The Autobiographies of Earl Lind - Ralph Werther - Jennie June - Stuff You Missed in History Class

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we're going to talk
about a collection of autobiographies that were written more than

(00:21):
a hundred years ago. The two that were published had
three names on the title pages. Those were Earl Lynde,
Ralph Werther, and Jenny June, and there were slightly different
ordering and punctuation between the two books. To quote from
the first book, which was titled Autobiography of an Andrew Gine, quote,

(00:42):
I have been doomed to be a girl who must
pass her earthly existence in a male body. So sometimes
these books are described as the first autobiographies of a
transgender person ever published in the West. They were printed
in nineteen eighteen and nineteen twenty two. That was more
than ten years before the publication of Man into Woman,

(01:03):
An Authentic Record of a Change of sex. That book
had been created from Lily Elbe's diaries and letters after
her death. This was also decades before the term transgender
was coined and the way people understood and talked about
their own lives and the way doctors and psychologists described them.
That was all very, very different from today. So we're

(01:26):
going to do some level setting about the language that
this person used and how that language compares to what
is in use today. Before we talk about the books
themselves and their significance and the life of the person
who wrote them, we also need to note that this
person was living at a time when the amount of
stigma and shame surrounding any kind of divergence from established

(01:50):
social engender norms was much greater than it is today.
I'm not saying we're in a great place right now,
but it was worse. There will be some discussions of
her asthment, sexual assault, self harm, and suicide. And also
we're not going to get into graphic detail about the
author's sex life, but that was a big part of
these books, so we will be discussing that a little

(02:11):
bit as well. So we are not actually sure who
this person was, although there is research into that and
we will talk about it. Earland, Ralph Werther, and Jenny
June are all pseudonyms. None of them are the writer's
birth name, and this was of course to protect the
author because so much of what was in these books

(02:32):
was illegal in the addition to being deeply stigmatized or both,
particularly in terms of the author's gender presentation and sexual experiences.
This meant that the autobiographies themselves were also illegal in
the United States under the Federal Comstock Law and other
anti obscenity laws. It took about eighteen years for the

(02:53):
author to find a publisher that was willing to take
on the risk involved with publishing Autobiography of an Andrew
John That was ultimately the Medico Legal Journal based in
New York. Alfred W. Herzog, who was both a doctor
and a lawyer, served as editor for the first two books,
and they were sold by mail order only to people

(03:15):
like doctors, lawyers, legislators, psychologists, and sociologists. In other words,
people who could be interpreted is having some kind of
professional reason for needing to read them. This author wrote
a lot about gender and sexuality. As Tracy noted earlier,
these subjects were understood very differently in the US at

(03:36):
the time, and we're talked about with a totally different
vocabulary than would generally be used today. These autobiographies are
definitely part of LGBTQ history and specifically transgender history, but
as Tracy noted, earlier, the term transgender didn't exist then.
It didn't exist until about fifty years after these were published.

(03:58):
A lot of the words that were used in these
autobiographies and in other writing at the time really are
not used today. Like people who cross dressed or who
had same sex relationships were all described as sexual inverts.
Other words like bisexual were used with different meanings, so
in these books, bisexual generally describes a person who has

(04:21):
elements of two sexes, rather than describing a person who
is attracted to people of more than one gender. The
author uses andragine essentially to mean a feminine man and
fairy spelled fairiie to mean quote, a youthful andragine or
other passive invert, for they are perhaps not all members

(04:44):
of the extreme class of andragines, whom natural, predestination or
other circumstances led to adopt the profession of the fie dejois,
in other words, to be a sex worker, a counterpart
to andragine is, or a masculine woman. Beyond that, today

(05:05):
we think of sex and gender as two different things,
but at the time there often wasn't really a separation
between them. The idea of inversion didn't distinguish between people
that we might describe as gay, men, lesbians, or bisexuals
today and people we might describe as transgender. This was
all one thing, along with pretty much any other divergence

(05:28):
from what was considered the norm. During this period. Many,
but not all, psychologists and sexologists also took an approach
that was very binary in terms of male and female,
with anything that didn't fit within that binary considered to
be part of a third sex. Many psychologists also described
a man who was attracted to men as being inwardly female,

(05:52):
or a woman attracted to women as inwardly male. It
was sort of conflating what we think of as gender
and sexual orientation today. In the introduction to the first
of these autobiographies, Herzog wrote, quote, it must be understood
that the congenital homosexualist is really a human being born
with the body of a male, with perhaps some female characteristics,

(06:14):
but with the soul of a female. The congenital homosexualist
always feels himself as a female, and therefore is always
attracted towards men, and would rather be in their society
than the society of females who are sexually repulsive to him.
Because of these and other huge differences in language and
how people have understood gender and sexuality. Historians who have

(06:37):
studied these autobiographies over the decades since they were written
have interpreted them in a range of ways. Some have
described Jenny June as a gay man, others as non
binary or as a transgender woman. The autobiographies describe Jenny
June as having a small stature of feminine frame and
breasts as an adult, so others conclude that the writer

(07:01):
was intersects, and some have avoided making any specific interpretation.
Because of all these differences in language and cultural context,
historians who have written about these books and their author
in recent years have also taken a number of approaches
in terms of the author's name and pronouns. For example,
Susan Stryker's Transgender History briefly mentions these books and names

(07:24):
their author as Earl Lynde, who also used the names
Ralph Werther and Jenny June, but doesn't otherwise use identifying
names or pronouns. In Histories of the Transgender Child, Jules
gil Peterson describes Jenny June using she her pronouns, but
when describing research into who this person might have been,

(07:45):
Gerard Channing Joseph uses the name Jenny June and he
him pronouns because those are the pronouns that the author
generally used, and in Joseph's words, quote, I honor his
usage here. Language round, gender, and sexuality have evolved so
much in the last hundred years and will continue to

(08:06):
evolve that I don't think there's a perfect approach here
that everyone will agree on, and I am in no
way passing judgment on the choices of any of the
historians that we just mentioned on the show. We've generally
tried to take our cues from the people that we're
talking about as much as we can, and part of
me really strongly resist the idea of reassigning someone's pronouns

(08:28):
to something other than what they used for themselves. We
can imagine what a person might do or how they
might identify if they were living today, but it's important
to recognize the context that they were actually living in.
As Joseph notes, the author of these books did usually
describe their own life using he him pronouns and place

(08:49):
the names Ralph Werther and Earl Lynde first in these
autobiographies and in other writing at the same time. Though
in these autobiographies, the author write. It's over and over
about feeling like a woman and wanting to be a woman,
and praying to be made into a woman, and saying
things like quote, please don't call me boy, call me girl.

(09:12):
We'll be reading some passages about how terrible it felt
to the author to be made to wear boy's clothes
and to use the boy's bathroom at school. So, especially
while we're living in this moment when so many states
in the United States are trying to pass or have
past anti trans laws, including laws that are banning evidence based,

(09:35):
necessary and life saving medical care for children. Using key
him pronouns for this person seemed really wrong. I'm sure
the United States is not the only place where this
is happening, but the US is where we live. It's
what I can speak to. So with all that in mind,
when we quote from historical texts in this episode, we're
quoting them as they are written, but when we're using

(09:57):
our own words, we'll use she her pronouns to tie
about Jenny June. So with all of that level setting,
we will take a little break, and then when we
come back, we will talk more about the books Jenny

(10:19):
June wrote three autobiographies. The first autobiography of an Androgyne
originally covered her life from birth until about the age
of thirty two, but as we mentioned at the top
of the show, it took her eighteen years to find
a publisher, so she filled in a little detail about
those eighteen years before the book went to print. Although

(10:39):
she said she was writing this book for a professional audience,
it doesn't read like an academic text. There's a lot
of writing about her sex life, and it's in a
tone and a level of detail that seemed kind of
incongruous with the idea of professional writing. Aside from that,
it's cleared that she thought doctors and psychiatrists didn't understand

(10:59):
people like her, and she wanted to fill in the
gaps in their knowledge and also try to dispel stigma.
As she concluded, quote, I trust that the publication of
my life story will contribute to a correct estimate of
androginism on the part of scientists, the molders of public opinion,
and the lawmakers, and to a more kindly treatment by

(11:20):
society of those born with this curse. It is only
expressing half the truth to say that they are more
to be pitied than scorned, they are wholly to be pitied.
Not long after Autobiography of an Androgyne went to print,
Jenny June started working on The Female Impersonators, which came
out in nineteen twenty two. This is a counterpart to

(11:42):
her first book, this time written for a general audience,
with the same overall goals. In her words, quote, my
aim was to save thousands of innocent step children of
nature from an aggregate of tens of thousands of years
in prison, and bring about a repeal of the laws
under which they are incarcerated and which are still in

(12:02):
the codes, because civilized man has not yet entirely emerged
from the prejudice and superstition of the dark ages. My
second aim was to put a stop to the continuous
string of murders of these step children, the assassins laboring
under the delusion that homosexuality is due to deepest moral depravity,
and feeling that they are mandatories of society. In ridding

(12:25):
the world of these quote monsters, my third aim was
to save hundreds of these superlatively melancholy sexual intermediates from
suicide as the result of bitter persecution by those who
pride themselves on the fact that in their own case,
sex has been thoroughly differentiated. In addition to the descriptions

(12:46):
of her life and her feelings and experiences, the Female
Impersonators included a lot of Jenny June's general thoughts on sexuality, masculinity,
and femininity, including the idea that androgynes have both male
and male elements. She included examples of mythical and historical
figures that she interpreted as andrew giants, including Apollo, Hermaphroditis,

(13:09):
and ganny Meade from Greek mythology, and the historical figures
of Alexander the Great, Walt Whitman, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Shakespeare.
She thought Shakespeare was a pen name for Francis Bacon,
which was a pretty popular idea in the mid late
nineteenth century. There were still people debating it in my
college when I was an undergrad. Will probably never do

(13:31):
an episode on the who wrote William Shakespeare's works because
people feel too passionately about it. Yep. This book also
includes the stories of two other to use her term
female impersonators, who she names as Frank Unice and Angelo Phyllis.
To be clear, she did not mean female impersonators as
in vaudeville performers. Although the people she was talking about

(13:54):
could take the stage, these were instinctive female impersonators, so
she meant other people like herself, and she reprinted the
text of three newspaper articles reporting on the murders of
other androgynes, edited to preserve those people's anonymity. She offered
her commentary on the reporting and on the crimes that

(14:15):
were being reported. For example, one of these articles was
about someone who had been found strangled on a yacht
dressed in women's clothes. According to the news report, there
was no reason for suicide and no motive for murder.
But in Jenny June's commentary quote, the strongest of reasons
for suicide and the strongest of motives for murder, andregines,

(14:38):
because so terribly misjudged by their associates, are the most
melancholy and prone to suicide of any class of mankind. Moreover,
they are often murdered on the strong motive of intense
loathing felt by prudes ignorant of abnormal psychology, in whose
eyes the andragine is a sodomite, with all the terrible

(14:59):
though false connotation of that term. Such prudes believe themselves
mandatories of society to rid the world of the monster.
The Female Impersonators ends with two condensed psychiatric articles about Andrewginism,
again with Jenny June's commentary, including pushing back in areas
where she thought the psychiatric community was just wrong. There

(15:22):
was also a selection of poems that she had written,
what she called Andregine Verse. There are also poems included
in Autobiography of An Androgine as well. Alfred W. Herzag
wrote introductions to both of these books. Regarding Autobiography of
an Andragine, he wrote, quote, this book is published in
an endeavor to obtain justice and humane treatment for the Androgines,

(15:46):
that class of homosexualists, into whom homosexuality is not an
acquired vice, but in whom it is congenital. He later
noted that he had agreed to publish it because he
had been quote persuaded that Andraginism is not sufficiently understood,
and that therefore androgynes were unjustly made to suffer. Herzog

(16:06):
also explained why, even though he was listed as editor,
he had not made changes to the author's words beyond
ones that were necessary to protect people's anonymity. Essentially, he
thought that the author had created quote a psychoanalysis of
himself without attempting to do so. Herzog thought that inadvertently
created psychoanalysis was worthy of careful professional study. We don't

(16:31):
want to leave the impression that Herzog was entirely supportive
of Jenny June or her efforts, though in introductions to
both of the books he treats her and people like
her with both empathy and revulsion. He drew a clear
distinction between people who are born andregines, or maybe develop
these kinds of affinities during childhood, and people who chose

(16:53):
to pursue same sex relationships later on in life. He
described that as a vice. Also described Autobiography of An
Androgine as having quote neither literary nor scientific value, and
he called it subject matter nauseating. He also described The
Female Impersonators as a failure as a book meant to

(17:14):
quote set forth the facts of androginism for the general public.
He said that he thought the general public would find
it immoral or revolting. At the same time, though this
was all happening when cross dressing and same sex relationships
were illegal, especially same sex relationships between men and Herzog
stress that people like Jenny June should not be punished

(17:36):
for who they were or for quote harmless sexual lapses.
Both Herzog and Jenny June also differentiated between pederasts and
others who were abusing or otherwise harming people, and people
who were simply trying to live their lives according to
their own innate natures and who were being unjustly imprisoned, blackmailed,

(17:56):
driven to suicide, or murdered. Jenny June wrote her third book,
Riddle of the Underground, in tandem with the second, and
it's not clear why the Medico Legal Journal didn't publish
it as it did the others. At this point, all
we have of this text are fragments that were discovered
by doctor Randall Sell in twenty ten. These fragments were

(18:17):
in the archives of the United States National Laboratory of
Medicine in the papers of doctor Victor Robinson. Robinson had
worked out a contract with the author to publish Riddle
of the Underground serially in the journal Medical Life. While
we don't have all the text of Riddle of the Underground,
we do have Jenny June's description of it, which was

(18:38):
published as an advertisement at the end of the Female Impersonators.
Like the first two books, it covered her life and
her experiences with her gender and sexuality. It also focused
on the histories of the white light and red light
districts of New York since the start of the nineteenth century,
as well as vice and crime, slums, lodging houses, nightlife,

(19:00):
and her time as a female impersonator in these parts
of the city. It does not seem as though Victor
Robinson wound up printing a Riddle of the Underground in
Medical Life. It seems like if he had, someone would
have found it by now. I was only able to
find a scan of that publication from nineteen twenty, which
was before Riddle of the Underground was written. But if

(19:22):
it were ever unearthed, this could turn out to be
just a really important resource into the underground nightlife and
the social life of LGBTQ people in New York during
this period. We're going to take a quick break, and
after that we'll talk about what we know about Jenny
June's life as gleaned from these anonymized autobiographies. As we

(19:51):
said at the top of the show, we don't know
for sure who Jenny June was, and identifying details were
changed in these books to try to protect people was anonymity.
But according to Jenny June's autobiographies, she was born in
Connecticut in eighteen seventy four and was the fourth of
her parents eleven children, although at another point in the

(20:11):
same book she describes herself as the shortest out of
their eight children. Not sure what's going on with that discrepancy.
This was an affluent Protestant family. They were living in
the nicest area of their town, which was about fifty
miles north of New York City. Jenny June described having
sexual experiences starting at a very young age, and these

(20:34):
were with other children, not with adults, although in one
case this was with the boy who was five years older.
That is very disturbing to read. Yeah, the age difference,
even among children that young. It just it felt like
a lot. Yeah. At this point, all children usually wore
dresses or gowns for their first few years of life,

(20:55):
and in Autobiography of an Androgyne, Jenny June described the
expectation that she start wearing trousers this way quote. My
first impression of the stern realities of life came at
the age of six, when my parents insisted on putting
me in breeches. I wanted to wear skirts all my life.
I shrunk from going out in distinctively male garb and

(21:16):
dodged behind the trees when I discovered an acquaintance approaching.
The sensation was almost as painful as if I had
been compelled to walk the streets naked. Until I reached
my early thirties, I did not cease to regret being
compelled to taboo feminine apparel, and was constantly being criticized
by members of my family for choosing bright colors and

(21:37):
as fancy apparel as a male can possibly wear. From
the age of seven to twelve, I occasionally masqueraded in
a sister's dress coquetting with my boy acquaintances, the same
as if I were physically a girl. Jenny June started
going to a day school for boys at the age
of nine and was mocked and bullied by classmates for
being a feminine. She described being so horrified at the

(22:01):
idea of using the boy's bathroom that she wound up
losing control of her bladder during class and being sent
home to change. This, of course, led to more bullying,
including classmates beating her to quote make a man out
of you. Jenny June described an increasing fixation on sex
during her early teens, especially on oral sex. At around

(22:23):
age fifteen, she turned to devout religious belief with the
hope of changing herself. Quote. I definitely chose the Christian
ministry and a heathen land as my field of labor
when I had finished my education. This greatly increased interest
in religion fortunately put a stop to my morbid reveries.
I now looked upon my yearning for fallacio as my

(22:44):
besetting sin, and until the age of nineteen, fought against
it as few others have struggled to be freed from
lustful desires. While pursuing this religious devotion, Jenny June became
really isolated and started to believe that she might not
live to adulthood. She had started contemplating suicide much earlier
in her childhood, and in her mid teens, these suicidal

(23:07):
thoughts became a lot more frequent and pronounced. She went
through periods of intense shame and distress. In September of
eighteen ninety one, Jenny June started college in New York
City in a weird irony. Her classmates soon gave her
the nickname Anthony Comstock, namesake of the Comstock laws that

(23:28):
would later make her books illegal. Because people thought that
she acted like a prude, she started going out at
night into different neighborhoods of New York looking for sex
and doing sex work, using aliases with the hope that
no one would trace her back to the college. Over
the course of her life, her aliases were Rafael, Wather,

(23:48):
Ralph Wather, Earl Lynde, Jenny, June, and Pussy. Raphael was
after the painter Raphael quote because he was the greatest
ultra androgyne who ever lived. He was my idol, my ideal.
I wished him to pass through the earthly life all
over again. In my body were there was after Gerta's

(24:08):
novel Sorrows of Young were there in her own words
quote As for the genesis of my first feminine name,
I chose Jenny at four. I have always considered it
the most feminine of names. When I began my double life,
I appended June. I adopted that surname because of its
beautiful associations, as well as the repetition of the J

(24:29):
and N. I later substituted the feminine pussy because so
nicknamed to my delight by the tremendously virile. I later
adopted Earl, primarily because it rhymes with girl, the creature
of enchantment that I longed to be, and secondarily because
it arouses noble ideas. I adopted Lynde after Jenny Lynde,

(24:50):
one of my models, kind of as an aside. Jenny
June was also the pen name of journalist and author
Jane Cunningham Crowley. This is something this Jenny June said
she realized only after the fact, and she also struggled
with her mental health. In her words, quote, paroxysms of
melancholia occasionally came upon me at night when I felt

(25:13):
their approach. I could not stand it to remain in
my room, where I must be noiseless, but went out
to a deserted spot in a large park near where
I lived, where I would shriek repeatedly. All my muscles
seemed to be rigid, and my fists were clenched. I
would dig my fingernails into my palms and wave my
arms wildly. Within a few minutes, my strength would be

(25:35):
completely gone. I looked upon these paroxysms as fits of insanity,
and I feared I would become permanently and violently insane.
Jenny June started consulting doctors, hoping they would take away
what she described as her abnormal passion. The treatments she
received included drugs and electroshock therapy. One doctor advised her

(25:58):
to get married word quote, I cultivated the society of
a girlfriend, but after months of effort, feminine beauty proved
powerless to attract me in the least, while male beauty
was constantly increasing its way over me. Another doctor recommended castration,
but when Jenny June looked for someone to do the procedure,

(26:18):
she was told she might regret it later. At some point,
Jenny June was expelled from her college, although she did
eventually finish a bachelor's degree and went on to do
at least some graduate study. Finally, in eighteen ninety three,
she decided that this was how she was trying to change.
It was fruitless, and she should stop struggling against it.

(26:39):
She allowed herself to live in what she described as
her French doll baby spirit for about one night a week.
She wrote a lot about feeling both feminine and babyish.
Sometimes this one night a week allowed the rest of
her life to quote flow on peacefully and blissfully. But
at other times she felt just a huge amount of

(27:00):
abhorrence and shame, she wrote, quote as the classy, hypocritical,
and bigoted overworld considers a bisexual as monster and outcast.
I was driven to a career in the democratic, frank,
liberal minded underworld. While my male soul was a leader
in scholarship at the University Uptown. My female soul, one

(27:21):
evening a week, flaunted itself as a French doll baby
in the shadowy haunts of nightlife downtown. She frequented a
hotel that she called Hotel Comfort to preserve its anonymity,
as well as a club that she called Pugilists Haven
because its regulars included a lot of prize fighters and gamblers.
She was also a regular at Columbia Hall, also known

(27:43):
by the disparaging nickname Press Hall, which was a gay
bar in brothel in the Bowery neighborhood of Lower Manhattan.
By the time the autobiographies were written, that had been
closed down, so she didn't need to disguise its name.
According to Jenny June, an organization called Circle Hermaphroditos had
been formed. Quote for Defense against the world's bitter persecution

(28:05):
of bisexuals, and they met in an upstairs room at
Columbia Hall. The only primary sources we really have about
this organization are Jenny June's autobiographies, so some historians have
concluded that it may have been more like kind of
an informal social circle that nicknamed itself, but it's possible
that this was the oldest known transgender rights organization in

(28:27):
the United States. She may have also been connected to
Aliah Walker, daughter of Madame CJ. Walker. Aliliah Walker had
become president of her late mother's cosmetics company, and she
was known for hosting enormous parties at her townhouse in Manhattan,
welcoming artists, writers, musicians, and other figures from the Harlem Renaissance,

(28:48):
as well as people who might be described as gay
or transgender today. Some of those were the same people.
I got absolutely derailed when researching this when I was like, wait,
Madam C. J. Walker's daughter, Wit. Yeah. Jenny June also
attended and participated in drag Balls, which she described as

(29:10):
the spectacle of a lifetime quote. Some of the costumes
had been ordered from Paris and London. Many have already
graced the Mardi grav New Orleans or Niece. Practically every
romantic or grotesque character ever heard of is on the floor. Monkeys, parrots, geese,
yellow kids, Foxy Grandpa, Happy Hooligan, Cupid, Mephistophels, and a

(29:31):
thousand others. For about eighteen months, she spent a lot
of time in nocturnal rambles in parts of Manhattan, including
Hill's Kitchen, Fourteenth Street, and Mulberry Street. She was particularly
attracted to Irish American and Italian American men, so she
spent a lot of time in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations.

(29:53):
There were also class elements to all of this. Jenny
June was from a well off family but was cruising
in poorer neighborhoods. Sometimes these hookups seem to have been
fulfilling to her, and there were times when she wrote
about falling in love, but at multiple points she was
also robbed, beaten, sometimes to the point of requiring hospitalization,

(30:15):
or blackmailed, and more than once she was afraid that
she was going to be murdered because of what she
was doing. Eventually, Jenny June turned her attention to military
bases located outside of New York City. She describes herself
as popular and welcomed among some of the military men,
but she was also arrested at one point, and her family,

(30:36):
who lived nearby, found out about it. Although she never
discussed it with them, Her father quote soon began to
treat me regularly with extreme bitterness, as if he wished
I had never been born. Some of the soldiers that
one of the military bases also tried to blackmail her,
and when she tried to run away from them, they
caught up to her and beat her severely. In her account,

(31:00):
she tried to bring these soldiers to justice, which led
to a court martial in which she felt like she
was the one on trial. Eventually, Jenny June, in her
masculine persona, was hired as a private secretary to an
elderly rich man. This allowed her to travel to Europe
in his company, and she sought out the kinds of
underground nightlife that she had already known in New York

(31:23):
and visited military bases overseas. But after they returned from
some travel, she was recognized by a delivery driver who
came to her employer's house, and she had to resign.
Throughout all of this, Jenny June had experienced a huge
amount of emotional and psychological distress because of her desire

(31:44):
to be a woman and her desire for sexual experiences
with men. She described her desires as insatiable and accompanied
by spermataria or excessive seamen. In the nineteenth century, this
was a diagnosis that was often connected to social concerns
about male sexuality and sexual practices, so it's not really

(32:05):
clear whether Jenny June was having a physiological issue or
whether this was more something connected to a lot of
social stigma around sex. Regardless, at the age of twenty eight,
she chose to be castrated with the hope of getting
relief from all of this, and just for clarity, this
was the removal of her testicles, not her penis. She

(32:25):
had also been waxing her facial hair for years. As
it grew back in. She would stay home for the
last couple of days before it became long enough to
wax again so that people would not see her with it.
She had hoped that castration would address this as well.
Quote minor motives were that I would prefer to possess
one less mark of the male, and that I thought

(32:46):
that facial hair cells would cease to function, and I
thus be rid of my most detested and most troublesome
badge of masculinity. About two years passed after her surgery,
before Jenny June felt like her sexual or as were subsiding,
although her facial hair never really changed. Even though that
effect hadn't been as she hoped, she described this as

(33:08):
giving her a new lease on life once she had
recovered from an initial loss of physical strength that followed
the procedure. At the age of thirty two, Jenny June
moved out of the city to a smaller town where
it was no longer possible to maintain a double life.
While still remaining anonymous. She wrote her autobiographies and eventually

(33:28):
got a job as an assistant at the Medico Legal Journal.
When she first tried to get her book published there,
she said it had been written by a friend. By
the time the first of the books was published, she
wrote a feeling as though her sex drive had nearly
reached its end, something that she found to be a
huge relief. Has this work as a private secretary and
the work as an assistant at the Medical Legal Journal,

(33:51):
these were like a couple of jobs that she had
over the course of her life that she wrote about,
and she had just a series of like professional level
jobs doing a variety of things that we did not
really get into a lot of detail. In addition to
her autobiographies, Jenny June also published articles in at least
one medical journal, the American Journal of Urology and Sexology.

(34:13):
This was under the name Ralph Werther Jenny June. She
did this over the course of nineteen eighteen and nineteen nineteen.
Some of these articles cover the same basic territory as
her autobiography. One piece, which was titled The Girl Boys Suicide,
combines her own experiences as a child with that of
another child that she knew of when she was growing up,

(34:34):
who had died by suicide after being tormented by peers
for being effeminate. Jenny June's autobiography does seem to have
gotten some academic and medical attention. US Army doctor Robert W.
Shufelt references it in a nineteen oh five paper in
the Pacific Medical Journal. Shoefelt got a copy of the
manuscript from someone, in his words, well known to the author.

(34:58):
It might have been Jenny June herself. Shufelt seems to
have believed that the author of the manuscript had died
by suicide around the age of thirty. In an article
about perversion and inversion, Shufelt described the autobiography as required
reading for quote every sociologist, anthropologist, and professional person in

(35:18):
this country. Numerous medical journals mentioned or reviewed at least
one of these books in the years after they were published. Yeah,
she clearly got a copy of it at some point
during that eighteen year process of trying to find a publisher.
Autobiography of an Androgyne found renewed interest after being reprinted
in nineteen seventy five and then again in two thousand

(35:40):
and eight, and then throughout that time, researchers have tried
to figure out who Jenny June may have been, since
that would add further context to our understanding of her
life and of the world that she was describing in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In October twenty
twenty two, the website out History announced that Channing Gerard

(36:02):
Joseph had concluded that Jenny June was journalist and essayist
Maury Sabin. Joseph based this conclusion on extensive research through
resources like census records and details from Jenny June's and
Maury Saban's lives, as well as comparisons of their written
work and known photos of them. Maury Sabin was born

(36:22):
in Massachusetts rather than Connecticut, in eighteen seventy rather than
eighteen seventy four. Both attended prep schools for boys. Both
were expelled from college. Saban also had a sister named Jenny.
May and Joseph found similarities between Jenny June's writing style
and Maury Saban's published essays. Other potential authors have also

(36:45):
been proposed over the years as well. This is really
tricky to conclusively prove since, as we said earlier, details
from Jenny June's books are intentionally obbuscated. Unfortunately, since we
don't know who was writing under the name Jenny, we
really don't know what happened to her after those autobiographies end.

(37:06):
So much to talk about on Friday. There is so
much to talk about on Friday. In the meantime, we
have a listener mail that is a little lighter, although
it is also about our Brown Dog Affair episode which
was about vivisection. This is from Katie and Katie wrote,
Hello Holly and Tracy. Never thought i'd have a reason

(37:26):
to write you, but I'm glad to today. I heard
your Brown Dog Affair episode, such a heartbreaking tale. While listening,
I realized I used to live near the statue the
newer iteration. I've passed it many a time when walking
my own dog through Battersea Park, so yes, you may
be happy to know it is indeed in Battersea Park.
What's more, the statue is in a little patch of

(37:48):
doggy heaven. It's more hidden away now. It's an enclosed
walkway surrounded by trees, somewhere near the pagoda. It's probably
the most squirrel populated part of the park, so you'll
often hear dog running around having the time of their
life near it. We also get a lot of birds
and green parrots here. Yeah, the green parrots are kind
of a thing in London. There's many a rumor as

(38:10):
to why they're about. Beyond it is a huge open
field where dogs and owners are often found playing together.
If I remember correctly. The inscription is now kind of different,
more subtle, but to me at least, I think it's
the perfect resting place for any dog after a hard life.
I do think if dogs have a heaven it must
look at least a little like Battersea Park. I know

(38:31):
you guys like your pet photos, so please enjoy some
of our not so little Welsh Corgi named Badger. He's
as cute as he is troublesome, and we work hard
to give him the best life a dog and have
goodness knows, he repays the love tenfold. I hope this
helps you both smile. Thank you for making our dog
walks so very educational. Best wishes, Katie. What unadorable Welsh

(38:52):
corgy in one picture sitting next to a pumpkin and
other looks like next to maybe a square shmellow with
a cant of Doctor Pepper a big close up of
doggy face. Thank you so much for this email, Katie.
I'm glad to have a little more knowledge of what
that part of the park is like, aunt to have

(39:13):
these adorable dog pictures. We'll talk some more about our
personal thoughts in this episode on Friday. If you'd like
to send us a note, We're at History Podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com, and we're all over social media at
missed in History, where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest
and Instagram and You can subscribe to our show at
the iHeartRadio app or wherever else you'll like be at

(39:36):
your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.

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The Autobiographies of Earl Lind - Ralph Werther - Jennie June

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