Louise Lawrence

Louise Lawrence (1912–1976) was an American transgender activist, artist, writer, and lecturer. She organized a network of gender non-conforming people across the US and abroad, and advocated for transgender issues during the mid-20th century. She was an early founder of the magazine Transvestia. Historian Susan Stryker wrote, "If there is an unheralded founder of the transgender community in the United States, it's Louise Lawrence."

Personal life Lawrence was born in 1912 and was assigned male at birth. She began wearing traditionally feminine clothing at a young age and would wear her mother's clothes. In 1930, she married and, when she was twenty-two, had a daughter. After the death of her first wife, she married a woman who at first accepted her wearing gender-affirming clothing, but they divorced three years later. After the divorce, Lawrence lived full-time as a woman in Berkeley and starting in 1947, in San Francisco, initially with a "close" female roommate.

In 1950s she co-owned a tenant house with an US Army nurse, Gay Elkins, and they frequently traveled together. In 1957, when Elkins was stationed in Germany, Lawrence acquired a passport with a female gender marker, leading to Elkins being dishonorably discharged from the army on suspicion of lesbianism. After State Department reconsidered the passport suspecting identity fraud, Elkins won an appeal, retroactively rendering her honorably discharged with full veteran benefits. Later the State Department reversed their previous decision, allowing Lawrence to use and travel with a female passport.

Of her transition, Lawrence wrote in one of her journals:I consider Louise to be my true identity even though the birth records say differently. And on this I will stand. For to me, as to most people who know me, I AM Louise. Lawrence was also an artist and sold paintings. She wrote a 117-page autobiography and a shorter autobiographical text, both of which are unpublished and housed at the Louise Lawrence Collection in the Kinsey Institute Archives. Her network also included gay female impersonators, drag queens,

Medical community From the 1940s until her death, Lawrence sought to educate the public about gender nonconformity. To achieve this, she acted as a key interface between medical researchers and her network within the transgender community. According to its website, "the goal of the Louise Lawrence Transgender Archive (LLTA) is to increase the understanding of transgender people and encourage new scholarship by making transgender historical materials available to students, scholars and the public." Chris E. Vargas designed a collage for the exhibition called "Transvestites in the News," named after the title Lawrence gave to her scrapbooks.