Through The Looking Glass

Fighting To Be Seen Can Mean Contending With Being Misheard. Forty Years After An Unprecedented Playboy Interview, Thomas Page Mcbee Examines Destructive Trans Narratives And Flawed Frameworks.

In 1979, famed composer Wendy Carlos came out as trans in the pages of this magazine. This was no small thing. By the time she sat down with journalist Arthur Bell for the Playboy Interview, Carlos had won three Grammy Awards for her 1968 synthesized take on Bach and scored Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. PLAYBOY's nearly 14,000-word piece—billed as “a candid conversation with the Switched-On Bach composer who, for the first time, reveals her sex-change operation and her secret life as a woman”— elicited sympathetic letters from readers and was arguably groundbreaking.

It was, after all, one of the few pieces of original journalism about trans people in the mainstream media in the late 1970s. Yet a rereading reveals troubling ways in which gatekeepers, ostensibly charged with faithfully presenting our emergent stories, failed. It is also a reminder that the human cost of that failure, all these decades later, is part of every trans person’s story, including my own.

If Americans had heard of a trans person at all at the time of the Carlos interview, it was probably Renée Richards, who in 1976 and 1977 had fought to continue playing tennis after her transition, generating a major controversy in women’s sports. For refusing to abandon her desire to play professionally, Richards was called an “extraordinary spectacle” in Sports Illustrated, shortly before a 1977 New York Supreme Court ruling confirmed her right to compete “as female.”