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Great Events from History: LGBTQ, 2nd Edition

Hart Recognized as a Transgender Man

by Liz Highleyman

Date: 1996

Locale: Portland, Oregon

Categories: Transgender/transsexuality; health and medicine; organizations and institutions

Key Figures

Alan Lucill Hart (1890-1962), physician, novelist, and female-to-male transgender

Joshua Allen Gilbert (1867-1948), psychiatrist who treated and wrote about Hart

Summary of Event

Alan Hart’s story became known to the LGBT community with the publication of gay historian Jonathan Ned Katz’s seminal work Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. In this 1976 book, Katz described Hart as a “passing woman,” one of several in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who donned male apparel and worked in traditionally male jobs. While some of these passing women were lesbians, others were what are now called transgender men.

Hart, originally named Alberta Lucille, was born in Hall’s Summit, Kansas, on October 4, 1890. As a child, he enjoyed boys’ chores and disliked girls’ housework and 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—the only female-born person in the class—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, who knew that Hart had been born female.

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, obtained master’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University, and 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, “[D]espite the confusion of Dr. Gilbert and ‘H’ herself about her sexual nature, ‘H’ is clearly a Lesbian, a woman-loving woman.” 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 1990’s, the burgeoning transgender movement began to reclaim historical figures believed to have been wrongly considered gay or lesbian; one of these figures was 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 fund-raising awards dinner after “Lucille” Hart. Candace Hellen Brown, a transsexual woman, 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 gay and lesbian group called Basic Rights Oregon (BRO). In September, 2000, BRO revived the tradition of hosting a fund-raising 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 “transsexual,” which was not coined until 1949. 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 reassignment 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 him firmly on the transgender spectrum. Ascribing modern identities to individuals from the past remains problematic, however.

Historian Susan Stryker (a transgender woman) wrote that she had reservations about using the contemporary word “transsexual” to describe people who lived or flourished before the mid-twentieth century, and in a 1998 article, scholar and transgender activist C. Jacob Hale (a transgender man) 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 in the two decades or so in organizing as a distinct movement, and also in educating the lesbian and gay community and society at large about gender and sexual identity, and the blurred and fluid boundaries of gender, sex, and sexuality.

Citation Types

Type

Format

MLA 9th

Highleyman, Liz. "Hart Recognized As A Transgender Man." Great Events from History: LGBTQ, 2nd Edition, edited by Robert C. Evans, Salem Press, 2017. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=LGBTQ2E_0256.

APA 7th

Highleyman, L. (2017). Hart Recognized as a Transgender Man. In R. C. Evans (Ed.), Great Events from History: LGBTQ, 2nd Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.

CMOS 17th

Highleyman, Liz. "Hart Recognized As A Transgender Man." Edited by Robert C. Evans. Great Events from History: LGBTQ, 2nd Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2017. Accessed September 15, 2025. online.salempress.com.

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