Born in Kentucky in 1886, Lucy Hicks Anderson was assigned male at birth but maintained from an early age that she was female and named herself “Lucy.” Taking advice from doctors, Anderson’s parents supported her gender identity, allowing her to wear dresses and identify as she felt most comfortable at a time when “transgender” was not a term that even existed.
As a domestic worker from her teens and then in hotels in the southwestern United States, she married and moved to California in her mid-thirties. Once in California, she won a few baking competitions and secured enough money to open her own boarding house (though this became a brothel and speakeasy during Prohibition). Through her connections with local high society, she avoided jail time and even was bailed out by a local banker once because he wanted her to attend his dinner party. During this time, she divorced and remarried, this time to a soldier stationed on Long Island.
In 1945, a soldier who frequented Anderson’s brothel accused one of her workers of infecting him with a sexually-transmitted infection, and Anderson and the women she employed were all subject to a medical examination. Upon this examination and the public disclosure that Anderson had been assigned male at birth, she was brought to trial for perjury (arguing that she lied about her sex on her marriage license). During this trial, Anderson stated, “I defy any doctor in the world to prove that I am not a woman,” and “I have lived, dressed, acted just what I am, a woman.”
The jury found Anderson guilty of perjury and sentenced her to 10 years probation. After this case, the federal authorities became involved, charging her with fraud for receiving federal aid given to the wives of soldiers during World War II, as well as for failing to register for the draft (though Anderson was able to prove she was too old to register regardless of the views on gender identity). Anderson and her husband were both found guilty in the federal case and sentenced to a men’s prison, where Anderson was prohibited from wearing women’s clothing.
Once released from prison, Anderson and her husband were barred from returning to the town they had lived in and settled instead in Los Angeles, where they lived quietly until Anderson died in 1954 at the age of 68.
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Legends of Pride 