From Robin Gee, Graduate Assistant
November 13th through 19th is Transgender Awareness Week, which leads up to Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual observance on November 20 that honors the memory of the transgender people whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence that year. In honor of Transgender Awareness Week and Transgender Day of Remembrance, I’d like to highlight some books and films from the library’s online collection. You can access these on-campus or off – just log in with your Edgewood username and password when prompted!
eBooks
Trans bodies, trans selves : a resource for the transgender community
There is no single way to be transgender – trans and gender-non-conforming people have a multitude of ways of understanding and expressing their gender identity. Trans bodies, trans selves is a comprehensive, reader-friendly guide for transgender people, with each chapter written by transgender or genderqueer authors. It is a welcoming place for transgender and gender-questioning people, their partners and families, students, professors, guidance counselors, and others to look for up-to-date information on transgender life.
Everything you ever wanted to know about trans (but were afraid to ask)
Written by a trans activist and essayist, this is a thorough walkthrough of transgender issues, starting with "What does transgender mean?" before moving on to more complex topics including growing up trans, dating and sex, medical and mental health, and debates around gender and feminism. It also challenges transphobic myths and biased research, bad statistics and bad science are carefully and clearly refuted. Important for anyone who is interested in learning more about transgender issues, and becoming a better ally.
Transgender voices : beyond women and men
Based on interviews the author conducted with 150 trans and gender-non-conforming people, this book shows a diverse spectrum of lives and gender experiences. Transgender voices provides a thorough exploration of the embodied experiences of gender variant people, and demonstrates that there is nothing inherently binary about gender, and that the way each of us experiences our own gender is, in fact, normal and natural.
Nonbinary : memoirs of gender and identity
Just as there’s no single way to be transgender, there are also many instances of people whose gender doesn’t fit neatly into male or female categories. Unfortunately, even mundane interactions like filling out a form or using a public bathroom can be a struggle when these designations prove inadequate. Nonbinary collects personal essays from 30 writers whose gender identities span a wide spectrum. The writers’ experiences vary not just in gender identity but also in age, race, and background, illustrating just how diverse nonbinary identities can be.
Documentaries
Exploring the life and campaigns of Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a formerly incarcerated Black transgender elder and activist who has been fighting for the rights of trans women of color for over 40 years. A veteran of the Stonewall Rebellion, Miss Major has been a fierce advocate for trans women of color who have survived police brutality and incarceration in men's jails and prisons. She is known simply as 'Mama' to many in her community.
Through the library, you have access to Kanopy, a film-streaming platform. These are just a few of the documentaries and films available there:
Māhū are Native Hawaiian third gender people, who have highly respected roles within indigenous Hawaiian culture. Kimu Hina focuses on Hina Wong-Kalu, a māhū, teacher, and mentor trying to preserve and pass on indigenous culture to younger generations, and encourages them to subvert modern gender norms. An inspiring and enlightening look at a queer culture which is often overlooked by Western audiences.
Documenting a landmark 2013 case in which the Colorado Civil Rights Division ruled in favor of allowing Coy Mathis, a six-year-old transgender girl, to use the bathroom of her choice at her elementary school. Midway through first grade, Coy’s school banned her from using the girls’ bathroom. Her parents decided to fight the school’s decision, which threw them and their daughter into an international spotlight. The case has been credited with setting off a wave of bathroom bills across the United States in the years since.
Created by trans filmmaker T Cooper, Man Made follows the lives of four transgender men preparing to compete at TransFitCon, the only all-trans bodybuilding competition in the world. Unfortunately, it is rare to see a transgender film made by a transgender filmmaker, which makes this one so unique. Many different perspectives on race, geography, financial stability, body shapes and gender expressions are represented, making this film a joyful and hopeful look into how transgender people shape themselves and their identities.
Looking for more books by transgender authors? Stop by the library to pick out a book from our Transgender Awareness Week display!
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Toothpaste, Radium, and the Golden Age of Radio
We found the caption “She uses irium” next to a photograph of a laughing woman with a bright smile. What on earth could irium be, and what had it to do with the woman in the photo? Upon realizing that irium sounds a bit like radium, and remembering that in the early 1900s, radium was a trendy health product, we got a little worried and did some frantic googling. Was this Edgewood College student poisoning herself with radioactivity?
As it turns out, radium-sounding names helped to sell all kinds of products even when they did not contain any radium. Besides, by the 1920s (well before this photo was taken) people had begun to connect radium to some truly horrible health problems.
Luckily for the student in the photo, irium does not actually exist! It is a made-up ingredient of Pepsodent Tooth Paste. Its name was a marketing contrivance designed to dazzle consumers into buying a product with a magic ingredient, and its use in the photo caption was probably a reference to the subject’s beaming white smile.
This photo is found in an album from the late 1940s, though. Radium’s ill-effects had been known for decades, thanks to some nasty cases of radiation poisoning that went public. The recent film Radium Girls (2018) traces a particularly famous lawsuit by factory workers whose job was to paint watch faces with glow-in-the-dark radium paint. They suffered notoriously and horribly as a result of ingesting radium on the job, and in a very public trial, sued their employers for poisoning in 1928.
So why were people still talking about irium in Pepsodent toothpaste, twenty-odd years after the Radium Girls case made it quite clear that ingesting radium is bad? Pepsodent toothpaste became very successful indeed, but it did not do so on the strength of its magic ingredient alone. Instead, its fame was tied to popular programming from the Golden Age of Radio.
In 1929 Pepsodent used its Tooth Paste to sponsor the weekly radio show Amos and Andy which became extremely popular through the next decade; so popular, in fact, that movie theatres delayed the start of films that overlapped with the radio show’s timeslot. In 1938, the toothpaste moved on to sponsor The Pepsodent Show Starring Bob Hope, which ran until 1948.
Check out this short, interactive article, A Success Story: From Near Extinction To Top Selling Brand by Danny Goodwin by Danny Goodwin to read more about how the toothpaste rose to fame and the shows through which it found success. You can even listen to the advertising jingle featuring Poor Miriam, whose beau were frightened away by her icky smile -- until she started using Pepsodent Tooth Paste! “Dear Miriam, poor Miriam, neglected using irium...”
Looking through objects from the archives, we often find things we don’t understand; missing labels, lost context, and unexplained references pique our curiosity. In this case, we had two mysteries to solve- the irium mentioned in the caption and the person featured in the photo. Who was Irium Girl? We combed the rest of the scrapbook in an attempt to find the answer.
The scrapbook in question is Marshallites-Towerites 1946-7 Volume IV, a scrapbook created by residents of the Tower and Marshall Hall at Edgewood College as “a treasury of well-known and well-loved faces and of many delightful festivities we shared together,” as it says in the hand-lettered Foreward.
Each woman (Edgewood College was not co-educational until 1970) has a profile page with her room number, a headshot, and a writeup. A few memorable activities are noted and illustrated in the calendar section, and the rest of the pages contain black and white photographs fixed in photo corners and captioned by few words; the human subjects are seldom identified by name.
Among photos labeled simply (“the dance” and “winter sports”) are more playful captions: “A date with -- Gym” (four women in exercise clothes) and “I’m too beautiful for one man alone” (the subject standing at a distance with arms casually folded and ankles crossed, looking down at the photographer who stands below).
When the curious “She uses irium” caption caught our eye, we naturally wanted to know who Irium Girl was. Our detective work consisted of flipping the brittle pages of the album back and forth to compare profiles, muttering things like “is the nose right?” "I can’t see her eyebrows because she’s wearing glasses.” “No, this can’t be her. The chin is a different shape” until we arrived at the tentative identification of Irium Girl as Virginia Kiefer, resident in #7 Marshall Hall. Here is her profile, nicknaming her “Tomah’s Tops”. She contributed to the writeups in the Marshallites-Towerites 1946-7 and was part of the staff of the Torch yearbook, too. (You can read about her other activities in our Digital Collections.)
Plenty of items in the Edgewood College Archives have made their way into our history without the specific intention of their creators. That is to say, people who make things don't always consider how an audience will interpret or react to that creation in the future. Slang, inside jokes, and references just beyond the reader/viewer’s grasp make historical items vivid and evocative, but we audiences like to savor the specifics, too. So remember to write down names, dates, and details in your photo albums! The combination of familiarity and strangeness might be the most captivating part of an object from the past.
If you enjoyed hearing about the Golden Age of Radio, be sure to check out Vintage Hitchcock: A Live Radio Play this weekend here at Edgewood College! Tune your campus radio to 100.1 FM or grab tickets for the performance in person at the Diane Ballweg Theater!
Want a closer look at the Marshallites-Towerites scrapbook, or anything else in our archives? It's easy to make an research request! Just contact the library via email and tell us what kind of materials you would like to view or the topic you are interested in. We also have many photos and materials available online on our Digital Collections page.
Image credit: Metal bottle of 'Pepsodent' tooth powder, London, England,. Science Museum, London. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)