Academic and historian Susan Stryker wrote, "If there is an unheralded founder of the transgender community in the United States, it’s Louise Lawrence.".
Of her transition, Lawrence wrote in one of her journals:I consider Louise to be my true identity even though the birth records say differently.
[4][7]Although she considered gender reassignment surgery, she chose not to pursue it, and instead experimented with hormone treatment, under the guidance of Harry Benjamin.
Through Lawrence's network, members connected and collectivized, sharing information about doctors, medical procedures and comparing surgical results.
In 1952, Lawrence helped to publish, along with Prince and others, the newsletter "Transvestia: Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress", which hoped to combat discrimination against cross-dressers and educate researchers about transvestism.
Although the publication was grown by Virginia Prince after 1960, the paper's first edition was largely funded by and distributed to the people in Lawrence's network.
"[8] In 1942, she met leading psychiatrist Karl Bowman, the director of the Langley Porter Psychiatric Clinic at University of California - San Francisco.
Through Bowman, Lawrence met Harry Benjamin, a researcher in transsexual medicine from Germany, and introduced him to her contacts in the transgender community.
[10]By 1950, Kinsey had employed Lawrence to type the life histories of her acquaintances and to copy out manuscripts of transvestite fiction, especially an underground genre known as petticoat discipline.
[10] She sent him a collected scrapbook of newspaper clippings, along with personal materials, such as her correspondence, a diary of the year she began to transition, photographs, and her autobiographical writing.
"[8] Susan Stryker wrote that the work of Lawrence and others in connecting the transgender community with institutions of power "would produce long-lasting organizations and provide the base of a social movement".
[14][15] Chris E. Vargas designed a collage for the exhibition called "Transvestites in the News," named after the title Lawrence gave to her scrapbooks.