never attracted to women at all.
• "instinctive female impersonator", meaning that it was their nature to want to live as a woman.
• fairie [sic], a word widely used in the contemporary underworld for people who were assigned male at birth, and who had receptive sex with men.^[15]
• Ultra-Androgyne, meaning those at the very end of Androgyne who both felt & acted predominantly female. Those of this type were described as shaving & plucking their beard hair; in public preferring bright clothing in lieu of the risk associated female clothing, although some risqué did don the latter. Furthermore, they usually took on submissive/passive roles during intercourse, and despised vulgarity & other typically masculine things. Additionally, J-W states the correct pronouns for an Ultra-Androgyne would be he/her. A quote from her second book reads: "Superficially and according to man-made law, ultra-androgynes are men. According to the unabridged dictionary, they are neither men nor women. That is, they are capable neither of begetting nor conceiving. But in respect to mind and feelings, in respect to their protoplasm—and thus essentially—they are women." J-W estimated they numbered at least 1 in every 300 individuals globally.

Many of these names reflect the contemporary way of thought, which made no distinction between gender identity and sexual orientation. The popular idea during that era was that a man attracted to men must be somehow partly a woman, in brain or even body. Some contemporaries recognized this was not true for everyone, arguing that men who liked men could be just as manly.^[16] However, for June, it was a suitable description of how they felt.

As young as the ages three to seven, June expected that they would only ever wear skirts after growing up, and asked playmates to call them Jennie.^[6] In that era, all very young children wore dresses. When older, boys would be "breeched", that is, switched to wearing masculine attire, with trousers.^[17] When June's parents breeched them at seven, they were so heartbroken that they wished they were dead. They occasionally borrowed a sister's clothing. They often prayed to be turned into a girl, and sometimes almost believed that their prayers were being answered. They began to have some breast growth in his middle teens, possibly gynecomastia, which is not rare in people who were assigned male at birth. They were disappointed that their genitals remained the same. At fourteen, they began to instead pray for one to two hours a day to no longer desire to be a girl, and to no longer desire males.^[6]

At eighteen, June became so depressed about being an invert that they sought medical help to make them feel like a "normal male". The two New York medical professors he went to first, venereologist Dr. Prince A. Morrow^[6][18] (1846–1913) and then alienist Dr. Robert S. Newton^[6][18][19] both saw inversion as a defect, and attempted for months to cure them of it by every known method. (Alienist was an early Victorian word for a psychiatrist.) June's treatments included drugs, hypnosis, and aphrodisiacs in the hope of making June attracted to women, and electrical stimulation of the brain and spinal cord (electroconvulsive therapy).^[20] These treatments had no effect: June remained an invert, depressed, and also a nervous wreck from the drugs.^[6]

June's third doctor was an alienist who understood inversion better. (The transcription of the manuscript of The Riddle of the Underworld also calls him Dr. Robert S. Newton, giving this name to two different doctors, which is a transcription error.) The alienist taught June that being an androgyne was natural for them, and not a "depravity". This finally cured June's lifelong depression, because instead of trying to purge themselves of their inversion out of the fear that it was a sin, they instead concluded that God had predestined them to be an invert.^[6]

According to one autobiography, June had engaged in "intimate relations" with 800 young men, half of whom were volunteer soldiers or sailors.^[21]

At the age of 28, June fulfilled their lifelong desire to have an orchiectomy, removal of the testicles. June expected this would make them healthier and decrease their extreme and "disturbing" desires for sex, and eliminate some masculine features they disliked, such as facial hair.^[4] During that era, there was the incorrect but widespread medical belief that nocturnal emissions would damage a person's health and intelligence, and June was fearful of that possibility.^[6] Castration was one of the commonly recommended treatments thought to cure males of inversion.^[20]

As a young adult, June found safe havens in places such as the gay bar Paresis Hall in New York City to express their feminine identity. Paresis Hall, or Columbia Hall, was one of many establishments considered the center of homosexual nightlife where male prostitutes would do as female prostitutes did, soliciting men under an effeminate persona. Places like Paresis Hall provided a place where people like June could gather and feel more free to express themselves and socialize with similar people in a time when cross dressing was socially unacceptable and illegal.^[22]

June was one of the members of the Cercle Hermaphroditos in 1895, led by pseudonymous Roland Reeves, along with other androgynes who frequented Paresis Hall.^[23] The purpose of the organization was "to unite for defense against the world's bitter persecution", and to show that being an invert was natural.^[24] The Cercle is noted by transgender historian Susan Stryker as "the first known informal organization in the United States to concern itself with what we might now call transgender social justice issues".^[25][26][27] Little evidence of the Cercle's existence is known to survive today, outside of June's autobiography. If it issued any pamphlets, none are yet known to historians. For this reason, some historians have raised questions about whether the Cercle existed at all.^[28]

June published their first autobiography, The Autobiography of an Androgyne, in 1918, and their second, The Female-Impersonators, in 1922. Therefore June is one of the first transgender, or gender nonconforming, Americans to publicize their own story. In June's preface to the book, June explains that they had kept diaries of their life and that their autobiography has been taken from those.

June organized the book into episode-like sections, wherein they discuss incidents in their life as well as their opinions on certain social matters.^[29] June's stated goal in writing the book was to rally the support of Americans to create an accepting environment for young adults who do not adhere to gender and sexual norms, because that was what June would have wanted for themselves, and they wanted to prevent them from committing suicide.^[4] June discusses their desires, which they struggled with because they were so different to what was considered normal.

The memoir describes in detail many personal narratives as well as June's sexual encounters and desires, including their story of his castration, but also contains pleas for understanding and acceptance of "fairies". The Autobiography of an Androgyne also describes how June felt that they lived a double life in the sense that they were an educated, middle-class white male scholar, but also had intense yearnings for performing masochistic sexual acts that distressed him.

June's second book, released under the alias, Earl Lind—Earl standing for girl—was released in 1921 and numbered then 1,000 copies intended to be sent to various individuals in the medical communities. It focused on subjects such as hate-crimes—murder, blackmail, general violence and sexual abuse—as well as June's early years, and the lives of two other Ultra-Androgynes, among other topics.

A quote from the book reads:^[30]

Unless otherwise indicated I shall use the terms "androgyne" and "pseudo-man" only in reference to the ultra-androgynous. All my androgyne associates whom I shall portray in this book belong to this class, because with a few exceptions they alone are Female-Impersonators. In my Riddle of the Underworld I describe some mild androgynes.

In 2010, Dr. Randall Sell, a professor at Drexel University, became intrigued by the first two volumes of the trilogy. After searching for around twenty years for the long-lost third volume, he finally discovered the partial manuscript in the archives of the National Library of Medicine.^[31]

Called The Riddle of the Underworld, written in 1921, this third volume was to focus on the communities of inverts all over the world. It includes an encounter in which June was beaten by men whom they had tried to pick up. June once again defends gender and sexual nonconformists, insisting that they were simply born of a different nature, but natural nonetheless.^[32]

As mentioned in their second book, one chapter of Riddle was dedicated to the Gynander, those with "physically female bodies" who leaned into masculinity by varying degrees, but this one was not found within the Robinson manuscript.^[30]

Riddle was slated to release in parts within the Medical Life journal by or after March 1922, but this never came to be despite the contract and conditions for publication enclosed within the discovered manuscript.^[33] A planned trilogy collection of all books was intended to release in fall 1922, but this never happened. Early 1922 appears to be the last time J-W was active within the Underworld.^[30]

Currently, historians do not certainly know the date of June's life and death. Channing Gerard Joseph theorizes that June was likely Mowry Saben (1870–1950), the writer and journalist. Saben was born in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, into a prominent family, and had a younger sister, Jennie May.^[5] They graduated from Harvard University, Oxford University, and Heidelberg University.^[34] They died in San Francisco in 1950.^[5]

June left instructions for the creation of a memorial plaque. June wanted the plaque to be placed on the Grand Street facade of a new police building, near the site of their debut, where they had first taken the name Jennie June. A police building could be considered an intriguing choice, given the police harassement June and their friends experienced.^[10]

• Autobiography of an Androgyne, published 1918
• The Female-impersonators, published 1922
• The Riddle of the Underworld, written in 1921, unpublished. Only three chapters of the manuscript are known to survive

Jennie June published these photographs of themselves in their books. Along with June's use of pseudonyms, these photos mostly obscure June's face, as a further protection of anonymity, even while exposing June's body, because there were laws in New York against cross-dressing. Some of these photographs treat their subjects as medical specimens, because a popular Victorian pseudoscience called physiognomy believed that the personality could be seen in the shape of the body, supporting June's argument that it is in their nature to be an invert.^[9] The statue that June imitates in one of these photos is the Sleeping Hermaphroditus, a lost bronze original by the ancient Greek Polycles (working ca 155 BC).^[35] The Borghese Hermaphroditus is usually considered the main ancient Roman copy of that lost original, and has been in the Louvre since before 1863. The one in Uffizi that June mentions is another ancient Roman copy.

• 
  "The Author Ready to Set Out on Life's Journey"
• 
  "Rear View of Author at Thirty-three"
• 
  "Front View of Author at Thirty-three"
• 
  "The Author at Thirty-four"
• 
  "The Author—a Modern Living Replica of the Ancient Greek Statue, 'Hermaphroditos' (Photo by Dr. A. W. Herzog)"
• 
  June included this photo of the statue that they were imitating, captioning it "Ancient Greek Statue of an Androgyne, Called 'Hermaphroditos,' Now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy"
• 
  "The Author at Forty-four"

• The Public Universal Friend, an 18th-century genderless preacher from a religious family in New England
• History of transgender people in the United States