(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 A third, unpublished autobiography, The Riddle of the Underworld, was discovered in 2011.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

“Hiratsuka-san and I were bound by a love that was a step beyond the ordinary, so I can no longer see her objectively. People say she is like a man, but they are wrong. She is kind and gentle, a woman of strong emotions.”
– Otake Kokichi

(1886–1971) The famed writer, journalist, and feminist Hiratsuka Raicho was born to a middle class family in Tokyo in 1886. In her youth she found herself critical of women’s place in society. She pressured her skeptical family into allowing her to obtain higher education. She enrolled at Japan’s Womens University where she became introduced to anarchism through the writings of Henrik Ibsen and Max Stirner.

When she graduated, she founded Bluestocking, Japan’s first women’s magazine in 1913. Started as a literary collective, the magazine quickly became a platform for her anarcha-feminist ideas, with concepts such as abortion, homosexuality, and free love openly discussed. Though it only lasted a couple of years, it deeply influenced the women’s movement in Japan. Raicho caused public outrage when she and her Bluestocking co-contributor Otake Kokichi openly had a queer relationship with one another during their years in the collective.

She would later form the New Women’s Association, which succeeded in getting the ban on womens participation in political meetings and organizations in Japan scrapped in 1922. Settling down with artist Okumura Hiroshi, the pair would spend their later years involved in the cooperative and anti-nuclear movements in Japan.

Further Reading:
-In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun: The Autobiography of a Japanese Feminist by Raicho Hiratsuka

(1942-2011) Martha Ferro, born in Buenos Aires, was the daughter of two anarchist partisans who fought in the Spanish Civil War. Influenced by the stories told to her by her parents and grandmother of Mujeres Libres, the anarcha-feminist organization of the CNT, she founded El Sotano (The Basement), Argentina’s first lesbian bar in 1976, during the US-backed fascist/military dictatorship of General Jorge Rafael Videla.

Inspired by the events of Stonewall, she wrote to the Gay Liberation Front in New York, with her poetry appearing in their newspaper Come Out. Modelling her bar after the spaces opened in the wake of the riot, it operated as an underground meeting space, club, and hideout for lesbians and feminists during a time homosexuality was punishable by life in prison. Drawing from from her lifelong study of anarchism and Trotskyism, this clandestine space served as both a place of escape from the repressive regime and a training ground for armed struggle against it. Located at the corner of San Lorenzo and Defensa streets in Buenos Aires, doors were kept barricaded, windows were covered and meetings were organized sporadically by word of mouth only to avert police and military raids. The space lasted from 1976 until the dictatorship began to crumble in 1983, and became a nexus for feminist, trans, and queer organizing in Argentina. 

“She used investigative journalism as a form of denunciation, not only about domestic violence but also about the persecution and death of transvestites, flood victims, and people who had been swindled. She had a very broad vision, especially of poor and marginalized sectors. Her feminism was openly classist.”
-Mabel Bellucci

Further Reading
-The Way to Newark and Other Poems by Martha Ferro

”The anarchists are not promising anything to anyone. The anarchists only want people to be conscious of their own situation and seize freedom for themselves”
-Maria Nikiforova

(1885-1919) Maria Nikiforova was born in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine in 1885 to a poor family. As an intersex child she spent much of her childhood forced to live as a boy, under a boys name. As a teenager she began presenting more androgynously and ran away from home. She found herself living in squatted tenements in the slums of Zaporizhzhia, and working in the city’s distilleries and bottle factories. It was here she became radicalized and got involved with local anarchists, carrying out militant actions and expropriations against the rich. After one particularly daring action, she found herself sentenced to a life of hard labor in Siberia. With nothing to lose, she and other prisoners staged a mass insurrection, during which she was able to escape to Japan. While there, she stayed with Japanese anarchists and appealed to anarchist comrades in China for help to get to the United States. Lui Shifu and others managed to secure her safe passage to California where she hitchhiked to Chicago to stay with the community of Russian anarchist refugees living there.

By her 20s, she changed her name to Maria and began living more publicly as a woman. Seeking to return to Europe, she moved to Paris where she continued to organize with local anarchists. After a period there she spent some time in Spain and Portugal, assisting with various propaganda by the deed actions for two years. Wounded in a bank robbery in Barcelona, Nikiforova soon returned to Paris for medical treatment. She would spend the next few years there, studying, working, and networking with other anarchists around the world. At the onset of World War I, the anarchist movement found itself divided between those who opposed the war, and those who, under the guidance of Peter Kropotkin, supported the Allies against the Germans. She soon found herself enlisted and fighting in World War 1 for the Allies.

When revolution broke out in Russia and Ukraine in early 1917, she promptly abandoned her military post to return home and fight for anarchist revolution. There she began arming workers and advocating for anarchism. She became an early influence on the Kronstadt mutineers, and delivered fiery speeches across Russia and Ukraine in support of anarchism. She organized a large detachment of anarchists, workers, and peasants which robbed from the rich, the police, and the government and redistributed their belongings among the poor and working class. In time, she became an associate of fellow anarchist Nestor Makhno who was leading similar efforts and they began organizing together. Her detachment became the foundation for what developed into the anarchist Black Guards. The Provisional Government of Zaporizhzhia arrested her for her actions, but the local workers were deeply loyal to her and considered her one of their own. They kidnapped the head of the soviet at gunpoint, marched him to the prison and threatened to kill him if she wasn’t released. Their strategy succeeded and she was soon released.

She would go on to fight alongside Makhno and other anarchists against the General Council of Ukraine and its forces. After their victory there, she gave heartfelt speeches and won the sympathies of many workers and cossacks. She was nominated as deputy commander of the Black Guards in Zaporizhzhia, and after Makhno withdrew, she became the commander. Her detachment of The Black Guards became known as Free Combat Druzhina. Shunning uniforms, making decisions collectively, raiding prisons to free prisoners, and armoring a train they used to terrorize the rich and the those sympathetic to the Central Council of Ukraine, they proved to be quite the unconventional military detachment.

After some initial advances, The Central Council of Ukraine would ally with the Central powers and the added reinforcements of the German and Austrian army would prove to be too much for the Black Guards as well as Red Army. After the initial defeat in Ukraine, the Soviets no longer viewed the anarchists as necessary allies, and she would live in conflict with them for the rest of her life, being arrested multiple times by the Cheka and put on trial, narrowly escaping each time. In 1919, she was finally caught by the Whites and executed alongside her lover Withold Brzotek.

“One more pillar of anarchism has been broken, one more idol of blackness has crashed down from its pedestal… . Legends formed around this ‘tsaritsa of anarchism’. Several times she was wounded, several times her head was cut off but, like the legendary Hydra, she always grew a new one. She survived and turned up again, ready to spill more blood…”
-Aleksandrovsk newspaper

Further Reading:
–Atamansha: The Story of Maria Nikiforova, the Anarchist Joan of Arc by Malcolm Archibald
–The Immediate Revolution: An Anarchist’s Epic through Ukraine by Mila Cotlenko
–Maria Nikiforova by JP Press

(1905-1977) Born into poverty in New York City as Arthur William Oldag, John Olday was abandoned by his father as an infant and later sent by his struggling mother to Hamburg, Germany. As a teenager, he participated in the Kiel mutiny, which lead to the overthrow of the German monarchy. He had joined the Young Communist League but was soon expelled due to his anarchist tendencies and his homosexuality.

He left Hamburg and settled in the Ruhr valley, where he organized workers along syndicalist lines with other anarchists. During this period he also produced a number of theater and cabaret acts and drew political cartoons during the Weimar Republic, which gained him national acclaim as one of Germany’s leading artists. When Nazis came to power, he leaked information about them to the IWW. Nazis made plans to arrest him and ship him off to a concentration camp, but he caught word, and fled to England in 1937.

While in England he married lesbian Hilde Meisel in a fictitious marriage, so the two could carry on with their underground anti-fascist activities, aiding refugees in escaping Germany and other Nazi occupied countries. During this time he also began working as a cartoonist for the Industrial Worker and Freedom Press. Soon he was forced underground when he was drafted into the war effort by the British government, where he continued aiding refugees and sending subversive anti-fascist literature to Germany.

Eventually he was arrested for stealing a typewriter to continue his work and sentenced to a year in prison. After being released, he was promptly transferred to serve hard labor in a military prison for 2 years for desertion. But a massive campaign organized by Herbert Read and Freedom Press for his release would lead to him only serving 3 months.

Following his release, he moved to Australia, where he became an early advocate of queer and trans liberation, opening gay friendly Cafe La Boheme in the late 50s and organizing the “Immortal Clown Cabaret” which was the country’s earliest drag show. He moved back to London in his last few years of life, where he died in 1977.

Further Reading:
Kingdom of Rags: The Autobiography of John Olday by John Olday