Cercle Hermaphroditos

{{Short description|Informal transgender advocacy organisation in the United States}}

File:Bowery_Queen_2.jpg Queen", ca. 1890s]]

File:Bowery_Queen_1.jpg

The Cercle Hermaphroditos was the first known informal transgender advocacy organisation in the United States, founded in 1895 in New York City "to unite for defense against the world’s bitter persecution".{{sfn|Stryker|2008|p=71-72}} The group first met at Paresis Hall, also called Columbia Hall or simply "the Hall," which was a center of homosexual nightlife in New York City. There, male sex workers would solicit men under an effeminate persona.{{Citation needed|date=November 2024}}

In a time when cross dressing was socially unacceptable and a punishable crime, places like Paresis Hall provided a place where self-described "instinctive female-impersonators," androgynes, queens, fairies, or Uranians could gather and feel more free to express themselves and socialize with similar people.Gross, Tasha. "LGBTQ History: Cooper Square and Bowery". LGBTQ History: Cooper Square and Bowery. N.p., December 4, 2014. Web. Retrieved April 13, 2017.{{sfn|Eskridge|2008|p=302}} These were Victorian era and Edwardian era words – with their own nuances of meaning – for people who were born male, felt they were at least partly women in mind or spirit, and preferred having sex with men; people who today might call themselves transgender women, non-binary people, or feminine gay men, in the language of today's LGBT communities.{{cite book|author=Jennie June|title=Autobiography of an Androgyne|year=2008 |page=xxiv|publisher=Rutgers University Press |isbn=9780813543000 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=KXxTbGocCvQC&dq=%22Robert+S.+Newton%22+alienist&pg=PR24}}{{cite book|title=We are everywhere: A historical sourcebook of gay and lesbian politics|page=61|isbn=9780415908580 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=rDG3xdtDutkC&dq=urning&pg=PA65|last1=Blasius |first1=Mark |last2=Phelan |first2=Shane |year=1997 |publisher=Routledge }}{{cite book|author=Karl Heinrich Ulrichs|chapter=Critical arrow|year=1879|title=Excerpt reprinted in: We are everywhere: A historical sourcebook of gay and lesbian politics|pages=64–65|publisher=Routledge |isbn=9780415908580 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=rDG3xdtDutkC&dq=urning&pg=PA65}}

The nature of Paresis Hall during this period is known to historians today from a variety of sources. However, the Cercle Hermaphroditos is more apocryphal, known chiefly from the autobiography of an "instinctive female-impersonator," Jennie June, who provides the main surviving description of it. June says all the group's members knew one another only by pseudonyms, for reasons of safety.Jonathan Ned Katz. [https://web.archive.org/web/20210421022723/http://www.outhistory.org/exhibits/show/earl-lind/related/cercle-hermaphroditos "Earl Lind: The Cercle Hermaphroditos, c. 1895"] OutHistory. Retrieved April 21, 2021. Additionally, June also stated that the majority of the group were Ultra-Androgyne, & would always clothe themselves as female in their daily lives if the law permitted it.{{Cite book |last=Werther |first=Ralph |title=The female-impersonators |url=https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/70019/pg70019-images.html |access-date=2025-05-16 |publisher=The Medico-Legal journal |date=1922 |language=en}} The group was led by pseudonymous Roland Reeves.{{sfn|Stryker|2008|p=71}} 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.{{sfn|Kissack|2008|p=2-3}}

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".{{sfn|Stryker|2008|p=72}}