Virginia Prince, a pioneer of the cross-dressing community and longtime activist for transgender rights, died on Saturday May 2. She was 96 years old. Prince’s philosophies attracted fierce criticism, especially from transgendered people. She was staunchly against sex-reassignment surgery, writing in 1978 that she believed it was “perfectly possible to be a woman without having sex surgery.”

She is widely believed to have coined the term “transgender” around 1970, which she used to mean a person who lived full-time in a gender other than the one assigned at birth but without surgical body modification. This is slightly different than what the world would come to mean later. She also made many claims about the non-fetishistic nature of most cross-dressing, asserting instead that it was a display of identity rather than a fetish. But in discussions with Robert Stoller of UCLA, she instead affirmed the erotic aspects. Prince is also well known for her virulent disdain for transsexuals and those with Gender Identity Disorder believing that SRS (Sex Reassignment Surgery) was a necessary treatment.

Following the sensationalism of transsexualism in 1952 with the media coverage of Christine Jorgensen’s “sex change,” Virginia (Charles) Prince emerged as a champion of transvestism. In 1962, Prince started a national organization for heterosexual cross-dressers called the Foundation for Full Personality Expression, which evolved into Tri-Sigma, or the Society for the Second Self. Today that group is known as Tri-Ess. These groups provided a much-needed space for her community, but interviewers were cautioned against admitting “homosexuals, transsexuals, or emotionally disturbed people” into the organization.

After her second divorce in 1964, Prince began living full-time as a woman and in searching for a term to describe her decision to become a woman without changing her genitals, introduced the word transgender, which has subsequently become a generic term often used to describe all trans people.

It was as a direct result of Virginia Prince’s work that the Beaumont Society in Britain was formed to provide support for heterosexual cross-dressers, taking its name from the Chevalier d’Eon de Beaumont and setting membership rules to exclude homosexual or bisexual cross-dressers and transsexuals, although it now supports all trans people. For nearly 20 years, she published Transvestia, a magazine for “heterosexual persons who have become aware of their ‘other side’ and seek to express it.” However, Prince was also blasted for pushing a stereotypical, ultra-feminine ideal for cross-dressers. In her 1971 book, How to Be a Woman Though Male, Prince writes, “if you are going to appear in society as a woman, don’t just be a woman, be a lady.”

Despite Prince’s controversial views, Milton Diamond, professor at the University of Hawaii’s Pacific Center for Sex and Society, says she will be remembered for defying convention by being public in the 1950s, a time when there was little sympathy for trans people. “Her contribution to the self-respect of heterosexual transvestites and the creation of a cross-dressing community is undeniable.”

Our journey is far from over before we can have people see us as human. With words such as pedophile being included in hate crimes bills and the religious right wing still trying to burn us at the stake, we need more pioneer-type people to step up and put a positive face on the trans community. I do not agree with everything Virginia Prince said or taught. But I am knowledgeable enough to know that without Virginia, a boy by the name of John at age 13 would never have had the courage to put on that leather mini-skirt and walk out the door with a face painted to look like Marilyn Monroe. That was in 1982 and back then John did not know the word transition or that there were other people like him. I remember those days as I was John.

Now I am 41 and live open and very out as trans. And I thank Virginia Prince for paving the way for me to be able to have the courage to express myself. Let us all honor her by expressing our true selves in all we do at all times. In truth, we will prevail.