she came out at swarthmore in 1971, told students they could write in any of her nine languages, and has died at 93. we'd have taken the class.

via Swarthmore College, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Swarthmore College Bulletin

"If English is not your native language, you can write in any language you want, because I know nine."

That is how T. Kaori Kitao opened her classes at Swarthmore College, according to the college. She taught there for 35 years, from 1966 to 2001, and in 1971 she became something the college had never had: an openly transgender professor. She died on Sept. 21 in New York City. She was 93.

who kaori kitao was

She was born in Tokyo in 1933, grew up there through World War II, and came to the United States in 1952, the Inquirer reports. After degrees in architecture and art history at Berkeley and a Harvard doctorate, she arrived at Swarthmore having just finished a dissertation on Bernini that became Circle and Oval in the Square of Saint Peter's (1974), which the college calls the definitive work on the landmark. She taught the Renaissance and the Baroque, Japanese architecture, the history of cinema, and a course she invented called Everyday Things. The student art gallery has carried her name since 2001.

"Most of all, she taught students how to see," said Brian Goldstein, who chairs the department. A colleague, Tomoko Sakomura, remembered "joy, whimsy, and her razor-sharp wit."

regaining her rightful womanhood

In a 2017 blog post quoted by the college's alumni magazine, she put it with an architect's love of symmetry: "I assumed a male identity until 1971, when I regained my rightful womanhood; I was 38 then." In the same post she noted that she and her wife, the fiber artist Tokiko Kitao, had been together 38 years, "19 twice," until Tokiko's death in 1995.

Alumni told the magazine that word got around campus the day the painter Robert Motherwell came to lecture, and thanked "Madame Chairman" after her introduction. "That sealed it publicly," one said. She never wanted the activist label. "I have never been a trans activist," she wrote to a former student. Her conviction, she said, was simply "being what I am."

She ran the numbers once more in that 2017 post. If she lived until 2033, she wrote, she would turn 100. "Cool." She got to 93, which is still a very good number. She is survived by her son, Giulio, and her interment was set for Oct. 17 at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.