On July 1, 1941, a 29-year-old interior decorator walked into a Los Angeles courthouse and filed a request that vanishingly few law clerks would have processed before: As a part of her gender transition, she wanted to change her name on her legal documents.
The applicant, named Barbara Ann Richards, was a woman, but the state of California still classified her as a man, and her birth certificate listed a traditionally masculine name she no longer claimed as her own. Richards explained to the court that she had undergone, by her own description, a physical metamorphosis. She had “always lived and worked as a man until about two years ago,” at which point, she said, “I realized that some vital physiological change was taking place.”
Without warning, her beard—which she used to shave twice a day—stopped growing. Her voice changed pitch. “I began to observe that my skin had become smoother, that the shape of my face was different, my waist was smaller, my hips heavier, my throat smaller,” she said in her testimony. Accompanying those unexplained physical changes were psychological ones as well: She said she started gravitating more toward cooking and housework. She stopped reading Esquire, she said, and switched over to Ladies’ Home Journal.
The previous October, as World War II loomed, Richards had gone to register for the draft, but the Selective Service System turned her away. The government classified her as “4-F,” a designation for people “unfit” for the military that was commonly applied to homosexuals. Richards told the court that, after the selective service rejection, “I decided that I was, in every essential way, a woman, and I was determined that in justice to myself I should petition the court for feminine status.”
Her lawyer, a newly minted family law attorney named Chester B. Anderson, paraded out experts who offered medical explanations for Richards’ story. An endocrinologist named Marcus Graham, who claimed to have examined Barbara for an American Psychiatric Association conference, speculated that a childhood illness might have been the cause of her so-called metamorphosis. “Such diseases as mumps have been known to cause destruction of important male characteristics,” Graham said. Although rare, “it is possible through an illness to lose the predominating male characteristics.”