(1870-1950) Jennie June was believed to have been the pen name and one of the chosen names of writer Mowry Saben. Born in rural Massachusetts and raised to be a boy, Jennie June realized from an early age their gender presentation and mannerisms did not conform to society’s expectations. Their older sister was named Jennie May, and the name Jennie June may have originated as a clever play on this. At 18, they began to seek out doctors over their sexual desires and gender dysphoria, but found no relief. By young adulthood Jennie began to identify themselves as an “androgyne”, a term that was often used to denote people who fell outside of the gender binary and generally outside heterosexuality. They attended Harvard but soon left due to hardships of being an androgyne. Soon after they moved to New York City and began living at times as Mowry Saben and other times as Jennie June. At 28 they became one of the earliest gender non-conforming people to have an orchiectomy.

As Mowry Saben, they became an outspoken advocate for free love, gender non-conformity, and anarchism and they wrote numerous books and toured the United States lecturing on these subjects with Voltairine DeCleyre and promoting their book The Spirit of Life.

As Jennie June and sometimes Earl Lind they began corresponding with various medical and sexology journals, advocating for the liberation of androgynes and openly talking about their life as a gender nonconforming person and their sexual relationships with men. In 1918 they published their first autobiography, The Autobiography of an Androgyne and would go on to publish a second The Female Impersonators in 1922. A third, unpublished autobiography, The Riddle of the Underworld, was discovered in 2011. These three groundbreaking works are considered some of the earliest first hand accounts of gender nonconformity in the American literature.

They would go on to help start Cercle Hermaphroditos with Roland Reeves, often credited with being the first transgender organization in the United States.

“Mowry Saben and Voltairine Decleyre make no secret of their belief in anarchism.”
-Philadelphia Enquirer, 1901

Further Reading:
–The Autobiography of an Androgyne by Jennie June
–The Female Impersonators by Jennie June
–Riddle of the Underworld by Jennie June
–The Spirit of Life by Mowry Saben