Virginia Prince was a pioneer for transgender recognition

Born in Los Angeles, California in 1912, Virginia Prince was assigned male at birth.

From when she was 12 years old she used to often dress in women’s clothes, and began to present as feminine in public. When she was 18, she attended at Church Halloween Party as a woman and won the first prize in a competition for ‘best costume’.

After training as a pharmacist, she married and had a son, but the relationship did not last. Her family were shocked when her divorce papers cited “transvestitism” – the term of the time – as the grounds for the divorce.

After consulting a psychiatrist, who advised her to just embrace the desire and accept who she was, Prince became more comfortable with her gender.

In 1960, she began publishing the magazine Transvestia. She started the project by getting 25 friends to donate $4 each to the start-up costs of the publication.

Sold by mail order, and through adult bookstores, Transvestia published bi-monthly, and 100 issues were created between 1960 and 1980. The magazine attracted readers from around the world.

With the magazine she forcefully rejected the notion of the time that people like her were ‘disturbed’, and she was at the forefront of using the term transgender.

However, by the 1970s she was criticised for her promotion of traditional family values and societal norms. She argued that homosexuals, and people who treated gender as a fetish, were not aligned with her views.

She passed away in 2009 in Los Angeles.

Image Virginia Prince: copyright University of Victoria Libraries published under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

This post was first published in 2021 and has been subsequently updated. 

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