Advocate.com – By Amita Parashar
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 transgender 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, but as a description exclusively for heterosexual people who did not wish to have reassignment surgery.