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Modern audiences might assume that trans+ history is a relatively recent story. Indeed, there remains an (incorrect) perception that gender transition itself is only a post-World War II development, made possible in an environment when advances in scientific and medical knowledge rendered transitions possible. However, this view ignores the millennia of gender transition evidence available to scholars, centuries before the concept of “medical” transition. Even worse, it glosses over the stories of some fabulous individuals in trans+ history whose lives were concurrent with that period of rapid change. One of these is Lucy Hicks Anderson – a Black transgender woman whose story rocked California in the 1940s, and whose legacy is a fascinating piece of Black trans+ history.
Migration and Renaissance
As a Black and transgender woman, Lucy Hicks Anderson’s story is a notable case study in how intersectionality in identity is fundamental to understanding queer history. This was particularly true at the tumultuous turn of the 20th century in the United States. The early feminist movements, Black civil rights initiatives and even flickers of queer activism (certainly queer individuals in public life) were all becoming more visible as the Gilded Age slowly receded.
This was an especially brilliant period for Black arts and culture, as exemplified by the Harlem Renaissance which peaked in the 1920s and 30s. The Harlem Renaissance was spurred in large part by “the Great Migration”. The United States federal government had abandoned any real effort at post-war Reconstruction by 1900. As a result, white supremacist terrorism was rampant throughout the American south, and Black families were subjected to seemingly endless and unabated violence. Isabel Wilkerson writes, “the vast majority of African-Americans had been confined to the South, at the bottom of a feudal social order, at the mercy of slaveholders and their descendants and often-violent vigilantes.”[1] The Great Migration, which saw almost half of Black Americans living outside the South by the 1970s, was for many an escape route out of these terrifying conditions.
As it swelled to a crescendo, “[t]he Great Migration drew to Harlem some of the greatest minds and brightest talents of the day, an astonishing array of African American artists and scholars. Between the end of World War I and the mid-1930s, they produced one of the most significant eras of cultural expression in the nation’s history.” [2] This flowering of Black culture included such figures as Gladys Bentley (the subject of a previous post on this blog), Josephine Baker, Jimmie Daniels, and Langston Hughes among dozens of other Black artistic and literary lights of the age.
Each of those Black artists listed above was also publicly, or widely thought to be, queer. Indeed, as African American literary scholar Henry Louis Gates famously quipped, the Harlem Renaissance was “surely as gay as it was Black.”[3] The period of the Harlem Renaissance, while not confined to Harlem or even necessarily to large cities alone, saw an explosion in visibility and representation of Black queer voices. Many of these individuals flouted the sexual and gender norms of their day, challenging and upending stereotypes with flair. Gladys Bentley, the “Drag King of Harlem”, staged infamous performances where she sang alongside a chorus of flamboyant drag queens at the Ubangi Club, donning her own tuxedo and top hat.[4]
Trans at the Turn of the Century
Concurrent to this Black queer history was an emerging field of transgender studies in the same period. The early 20th century would radically alter the extant understanding of gender binary and normativity, and provided the crucial context for Lucy Hicks Anderson’s story of social transition.
To be sure, “cross-dressers” (in the terminology of a spate of late 19th century laws) and examples of possible American transgender figures predated 1900.[5] But the period immediately preceding and then following World War I brought a transformed social scene for queer Americans, particularly trans+ and gender non-conforming individuals. Susan Stryker notes that the industrialization and urbanization trends of the late Victorian period resulted in new socioeconomic conditions which favored the growth of burgeoning queer communities.[6] These included (and continue to include) individuals of wide-ranging sexual and gender identities living together. In this period, moder categorical distinctions among identities far less clear than in today’s parlance.
But the 1910s – 1930s were also a critical period of transgender scientific and medical advances. Magnus Hirschfeld, who would go on to found the Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin, was a pioneer of this era. He penned a groundbreaking treatise, The Transvestites, in 1910 describing people who would now be considered transgender, and facilitated the first documented male-to-female bottom surgery for Dorchen Richter in 1931.[7]
While Hirschfeld was a leading authority of his era, he was not working in isolation. One of his protegees, Dr. Harry Benjamin, was a frequent visitor at Hirschfeld’s Institute in the decades before World War II and would go on to become an advocate for understanding “transsexualism” and access to medical transition resources in the United States throughout the 1940s – 1960s.[8] The early 20th century thus saw historic advances in transgender medical and therapeutic treatments, allowing (arguably for the first time) transgender individuals the opportunity to achieve complete physical transitions if they had the desire (and financial means) to do so.
Becoming Lucy
These decades thus saw both an explosion in queer Black representation as well as leaps forward in the understanding and treatment of trans+ individuals. Lucy Hicks Anderson’s life sits at the crossroads of an American social fabric in a, literal and figurative, transition. Her history represents an especially important case study in how racism and transphobia melded into the persecution of a Black transgender woman – and how she fought back.
That story begins in perhaps the unlikeliest place – a small Kentucky town in the late 1800s. A common transphobic assertion, specifically regarding gender affirming care for young adults and minors, is that transgender children “do not actually exist”. Lucy’s narrative, however, confirms that they do exist – and did over a century ago.
Lucy (then surnamed Lawson) was born in 1886 in Waddy, Kentucky, a community situated between the larger urban areas of Louisville and Lexington. By her own accounts, Lucy was never anything but a girl at any point in her childhood despite her presumed anatomical gender.[9] Lucy was assigned male at birth and given a boy’s name but insisted on attiring herself in dresses even as a child. She reportedly demanded that she be allowed to wear girls’ clothing in public (especially to school) and required that her family treat her as a little girl.[10] This behavior persisted throughout her childhood; eventually, her mother (perhaps having hoped this behavior was a phase of some sort) decided to seek a professional opinion.[11]
Surprisingly, Lucy’s doctor offered a sanguine and arguably progressive opinion for a medical professional at the turn of the century: he advised that Lucy be allowed to live exactly as she pleased, as a woman, and behaving and attiring herself in accordance with her gender identity.[12] Perhaps the doctor had known Lucy throughout her life and already understood her, or perhaps had passing interactions with the emerging “transsexual” sciences of the day which were the latest news in his profession. In either case, Lucy continued to live and present as a woman into her early teen years.
At age fifteen, Lucy became Lucy once and for all. Abandoning her Kentucky home, the now teenager completed her social transition and left the small community where she was raised, ultimately headed for new adventures. It would be on the West Coast, in sunny California, that Lucy would become a local star – and a national sensation.
Madam
Records suggest that Lucy Lawson arrived in Oxnard, California in 1920, then in her mid-30s. Throughout this time, and for many years thereafter in California, Lucy was fully accepted as a woman in a wide range of social contexts – by her husband(s), by her employers, and by a community which came to love her. She was also, as time would prove, a clever entrepreneur.
Lucy’s entrance to Oxnard came about from her first marriage to Clarence Hicks, reportedly in the same year as they relocated there together as a married couple.[13] Lucy, now surnamed Hicks, took on roles as a “domestic”, which could entail a wide range of tasks in this time period. Domestics usually served in common household roles such as household maintenance, sewing, cooking, and cleaning – typically for wealthy families in large homes or sizable estates, of which there were no shortage in Oxnard.
For Lucy, these roles presented an opportunity to leverage her natural gifts into something greater. In today’s colloquialisms, we might call Lucy a “social butterfly”. She offered a sparkling wit to brighten any conversation, even those with her later persecutors, and for the next two decades wound her way from domestic to local socialite in spectacular fashion.
During the 1920s, Lucy cultivated a culinary reputation in her domestic roles. As a 1945 Time magazine article “Sin and Souffl” featuring Lucy would suggest, she was adored in her community as a chef and hostess:
“From the moment she got off the train in California more than 30 years ago, Lucy Hicks liked Oxnard, and Oxnard liked Lucy…[Lucy] set out to get a good reputation as a preliminary to getting a bad one. She began cooking for Oxnard’s leading families.”[14]
The article goes on to detail Lucy’s bon vivant role:
“She wore bright, low-cut silk dresses from which her slatlike collarbones protruded, and she affected picture hats and high-heeled shoes. Her wigs were her pride —she had a long, black, wavy one, a short, straight, bobbed one, and for special occasions a shoulder-length job in red…She not only kept on cooking in Oxnard’s big houses, but tended children, helped dress many an Oxnard daughter for parties. The town thought little of seeing fat and prosperous Oxnard dames driving to Lucy’s house to borrow one of her legendary recipes. When a new Catholic priest came to town, Lucy prepared the barbecue with which the parish welcomed him.”[15]
But Lucy wasn’t just whipping up feasts in her popular kitchen – she was also whipping up a personal fortune through other, more illicit, activities. In 1929, Lucy divorced Clarence Hicks and spent the next fifteen years pooling funds for ever more ambitious projects than her ex-husband presumably would have supported. During these interim years between marriages, she opened her first “bawdyhouse” or bordello, in Oxnard in an area known as “China Alley”. Between her profits in the sex trade and her other roles, she saved enough to purchase multiple properties such that she managed a “sprawling half block of brothels” at the height of her business.[16]
None of this appeared to bother her friends. As one anecdote relates:
“When the sheriff arrested her one night, her double-barreled reputation paid off—Charles Donlon, the town’s leading banker, promptly bailed her out. Reason: he had scheduled a huge dinner party which would have collapsed dismally with Lucy in jail. After that, for three decades, Lucy Hicks trafficked successfully in both sin and souffle.”[17]
Wartime Woes
By the onset of World War II, Lucy Hicks was a beloved and valued fixture in Oxnard, with tremendous commercial success to boot. During the war, Lucy further endeared herself to her neighborhood with devoted patriotism: she personally bought $50,000 in US war bonds and donated generously to the Red Cross and Boy Scouts organizations.[18] She leveraged her exceptional hostess skills to honor soldiers departing off to the Pacific front and was known to grieve alongside the many families who lost their fathers and sons to the grinding global war.
Perhaps her prosperity gave Lucy the confidence to marry again, possibly to build her connections further and grow her local empire with a right-hand man of sorts. Here again she showed a mark of patriotism when she wed a New York soldier, Reuben Anderson, in 1944. It would be a fateful union, which ultimately intensified her imminent legal troubles.
But their union, initially successful, was not the spark that put Lucy in the crosshairs of the law. In the autumn of 1945, Lucy must have been looking ahead to a brilliant future with the World War ended and men returning from years abroad – and back to her thriving bordellos. Business must have been booming, but so too did the constant threat of venereal disease.
It is unclear if Lucy’s houses were the source of a major outbreak which caught the Navy’s attention that year, but enough servicemen indicated that such was the case that Lucy’s establishment – and her person – came under scrutiny. Despite Lucy’s efforts to dissuade them, Lucy’s sex workers were all examined for signs of disease. Not satisfied, doctors demanded to examine Lucy herself. This unwanted examination led to the discovery that Lucy was anatomically male – information which inevitably became publicized, most notably in the Time article above. Scholar C. Riley Snorton analyzes that article’s ending thusly: “[i]t’s final sentence, a punch line, ‘Lucy was a man’ conclusively signaled to Time’s readership that she was someone to laugh at.”[19]
“What I am…”
This revelation resulted in a protracted legal battle which saw both Lucy’s identity and her marriage threatened. The latter was the immediate problem, as local authorities argued that Lucy – regardless of her stated gender identity – was really a man. Therefore, in applying for a marriage license to wed Reuben Anderson, they had both committed perjury.
The Ventura County District Attorney voided their marriage, but Lucy and Reuben faced the perjury charges as a federal matter.[20] The subsequent trial at the end of 1945 revealed Lucy’s courage, wit and determination in the face of her (white) prosecutors. Contemporary accounts of her trial show her practically mocking her interrogators, including an anecdote where she puffed out her chest when asked which parts of her body were “feminine”.[21]
Witty rebuttals aside, Lucy’s statements about her own identity were extraordinary in the context of 1945 America. Christine Jorgensen, notably, did not go public with her famous gender transition until 1952; Lucy Hicks Anderson’s trial predates that seminal queer history moment by over six years. Despite this, Lucy’s voice across history is unwavering:
“I defy any doctor in the world to prove that I am not a woman. I have lived, dressed, acted just like what I am, a woman.”[22]
This is an extraordinary statement in of itself, mirroring the rapid advancements in science and psychology that had occurred in transgender studies concurrent to her own lifetime: that physical and phenotypical traits may or may not connect to how one perceives, senses and interprets their own gender. Lucy Hicks Anderson was not a scholar, medical professional, or had any experience with “queer critical studies” or any genre of the sort – she simply articulated her own lived experience in stunning, unapologetic fashion.
Aftermath
Despite her bravery, Lucy and Reuben were still convicted and ostensibly sentenced to a decade in prison. However, Lucy’s attorney managed to devise a “compromise” to keep his client out of a lengthy incarceration that would have been exceptionally dangerous for her. He theorized that Lucy must have “hidden organs” which had somehow influenced her character and sense of identity, and that she might agree to donate her body to medical research upon her natural death.[23] With this mutual agreement, Lucy’s sentence was commuted to probation (though it is unclear if this medical analysis ever occurred after Lucy’s death).
Alas, the couple’s legal problems were not yet over: Reuben Anderson faced a trial for fraud in April 1946 because he had sent his wife his allotment checks – despite the fact that her anatomical gender, in the eyes of the law, made such provision illegal. Lucy would testify again at her husband’s trial, repeatedly refusing to confirm prosecutors’ suggestions that she was a man or had male body parts.[24] Again, the couple found themselves convicted and both were briefly imprisoned together in a men’s detention facility.
The couple did suffer a cruel twist of fate, however, even after their eventual release. Lucy’s Oxnard community, at the behest of its police chief, officially banned her and her husband from returning for at least ten years. As a result, the Andersons left for the more welcoming Los Angeles, about two hours east of the place where Lucy had once been a reigning starlet.
From here, Lucy largely disappears from the historical record. Given the strange and painful twists of her life to that point, perhaps she longed for a bit of peace and quiet in a new locale. Perhaps she was grateful that she and Reuben had survived it all and avoided the threat of a long, excruciating imprisonment. But perhaps there was also a sense of betrayal, that her glittering life had gone so far awry, that her old friends forced her out of the town they once shared. Perhaps Lucy got back into business, any of her former businesses, quietly and carefully skirting the eyes of the law.
Lucy might have returned to Oxnard in 1955 – but she did not live long enough. She passed the year prior, in September 1954, by then a relatively obscure figure whose brief touch with national fame had long since faded into the annals of legal (and queer) history.
“Die a Woman”
In the end, we might posit that Lucy won: when she was quoted in the Oxnard Press-Courier in 1945, she declared emphatically:
“I have lived a good citizen for many years in this town and am going to die a good citizen, but I am going to die a woman.”[25]
Indeed she did – both free and defiant of the laws and systems which were designed to persecute her. These systems, firmly grounded in the prevailing racial and gender constructs of the era, offered no mechanism by which an individual like Lucy Hicks Anderson could have existed openly and peacefully at the same time.
Had the bout of venereal disease never put the unwelcome spotlight of inquiry on her brothels, Lucy may never have been revealed as a transgender woman at all. This fact makes plain an obvious truth: that millions of transgender individuals have likely existed, far more than those noted in the historical record, throughout time. As ever, the available record in queer historical research pales in comparison to the volumes upon volumes of lived stories which may never be told.
But Lucy Hicks Anderson was not just a transgender woman; she was a Black transgender woman. As C. Riley Snorton’s account in Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity contends, her identities shaped her portrayal within the harsh and racist lens of American society in 1945. He cites, for example, “racially caricatured speech” and “deployment of gender-as-a-punch line” in her Time coverage. At the same time, her witty trial responses might likewise be characterized as “instances of counterpower” from a woman who was marginalized in multiple, intersecting manners.[26]
Her courage in the face of these pressures, and her certainty that she could and would survive as her authentic self, can only inspire our admiration today. In recent years, Lucy Hicks Anderson has been rightly acknowledged as a pioneer among the Black queer icons of the 20th century. Her narrative is no fairy tale, but her perseverance and determination were nothing short of astonishing then as now. Lucy died a woman, as she wanted, but she remains a woman for the ages.
[1] Isabel Wilkerson, “The Long-Lasting Legacy of the Great Migration,” Smithsonian Magazine, September 2016, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/long-lasting-legacy-great-migration-180960118/.
[2] The National Museum of African American History and Culture, “A New African American Identity: The Harlem Renaissance,” accessed February 1, 2025, https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/new-african-american-identity-harlem-renaissance.
[3] Steven W. Lewis, “The Harlem Renaissance in Black Queer History,” National Museum of African American History and Culture, May 28, 2022, https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/harlem-renaissance-black-queer-history.
[4] National Museum of African American History and Culture, “Gladys Bentley,” accessed February 1, 2025, https://nmaahc.si.edu/gladys-bentley
[5] Note that this terminology here is not meant to imply that all those who engage in cross-dressing – historically or in the present day – are necessarily part of the trans+ community, much the same as the simplistic label of “cross-dresser” in the late Victorian period is not confirmation that such figures were also definitively not transgender.
[6] Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution (New York: Seal Press, 2017), pgs. 48 – 50.
[7] Stryker, pg. 55.
[8] Alison Li, “Harry Benjamin and the birth of transgender medicine,” Canadian Medical Association Journal, December 10, 2023, doi: 10.1503/cmaj.231436.
[9] Malaysia Walker, “Lucy Hicks Anderson, A Black Trans Pioneer,” American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi , February 21, 2018, https://www.aclu-ms.org/en/news/highlight-lucy-hicks-anderson-black-trans-pioneer.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Owen Keehnen, “Lucy Hicks Anderson,” The Legacy Project, accessed February 8, 2025, https://legacyprojectchicago.org/person/lucy-hicks-anderson.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Walker, ibid.
[14] “CALIFORNIA: Sin & Souffl,” Time Magazine, November 5, 1945, https://time.com/archive/6789857/california-sin-souffl/.
[15] Ibid.
[16] C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), pg. 147.
[17] Time Magazine, ibid.
[18] Walker, ibid.
[19] Snorton, pg. 148.
[20] Keehnen, ibid.
[21] Snorton, pg. 149.
[22] Walker, ibid.
[23] Snorton, pg. 150.
[24] Ibid, pg. 151.
[25] Article clipping reproduced in Sidedoor “Lucy Hicks Anderson,” a production of the Smithsonian Institute.
[26] Snorton, pgs. 148 – 149.