Zuni Two-Spirit person in photo titled, “We-Wa, a Zuni berdache, weaving” (John K. Hillers, 1843–1925, photographer, Smithsonian Institution. Bureau of American Ethnology, ca. 1871–ca. 1907).
Genny Beemyn
GENDER NONCONFORMING INDIVIDUALS have been documented in many different cultures and eras. But can there be said to be a “transgender history,” when “transgender” is a contemporary term and when individuals in past centuries who would perhaps appear to be transgender from our vantage point might not have conceptualized their lives in such a way? And what about individuals today who have the ability to describe themselves as transgender but choose not to for a variety of reasons, including the perception that it is a white, middle-class Western term or that it implies transitioning from one gender to another? Should they be left out of “transgender history” because they do not specifically identify as transgender?
Historians have often ignored or dismissed instances of nonnormative gender expression, especially among individuals assigned female at birth, who were regarded as simply seeking male privilege if they lived as men. It was not until lesbian and gay historians in the 1970s and 1980s sought to identify and celebrate individuals from the past who had had same-sex relationships that gender nonconforming individuals began to receive more than cursory attention. However, in their attempts to normalize same-sex sexuality by showing that people attracted to others of the same sex existed across time and cultures, many of these historians assumed that anyone who cross-dressed or lived as a gender different from the one assigned to them at birth did so in order to pursue same-sex relationships. Many transgender people have begun to call attention to our own history, pointing to evidence that many of these individuals were not motivated primarily by same-sex attraction (Califia, 1997, p. 121).
These questions complicate any attempt to write a transgender history. While it would be inappropriate to limit transgender history to people who lived at a time and place when the concept of “transgender” was available and used by them, it would also be inappropriate to assume that people who are “transgender,” as we currently understand the term, existed throughout history. For this reason, we should not claim that gender nonconforming individuals were “transgender” or “transsexual” if these categories were not yet named or yet to be embraced.
Another difficulty in writing transgender history is that people in the past may have presented as a gender different from the one assigned to them at birth for reasons other than a sense of gender difference. For example, female-assigned individuals may have presented as men in order to escape restrictive gender roles, and both women and men may have lived cross-gender lives to pursue same-sex sexual relationships.
A scholar who has sought to address this issue is anthropologist Jason Cromwell (1999). He devised three questions for researchers to consider in trying to determine whether female-assigned individuals from the past who presented as male might have been what we would call “transsexual” today: If the individuals indicated that they were men, if they attempted to modify their bodies to look more traditionally male, and if they tried to live their lives as men, keeping the knowledge of their female bodies a secret, even if it meant dying rather than seeking necessary medical care.
Cromwell’s approach can also be used for individuals assigned male at birth who presented as female. But his questions do not address the differences between transsexual people and individuals we now refer to as cross-dressers. To make this distinction, two other questions can be asked: If the individuals continued to cross-dress when it was publicly known that they cross-dressed or if they cross-dressed consistently but only in private, so that no one else knew, except perhaps their families. In either case, the important factor is that the people who cross-dressed did not receive any advantage or benefit from doing so, other than their own comfort and satisfaction.
The European nations that colonized what is today the United States rejected and often punished perceived instances of gender nonconformity. But many Native American cultures at the time of European conquest welcomed and had recognized roles for individuals who assumed behaviors and identities different from those of the gender assigned to them at birth. These cultures enabled male-assigned individuals and, to a lesser extent, female-assigned individuals to dress, work, and live, either partially or completely, as a different gender.
One person cited by anthropologist Jason Cromwell who fits the criteria of a trans person in history is Billy Tipton, a jazz musician who lived as a man for more than 50 years and who was not discovered to have been assigned female until his death in 1989. Tipton apparently turned away from what could have been his big break in the music industry for fear that the exposure would “out” him. He also avoided doctors and died from a treatable medical condition, rather than risk disclosure.
Spanish conquistador Cabeza de Vaca wrote one of the earliest known descriptions of gender nonconforming individuals in Native American society. In the 1530s, he described seeing, among a group of Coahuiltecan Indians in what is today Southern Texas, “effeminate, impotent men” who are married to other men and “go about covered-up like women and they do the work of women” (Lang, 1998, p. 67).
Zuni Two-Spirit person in photo titled, “We-Wa, a Zuni berdache, weaving” (John K. Hillers, 1843–1925, photographer, Smithsonian Institution. Bureau of American Ethnology, ca. 1871–ca. 1907).
Like de Vaca, most of those who reported on gender diversity in Native American cultures were Europeans—conquistadors, explorers, missionaries, or traders—whose worldviews were shaped by Christian doctrines that espoused adherence to strict gender roles and condemned any expressions of sexuality outside of married male-female relationships. Consequently, they reacted to instances of nonbinary genders, in the words of gay scholar Will Roscoe (1998), “with amazement, dismay, disgust, and occasionally, when they weren’t dependent on the natives’ goodwill, with violence” (p. 4).
A less judgmental account was provided by Edwin T. Denig, a mid-19th-century fur trader in present-day Montana, who expressed astonishment at the Crow Indians’ acceptance of a “neuter” gender. “Strange country this,” he stated, “where males assume the dress and perform the duties of females, while women turn men and mate with their own sex!” (Roscoe, 1998, p. 3). Another matter-of-fact narrative was provided by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, an artist who accompanied a French expedition to Florida in 1564, who noted that what he referred to as “hermaphrodites” were “quite common” among the Timucua Indians (Katz, 1976, p. 287).
At the other extreme was the reaction of Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa. In his trek across the Isthmus of Panama in 1513, Balboa set his troop’s dogs on 40 male-assigned Cueva Indians for being “sodomites,” as they had assumed the roles of women. Another Spanish conquistador, Nuño de Guzmán, burned alive a male-assigned individual who presented as female—considering the person to be a male prostitute—while traveling through Mexico in the 1530s (Saslow, 1999).
As these different accounts indicate, Europeans did not agree on what to make of cultures that recognized nonbinary genders. Lacking comparable institutional roles in their own societies, they labeled the aspects that seemed familiar to them: Male-assigned individuals engaged in same-sex sexual behavior (“sodomites”) or individuals that combined male and female elements (“hermaphrodites”). Anthropologists and historians in the 20th century would repeat the same mistake, interpreting these individuals as “homosexuals,” “transvestites,” or “berdaches” (a French adaptation of the Arabic word for a male prostitute or a young male slave used for sexual purposes) (Roscoe, 1987).
While male-assigned individuals who assumed female roles often married other male-assigned individuals, their partners presented as masculine and the relationships were generally not viewed in Native American cultures as involving two people of the same gender. The same was true of female-assigned individuals who assumed male roles and married other female-assigned individuals. Because many Native American groups recognized genders beyond male and female, these relationships would better be categorized as what anthropologist Sabine Lang (1999, p. 98) calls “hetero-gender” relationships—not as “same-sex” relationships, as they were often described by European and Euro-American writers from the 17th through the late 20th centuries.
By failing to see beyond their own biases and prejudices, these observers mischaracterized the Native American societies that accepted gender diversity. Within most Native American cultures, male- and female-assigned individuals who assumed different genders were not considered to be women or men; rather, they constituted separate genders that combined female and male elements. This fact is reflected in the words that Native American groups developed to describe multiple genders. For example, the terms for male-assigned individuals who took on female roles used by the Cheyenne (heemaneh), the Ojibwa (agokwa), and the Yuki (i-wa-musp) translate as “half men, half women,” or “men-women.” Other Native American groups referred to male-assigned individuals who “dress as a woman,” “act like a woman,” or were a “would-be woman” (Lang, 1998). Similarly, the Zuni called a female-assigned individual who took on male roles a katsotse, or “boy-girl” (Lang, 1999).
Individuals who assumed different genders were apparently accepted in most of the Native American societies in which they have been known to exist, but their statuses and roles differed from group to group and over time. Some Native American cultures considered them to possess supernatural powers and afforded them special ceremonial roles; in other cultures, they were less revered and viewed more secularly (Lang, 1998). In these societies, the status of individuals who assumed different genders seems to have reflected their gender role, rather than a special gender status. If women predominated in particular occupations, such as being healers, shamans, and handcrafters, then male-assigned individuals who took on female roles engaged in the same professions. In a similar way, the female-assigned individuals who took on male roles became hunters and warriors (Lang, 1999).
Just as the cultural status of individuals who assumed different genders seems to have varied greatly, so too did the extent to which they took on these roles. Some adopted male or female roles completely, others only partly or part of the time. In some cases, dressing as a different gender was central to assuming the gender role; in others, it was not. Marrying or having relationships with other male-assigned or other female-assigned individuals was likewise common in some cultures but less so in others. “Gender variance is as diverse as Native American cultures themselves,” writes Sabine Lang, (1999). “About the only common denominator is that in many Native American tribal cultures systems of multiple genders existed” (pp. 95–96).
The cultural inclusion of individuals who assumed different genders in some Native American societies stands in contrast to the general lack of recognition within the white-dominated American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries. To the extent that individuals who cross-dressed or who lived as a gender different from the one assigned to them at birth were acknowledged in the colonies, it was largely to condemn their behavior as unnatural and sinful. For example, when Mary Henly, a female-assigned individual in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, was arrested in 1692 for wearing “men’s clothing,” the charges stated that such behavior was “seeming to confound the course of nature” (Reis, 2007, p. 152).
One of the first recorded examples of a gender nonconforming individual in colonial America involved a Virginia servant who claimed to be both a man and a woman and, at different times, adopted the traditional roles and clothing of men and women and variously went by the names of Thomas and Thomasine Hall. Unable to establish Hall’s “true” gender, despite repeated physical examinations, and unsure of whether to punish him or her for wearing men’s or women’s apparel, local citizens asked the court at Jamestown to resolve the issue.
Perhaps because it took Hall at his or her word that he or she was bigendered (what we would call intersex today), the court ordered Hall in 1629 to wear both a man’s breeches and a woman’s apron and cap. In a sense, this unique ruling affirmed Hall’s dual nature and subverted traditional gender categories. But by fixing Hall’s gender and denying him or her the freedom to switch between male and female identities, the decision punished Hall and reinforced gender boundaries (Brown, 1995; Reis, 2007; Rupp, 1999).
Relatively few instances of gender nonconformity are documented in the colonial and postcolonial periods. A number of the cases that became known involved female-assigned individuals who lived as men and whose birth gender was discovered only when their bodies were examined following an injury or death. Fewer examples of male-assigned individuals who lived as women are recorded, perhaps because they had less ability to present effectively as female due to their facial hair and physiques.
The lack of a public presence for individuals who assumed different genders began to change in the mid-19th century, as a growing number of single people left their communities of origin to earn a living, gain greater freedom, or simply see the world. Able to take advantage of the anonymity afforded by new surroundings, these migrants had greater opportunities to fashion their own lives, which for some meant presenting as a gender different from the one assigned to them at birth.
Some headed out West, where, according to historian Peter Boag (2011), “crossdressers were not simply ubiquitous, but were very much a part of daily life on the frontier” (pp. 1–2). The industrialization of US cities led others to move from rural to urban areas, where individuals who lived different gendered lives created community spaces in which they could meet and socialize with others like themselves. The most popular of these gathering places were masquerade balls, or “drags” as they were commonly known. One of the earliest known drags took place in Washington, D.C., on New Year’s Eve in 1885. The event was documented by the Washington Evening Star because a participant, “Miss Maud,” was arrested while returning home the following morning. Dressed in “a pink dress trimmed with white lace, with stockings and undergarments to match,” the 30-year-old male-assigned black participant was charged with vagrancy and sentenced to three months in jail, even though the judge, the newspaper reported, “admired his stylish appearance” (Roscoe, 1991, p. 240).
The growing visibility of male-assigned individuals who presented as female in the late 19th century was not limited to Washington. By the 1890s, female-presenting cross-dressers had also begun organizing drag events in New York City. These drags drew enormous numbers of black and white participants and spectators, especially during the late 1920s and early 1930s, when at least a half dozen events were staged each year in some of the city’s largest venues, including Madison Square Garden (Chauncey, 1994). By 1930, public drag balls were also being held in Chicago, New Orleans, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and other US cities, bringing together hundreds of cross-dressing individuals and their escorts, and often an equal or greater number of curious onlookers (Anonymous, 1933; Drexel, 1997; Matthews, 1927). Organizers typically obtained a license from the police to prevent participants from being arrested for violating ordinances against cross-dressing.
While female-assigned individuals who presented as male did not hold drag balls in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were by no means invisible in society. Some performed as male impersonators to entertain audiences, while others cross-dressed both on and off stage. One of the most notable cross-dressers was Gladys Bentley, a black blues singer and pianist who became well known during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Bentley, an open lesbian, performed in a white tuxedo and top hat and regularly wore “men’s” clothing out in public with her female partner (Garber, 1988).
Another indication of the growing presence of individuals who assumed gender behaviors and identities different from the gender assigned to them at birth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the interest that US and European physicians began to show in their experiences. Many of these sexologists, as they became known, did not make clear distinctions between gender nonconformity and same-sex attraction. Rather than treating same-sex sexuality as a separate category, they considered it only a sign of “gender inversion”—that is, having a gender inverted or opposite of the gender assigned to the person at birth. One of the leading advocates of this theory was Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German lawyer who wrote in the 1860s that his own interest in other men resulted from having “a female soul enclosed within a male body” (Meyerowitz, 2002; Rupp, 1999; Stryker, 2008, p. 37).
The sexologist who had the greatest influence on the Western medical profession’s views toward sexual and gender difference in the late 19th century was Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. In his widely cited study, Psychopathia Sexualis, which was first published in 1886, Krafft-Ebing created a framework of increasing severity of cross-gender identification (and, in his view, increasing pathology). The range went from individuals who had a strong preference for clothing of the “other sex,” to individuals whose feelings and inclinations were considered more appropriate for someone of the “other sex,” to individuals who believed themselves to be the “other sex” and who claimed that the sex assigned to them at birth was wrong (Heidenreich, 1997, p. 270; Stryker, 2008; von Krafft-Ebing, 2006).
Not until the early 20th century did gender difference become considered a separate phenomenon from same-sex sexuality and start to be less pathologized by the medical profession. In his pioneering 1910 work Transvestites, German physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld coined the word “transvestite”—from the Latin “trans” or “across” and “vestis” or “clothing”—to refer to individuals who are overcome with a “feeling of peace, security and exaltation, happiness and well-being...when in the clothing of the other sex” (p. 125).
Hirschfeld (1991 [1910]) saw cross-dressing as completely distinct from “homosexuality,” a term that began to be commonly used in the medical literature in the early 20th century to categorize individuals who were attracted to others of the same sex. Through his research, Hirschfeld, who was homosexual himself, not only found that transvestites could be of any sexual orientation (including asexual) but also that most he met were heterosexual from the standpoint of their gender assigned at birth. In his study of 17 individuals who cross-dressed, he considered none to be homosexual and “at the most” one—the lone female-assigned person in his sample—to be bisexual.
It is significant that Hirschfeld included a female-assigned person in his study, as most researchers, before and after him, considered cross-dressing to be an exclusively male phenomenon. Also unlike other medical writers, especially psychoanalysts, Hirschfeld recognized that cross-dressers were not suffering from a form of psychopathology, nor were they masochists or fetishists. While some derived erotic pleasure from cross-dressing, not all did, and Hirschfeld was not convinced that it was a necessary part of transvestism.
While Hirschfeld was ahead of his time in many of the ways he conceptualized gender difference, he did not distinguish between individuals who cross-dressed but who identified as their birth gender and individuals who identified as a gender different from the one assigned to them at birth and who lived cross-gendered lives, which included cross-dressing. Among the 17 people in his study, four had lived part of their lives as a different gender, including the female-assigned participant, and would now likely be thought of as transsexual or transgender (Meyerowitz, 2002).
Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, the world’s first institute devoted to sexology, also performed the earliest recorded genital transformation surgeries. The first documented case was that of Dorchen Richter, a male-assigned individual from a poor German family who had desired to be female since early childhood, lived as a woman when she could, and hated her male anatomy. She underwent castration in 1922 and had her penis removed and a vagina constructed in 1931 (Meyerowitz, 2002, p. 19).
The institute’s most well-known patient was Einar Wegener, a Dutch painter who began to present and identify as Lili Elbe in the 1920s. After being evaluated by Hirschfeld, Elbe underwent a series of male-to-female surgeries. In addition to castration and the construction of a vagina, she had ovaries inserted into her abdomen, which at a time before the synthesis of hormones, was the only way that doctors knew to try to change estrogen levels. In 1931, she proceeded with a final operation to create a uterus in an attempt to be a mother, but she died from complications from the surgery (Hoyer, 1953; Kennedy, 2007).
Before her death, Elbe requested that her friend Ernst Ludwig Hathorn Jacobson develop a book based on her diary entries, letters, and dictated material. Jacobson published the resulting work, A Man Changes His Sex, in Dutch and German in 1932 under the pseudonym Niels Hoyer. It was translated into English a year later as Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex and is the first known book-length account of a gender transition (Meyerowitz, 2002).
Elbe was one of Hirschfeld’s last patients. With the rise of Nazism, the ability for him to do his work became increasingly more difficult, and it became impossible after Adolph Hitler personally called Hirschfeld “the most dangerous Jew in Germany” (Stryker, 2008, p. 40). Fearing for his life, Hirschfeld left the country, and in his absence, the Nazis destroyed the Institute in 1933, holding a public bonfire of its contents. Hirschfeld died in exile in France 2 years later.
Although opportunities for surgical transition diminished with the destruction of Hirschfeld’s Institute, two breakthroughs in hormonal research in the 1930s gave new hope to individuals who felt gender different. First, the discovery by endocrinologists that “male” hormones occurred naturally in women and that “female” hormones occurred naturally in men challenged the dominant scientific thinking that there were two separate and mutually exclusive biological sexes. The findings refuted the medical profession’s assumption that only men could be given “male” hormones and women given “female” hormones, making cross-gender medical treatments possible (H. Rubin, 2006). At the same time, the development of synthetic testosterone and estrogen enabled hormone therapy to become more affordable and, over time, more widely available. In the 1930s and 1940s, few European and US physicians were willing to provide hormones to patients seeking to transition, but a small number of gender nonconforming individuals found ways to obtain them (Kennedy, 2007).
The first female-assigned individual known to have taken testosterone for the purpose of transforming his body was Michael Dillon, a doctor from an aristocratic British family, who had entered medicine in order to better understand his own masculine identity and how he could change his body to be like other men. He began taking hormones in 1939, had a double mastectomy three years later, and underwent more than a dozen operations to construct a penis beginning in 1946. His were the first recorded female-to-male genital surgeries performed on a nonintersex person (Kennedy, 2007; Shapiro, 2010).
The same year that Dillon began his phalloplasty, he also published a book on the treatment of gender nonconforming individuals, Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology. The book focused on the need for society to understand people who, like Dillon, felt that their gender was different from the one assigned to them at birth. Dillon argued that such individuals were not mentally unbalanced but “would develop naturally enough if only [they] belonged to the other sex.” He was especially critical of the psychologists who believed that they could change the sense of self of gender nonconforming individuals through therapy, when what their clients really needed was access to hormones and genital surgeries.
Making an argument that would become commonplace in the years that followed, Dillon reasoned that “where the mind cannot be made to fit the body, the body should be made to fit, approximately, at any rate to the mind, despite the prejudices of those who have not suffered these things” (p. 53). Self, though, was not widely circulated, and Dillon sought to avoid public attention, even taking the extraordinary step of going into exile in India in 1958, when the media discovered his past and ran stories about a transsexual being the heir to a British title.
Instead of Dillon, Harry Benjamin, a German-born, US endocrinologist, became the leading advocate in the 1950s and 1960s for providing hormones and surgeries to gender nonconforming people. Benjamin (1966), like Dillon, saw attempts to “cure” such individuals by psychotherapy as “a useless undertaking” (p. 91), and he began prescribing hormones to them and suggesting surgeons abroad, as no physician in the United States at that time would openly perform gender-affirming operations.
Along with US physician David O. Cauldwell, Benjamin referred to those who desired to change their sex as “transsexuals” in order to distinguish them from “transvestites.” The difference between the groups, according to Benjamin, was that “true transsexuals feel that they belong to the other sex, they want to be and function as members of the opposite sex, not only to appear as such” (1966, p. 13).
In 1949, Cauldwell (2006) was apparently the first medical professional to use the word “transsexual”—which he initially spelled “transexual”—in its contemporary sense. But in sharp contrast to Benjamin, Cauldwell believed that transsexuals were mentally ill and saw gender-affirming surgeries as mutilation and a criminal action. At the time, most physicians supported Cauldwell’s position, assuming that biological sex was the defining aspect of someone’s gender and was immutable, outside of cases of intersex individuals, where the “true” sex of the person may not be immediately known.
Increasingly, though, this belief was challenged by doctors and researchers like Benjamin who distinguished between biological sex and “psychological sex” or, as it came to be known, “gender identity.” As more and more transsexual individuals were acknowledged and studied, these physicians and scientists developed the evidence to begin to gradually shift the dominant medical view to the contrary argument: that gender identity—not biological sex—was the critical, immutable element of someone’s gender. Thus, transsexual individuals needed to be able to change the sex of their bodies to match their sense of self (Meyerowitz, 2002).
Although Harry Benjamin was referring to the issue of transsexuality in general and not to Christine Jorgensen in particular with the title of his pioneering 1966 work The Transsexual Phenomenon, it would not be an exaggeration to characterize her as such. Through the publicity given to her transition, she brought the concept of “sex change” into everyday conversations in the United States, served as a role model for many other transsexual individuals to understand themselves and pursue medical treatment, and transformed the debate about the use of hormones and gender-affirming surgeries. Following the media frenzy over Jorgensen, much of the US public began to recognize that “sex change” was indeed possible.
Born in 1926 to Danish American parents in New York City, Jorgensen struggled with an intense feeling from a young age that she should have been born female. Among the childhood experiences that she recounts in her 1967 autobiography were preferring to play with girls, wishing that she had been sent to a girls’ camp rather than one for boys, and having “a small piece of needlepoint” that she cherished taken away by an unsympathetic elementary school teacher. The teacher confronted Jorgensen’s mother, asking, “Do you think that this is anything for a red-blooded boy to have in his desk as a keepsake?” (p. 18).
Although not mentioned in her autobiography, Jorgensen also apparently began wearing her sister’s clothing in secret when she was young and, by her teens, had acquired her own small wardrobe of “women’s” clothing. Many transsexual individuals dress as the gender with which they identify from a young age, but Jorgensen may have been concerned that readers would confuse her for a “transvestite” or a feminine “homosexual.” She did indicate being attracted to men in her autobiography, and she acknowledged years later to having had “a couple” of same-sex sexual encounters in her youth (Meyerowitz, 2002, p. 57). However, by her early twenties, Jorgensen gradually became aware that she was a heterosexual woman, rather than a cross-dresser or gay man, and began to look for all she could find about medical and surgical transition.
Howard Chiang is assistant professor of history at the University of Warwick and author of Transgender China (2012).
In 1953, 4 years after Mao Zedong’s political regime took over mainland China and the Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek was forced to relocate its base, news of the success of native doctors in converting a man into a woman made headlines in Taiwan. On August 14 that year, the United Daily News (Lianhebao) surprised the public by announcing the discovery of an intersex soldier, Xie Jianshun, in Tainan, Taiwan. Within a week, the paper adopted a radically different rhetoric, now with a headline claiming that “Christine Will Not Be America’s Exclusive: Soldier Destined to Become a Lady.” Xie was frequently dubbed the “Chinese Christine.” This allusion to the contemporaneous American ex-G.I. celebrity Christine Jorgensen reflected the growing influence of American culture on the Republic of China at the peak of the Cold War.
Dripping with national and trans-Pacific significance, Xie’s experience made bianxingren (transsexual) a household term in the 1950s. She served as a focal point for numerous new stories that broached the topics of changing sex and human intersexuality. People who wrote about her debated whether she qualified as a woman, whether medical technology could transform sex, and whether the “two Christines” were more similar or different. These questions led to persistent comparisons of Taiwan with the United States, but Xie never presented herself as a duplicate of Jorgensen. As Xie knew, her story highlighted issues that pervaded postwar Taiwanese society: the censorship of public culture by the state, the unique social status of men serving in the armed forces, the limit of individualism, the promise and pitfalls of science, the normative behaviors of men and women, and the boundaries of acceptable sexual expression.
Jorgensen read about the first studies to examine the effects of hormone treatments and about “various conversion experiments in Sweden,” which led her to obtain commercially synthesized female hormones and to travel “first to Denmark, where [she] had relatives, and then to Stockholm, where [she] hoped [she] would find doctors who would be willing to handle [her] case” (pp. 81 and 94). While in Denmark, though, Jorgensen learned that doctors in that country could help her. She came under the care of leading endocrinologist Christian Hamburger, who treated her with increasingly higher doses of female hormones for 2 years, beginning in 1950, and arranged for her to have operations to remove her testicles and penis and to reshape her scrotum into labia.
While recovering from this latter operation in December 1952, Jorgensen went from being an unknown American abroad to “the most talked-about girl in the world.” It seems astounding today to think that someone would become internationally famous simply for altering her appearance through electrolysis, hormones, and surgeries, but that was Jorgensen’s experience when news of her gender transition reached the press (Serlin, 1995, p. 140; Stryker, 2000). A trade magazine for the publishing industry announced in 1954 that Jorgensen’s story over the previous year “had received the largest worldwide coverage in the history of newspaper publishing.” Looking back years later on the media’s obsession, Jorgensen (1967) remained incredulous: “A tragic war was still raging in Korea, George VI died and Britain had a new queen, sophisticated guided missiles were going off in New Mexico, Jonas Salk was working on a vaccine for infantile paralysis....[yet] Christine Jorgensen was on page one” (pp. 249 and 144).
Jorgensen was by no means the first person to undergo a gender transition, and some of these cases had been widely covered in the media. However, Jorgensen became a sensation, in part, because she had been a US serviceman, the epitome of masculinity in post–World War II America (though Jorgensen served in the United States and never saw combat), and had been reborn into a “blonde bombshell,” the symbol of 1950s white feminine sexuality (Meyerowitz, 2002, p. 62).
The initial newspaper story, published in The New York Daily News on December 1, 1952, highlighted this dramatic transformation, with its headline, “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty,” and its accompanying “before” and “after” photographs. A grainy Army picture of a nerdish-looking, male-bodied Jorgensen in uniform is contrasted with a professionally taken profile picture of a feminine Jorgensen looking like Grace Kelly.
The tremendous attention that Jorgensen’s transition received also reflected the public’s fascination with the power of science in the mid-20th century. A tidal wave of remarkable inventions—from television and the transistor radio to the atomic bomb—had made scientists in the 1950s seem capable of anything, so why not the ability to turn a man into a woman? However, in the aftermath of the first use of nuclear weapons, Jorgensen’s transformation was also pointed to as evidence that science had gone too far in its efforts to alter the natural environment. Jorgensen thus served as a symbol for both scientific progress and a fear that science was attempting to play God. By being at the center of postwar debates over technological advancement, she remained in the spotlight well after the initial reports of her transition and was able to have a successful stage career based on her celebrity status (Meyerowitz, 2002).
Anxieties over changing gender roles were another factor that contributed to Jorgensen’s celebrity. At a time when millions of US women who had been recruited to work in factories during the war were being pushed back into the home in order to make way for returning servicemen, gender expectations for both women and men were in a state of flux. Suddenly, the assumed naturalness of what it meant to be male and female was being called into question. Not only could women do “men’s” work, but men could also become women. As historian Susan Stryker writes, “Jorgensen’s notoriety in the 1950s was undoubtedly fueled by the pervasive unease felt in some quarters that American manhood, already under siege, could quite literally be undone and refashioned into its seeming opposite through the power of modern science” (Stryker, 2000, p. viii).
Dallas Denny and Jamison Green
Gender-variant characters and themes are especially prevalent in science fiction and fantasy. One of the genre’s superstars, Robert A. Heinlein, wrote several pieces that touch on this topic. His short story All You Zombies, written in 1958, is without a doubt the ultimate (and perhaps the only) example of time-travel gender-fuck fiction. The main (actually, only) character in the work is not only at various times male and female, and both the mother and father of their own offspring, but manages to set up the entire conundrum in the first place. Heinlein’s 1970 novel I Will Fear No Evil features an ailing old man whose brain is transplanted into the body of a brain-dead young woman. His novel Friday (1982) resonates with many transgendered people because of its themes of discrimination and passing. Friday is an artificial person, laboratory born, and her social experiences closely reflect those of transsexual women.
Some science-fiction and fantasy authors have portrayed alien races with more or different genders that those on Earth. For example, Ursula LeGuin’s 1969 The Left Hand of Darkness features aliens who are gendered only when reproducing, and who alternately take on male and female roles and characteristics. The aliens in Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves have not two, but three genders.
A number of science fiction authors (LeGuin included) have made feminist statements through the use of gender-variant characters in their speculative fiction. Science fiction critic Cheryl Morgan includes in this feminist category Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977). In this novel, a chauvinistic professor of English is surgically transformed into a woman and then experiences rape, enslavement, humiliation, and (almost) forced impregnation.
While many in 1950s America were deeply troubled by what Jorgensen’s transition meant for traditional gender roles, many transsexual individuals, particularly transsexual women, experienced a tremendous sense of relief. They finally understood and had a name for the sense of gender difference that many had felt from early childhood and recognized that others shared their feelings.
“Christine Jorgensen’s return to the U.S. was a true lifesaving event for me....The only thing that kept me from suicide at 12 was the publicity of Christine Jorgensen. It was the first time I found out that there were others like me— I was no longer alone.”
“When her surgery was on the front pages, I was giddy because for the first time ever I realized it was possible.”
Many other transsexual individuals also saw themselves in Jorgensen and hoped to gain access to hormones and surgical procedures. In the months following her return to the United States, Jorgensen received “hundreds of tragic letters...from men and women who also had experienced the deep frustrations of lives lived in sexual twilight.” Her endocrinologist, Dr. Hamburger was likewise inundated with requests from individuals seeking to transition; in the 10 and a half months following his treatment of Jorgensen, he received more than 1, 100 letters from transsexual people, many of whom sought to be his patients (Jorgensen, 1967, pp. 149–150).
Deluged with requests from people around the world who wanted to travel to Denmark for hormonal and surgical treatments in the wake of the media frenzy over Jorgensen, the Danish government banned such procedures for noncitizens. In the United States, many physicians simply dismissed the rapidly growing number of individuals seeking gender-affirming surgeries as being mentally ill. Other, more sympathetic doctors were reluctant to operate because of a fear that they would be either criminally prosecuted under “mayhem” statutes for destroying healthy tissue or sued by patients who were unsatisfied with the surgical outcomes. Thus, despite the tremendous demand, only a few dozen, mostly secretive, genital surgeries were performed in the United States in the years after Jorgensen first made headlines (Stryker, 2008).
Not until the mid-1960s did gender-affirming surgery become more available. The constant mainstream media coverage of transsexual people in the decade following the disclosure of Jorgensen’s transition made it increasingly difficult for the medical establishment to characterize them as a few psychologically disordered individuals. At the same time, the first published studies of the effects of gender-affirming surgery demonstrated the benefits of medical intervention.
Harry Benjamin, who worked with more transsexual individuals than any other physician in the United States, found that among 51 of his trans women patients who underwent surgery, 86% had “good” or “satisfactory” lives afterward. He concluded: “I have become convinced from what I have seen that a miserable, unhappy male [assigned] transsexual can, with the help of surgery and endocrinology, attain a happier future as a woman” (Benjamin, 1966, p. 135; Meyerowitz, 2002). The smaller number of trans men patients he saw likewise felt better about themselves and were more psychologically well-adjusted following surgery.
Within months of the publication of Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon in 1966, Johns Hopkins University opened the first gender identity clinic in the United States to diagnose and treat transsexual individuals and to conduct research related to transsexuality. Similar programs were soon established at the University of Minnesota, Stanford University, the University of Oregon, and Case Western University, and within 10 years, more than 40 university-affiliated clinics existed throughout the United States (Bullough & Bullough, 1998; Denny, 2006; Stryker, 2008).
The sudden proliferation of health care services for transsexual individuals reflected not only the effect of Benjamin’s work and the influence of a prestigious university like Hopkins on other institutions but also the behind-the-scenes involvement of millionaire philanthropist Reed Erickson. A transsexual man and a patient of Benjamin, Erickson created a foundation that paid for Benjamin’s research and helped fund the Hopkins program and other gender identity clinics. The agency also disseminated information related to transsexuality and served as an indispensable resource for individuals who were coming out as transsexual (Stryker, 2008).
The establishment of gender identity clinics at leading universities called attention to the health care needs of transsexual people and helped to legitimize gender-affirming surgery. However, most clinics provided hormones and surgery only to individuals who fit a very narrow definition of “transsexual”—someone who has felt themselves to be in the “wrong” body from their earliest memories and who is attracted to individuals of the same birth sex as a member of the “other” sex (i.e., a heterosexual trans person). As detailed by trans writer Dallas Denny (2006):
To qualify for treatment, it was important that applicants report that their gender dysphorias manifested at an early age; that they have a history of playing with dolls as a child, if born male, or trucks and guns, if born female; that their sexual attractions were exclusively to the same biological sex; that they have a history of failure at endeavors undertaken while in the original gender role; and that they pass or had potential to pass successfully as a member of the desired sex. (p. 177)
Unable to meet these narrow and biased criteria, the vast majority of interested people were turned away from the gender identity clinics. In its first 2.5 years, Johns Hopkins received almost 2, 000 requests for gender-affirming surgery but performed operations on only 24 individuals (Meyerowitz, 2002).
Jodi Kaufmann is an associate professor at Georgia State University.
Trans people spend a lot of time helping others to understand what it’s like to be trans. There are three primary narratives trans people have turned to in order to share their stories.
The “hermaphroditic narrative” emerged in Germany with the story of Lili Elbe, one of the first transgender people to record her story. Elbe said she was a female “personality” born into a hermaphroditic (or what today would be called intersex) body, a body with both male and female reproductive organs. The hermaphroditic narrative—having a hermaphroditic body and a desire for men—allowed Elbe to receive a sex change operation in the West. Elbe’s autobiography was translated into English in 1933, and her story spread in the United States.
The hermaphroditic narrative began to wane in the years following World War II, and the “sex-gender misalignment” narrative took hold. In 1949, psychiatrist David Cauldwell defined “trans-sexual” people as those who are physically of one sex and psychologically of the opposite sex. Harry Benjamin, an endocrinologist, helped spread this “born in the wrong body” narrative. In order to be diagnosed as transsexual by doctors like Benjamin, one had to use this narrative, and because only those with the diagnosis could access sex reassignment surgery, trans people felt pressure to use it.
The “queer narrative” began in the 1960s, when the assumed norms of binary gender and heterosexuality came under scrutiny. People started telling stories of who they were that did not align with the hetero-norm. The “queer narrative” hit academia when writer Sandy Stone called for posttranssexuality, or the acceptance of a wider range of expressions of sex and gender.
Over time, the ways in which we talk about transsexual identity and experience have changed. Each narrative has had personal and political significance, offering possibilities and limitations; for instance, the “sex-gender misalignment” narrative aided in gaining medical assistance for transitioning but also reinforced hetero-normative ways of thinking about sex and gender. There is no single narrative that fits every trans body and no narrative that remains free from political and personal limitations. It is critical to be aware of how we share and listen to experiences of sex and gender, because the narratives we use can have powerful consequences.
Transsexual men especially encountered difficulties convincing doctors to approve them for surgery. In the wake of the extraordinary publicity given to Jorgensen and the transsexual women who followed her in the spotlight in the 1950s and 1960s, transsexuality became seen as a primarily trans female phenomenon. The medical establishment gave little consideration to transsexual men, and some physicians questioned whether trans men should even be considered transsexuals (Meyerowitz, 2002).
Admittedly, many trans men did not recognize themselves as transsexual either. While they may have known about Jorgensen and other transsexual women, they did not know anyone who had transitioned from female to male or that such a transition was even possible. This sense of being “the only one” was especially common among the transsexual men who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s (Beemyn & Rankin, 2011).
Transsexual men who did transition often did not pursue surgery to construct a penis because the process was expensive, involved multiple surgeries, and produced imperfect results. Moreover, few doctors were skilled in performing phalloplasties. In the United States, the first “bottom surgeries” for trans men were apparently not undertaken until the early 1960s, and even when the gender identity clinics opened, the programs did only a handful of such operations (Meyerowitz, 2002). The vast majority of transsexual men had to be satisfied with hormone therapy and the removal of their breasts and internal reproductive organs, surgeries which were already commonly performed on women. However, since the effects of hormones (especially increased facial hair and lower voices) and “top surgery” enabled trans men to be seen more readily by others as men, these steps were considered more critical by most transsexual men.
In 1952, the year that Jorgensen became an international media phenomenon, a group of cross-dressers in the Los Angeles area led by Virginia Prince quietly created a mimeographed newsletter, Transvestia: The Journal of the American Society for Equity in Dress. Although its distribution was limited to a small number of cross-dressers on the group’s mailing list and it lasted just two issues, Transvestia was apparently the first specifically transgender publication in the United States and served as a trial run for wider organizing among cross-dressers.
Virginia Prince, pioneer (copyright Mariette Pathy Allen).
Prince relaunched Transvestia in 1960 as a bimonthly magazine with 25 subscribers. Sold through adult bookstores and by word of mouth, Transvestia grew to several hundred subscribers within two years and to more than 1, 000 from across the country by the mid-1960s (Ekins & King, 2005; Prince, 1962; Prince & Bentler, 1972). Prince wrote regular columns for the magazine but relied on readers for much of the content, which included life stories, fiction, letters to the author, personal photographs, and advice on cross-dressing. The involvement of its subscribers, many of whom came out publicly for the first time on the magazine’s pages, had the effect of creating a loyal fan base and contributed to its longevity. Prince’s commitment also sustained Transvestia; she served as its editor and publisher for 20 years, retiring after its hundredth issue in 1979 (Hill, 2007).
Through Transvestia, Prince was able to form a transgender organization that continues more than 50 years later. A year after starting the magazine, she invited several Los Angeles subscribers to a clandestine meeting in a local hotel room. The female-presenting cross-dressers were requested to bring stockings and high heels, but they were not told that the others would be there. When the meeting began, Prince had them don the female apparel, thus outing themselves to each other and forcing them to maintain their shared secret. Initially known as the Hose and Heels Club, the group was renamed the Foundation for Personality Expression (FPE or Phi Pi Epsilon) the following year by Prince, who envisioned it as the alpha chapter of a sorority-like organization that would have chapters throughout the country. By the mid-1960s, several other chapters had been chartered by Prince, who set strict membership requirements.
Only individuals who had subscribed to and read at least five issues of Transvestia could apply to join, and then they had to have their application personally approved by Prince and be interviewed by her or an area representative. Prince kept control over who could be a member through the mid-1970s, when FPE merged with a Southern California cross-dressing group, Mamselle, to become the Society for the Second Self or Tri-Ess, the name by which it is known today (Ekins & King, 2005; Stryker, 2008). Continuing the practice of FPE, Tri-Ess is modeled on the sorority system and currently has more than 25 chapters throughout the country.
Angelika Van Ashley
At about the age of 5, I began to recognize myself as being different somehow from boys. I had no clue as to what was going on inside as a child growing up in the 1950s. I began to do research secretly in the mid-1960s, when I was in my early teens, to try to figure out what was going on, but what I found only said that my condition was an illness and curable. I finally discovered Masters and Johnson’s research, which spoke of “transvestism” in a more humane and positive light. The term still felt clinical, but I saw myself reflected enough in the description to think “maybe that’s what I am.”
My now ex-partner was my support system for many years, and she learned about Tri-Ess on the Internet. There was a chapter, Sigma Rho Delta (SRD), near me in Raleigh, North Carolina. I wasn’t looking for support or understanding, just simple camaraderie, and SRD provided that for me. It was fun.
The group began with a handful of members, but it soon grew exponentially as word got out via the street and the Internet. We went from three to 40 members. I served as vice president of membership and later as president. All persuasions and ages passed through our door. Twenty-somethings to people over 70 years young. Timid, garden-variety cross-dressers in hiding from years of accumulated fear. Bold and boisterous politicos. Fetish practitioners. The white glove and party manner set. Those in transition or considering it. Musical and artistic types. Truck drivers and doctors. Computer geeks and business owners. Individuals with disabilities or who were physically ailing.
We landed in restaurants, clubs, and at theatres. We played music together and laughed a lot at ourselves. We had picnics. Members who were so inclined bravely attended events of a political nature, such as lobby days at the state legislature, where we asked our elected officials their positions on the pending ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act) and LGBT-inclusive hate crimes bill. We even crashed a high-dollar-per-plate Human Rights Campaign fundraiser that featured Representative Barney Frank and confronted him about his stance on transgender inclusion in the aforementioned legislation. We had a sense of strength within our own diversity.
Although membership declined and the group eventually disbanded, our lasting impressions and friendships have carried on past the decade of Sigma Rho Delta’s existence. We still stay in touch and visit one another. We are proud of our unique heritage and the challenges that we met together and as individuals. We found pride in ourselves.
Transvestia and FPE/Tri-Ess reflected Prince’s narrow beliefs about cross-dressing. In her view, the “true transvestite” is “exclusively heterosexual,” “frequently...married and often fathers,” and “values his male organs, enjoys using them and does not desire them removed” (Ekins & King, 2005, p. 9). She not only excluded admittedly gay and bisexual male cross-dressers and transsexual women but also was scornful of them; she openly expressed antigay sentiment and was a leading opponent of gender-affirming surgery. By making sharp distinctions between “real transvestites” and other groups, Prince addressed the two main fears of the wives and female partners of heterosexual male cross-dressers: that their husbands and boyfriends will leave them for men or become women. In addition, she sought to downplay the erotic and sexual aspects of cross-dressing for some people in order to lessen the stigma commonly associated with transvestism and to normalize the one way in which white, middle-class heterosexual male cross-dressers like herself were not privileged in society. In the mid-1960s, Transvestia was promoted as being “dedicated to the needs of the sexually (that’s heterosexual) normal individual” (Ekins & King, 2005, p. 7; Stryker, 2008).
Prince further sought to dissociate transvestism from sexual activity by coining the term “femmiphile”—literally “lover of the feminine”—as a replacement for “transvestite” in the 1960s. “Femmiphile” did not catch on, but the word “cross-dresser” slowly replaced “transvestite” as the preferred term among most transgender people and supporters. As gay and bisexual men who presented as female increasingly referred to themselves as drag queens, “cross-dresser” began to be applied only to heterosexual men—achieving the separation that Prince desired.
Prince deserves a tremendous amount of credit for bringing a segment of formerly isolated cross-dressers together, helping them to recognize that they are not pathological or immoral, creating a national organization that has provided support to tens of thousands of members and their partners over the past 50 years, and increasing the visibility of heterosexual male cross-dressers. At the same time, by preventing gay and bisexual cross-dressers from joining her organizations, she helped ensure that they would identify more with the gay community than with the cross-dressing community and form their own groups; thus, Prince’s prejudice and divisiveness foreclosed the possibility of a broad transgender or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) political coalition developing in the 1960s.
The largest and oldest continuing organization consisting primarily of gay male cross-dressers or drag queens, the Imperial Court System, was founded by José Sarria in San Francisco in 1965. Beginning with other chapters (known as “realms”) in Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles, the court system has grown today to more than 65 local groups in the United States, Canada, and Mexico; reflecting this expansion, its name is now the International Court System (Imperial Sovereign Rose Court, 2014). The primary mission of each chapter is to raise money for LGBTQ, HIV/AIDS, and other charities through annual costume balls and other fundraising events. Involvement often pays personal dividends as well. According to Steven Schacht (2002), a sociologist who has participated in the group, “courts also serve as an important conduit for gay and lesbian individuals to do drag and as a venue for formal affiliation and personal esteem (largely in the form of various drag titles; i.e. Empress, Emperor, Princess, and Prince) often unavailable to such individuals in the dominant culture” (p. 164).
By the late 1960s, black drag queens were organizing their own events. Growing out of the drag balls held in New York City earlier in the century, these gatherings began in Harlem and initially focused on extravagant feminine drag performances. As word spread about the balls, they attracted larger and larger audiences and the competitions became fiercer and more varied. The drag performers “walked” (competed) for trophies and prizes in a growing number of categories beyond most feminine (known as “femme realness”) or most glamorous, including categories for “butch queens”—gay and sometimes trans men who look “real” as different class-based male archetypes, such as “business executive,” “school boy,” and “thug.”
The many individuals seeking to participate in ball culture led to the establishment of “houses,” groups of Black and Latin@ “children” who gathered around a “house mother” or less often a “house father,” in the mid-1970s. These houses were often named after their leaders, such as Crystal LaBeija’s House of LaBeija, Avis Pendavis’s House of Pendavis, and Dorian Corey’s House of Corey, or took their names from leading fashion designers like the House of Chanel or the House of St. Laurent. The children, consisting of less experienced performers, walked in the balls under their house name and sought to win trophies for the glory of the house and to achieve “legendary” status for themselves. Given that many of the competitors were poor African American and Latin@ youth who came from broken homes or had been thrown out of their homes for being gay or transgender, the houses provided a surrogate family and a space where they could be accepted and have a sense of belonging (Cunningham, 1995; Trebay, 2000).
The ball culture spread to other cities in the 1980s and 1990s and achieved mainstream visibility in 1990 through Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris Is Burning and Madonna’s mega-hit song and video “Vogue.” In recent years, many of the New York balls have moved out of Harlem. They continue to include local houses and groups from other cities competing in a wide array of categories. Reflecting changes in the wider Black and Latin@ cultures, hip-hop and R & B have become more prominent in the ball scene, and a growing number of performers are butch queens who imitate rap musicians (Cunningham, 1995; Trebay, 2000).
In the 1950s and 1960s, lesbian, gay, and bisexual cross-dressers also found a home in bars, restaurants, and other venues that catered to (or at least tolerated) such a clientele. Sarria, for example, performed in drag at San Francisco’s Black Cat Bar in the 1950s and early 1960s and helped turn it into a social and cultural center for the city’s gay community until harassment from law enforcement and local authorities forced the bar to close (Boyd, 2003). Lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals—both those who did drag and those who did not—similarly carved out spaces in other US cities, despite regular police crackdowns against them.
Transsexual individuals also began to organize in the 1960s, though most of these efforts were small and short lived. In 1967, transgender people in San Francisco formed Conversion Our Goal, or COG, the first known transsexual support group in the United States. However, within a year, the organization had disintegrated into two competing groups, neither of which existed for very long. More successful was the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, a San Francisco–based social service agency established in 1968 with funding from Reed Erickson. That same year in New York City, Mario Martino, a transsexual man and registered nurse, and his wife founded Labyrinth, a counseling service for trans men. It was the first known organization in the United States to focus on the needs of transsexual men and worked with upwards of 100 transitioning individuals (Martino, 1977; Stryker, 2008).
The 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City have become legendary as the start of LGBTQ militancy and the birthplace of the LGBTQ liberation movement. However, Stonewall was not a unique event but the culmination of more than a decade of militant opposition by poor and working-class LGBTQ people to discriminatory treatment and police brutality. Much of this resistance took the form of spontaneous, everyday acts of defiance that were never documented or received little attention at the time, even in LGBTQ communities (Stryker, 2008).
The film Screaming Queens: The Riots at Compton’s Cafeteria connects the events at San Francisco’s Compton’s Cafeteria to the historical movements of the 1960s.
For example, one night in May 1959, two Los Angeles police officers went into Cooper’s Donuts—an all-night coffeehouse popular with drag queens and gay male hustlers, many of whom were Latin@ or African American—and began harassing and arresting the patrons in drag. The customers responded by fighting back, first by throwing doughnuts and ultimately by engaging in skirmishes with the officers that led the police to retreat and to call in backup. In the melee, the drag queens who had been arrested were able to escape (Faderman & Timmons, 2006; Stryker, 2008).
Sylvia Rivera and many of the other Stonewall participants were active in the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, and the anti–Vietnam War movement, and recognized that they would have to demand their rights as LGBTQ people, too. Rivera stated: “We had done so much for other movements. It was time....I always believed that we would have [to] fight back. I just knew that we would fight back. I just didn’t know it would be that night” (Feinberg, 1998, pp. 107, 109).
A similar incident occurred in San Francisco in 1966 at the Tenderloin location of Gene Compton’s Cafeteria—a 24-hour restaurant that, like Cooper’s, was frequented by drag queens and male hustlers, as well as the people looking to pick them up. As documented by historian Susan Stryker, the management called the police one August night, as it had done in the past, to get rid of a group of young drag queens who were seen as loitering. When a police officer tried to remove one of the queens forcibly, she threw a cup of coffee in his face and a riot ensued. Patrons pelted the officers with everything at their disposal, wrecking the cafeteria in the process. Vastly outnumbered, the police ran outside to call for reinforcements, only to have the drag queens chase after them, beating the officers with their purses and kicking them with their high heels. The incident served to empower the city’s drag community and motivated many to begin to organize for their rights (Silverman & Stryker, 2005; Stryker, 2008).
Three years later, the much larger and more widely known Stonewall Riots—which started at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City on June 28, 1969, and continued on and off for six days—inspired gender nonconforming people across the country and led to activism on an even greater scale. As with the earlier confrontations in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the immediate impetus for the Stonewall uprising was oppression by the local police, who regularly raided bars that were frequented by LGBTQ people to brutalize and arrest the patrons and to obtain payoffs from the bar owners in order to keep from being shut down. But the riots also reflected long-simmering anger. “Back then we were beat up by the police, by everybody....You get tired of being just pushed around,” recalls Sylvia Rivera, a Puerto Rican transgender woman who was a leader in the riots and the LGBTQ organizing that occurred afterward. “We were not taking any more of this shit” (Carter, 2004; Feinberg, 1998, p. 107).
Felicia Elizondo and Dee Dee at Compton’s Cafeteria riot anniversary, San Francisco, August 20, 2012 (photo by Liz Highleyman).
Sylvia Rivera, homeless, with Marlboro Man (copyright Mariette Pathy Allen).
On that June night, the police raided the Stonewall Inn and as usual began arresting the bar’s workers, customers who did not have identification, and those who were cross-dressed. But unlike in the past, the other patrons did not scatter when they were allowed to leave. Instead, they congregated outside and, with other LGBTQ people from the neighborhood, taunted the police as they tried to place the arrestees into a patrol wagon.
Accounts from this point on differ as to what incited the onlookers to violence; it is likely that events happened so fast that there was not one single precipitating incident. As the crowd grew, so too did anger toward the police for their rough treatment of the drag queens and at least one butch lesbian whom they had arrested. People began to throw coins at the officers, and when this failed to halt the brutality or to alleviate years of pent-up anger, they hurled whatever they could find—cans, bottles, cobblestones, and bricks from a nearby construction site (Duberman, 1993).
Unaccustomed to LGBTQ people resisting police brutality and fearful for their safety, the eight police officers retreated and barricaded themselves into the bar. In a reversal of roles, the LGBTQ crowd then tried to break in after them, while at least one person attempted to set the bar on fire. The arrival of police reinforcements likely kept those inside the bar from firing on the protesters. However, even the additional officers, who were members of an elite riot-control unit, could not immediately quell the uprising. The police would scatter people by wading into the crowd swinging their billy clubs, but rather than flee the area, the demonstrators simply ran around the block and, regrouping behind the riot squad, continued to jeer and throw objects at them.
At one point, the police turned around to a situation for which their training undoubtedly did not prepare them: a chorus line of drag queens, calling themselves the “Stonewall girls,” kicked up their heels—à la the Rockettes—and sang mockingly at the officers. Eventually, the police succeeded in dispersing the crowd, but only for the night. The rioting was similarly violent the following evening—some witnesses say more so—and sporadic and less combative demonstrations continued for the next several days (Duberman, 1993).
The effects of the Stonewall Riots were immediate and far-reaching. Among the first to notice a change in the LGBTQ community was Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine, the police officer who led the raid on the bar that night. “For those of us in public morals, things were completely changed,” Pine stated after the rebellion. “Suddenly [LGBTQ people] were not submissive anymore” (Duberman, 1993, p. 203).
The biggest impact may have been on LGBTQ youth. At the time of the Stonewall Riots, gay rights groups—often chapters of the Student Homophile League—existed at just six colleges in the United States, almost all of which were large universities in the Northeast. By 1971, groups had been formed at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the country (Beemyn, 2003). Reflecting the sense of militancy that had fueled the uprising, many of the new groups referred to themselves as Gay Liberation Fronts, after the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) that was formed in New York City a month after the riots, and typically had a more radical political agenda than the earlier student organizations. Many of the GLFs were also initially more welcoming to cross-dressers, drag queens, and transsexuals than the pre-Stonewall groups, and a number of transgender people helped form Gay Liberation Fronts.
Transgender people also established their own organizations in the immediate aftermath of the Stonewall Riots. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, an African American trans woman who had likewise been involved in the riots, founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in New York City in 1970 to support and to fight for the rights of the many young trans people who were living on the city’s streets. Rivera and Johnson hustled to open STAR House, a place where the youth could receive shelter, clothing, and food for free. The house remained open for two or three years and inspired similar efforts in Chicago, California, and England. Also in New York City in 1970, Lee Brewster and Bunny Eisenhower founded the Queens Liberation Front and led a campaign that decriminalized cross-dressing in New York. Brewster began Drag, one of the first politically oriented trans publications, in 1970 (Feinberg, 1998; Zagria, 2009). During this same time, trans man Jude Patton, along with Sister Mary Elizabeth Clark (formerly known as Joanna Clark), used funding from Reed Erickson to start disseminating information to trans people (Moonhawk River Stone, personal communication, May 12, 2013; Jamison Green, personal communication, June 6, 2013).
Despite the central role that trans people played in the Stonewall Riots and the political organizing that followed, much of the broader lesbian and gay movement soon abandoned them in an attempt to be more acceptable to the dominant society. Six months after the Stonewall riots, a group comprised mostly of white middle-class gay men, who were dissatisfied with the multiple issue politics and antiestablishment ethos of GLF, formed the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) in New York City to work “completely and solely” for their own equal rights (Duberman, 1993, p. 232). The group did not consider the rights of trans people to be relevant to its mission; GAA would not provide a loan to pay the rent to keep STAR House open or support a dance to raise the funds. Transgender people also did not feel welcomed in the group. Johnson remembered that she and Rivera were stared at when they attended GAA meetings, being the only trans people and sometimes the only people of color there (Jay & Young, 1972). Similar gay groups that excluded trans people subsequently formed in other cities.
Transgender women also often faced rejection in the 1970s from members of lesbian organizations, who viewed them not as “real women” but as “male infiltrators.” One of the most well-known victims of such prejudice was Beth Elliott, a transsexual lesbian activist and singer who joined the San Francisco chapter of the groundbreaking lesbian group the Daughters of Bilitis in 1971 and became its vice president and the editor of its newsletter. Although Elliott had been accepted for membership, she was forced out the following year as part of a campaign against her. She also faced opposition to her involvement in the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference. Elliott was on the conference’s planning committee and a scheduled performer, but when she took the stage, some audience members attempted to shout her down, saying that she was a man. Others defended her. Elliott managed to get through her performance, but the controversy continued.
In a keynote speech, feminist Robin Morgan viciously attacked Elliott, whom she called a “male transvestite,” who was “leeching off women who have spent entire lives as women in women’s bodies.” Morgan concluded her diatribe by declaring: “I charge him as an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a destroyer—with the mentality of a rapist” (Gallo, 2006; Stryker, 2008, pp. 104–105). Morgan called on the conference attendees to vote to eject Elliott. Although more than two-thirds reportedly chose to allow her to remain, Elliot was emotionally traumatized by the experience and decided to leave anyway.
The campaign against Elliott marked the start of the policing of “women’s spaces” by some lesbian separatists to exclude transsexual women. Another target was Sandy Stone, a sound engineer who, as part of the all-women Olivia Records, helped create the genre of women’s music in the mid-1970s. Stone had disclosed her transsexuality to the other women in the record collective and had their support, but when her gender history became widely known, Olivia was deluged with hate mail from lesbians—some threatening violence, others threatening a boycott if Stone was not fired. The collective initially defended her, but fearing that they would be put out of business, they reluctantly asked Stone to resign, which she did in 1979 (Califia, 1997; Devor & Matte, 2006).
Many lesbians had left activist organizations like GLF and GAA in the early and mid-1970s because of sexism among the predominantly gay male members, and there was not much that united the two groups, but one area of agreement was their rejection of trans people. In 1973, lesbian separatists and more conservative gay men in San Francisco organized an alternative Pride parade that banned trans people and individuals in drag; in subsequent years, this event became the city’s main Pride celebration. At the New York City Pride rally in 1973, Jean O’Leary of Lesbian Feminist Liberation read a statement that denounced drag queens as an insult to women, which further marked the exclusion of trans people from the “lesbian and gay” rights movement (Clendinen & Nagourney, 1999; Stryker, 2008).
The most vitriolic and influential attack on trans people was Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, published in 1979 and reissued in 1994. Raymond, a scholar in women’s studies, was one of the leading voices against Sandy Stone and against all transsexual women in lesbian feminist communities. While Robin Morgan argued that Elliott had “the mentality of a rapist,” Raymond went further, stating that transsexual women are rapists. In one of the most infamous passages, she claims: “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves.” She also contends that their supposedly secretive presence in lesbian feminist spaces constitutes an act of forced penetration that “violates women’s sexuality and spirit” (p. 104).
For Raymond, transsexual women are not women but “castrated” and “deviant” men who were a creation of the medical and psychological specialties that arose in support of gender-affirming surgeries—“the transsexual empire” to which her title refers. Ignoring centuries of gender nonconformity in cultures around the world, she considers transsexuality to be a recent phenomenon stemming from the development of genital surgeries, which she erroneously traces to Nazi Germany (as stated earlier, the first known gender-affirming surgery was performed in Germany in 1931, two years before Hitler came to power). To resist being taken over by the evil “transsexual empire,” Raymond advocates for a drastic reduction in the availability of gender-affirming surgery and recommends that transsexual individuals instead undergo “gender reorientation” (Stryker, 2008, p. 110).
Raymond’s inflammatory rhetoric and false allegations could be readily dismissed if her arguments had not had such a significant effect. Influenced in part by Raymond’s antitranssexual attacks, the gender identity clinics—which already served only a small number of trans individuals and were largely opposed by the medical establishment—performed even fewer surgeries and began to shut down altogether, starting with the Johns Hopkins program in 1979.
Talia Bettcher is a philosophy professor at Cal State Los Angeles.
It may seem obvious that feminist and trans politics go together like peanut butter and jelly. In both feminist and trans politics, there is a concern with gender oppression, so there appears to be a common cause. Trans women not only experience transphobia but also sexism; many trans men have had firsthand experience with sexism prior to transition (and even after if they are transphobically viewed as “really women”). So it might be surprising to learn that some (non-trans) feminists have viewed trans people in hostile, transphobic ways.
In the 1970s and 1980s, influential “second-wave” (non-trans) feminists such as Robin Morgan, Mary Daly, and Janice Raymond represented trans women as rapists and boundary violators trying to invade women’s space. Trans men were disregarded as mere tokens used to hide the patriarchal nature of the phenomenon of transsexuality. Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male systemizes these hostile views, and in trans circles it is widely regarded as a “classic” of transphobic literature.
While there are still non-trans feminists with these types of views, they are now in the minority. Much of this has to do with the emergence of so-called third-wave feminism. Transgender people are now often thought of as “beyond the binary.” One of the most important consequences of this development is that it became possible to view trans people as oppressed in a way that was not reduced to sexism. Perhaps the most important strand of third-wave feminism is the view that one cannot focus on only one kind of oppression (sexism) to the exclusion of others, such as racism (see Combahee River Collective, 1981). One important lesson of trans feminist Emi Koyama’s work is that any form of trans/feminism which marginalizes other forms of oppression, such as racism, does so at its own peril.
Despite these positive developments, there remains an important challenge for “trans/feminism.” Many trans people simply don’t identify as “beyond the binary” at all—they identify as plain men and women. Obviously the “beyond the binary” idea doesn’t provide much help to those trans people who, in this view, are regarded as “gender conservative.” How do we understand trans oppression/resistance if both “beyond the binary” and “trapped in the wrong body” are found to be inadequate? We might need a completely new theory.
Another factor in the closing of the Hopkins program and other gender identity clinics was a study published in 1979 by Jon Meyer, the director of the Hopkins clinic, and his secretary, Donna Reter, that purportedly showed “no objective improvement” among individuals who had undergone gender-affirming surgery at Hopkins, as compared to a group of transsexuals who had been turned down for surgery or had changed their minds (Denny, 2006, p. 176). Meyer and Reter’s study has been widely criticized for the arbitrariness of how it measured “social adjustment,” as well as for its value judgments: individuals who did not improve their socioeconomic standing, who continued to see a therapist, or who were unmarried or with a same-sex partner were deemed to be less well adjusted.
In addition, noticeably absent was any measure of the participants’ satisfaction or happiness with their lives. Meyer and Reter did, however, admit that only one of the individuals who underwent gender-affirming surgery expressed any regrets at having done so (and in this person’s case, because the surgery had been performed poorly). Other studies at the time, which considered the participants’ feelings, found much more positive outcomes from surgery (Bullough & Bullough, 1998; Rudacille, 2005).
The apparent bias of Meyer and Reter’s study was confirmed by a subsequent investigative report, which concluded that “the ending of surgery at the GIC [gender identity clinic] now appears to have been orchestrated by certain figures at Hopkins, who, for personal rather than scientific reasons, staunchly opposed any form of sex reassignment” (Denny, 2006, p. 176). One of these figures was the chair of the Psychiatry Department at Hopkins, Paul McHugh, who was responsible for closing the clinic. In an interview, he stated, “my personal feeling is that surgery is not a proper treatment for a psychiatric disorder, and it’s clear to me that these patients have severe psychological problems that don’t go away following surgery” (Zagria, 2010).
McHugh’s position that transsexual people were mentally disordered was a widespread belief among psychiatrists in the 1970s, despite the decades-long history of physicians successfully treating transsexuality as a physical concern. In 1980, this illness model was codified into the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which defined “transsexualism” as a “disorder” characterized by “a persistent sense of discomfort and inappropriateness about one’s anatomic sex and a persistent wish to be rid of one’s genitals and to live as a member of the other sex” (pp. 261–262).
Despite the efforts of some trans activists and allies to remove the diagnosis (just as “homosexuality” had been removed before the third edition), transsexuality continued to be listed as a psychological disorder in subsequent editions. The 1994 version of the DSM replaced the category “transsexualism” with “gender identity disorder,” but the diagnostic criteria remained largely unchanged. “A strong and persistent cross-gender identification” was evidence of a psychopathology (p. 532).
The 2013 edition of the DSM makes significant progress in undoing the stigma associated with transsexuality by replacing “gender identity disorder” with “gender dysphoria,” which is described as emotional distress resulting from “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender.” However, the latest version still defines gender nonconformity among children as pathological and includes a category of “transvestic disorder,” which, according to trans medical policy writer Kelley Winters (2010, 2012), “labels gender expression not stereotypically associated with assigned birth sex as inherently pathological and sexually deviant.”
While the early 1970s to the early 1980s were a cultural low point for trans people, the period did have a few bright spots. Notably, the 1970s marked the beginning of a steady stream of nonsensational transsexual books, mostly by individuals who had been successful in society as men before transitioning to female. Except for Jorgensen’s autobiography, the stories of transsexual women that were published in the 1960s and early 1970s were lurid exposés of female impersonators, strippers, and prostitutes with tabloid titles like “I Changed My Sex!” and “I Want to Be a Woman!” (Sherman, 1964; Star, 1963).
A new wave of transsexual autobiographies began with the 1974 publications of Jan Morris’s Conundrum and Canary Conn’s Canary. Morris, a renowned British author and travel writer who had accompanied the first known expedition to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1953, describes how she sublimated her sense of herself as female for decades through constant travel before undergoing gender-affirming surgery in 1972. Conn, a rising teenage rock star, transitioned in her early twenties, which seems to have led to the end of her singing career, while Morris continued to be a successful writer. Another significant autobiography, Mirror Image, was written in 1978 by award-winning Chicago Tribune newspaper reporter Nancy Hunt.
The most well-known autobiography of the era was Renée Richards’s Second Serve, published in 1983. Richards achieved international notoriety for successfully suing the Women’s Tennis Association when it barred her from competing in the 1976 US Women’s Open under a newly introduced “women-born women” policy. The court decision was groundbreaking and opened the door for other transsexual athletes. Surprisingly, though, Richards devotes relatively few pages of her autobiography to the case or her tennis career. Instead, she dedicates the majority of Second Serve to describing her struggle to accept herself as female, which came only after three failed attempts to go back to living as a man.
While the best-selling autobiographies by Jorgensen, Morris, and Richards, and to a lesser extent the works by Conn and Hunt, drew significant attention to the lives of transsexual women, the only full-length narrative by a trans man to be published in the United States prior to the 1990s was Mario Martino’s 1977 book Emergence: A Transsexual Autobiography (Stryker, 2008). Just as Morris, Hunt, and Richards pursued traditionally male careers in order to conform to societal gender expectations and to try to convince themselves and others of their masculinity, Martino entered a convent school, hoping but failing to suppress his feelings and be more feminine. After transitioning, he began to provide support to other transsexual men.
The story of Steve Dain, one of the first public trans men, was unfortunately eclipsed quickly from newspaper headlines by pieces about Renée Richards. Dain was a high school girls’ physical education teacher who fought to retain his job after transitioning in 1976, appearing on talk shows across the country. Although he ultimately won the right to teach again, he could not find a school that would hire him, so became a chiropractor with his own business. He died in 2007 of metastatic breast cancer at age 68 (Jamison Green, personal communication, June 6, 2013).
Another high point for trans people in the 1970s and early 1980s was the expansion of organizing efforts by both heterosexual male and gay and bisexual cross-dressers, which transformed local groups into national organizations. Cross-dressers started Fantasia Fair (2011), a weeklong series of social, entertainment, and education events in Provincetown, Massachusetts. First held in 1975, “The Fair” has become the oldest continuing trans event in the United States. Transsexual women likewise established many more support groups in the 1970s and 1980s—sometimes inclusive of heterosexual male cross-dressers who chose not to affiliate with Tri-Ess, and other times inclusive of transsexual men. But few trans male individuals joined these groups, as they were dominated by transsexual women and, with meetings focused on topics such as female makeup and clothing tips, failed to address the needs of transsexual men.
A few trans male support groups were started in the 1970s and early 1980s, including groups in Los Angeles, New York City, and Toronto (Green, 2004). The first FTM-only educational and support organization in the United States, which was called simply “FTM,” was begun in San Francisco in 1986 by Lou Sullivan, a gay transsexual man. The group published the quarterly FTM Newsletter, which became the leading source of information related to trans men and had hundreds of subscribers from around the world. In 1990, Sullivan also compiled the first guide for trans men, Information for the Female-to-Male Crossdresser and Transsexual, and wrote the first book explicitly about a trans male individual—a biography of Jack Bee Garland, a female-assigned journalist and social worker who lived as a man for 40 years in San Francisco in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Stryker, 2008). Sullivan died from complications from AIDS at the age of 39 in 1991.
Trans man Lou Sullivan helped mental health workers to understand the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity, and specifically pushed them to realize that trans people could be gay identified (Jamison Green, personal communication, June 6, 2013).
Under the subsequent leadership of Jamison Green (2004), FTM, which changed its name to FTM International in 1994, became the largest trans male organization in the world. Green went on to become a more public figure than Sullivan had been, convening the first trans male conference in 1995 (thanks to a grant from Dallas Denny), educating police officers and lawmakers, and working to reform the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care. Following in the footsteps of Stephen Whittle, Green was elected as the second trans President of WPATH.
Yoseñio V. Lewis
Rev. Moonhawk River Stone
Yoseñio V. Lewis is a black/Latino FTM and long-term social justice activist and artist, and Rev. Moonhawk River Stone, MS, LMHC is an interfaith minister, psychotherapist, consultant, educator, and writer.
Before transgender health care was a vibrant, multifaceted, comprehensive movement, there was the all-volunteer Eliminating Disparities Committee (informally known as the Transgender Health Care Committee) of the National Coalition for LGBT Health (NCLGBTH), active from 2003 to 2005. In 2004, we issued a report entitled “An Overview of U.S. Trans Health Priorities” and created the first of their kind fact sheets, one for trans men’s health and one for trans women’s health.
At that time, some of us had contact with the Boston Women’s Health Collective, the producers of the ground-breaking feminist work, Our Bodies, Ourselves (OBOS), and were offered the opportunity to review the groundbreaking inclusion of transgender issues and health concerns in the fifth edition of OBOS, which came out in May of 2005.
We began discussions about doing an analogous book for transgender people and calling ourselves the Our Trans Bodies Ourselves (OTBO) Collective. We created a closed yahoo group for communication (still a sort of new idea in 2006) and sought to invite as diverse a group of trans-identified individuals as we could. We had a formal consensus process for all decision making. It worked very well, and though it was time consuming, the results made the work we did authentic and powerful. Our archives contain those procedures and structures in great detail.
The OTBO Collective developed an elemental strategic plan for the book moving through 2009 to give our work form, structure, and guidance. We created subcommittees for the different areas of work and began the process of becoming our own nonprofit entity. We identified chapter areas and began some initial work on those chapters through what was then a brand new process: a wiki page (which is still up!).
Our OTBO Collective lived but a short 13 months. The practical difficulties all of us had (full-time work or school, full-time activist work, and/or caregiving for loved ones) proved our undoing. We also could not find funding beyond the Coalition’s phone support to continue our work.
The OTBO Collective’s most enduring sadness is that our book never came to be given to the transgender community. But we gave the transgender health care movement the shove and momentum it needed to blossom. Not bad at all for a “failed” Collective!
This volume, Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, is the next generation of our work—the blossom of the seeds we cast. Maybe it is just what we need to empower Our Many Selves forward into an increasingly welcoming and healthy world for all trans people.The authors would like to thank the following people: Jessica Xavier, Donald Hitchcock, Susan Hollinshead, Mara Keisling, Emilia Lombardi, Samuel Lurie, Diego Sanchez, Ben Singer, Bobbi Williams, Becky Allison, Heather Stephenson, Judy Norsigian, and the late Hutson W. Inniss.
A larger trans rights movement grew significantly in the 1990s, facilitated by the increasing use of the term “transgender” to encompass all individuals whose gender identity or expression differs from the gender assigned to them at birth. This wider application of “transgender” developed among writers and activists beginning in the mid-1980s and started to catch on more widely in the early 1990s.
Holly Boswell defined the term in a groundbreaking 1991 article “The Transgender Alternative,” as “encompass[ing] the whole spectrum” of gender diversity and bringing together all gender nonconforming people (Stryker, 2008, p. 123). This understanding of “transgender” became most strongly associated with socialist writer and activist Leslie Feinberg, who called on all people who face discrimination for not conforming to gender norms to organize around their shared oppression in hir 1992 pamphlet Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come and in hir subsequent books, Transgender Warriors and Trans Liberation. Writers such as Kate Bornstein and Martine Rothblatt also adopted the term, which helped make its usage commonplace by the late 1990s (Bornstein, 1994; Feinberg, 1992, 1996, 1998; Rothblatt, 1994).
The broad-based political movement that Feinberg envisioned came to fruition in response to continued acts of discrimination and violence against trans people. Reflecting the persistence of antitransgender bias among some lesbian feminists, trans women were banned from the National Lesbian Conference in 1991 and a postoperative transsexual woman, Nancy Jean Burkholder, was expelled that same year from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. The festival, an annual week-long women’s outdoor music and cultural event, has been a pilgrimage for thousands of lesbians since it began in 1976. While the event had always been for “womyn only,” Burkholder’s removal was the first known exclusion of a transsexual woman; afterwards, festival organizers articulated a policy limiting attendance to “womyn-born womyn” (G. Rubin, 2006).
The growth of an out trans community over the course of little more than a decade is demonstrated by the different responses to the expulsions of Stone and Burkholder. While few spoke publicly in Stone’s defense in 1979, the ouster of Burkholder in 1991 was widely denounced and led to protests at “Michigan” itself. Trans activists passed out thousands of “I might be transsexual” buttons to festivalgoers the next year, and following the removal of four more transsexual women in 1993, they created what became known as “Camp Trans” across from the entrance to the festival.
Camp Trans consisted of several dozen transsexual women and supporters who leafleted Michigan attendees and held workshops and readings that attracted hundreds of women from the other side of the road. The significance of this protest was noted by Riki Wilchins, one of the main organizers: “Camp Trans was the first time transpeople ever coordinated and pulled off a national event. Not only that, it was the first time that significant numbers of the hard-core lesbian-feminist community backed us” (Boyd, 2006; Califia, 1997, p. 227; Denny, 2006). The organizers of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, though, refused to change their policy, leading trans activists to re-establish Camp Trans in 1999. The festival leadership finally gave in to the pressure in the mid-2000s and no longer enforced their policy, while continuing to insist that only womyn-born womyn should attend. The situation is a version of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”: The festival organizers do not press the issue, and a number of trans women have attended the festival without calling significant attention to themselves. Camp Trans (2011) continues to be held to advocate, as their slogan states, for “room for all kinds of womyn.”
Campers at Camp Trans (photo by Bex H.).
A view of Camp Trans (photo by Bex H.).
It was not only lesbian feminists who discriminated against trans people in the early 1990s. When lesbian and gay leaders were planning to hold a March on Washington in 1993, transgender activists, with the support of bisexual allies, sought to have the word “transgender” added to the name of the event. Although some local organizing committees supported transgender inclusion, the march’s national steering committee voted by a significant margin to use the name “March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation.” The decision prompted many trans people to become more politically active and more organized.
Another major incident that mobilized a large number of trans people, especially many trans men, was the murder of 21-year-old Brandon Teena near Falls City, Nebraska, in the early hours of New Year’s Day in 1994. Teena lived as a man, but he was outed as being assigned female at birth when the county sheriff’s office reported his arrest on a misdemeanor to the local newspaper. Following the disclosure, two men whom Teena thought to be friends, John Lotter and Tom Nissen, beat and raped him, and a week after he reported the sexual assault to the sheriff, the two killed Teena and two others.
Brandon Teena should have been here, Gay Pride Parade, New York City (copyright Mariette Pathy Allen).
Teena’s murder touched off a series of important protests by trans people and allies, who were incensed not only by the horrific murders and the bias of the police for failing to arrest Lotter and Nissen after the rape but also by the initial media coverage, in which Teena was often portrayed as a butch lesbian and referred to as “her” (Califia, 1997). In response to the particularly insensitive reporting of the Village Voice, members of Transexual Menace, a direct action group that Riki Wilchins and Denise Norris had just started in New York City, picketed outside of the newspaper’s offices. The group and other trans activists also held a vigil outside of the Nebraska courthouse where Lotter was standing trial in 1995. Wilchins called the event “a turning point for trans activism,” because it was the first highly visible national demonstration organized by trans people and helped draw unprecedented media attention to an antitransgender hate crime (Califia, 1997, p. 232).
Teena’s life and death became the subject of many news stories, books, and movies, including Kimberly Peirce’s 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry, in which Hilary Swank played Teena and won an Academy Award for Best Actress. What also made this case different from most previous murders of trans people was that Teena’s killers received significant sentences—Nissen was given life imprisonment without the possibility of parole and Lotter the death penalty.
Transexual menace logo (courtesy of Riki Wilchins).
Press conference in Washington, D.C. (copyright Mariette Pathy Allen).
Riki Wilchins, MA, has written three books on gender theory, founded GenderPAC and The Transexual Menace, and was selected by Time as one of “100 Civic Innovators for the 21st Century.”
It started, as serious things often do, with a murder and a fight. The fight was the simple part. An attendee at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival was stopped by two women from Security and asked if she was really a man. She refused to affirm or deny. So, asserting that they thought she was a man, Nancy Jean Burkholder was forcibly evicted from the event. Afterwards, the Festival quietly and retroactively announced a new policy it called “womyn-born-womyn”—a weird, supposedly feminist-y sounding neologism which everyone concerned understood to mean “no trannies allowed.” Janis Walworth, a friend who had accompanied Nancy, reached out to several activists about coming to the next year’s Festival to raise awareness—few people even knew what had happened or were aware of the policy.
Four of us showed up that year. We camped out across the road from the main gate in the National Forest. Not to miss a beat, Festival Security was soon talking with Park Rangers and asking them to throw us out, but fortunately there were no grounds for doing so. We planned several workshops, distributed a few fliers to surprised attendees driving and walking by, and sat back to see what would happen next. What happened was that hundreds of women walked miles out of the Festival to attend our workshops, hang out, and offer support. A few even came to stay. Our little campground became crowded every evening. It became obvious that this was something that could scale, and we began laying plans for a bigger, better presence the next year. Transgender people were pushing back.
In fact, the idea of transgender protest had been circulating in the community. Transgender Nation, modeled on (and some said a reaction to transphobia in) Queer Nation, had been launched by Anne Ogborn in San Francisco. It had some early successes, but hadn’t really caught on. This was still at a time when many if not most of us still hoped to “pass.” There were relatively few public transgender activists. Susan Stryker had written a manifesto just a few years earlier in which she pointed to trans-visibility as a critical factor in launching transgender advocacy. But transgender people organizing politically and in public to confront cisgender bigotry (as opposed to coming together socially inside hotel conferences) was rare.
Some of us decided to print up a batch of “Transexual Menace” T-shirts, modeled on a combination of the Lavender Menace (who confronted NOW over its exclusion of lesbians) and the genderfuck of Rocky Horror Picture Show. We began handing them out any time we came together politically for events. They were visible, cheeky, and determinedly tongue-in-cheek, both outing ourselves but also mocking straights for their fear and loathing of transsexuals. . . and an instant hit. Being “out, loud, and proud” was new for trans people used to being very closeted.
I announced I was going to take a carload of T-shirts to the Southern Comfort conference in Atlanta with some of the NY Menace to see how they would play on a larger stage. This immediately launched widespread rumors that the Menace was coming to “disrupt” the conference and ruin the event. That was okay—the more hysteria the better. We could mock trans paranoia as well as cis paranoia. When I arrived, every one of the dozens of T-shirts was gone within 24 hours. Not just transsexuals, but academics, and even straight male cross-dressers (and their wives!) who had been closeted all their lives wore the black, blood-dripping red T-shirts. . . over their dresses. . . out of the hotel, all over Atlanta.
This was entirely new. Clearly, something was shifting in trans political consciousness. Pride was challenging, if not entirely replacing, passing. Within two years activists had started Menace chapters in 39 cities. Shifting, indeed.
Around this time, the Village Voice published a piece about the 1994 murder of FTM Brandon Teena, rubbing salt in the wound by positioning Brandon as a “hot butch,” a lesbian dreamboat, and referring to him as “Teena” and “she” and “her” throughout. The Menace promptly picketed both the Voice and the piece’s author. Many other gay and lesbian media outlets ignored the murder entirely because he wasn’t (wait for it. . .) gay or lesbian.
The murder trial of Brandon’s assailants, John Lotter and Tom Nissen, was set to start in Falls City, Nebraska. We decided there needed to be a visible, public response from the community. With Boston’s Nancy Nangeroni and Tony Baretto-Neto, a transgender deputy sheriff from Florida (who provided security), we announced a Memorial Vigil outside the courthouse on the first day of the trial. We didn’t know what would happen or if anyone would show. Forty-two people showed up, including Leslie Feinberg (author of Stone Butch Blues) and a quiet unknown filmmaker named Kimberly Pierce working on a script tentatively titled Boys Don’t Cry.
Apparently, transsexuals in black Menace T-shirts was not a common sight in Falls City, Nebraska. By noon, the local neo-Nazis showed up, spitting at us out of the windows of their trucks and trying to run us off the sidewalks. Tony had liaised with the Sheriff’s office beforehand and when a group of the skinheads advanced toward us on foot, a line of Deputy Sheriffs was all that stood between us and serious violence. It was chilling, knowing we were depending on the same Sheriff’s office that had outed Brandon and led to his death, perhaps even some of the same officers. So after that, Tony founded Transgender Officers Protect & Serve (TOPS).
Back in Michigan, plans were forming for what was inevitably becoming known as “Camp Trans.” That year, 30 of us showed up, again camping out across from the main gate. This time, instead of a few workshops, we had scheduled three solid days of workshops, musical events, and teach-ins, with a special speak-out by Leslie Feinberg. We drew almost a thousand attendees over three days, many of whom went back in wearing Menace T-shirts; even supportive members of Security wore them openly. Then, on the last day, a group of leather-clad Lesbian Avengers asked why we didn’t just come inside. Kidding, I asked them why they didn’t just send an escort. To my shock, they agreed instantly. That evening, four dozen of them showed up and escorted Leslie Feinberg, myself, and 10 other members of Camp Trans into the Festival and to a presentation attended by hundreds of waiting fans and supporters. The trans-discrimination policy, while still official policy, was for all intents broken.
Alas, the train of trans murders was not. Brandon’s death was a wake-up call. Once we started paying attention to and tracking transgender murders, it was shocking how many there. Deborah Forte, Channelle Pickett, Christian Paige, James Percy Rivers, Tarayon Corbitt, Quincy Taylor, Tyra Hunter—and that was just 1995.
This was not as immediately obvious as it seems. The Internet was new, there was no Google (that was three years in the future), many people still didn’t have or use e-mail. Finding out about new victims meant calling activists in different cities or looking for local news that began with the vague and stigmatizing words: “The body of a man wearing women’s clothing. . .”
Nancy, Tony, and I decided that whenever a transgender person was murdered, we would fly in to coordinate another memorial vigil. Transgender people from the local community always came out to support the events, and it created fresh media coverage and attention that had been absent.
Yet it quickly became apparent that we couldn’t expect to wage a struggle against violence and discrimination from a psychiatric category. We could portray ourselves in media as patients suffering from a medical disorder, or as an oppressed minority demanding their political and civil rights, but it was very difficult to do both simultaneously. The American Psychiatric Association was conveniently holding their annual conference in New York that year. With signboards declaring “Keep Your Diagnoses OFF our Bodies!” and accusing them of “GenderPathoPhilia” (defined “as an unnatural need or desire to pathologize any kind of gender that makes you feel uncomfortable”), the NYC Menace picketed the APA. Our list of demands was brief: depathologize transsexuality, just as long ago they had depathologized homosexuality.
It soon became apparent that you couldn’t stop the war from a M*A*S*H tent. Transpeople kept dying with regularity—one every few months. We needed to be on the front lines, or at least for transgender issues to be on the national agenda. All our actions had been local—one event, one city. I asked New York’s Lynn Walker how we could start a more national movement and she answered (quite brilliantly, in retrospect), “start doing things at the national level.” Out of that comment came two developments. First was GenderPAC, the first national organization devoted to political advocacy for the right to gender identity and expression. It was formalized at a meeting of the community held outside Philadelphia in 1995. The second was National Gender Lobby Day, with activist Jane Fee and Phyllis Frye (now Texas’s first transgender judge).
One hundred four transgender activists and their partners showed up. The New York Times led their national news with us. Strangely titled “Shunning He and She They Fight for Respect,” it was accompanied by the picture of a bearded Jamison Green sitting quietly in a suit on the D.C. Metro (which no doubt confused many readers). It was our first real print coverage of transgender political activism. Today you can’t pick up the Times, Washington Post, Time, Slate, or any other major outlet without reading trans news. But that was the first big piece.
Street activism was all about being insubordinate and loud; it was serious theater, to compel media attention. Capitol Hill was a different game. This was being professionally trans, sitting in a business suit in Congressional offices and patiently explaining our community’s needs. It was new and intimidating but also tremendously validating and exhilarating. We were no longer Kate Bornstein’s gender outlaws; we were citizens, voters, taxpayers. We were legitimate. In spite of that, I frankly expected us all to get arrested on Capitol Hill when we inevitably had to use the women’s rooms, especially the many male cross-dressers who had (bravely) shown up. But that didn’t happen. And that morning, as the sun rose over the Capitol dome, all of us stood together nervously before a bank of microphones and media cameras, taking turns answering questions before marching off to our first Congressional appointments. It was a sight: 100 transgender people walking off together to meet their elected representatives. A doorway had opened. A community was on the move. Something new had begun.
In addition to Camp Trans and Transexual Menace, a number of other trans institutions and groups were established in the early and mid-1990s. Dallas Denny created the American Educational Gender Information Service (AEGIS) in Decatur, Georgia, in 1990 to disseminate information about trans people, which included publishing Chrysalis Quarterly and The Transgender Treatment Bulletin (AEGIS, 1999). One of the largest annual trans events, the Southern Comfort conference, began in Atlanta in 1991, and the International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy, a yearly meeting to discuss strategies for creating transgender-supportive laws, was convened by attorney Phyllis Frye in Houston from 1992 to 1997 (Frye, 2001; Stryker, 2008). Also in 1992, Bet Power founded the East Coast FTM Group, the first FTM-only support group in the Eastern United States, in Northampton, Massachusetts. Today, it is the second-oldest continuing trans male organization in the world, after FTM International (B. Power, personal communication, June 15, 2011). In 1995, Wilchins began the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition (GenderPAC), a national organization whose accomplishments included producing some of the first reports on hate crimes against gender nonconforming people and holding an annual National Gender Lobby Day to urge members of Congress to address gender-based violence and discrimination.
Blake, in costume. Blake Alford is one of the main organizers of the Southern Comfort Conference (copyright Mariette Pathy Allen).
The 1990s also saw the highly visible, direct-action tactics pioneered by radical groups like ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and Queer Nation begin to infuse the transgender movement. The first trans organization to reflect this new queer activism was Transgender Nation, a subgroup of San Francisco’s Queer Nation chapter, which was formed in 1992 by Anne Ogborn to fight antitrans prejudice within the chapter and within society (Stryker, 2008). Soon Transgender Nation chapters were established in several other cities, most notably in Washington, D.C., where the group helped lead the response to the death of Tyra Hunter, a transsexual woman who passed away in 1995 after a D.C. firefighter and an emergency room physician denied her proper medical treatment because she was transgender. Although Transgender Nation was short lived, it inspired the creation of two other chapter-based trans activist groups, Transexual Menace and It’s Time America!, and led the trans movement to become more visible and more confrontational.
The most significant factor in the development of a national trans movement may have been the rise of the Internet in the mid-1990s. As sociologist Eve Shapiro (2010) states, the Internet revolutionized the movement by “allow[ing] transgender people to connect with one another more easily, especially those who live in geographically isolated places,” and by “giv[ing] individuals ways to experiment with defining their gender” (p. 132). Shapiro shows how online activism mobilized large numbers of people and generated substantial media attention in the debate over the American Psychiatric Association’s pathologizing of trans people in the DSM.
The Internet helped to give voice to trans people of color. Monica Roberts, a black trans woman from Houston who transitioned in 1994, started the award-winning blog TransGriot, which has become one of the most well-known hubs for news and information about trans people of color (Roberts, n.d.).
A 2006 national transgender study by Genny Beemyn and Sue Rankin also documented the importance of the Internet, especially for the participants under 50 years old, for whom the Web was their primary method of meeting others like themselves and accessing resources. The older participants less commonly socialized virtually, but many first recognized themselves as transgender and realized that they were not alone through exploring the Web. The study respondents in their forties or older often described feeling isolated or being in denial about their identities for decades—until they discovered online resources. Tina, an interviewee who had cross-dressed for 40 years, captured the sentiments of many participants: “I learned from reading, but I was liberated by the Internet!” (Beemyn & Rankin, 2011, pp. 57–58).
Like the growth of the Internet, the development of queer studies in the early 1990s helped create a space for trans people. Texts by queer theorists, such as Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), Diana Fuss (1989), Judith Butler (1990), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990), and Teresa de Lauretis (1991), laid the groundwork for transgender scholarship and greatly influenced how gender and sexuality were considered in academia. Transgender studies emerged as its own discipline in the late 1990s and early 2000s through conferences, academic email lists, special journal issues, and articles and books by the first generation of scholars whose primary area of research was transgender people. These scholars included Susan Stryker (1994), C. Jacob Hale (1996), Aaron Devor (1997), Judith Halberstam (1998), Jay Prosser (1998), Jason Cromwell (1999), Viviane Namaste (2000), and Stephen Whittle (2002).
The work of trans activists, writers, and scholars led a growing number of lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals and groups to become supportive of the rights of trans people and to consider them a part of what became known as the LGBTQ community. While many lesbian feminists in the 1970s and 1980s were influenced by The Transsexual Empire, many young lesbians in the mid and late 1990s—some of whom had yet to be born when Raymond’s book was published—had their attitude toward trans people shaped by Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw. Feinberg’s semiautobiographical 1993 novel tells the moving story of Jess Goldberg, an individual who journeys from being a butch lesbian in the years before the Stonewall Riots, to passing as a man in order to survive the economic recession of the 1970s, to living outside of a gender binary in the 1980s. Bornstein’s 1994 work combines memoir, performance, and commentary to offer insights into how society constructs gender. Many young queer women activists, as well as transgender individuals, considered these books necessary reading, and many instructors in LGBTQ and sexuality studies assigned them in courses in the 1990s.
Another point of connection between trans individuals and non-trans young queer women that resulted in increasing support of trans people was involvement in drag king culture. Individuals assigned female at birth have long experimented with gender and sought to blur gender lines by performing in “men’s” clothing. The contemporary phenomenon of drag king performances emerged in the mid-1980s in London and San Francisco, and within a decade, drag king shows and competitions involving both transgender men and cisgender lesbians were regularly held in major cities in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia (Ashburn, 2010). “In the last fifteen years, drag king culture has created a rope bridge of intellectual dialogue between the lesbian and transgender communities,” states Sile Singleton, an African American transgender person who organizes and performs as Luster/Lustivious de la Virgion in drag king shows. “Because drag kinging by its very nature invites self-exploration into gender, it has nurtured a noticeably less negative backlash toward transgendered bodies” (S. Singleton, personal communication, July 18, 2011). The first international event, the International Drag King Extravaganza, took place in Columbus, Ohio, in 1999. It brought together many drag king performers and troupes, as well as individuals who studied, filmed, and photographed drag kings, for the first time (Troka, 2003).
Sile P. Singleton is a scholar, philanthropist, parent, writer, social activist, and queer(ed) performance artist.
I was born in 1961, and grew up during the cresting height of several social movements (i.e., the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, the Black Panthers, the hippie movement, and anti-Vietnam war protests). Sitting at the dinner table, my formative years were filled with the background noise of Walter Cronkite’s reports on social unrest and the demands for equality sweeping, not just the good old US of A, but the world. In every newspaper, there were headlines about people demanding to be seen and treated fairly.
However, the reality of my situation was not about personal freedom. My staunchly democratic and liberal mother was terrified by my “mannishness.” Her usual reprogramming tactics included several verbal assaults referencing my walk and stance (like a peacock), my sweating and smell (like a football player), and my voice and laughter (like Barry White). I actually only pretended to be bothered by her attempts to “save me.” Secretly, I was relieved that I was recognizable, as male, because somewhere I have always known, regardless of an anatomically correct appendage (or, in my case, lack thereof) on the heavenly chart, I am male. Now I won’t say it is as simple as that, because for all the soul brother energy I ooze, I am most comfortable when packing in hot pants and 10-inch-high, matching lime pleather go-go boots. I couldn’t feel more he than when the bangs of my circa 1971 magenta “Geraldine Jones”-styled wig begin to fall into my 3-inch-long “Patti Labelle”-styled eyelashes, with my chest bound tight into a 36-inch wall of pectoral bulk. What is most amazing about all of this is that I had little conscious knowledge of these facts, prior to my 1992 involvement with a little historical Midwestern phenom known as the H.I.S. KINGS Show.
H.I.S. KINGS, a female-to-male, cross-dressing, gender-bending, lip-synching, entertainment troupe, was one of the country’s first drag king ensembles when it formed in Columbus, Ohio, in 1992. The troupe was the accidental brainchild of a couple of bored women’s studies graduate students and three in-your-face rad-ass lesbians named Helen, Ivett, and Sue (hence, “H.I.S.”). We had no idea that the wardrobe we decided to explore would be so critical to whom we see ourselves as now in terms of sex, sexuality, and gender identity.
The first show opened at a dyke bar named Summit Station in Columbus on September 13, 1992. That night five scared “kids,” including a birthday girl, a brand new DJ, and three budding drag kings, took the stage with no real idea of what they were doing. However, when the light bulb lit and the opportunity arrived to share all of me as the show’s premiere “Hostess with the Mostest,” Lustivious Dela Virgion, I did not hesitate. We practiced for seven to twenty hours a week. I was surrounded by people with similar chemistry. It was an amazing experience to be able to hang out with folks who were open to and accepted “beings” who exhibited multiple genders. At its height, the experience was exhilarating. At its close, exasperating. All in all, it was a fantastic “coming of gender” trip. And now, 20 years later, I know I experienced utopia, as we dared to celebrate masculinity: male, female, and otherwise.
The efforts of trans activists and allies resulted in many national, state, and local organizations in the United States that had focused primarily on the rights of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals to begin to address gender identity issues. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force added trans people to its mission statement in 1997, and PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) did so the following year. Other national organizations were initially more hesitant to include trans people in their work. The largest lesbian and gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), amended its mission statement in 2001 and GLAAD (formerly the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) only did so in 2013. On the state and local level, most of the organizations established since the mid-1990s have included trans people in their names and missions. Cases in point are the professionally staffed offices and centers that have been founded at US and Canadian colleges and universities to further sexual and gender diversity. Among the 26 offices and centers created before 1995, all but three had names that indicated that their constituencies were “gay and lesbian” or “gay, lesbian, and bisexual” individuals. Today there are more than 150 such centers and offices, and all are transgender inclusive in both their names and mission statements (Beemyn, 2002; Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals, 2011).
Patrick Califia took on trans history and politics in his 1997 book Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism (Berkeley, CA: Cleis Press).
However, the proliferation of LGBTQ organizations has not always resulted in greater attention to the needs of trans people; in some cases, the “T” seems to stand for “token,” rather than “transgender.” The most infamous example of transgender inclusion being little more than rhetoric involved the Human Rights Campaign. In 1994, the organization drafted and had allies in Congress introduce the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill to protect workers based on their sexual orientation. Transgender leaders were incensed by the exclusion of “gender identity” and lobbied Congress and the public for it to be added to the legislation—only to have HRC work to thwart their efforts. Following the failure of the bill by one vote in the Senate, HRC continued to insist on shutting out trans people when the legislation was reintroduced the next year, fearing that a more inclusive bill would lose votes. In response, trans activists and allies picketed the organization’s fundraising events, until HRC agreed to support an amendment to add “gender identity” as a protected class (Califia, 1997). Neither the amendment nor the original bill was approved by Congress, and the legislation was stalled for the next decade.
In 2006, ENDA was revived by openly gay Representative Barney Frank. However, after deciding that the transgender-inclusive bill would not readily pass, Frank put forward the legislation without protection for transgender people. Despite HRC’s promise that it would support only transgender-inclusive legislation, the organization endorsed Frank’s bill. HRC’s about-face showed that some within the mostly older, more conservative lesbian and gay establishment continued to see transgender people as dispensable. In support of a trans-inclusive ENDA, nearly 400 LGBTQ groups—virtually every major LGBTQ organization other than HRC—formed a coalition called United ENDA (unitedenda.org) to advocate for the restoration of gender identity protection. Although the effort failed to change the bill (which passed the House of Representatives in 2007 but died in the Senate), it represented an unprecedented level of support for transgender rights, and the coalition succeeded in having gender identity language included in ENDA thereafter, demonstrating that much had changed since the movement first abandoned trans people in the 1970s.
Laura A. Jacobs, LCSW, is a psychotherapist and activist in the New York City area specializing in LGBTQ and sexual minority populations, a member of the board of directors of the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, and the author of the upcoming book: Many Paths, The Choice of Gender.
“We know what we are, but know not what we may become.”—Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 5
Human identity has been intertwined with technology since the harnessing of fire. Transportation has changed how we move, electricity has restructured our days, agriculture has altered our diets, education has enhanced our thinking, and medicine has prolonged our lives. For trans and gender nonconforming people this is even more direct; hormones and surgeries reshape our bodies while telecommunications and psychotherapy fashion our selves. And this relationship will propel us into our futures.
The historical narrative of trans identity—“born in the wrong body”—was one of brokenness and victimization. Whether the error was attributed to biology, genetics, or a deity, such language positioned us as powerless, laboring to rectify a mistake outside our control. It reinforced “male” and “female” binaries of appearance and behavior. Trans people were thought to have been accidentally placed in the wrong category.
Drawing on Karl Ulrichs’s notion from 1860 of gay men having “a woman’s soul trapped in a man’s body,” early trans people adopted these narratives, offering them to providers who established diagnoses and treatments; the stories were repeated to others, who reiterated them once more, reinforcing the narratives further. Transition was understood as a means to remedy dysfunction, but it restricted identities to only those that fit within binary norms. No others were acceptable.
But many now consider themselves androgynous, Two-Spirited, genderqueer, or otherwise nonconforming. Through modern, client-centered treatment models, people can design for themselves bodies that may or may not be easily labeled, in innovative attempts to craft identity and to destabilize entrenched cultural constructions.
We can reinterpret trans identity as a call to explore through gender. Instead of insisting we must be one because we cannot be the opposite, or that we must be any particular gender because it represents a “true self,” we can engage in open-ended investigation, without judgment or predetermined conclusion, remaking our genders in empowered choice and artistic self-creation. We need no longer justify our changes by victimization or feel compelled to live by preexisting norms. We can approach gender as an arena to examine questions of meaning within the human experience.
As technology further impacts the body, gender will be less associated with binaries or even a spectrum. Prosthetics are already available for many applications, in forms both naturalistic and unorthodox, unions of mechanization and living tissue restoring or enhancing abilities. And in the future, surgery and genetic modification will liberate us from the “two arms-two legs-genitals-torso-head” outline we have at present.
Simultaneously, cybernetics and virtual reality will enable us to exist in online worlds via direct links to the brain. Initially these arenas will be simplistic representations of external reality, but these environments will not be bound by material laws and the embodiments we assume will rapidly be more abstract. We may exist as pure intelligences, occupying nonfigurative bodies as desired for any given moment. Today’s chatrooms and cartoonish avatars will be passé.
Ultimately we will abandon traditional gender expression and gender dimorphism. Genitalia and self will no longer be based on “penis/vagina,” “masculine/feminine” ideals, and transition will not be a shift from one gender to another but from the original human figure to something entirely novel. There will be countless human manifestations; people will be multilimbed with alternate sensory organs, have numerous and interchangeable genitalia, and occupy genders that are context dependent and ever varying. Our identities will be unlike anything currently conceivable and gender itself may become infinite. Hopefully, this progress will be available to all.
Those of us who perceive our transitions as imaginative constructions of body, identity, and relationship to society can be at the forefront of this revolution. We can be among the first to evolve toward the posthuman.
We know less than we would like to about transgender history in the United States, especially about nonbinary genders in many Native American cultures before and following European conquest, the lives of gender nonconforming individuals in other communities of color, and the experiences of all people who transgressed gender norms prior to the 20th century. We do know that gender nonconforming individuals have been documented in communities and cultures in what would become the United States since the 16th century. The efforts of transgender people over the 20th century and into the 21st to achieve visibility and justice are adding rich, vibrant chapters to this history.
My heartfelt thanks to Kylar Broadus, Laura A. Jacobs, Joanne Meyerowitz, Elizabeth Reis, Eve Shapiro, Susan Stryker, Eli Vitulli, Riki Wilchins, and Cristan Williams for their comments on this chapter.
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