As soon as I opened this book which transsexual male radiologist and author Alan Hart wrote and saw that the first line of biographical section of the introduction was this…

The insistent usage of “transmasculine/transmasc”, the argument that “not all trans people medically transition” in a biography about a binary transsex man, the likening of what I’d say is the genuine dysphoria Hart felt to the mindset of a eugenicist and the bringing up of patriarchy alongside it…

And the usage of “gender-affirmative surgery” while putting “sex change” in quotation marks as if it’s some ugly term. And it’s of course especially egregious to me that in both the inner cover and the introduction, he’s introduced as “Alan Hart, AFAB”.

Alan Hart was born in 1890. The fact that he was very tight-lipped and lived stealth only makes this more irreverent. The first information you get when you open his book is that he transitioned.

He’s been disrespected by the community plenty enough, posthumously gay man Jonathan Ned Katz described Hart as “clearly a lesbian” in two separate books in 1976 and 1983. Hart’s widowed wife refused to speak to Katz because she was so offended at him and by extension herself being labelled lesbian.

A gay and lesbian rights group then proceeded to host a dinner named for Hart’s deadname and started spreading the revisionist tale that he was a lesbian woman posing as a man “for safety”. They said his hysterectomy was an “unfortunate result” of that. Transsexual (and some cis homosexual) protesters had to rally to change the name of the dinner and restore his manhood.

When you type his name into Wikipedia, the blurb under his name says “Transgender American physician and writer (1890-1962)”.

Knowing all of this and respecting him greatly, finding this foreword in his book (written by a transgender man of today who doesn’t seem to understand Hart’s transsex position) was only another kick to the groin.