The Undaunted: And Now I Know
On the life and novels of Alan Hart.
BY CARTER SICKELS
In the opening scene of The Undaunted, handsome, heroic Richard Cameron flirts with a young woman on a train, who guesses correctly that he is a doctor. “What gives you away is your hands,” she says slyly. Cameron playfully calls her a “detective,” and she cautions, “Is it ever wise to think you are safe, doctor?” Eventually, she implies, a person’s secret will be exposed. The truth will be detected.
The Undaunted, published in 1936, is not directly about transgender lives or experiences, but, as the first novel published by a trans man in the United States, it’s an important documentation of trans existence. The novel follows a doctor’s search for a cure for pernicious anemia, a life-threatening disease in the early 1920s, and explores power struggles, hierarchies, and jealousy among doctors and medical researchers in research hospitals in Seattle and on the East Coast. It’s a novel about the growing importance of medicine and medical research in the early twentieth century, but it’s also a novel about masculinity and, through a potent secondary storyline, about a closeted gay man. Hart’s novel asks essential questions still relevant to trans experiences today in America: How does one live fully as oneself in a hostile environment? What toll does fear, secrecy, and shame take on a person’s life? What does it mean to be regarded as an outsider, to experience America from a liminal space?
I’m a trans man and novelist living in the twenty-first century in America, and I didn’t know who Alan Hart was when I was invited to write this introduction. For many decades, Hart’s work and documentation of his life vanished into obscurity—not a surprise, as trans and queer histories are routinely rendered invisible, distorted, or forgotten. Conservatives routinely try to depict transgender people as a recent phenomenon, but the truth is that transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people have existed across centuries and continents.
A doctor and medical researcher, Alan Hart made important contributions to X-ray detection of tuberculosis and, in the years following the Great Depression, published four socially-conscious novels, all medical dramas set in the Pacific Northwest. He was married twice, lived in the Pacific Northwest and on the East Coast, and was the first transmasculine person in the United States to receive gender-affirmative surgery.
Alan L. Hart, assigned female at birth, was born October 4, 1890, in Hall’s Summit, Kansas, the only child of Albert and Edna Hart. After his father died of typhoid fever when Hart was two, Hart and his mother moved to Albany, Oregon, where his mother remarried. Hart attended Albany College (now Lewis & Clark College), transferred to Stanford, then returned to Albany and graduated in 1912. He graduated from the University of Oregon Medical School (now Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine) in 1917 with the highest honors. Hart did well in school—he was creative, ambitious, intelligent, and active in student groups. He led the debate team in high school and college, wrote for student papers, played sports, and published editorials in defense of women’s liberation and dress reform. Possessing the privileges granted to a white, educated, middle-class person, he seemed to be headed toward a successful career—to join the other female physicians who were starting to find work in the medical field.
Then, in 1917, twenty-six-year old Hart approached Doctor J. Allen Gilbert, seeking psychiatric treatment for his “phobia.” At this time, the U.S. medical community overwhelmingly regarded homosexuality to be a malady, a perversion that needed to be cured, and there was little understanding about gender identity or expression. Gilbert attempted to “treat” Hart’s sexuality, not his gender identity, through analysis and hypnosis, and three years later published his psychoanalytic sessions with Hart as the case study “Homosexuality and Its Treatment” in the Journal of Mental and Nervous Disease (1920).
As was typical for sexologists during this time, Gilbert is most interested in documenting Hart’s sexual fantasies and experiences, and his romantic relationships with women—Hart had several sexual and long-term romantic relationships with women in high school and college. But what I find most interesting in the report is the revelation of Hart’s proactive role in constructing his own autobiography and gender history. Hart reveals to Gilbert a long history of rejecting traditional gender roles and expectations. As a child, he was allowed to dress as a boy and play with boy’s toys, and his parents seemed to be supportive. Are we surprised that parents in the late nineteenth century supported their child’s gender expression? Hart performed “boys’ work” around the farm, longed to cut his hair short, and from an early age “regarded [himself] as a boy” (302). As an adult in medical school, Hart followed the rules and wore the required skirts for women, but he masculinized his appearance by wearing men’s coats, collars, and ties, and was often “mistaken as a man,” Gilbert writes. As Hart discussed his years of unhappiness in trying to live as female, including suicide ideation, he resisted any treatment that would “ruin any chances of losing [his] general masculine psychological characteristics in exchange for any benefit that might be derived from a proper orientation… as a female sociological unit in the world of sex” (319). One day, after “long consideration,” Hart came into the office and told Gilbert that he had made up his mind “to adopt male attire in conformity with [his] true nature and try to face life under conditions that might make life bearable.” He asked Gilbert to perform a full hysterectomy, and Gilbert agreed.
““For many trans people, transitioning often doesn’t have a single start or end point. But for Hart and his doctor, the surgery symbolized a door: once Hart walked through it, he could live his life as a man.””
Not all or even most trans people choose surgery or take hormones, and, despite the common linear portrayals of transitioning, for many trans people, transitioning often doesn’t have a single start or end point. But for Hart and his doctor, the surgery symbolized a door: once Hart walked through it, he could live his life as a man. What did Hart—or Gilbert, for that matter—know about trans people? At the time, there would have been very little research, but both Gilbert and Hart would have put their faith in science and medical advances. Was it possible either had heard about Magnus Hirschfeld, a doctor and medical researcher in Berlin who studied gender and sexuality, advocated for trans and queer people, and educated other doctors on gender and sexuality diversity? Hirschfeld founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin in 1919, a library, lecture hall, and medical clinic, but that was two years after Hart approached Gilbert.
According to Gilbert, Hart reasoned that having a hysterectomy would also benefit society, because persons with “abnormal inversions” should be sterilized. What are we to make of Hart’s alleged eugenics rationale? In the early 1900s and continuing into the 1940s, the racist eugenics movement, a pseudo-scientific argument designed to uphold white supremacy and patriarchy, grew as a force in the U.S., both in academia and in mainstream popularity. Perhaps Hart actually believed this reasoning, or maybe he used this line on Gilbert because, like generations of trans people, he possessed the acumen to know how he needed to narrate his gender in order to access healthcare. I have also simplified my story to appease medical gatekeepers, and I’m not alone. Especially in the early 2000s, trans masc people knew they needed to recite medical-ready narratives, that they “felt trapped in the wrong body” or “felt like a boy since he was a child,” in order to obtain a prescription for testosterone, regardless of whether this narrative actually characterized their experiences. Because of decades of hard work by trans people and activists, more available trans-affirming healthcare exists, but gatekeeping still prevents trans people from accessing affordable and comprehensive healthcare. Doctors can still withhold treatment from trans patients or require hoop-jumping in order to obtain hormones or trans-affirmative surgeries. Maybe Hart was covering all his bases. His primary point, and the one Gilbert accepted, was that this medical procedure would help him live his life as a man. Providing his medical stamp of approval, Gilbert wrote in his report, “In fact, from a sociological and psychological standpoint [Hart] is a man” (332).
After his hysterectomy, Hart cut his hair short, wore only men’s clothing, and changed his name to Alan L. Hart. Although Gilbert seemed to be uncomfortable with Hart’s eloping with his girlfriend Inez Stark, the doctor held Hart in high regard and approved of his decision to live his authentic life, attesting that if society would “leave [Hart] alone,” he could fill his “niche” and “leave [the world] better for [his] bravery.” Gilbert treated Hart with surprising empathy and respect, and did not try to commit or “cure” him.
Hart married Inez Stark, a schoolteacher from Independence, Oregon, in 1918. After he received his Oregon medical license, Hart and Stark moved to Gardiner, Oregon, a remote village on the coast where Hart planned to open a practice. However, the couple only stayed about six months. Over the next five years, Hart and Inez moved frequently, across Oregon, Washington, and rural Montana, Hart leaving jobs out of fear that he would be outed, which happened at least once. According to scholar Peter Boag, a woman Hart had gone to medical school with recognized him and told their peers and colleagues; the story even made the local newspapers under a variety of tantalizing headlines, including: “Woman Doctor Parades as Man.”
Perhaps the hiding and running became too stressful. In 1923, Inez left Hart, and two years later, the couple divorced. After his divorce, Hart returned to Oregon, where he met Edna Ruddick. The couple married in New York, and Hart received a master’s degree in radiology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1930. From 1922 through the 1930s, Hart held various hospital positions in Washington, Illinois, Idaho, and New Mexico. While living in Washington during the Depression years, Hart had trouble finding steady work, and turned to creative writing. Over the span of seven years, Hart published four novels: Doctor Mallory (1935), The Undaunted (1936), In The Lives of Men (1937), and Dr. Finlay Sees It Through (1942).
Hart’s four novels take place in the Pacific Northwest and focus on medical research and health care, two characteristics which set his work apart from other socially-conscious fiction of the 1930s and 40s. Hart writes about idealist protagonists searching for cures or justice, evokes sympathy for outcasts, and exposes greed, arrogance, and prejudice in the medical world. The novels were reviewed positively in the New York Times, the New York Herald-Tribune, and the Saturday Review of Literature, among other outlets, and appealed to a mainstream audience. His fiction gave readers a look at medical and scientific advancements that would have been exciting at the time, and he was also one of the few pre-WWII authors writing about the Pacific Northwest, a region still unfamiliar and intriguing to the majority of Americans.
““It’s likely many of Hart’s readers had never encountered a queer character in a novel before, and certainly not one written about with sympathy.””
Hart is no prose stylist, and often draws the reader into the weeds of medical research, which can be challenging for the modern reader (at least it was for this reader). As with the majority of novels published in the early twentieth century, The Undaunted centers on white experiences and relies on stereotypes to describe minor Black characters. Hart’s focus is not nuanced character development but heroic protagonists, plot, setting, and ideas around medicine. As medical drama and love story, The Undaunted caught the attention of the New York Times: “for any one interested in the development of medical science… Alan Hart’s new novel will prove little less than fascinating.” The critic praised both the adventurous plot and the humanity of the characters.
The novel begins with Richard Cameron taking a new job at Safe Harbor Hospital in Seaforth, Hart’s fictional name for Seattle. Hart describes Seaforth as a beautiful city overlooking the Puget Sound and doused in continuous rain and fog; Cameron jokes that he’ll be “mildewed” by the rain. In addition to the descriptions of the weather and geography, Hart gives historical insight into Seattle as a developing city in the 1920s, as well as how it was regarded in the medical field, especially when compared to the established research hospitals of the East; another researcher describes Seaforth as a “raw city in a raw young state” and urges Cameron to get out, warning him that professionally it’s “like dropping into a scientific vacuum” (46-47). After facing resistance from the irascible and jealous Dr. Ascot, Cameron heads east for a job at a research hospital in Northdevon, Connecticut (Hartford), where the last two thirds of the novel takes place.
Hart details the characters’ physicality and clothing, especially tall, manly Cameron: “He was older, there was something bold about his nose and chin, his red hair seemed to crinkle with energy. The movements of his lean body and freckled hands were quick and deft and casual” (67). Cameron is a WWI veteran, bachelor, doctor, and all-American hero: white, masculine, heroic, and, obviously, handsome. Hart frequently describes Cameron as an adventurer and explorer who looks out for the underdog. He is alluring to women, and in one disturbing scene nearly assaults his date, “ripe for masculine domination” (66). Women are mostly dismissed as naïve or ignored until Cameron meets Judith Emerson, a librarian at the research hospital described as an intelligent woman who “had more than the average woman’s intelligence and tact” (136). Hart’s portrayal of Cameron reinforces and idealizes traditional masculinity, and essentialist views on gender and sexuality.
But the novel includes another storyline, one that may reveal—like the X-ray technology Hart studied—a truer story beneath the surface. That storyline belongs to Sandy Farquhar, an X-ray technician who carries a secret. In contrast to Cameron, Farquhar, a “small Scotsman” (51), is fearful and anxious, and his “existence had been a mosaic of fear and inner conflicts and outer bravado” (75). (His last name is derived from the Scottish Gaelic fearchar, from fear (“man”) and car (“beloved”). Like Hart, Farquhar moves from job to job, frequently resigning before his secret is exposed: “he had been driven from place to place, from job to job, for fifteen years because of something he could not alter any more than he could change the color of his eyes” (257). The last third of the novel—when Hart reveals Farquhar is gay—is the most riveting. Though it may be tempting to dismiss Farquhar as a stereotypically tragic queer character, writing a gay character with empathy during the early twentieth century was groundbreaking. It’s likely many of Hart’s readers had never encountered a queer character in a novel before, and certainly not one written about with sympathy.
Throughout the novel, Cameron is protective of Farquhar. He convinces Farquhar to leave his toxic work environment and travel east with him, and proudly watches as Farquhar goes for his doctorate in radiology and advances in his career. Hart contrasts their masculinity and blurs this with sexuality—Cameron is the straight, heroic, masculine hero, while Farquhar is the tragic queer man in a small “half a man” body. But their friendship is one of the most enduring relationships in the novel, Cameron remaining sympathetic and protective of Farquhar even after he learns he is gay. Cameron cares for Farquhar and describes him as “always an outcast,” but also a man who was “kind and honest and brave, he was a good doctor, he loved beautiful things, and in, spite of all that happened to him, he loved people” (263).
It would be a mistake to read Farquhar simply as a stand-in for Hart, however—not the least because Hart settled into a different kind of life. After marrying Edna and publishing four novels, Hart and Edna moved to Hartford, Connecticut in 1948, the same year Hart earned a master’s degree in public health from Yale University and dedicated his professional life to tuberculosis research. Tuberculosis had no available tests or known treatment at the time, and Hart was one of the first to document how the disease was transmitted and how it could be slowed by detection. He headed mass X-ray programs in Connecticut and published several articles and a nonfiction book, These Mysterious Rays (1943) on X-ray technology. The cover included a black and white author photo of Hart in a tweed suit jacket, wearing thick wire-rimmed round glasses and holding a pipe. His hair is cut short and slicked to the right. He looks pensive, serious, and intelligent.
Hart and Edna lived together in Connecticut until Hart’s death from heart failure in 1962. Nothing was revealed in Hart’s obituary about his gender history. His ashes were scattered in Port Angeles, Washington, and in his will and testament he instructed that certain letters and photographs locked in a safety deposit box be destroyed. Even in death, Hart still asserted control and agency over his biography—perhaps trying to protect himself, and his wife, from sensationalism or misreading.
There is only one record of Hart speaking publicly about his life and transition. After Hart was outed by his classmate in 1918, reporters from the local Albany Democrat confronted him about his “sex change.” Hart said, “I had to do it…For years I had been unhappy. With all the inclinations and desires of the boy I had to restrain myself to the more conventional ways of the other sex. I have been happier since I made this change than I ever have in my life, and will continue this way as long as I live…I have long suspected my condition, and now I know” (from Boag, p. 481). It’s an incredible, affirming quote about identity and autonomy: since he began to transition, he’s never been “happier,” and chooses to live as a man for the rest of his life. Instead of reading Hart’s story as one of manipulation or betrayal, I choose to read it as one of self-acceptance and truth. Over a hundred years ago, Hart imagined another way of living for himself. In his fiction, too, Hart argued for a kinder, more compassionate world, and as a transgender man, he lived a life of authenticity and courage.
Bibliography
Boag, Peter. “Go West Young Man, Go East Young Woman: Searching for the Trans in Western Gender History.” Western Historical Quarterly, Winter 2005, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 477-497
Gilbert, J. Allen. “Homo-sexuality and its Treatment,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.
Manion, Jen. Female Husbands: A Trans History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Stryker, Susan. Transgender History. New York: Seal Press, 2017.
Note: Biographical information on Alan Hart comes from J. Allen Gilbert’s published case study Homo-sexuality and its Treatment, and Brian Booth’s The Life and Career of Alberta Lucille/Dr. Alan Hart with Collected Early Writings.
Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Prettiest Star, published by Hub City Press, and winner of the 2021 Southern Book Prize and the Weatherford Award. The Prettiest Star was also selected as a Kirkus Best Book of 2020 and a Best LGBT Book of 2020 by O Magazine. His debut novel The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury 2012), an Oregon Book Award finalist and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, was adapted into a feature film that premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.
