Do Androids Dream of Amazing Breasts?
Hello! Welcome to Sex Change USA: The Newsletter!
This week's newsletter is all about tabloid ads!
I managed to cram a lot of awesome tabloid scans into this one, so buckle up!
Travel with me back in time... to a time before smartphones secretly turned on their cameras to track your eye-movements while you browsed tiktok...to a time before every household appliance and electronic TOTALLY WASN'T listening to you, yet somehow you'd receive suspiciously specific instagram ads for stuff you literally just spoke out loud an hour ago...to a time before the eyes and ears of the advertiser were in every American home and pocket...this time...was the 1990s...and and the big advertising baddie of the day was MARKET RESEARCH!
This meant that the advertisers would attempt to nail down a target audience, survey who was reading the publication, and tailor their ad content to whichever demographic that might be. This didn't stop the National Enquirer's ads from being absolutely fucking insane, appealing to everyone and kinda no-one at the same time. Take, for example, the infamous Blue Dot Ad:
Who is this for? The Blue Dot was advertised for decades, promising luck and riches and fortune to all who purchased it.
Today, we're gonna look at how different tabloid ads likely could have appealed to trans readers. There's so much to get into, so I'll focus on transfemmes for now and do a seperate newsletter about transmasc centered ads next week.
"Estrogen & wigs & breastforms, oh my!"
It’s important to note that none of these ads were found in trans focused publications or sex magazines. Ads targeting transgender women and cross-dressers like those found in Transgender Tapestry in were much more direct. All the ads in this newsletter had the cisgender consumer in mind.
If a closeted trans National Enquirer reader had a careful eye, she could pretty easily connect the dots and see how life as a transgender woman could be purchased in that weeks pages. Ads for size 10 high heels, wigs, dresses, breastforms, and estrogen creams were scattered among the pages, usually hiding in plain sight next to ads for weight loss pills and telephone psychics.
Now, obviously, cis women have need of wigs and huge shoes and hormone supplements. I'm not arguing that the advertisers at the Enquirer had trans women in mind. That being said, these advertisements frequently appear very close to (or at least in the same issue as) feature stories about trans women. See below:
Is it possible that a closeted trans reader would see a positive tabloid story about a late-in-life transitioner who was accepted by her family, then flip through pages and pages of ads for women's clothing, wigs, breast forms, and estrogen supplements and feel encouraged to transition? Doesn't seem too unlikely to me! I'll leave more ads below and let you decide:
Another aspect I'd like to highlight is that all of these products would be mailed directly to your home: no in person shopping required. My experiences going into stores and buying women's clothing when I was first transitioning were terrifying, and I think the availability of shopping via mail back then must have been a godsend to our community (and still is!)
Again, my ideas about how these ads were responded to and by whom are just theories. (I happen to think they are good theories!!) Further research is necessary into how people were managing to transition 30 years ago, and unfortunately stories can be hard to track down.
I've yet to meet anyone who purchased anything from these ads with the intention to transition genders. If any of you have an elderly family member who used the tabloids to purchase a movie star wig or shady estrogen supplements from a warehouse in Chicago PUT THEM IN TOUCH WITH ME. It would make a great interview.
ALSO
I'm a part of this AMAZING trans history panel happening on April 24th at NYU! RSVP for free here 😸 It's filling up fast!
