ABSTRACT
This chapter places Irene Clyde’s (1869–1954) feminist works in dialogue with other feminist writings in Anglophone literary modernism. Clyde was a trans feminist author who co-founded the radical feminist journal Urania in 1916. In her contributions to Urania and other publications, including her feminist utopian novel Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909) and collection of essays Eve’s Sour Apples (1934), Clyde called for the elimination of male supremacy, abolition of gender binaries, acknowledgement of the mutability of biological sex, critique of heterosexual marriage and biological reproduction, and celebration of female–female intimacy. To develop these lesbian-trans-feminist politics, Clyde mobilised ideas and concepts articulated within sexual science or sexology. Like many feminist contemporaries, Clyde was deeply sceptical of deterministic dimensions of sexological thought and resistant to sexual scientific systems of classification. At the same time, sexual science provided useful frameworks that allowed Clyde to expand understandings of the biological body, evolutionary development, sexual reproduction, and lesbian intimacy. Reading Clyde’s publications in tandem with writings by other feminist literary authors demonstrate previously obscure resonances between her work and wider feminist modernist cultures in the interwar period.
