These days, we use “LGBTQ” as a pan-identity label, and we often do not think about the unique politics, history, and experience of each of the individual “letters.” In this chapter on the “B” and the “T,” we turn to the people of the broad label who are most frequently left out of the politics and the history of the mainstream movement. It is here – in trans politics, bi politics, and the challenges these pose to the broader, mainstream movement – that we can see the LGBTQ movements going in new directions but also coming out of and building in response to longstanding tensions and divisions among activists and their politics. Politically, these two identity groups by no means necessarily share political interests, and there are both important intersections and fraught historical relationships between bisexual and transgender people and politics (Eisner 2013; Burleson 2014). But bi- and trans-identified people and communities do share the experience of being erased, marginalized, and sometimes completely abused by lesbian and gay movements of the past half-century. In this chapter, we see the ways in which exclusion and privilege have operated within the broad movement. We also see, in most recent years, the ways in which trans politics, in particular, have become more of a focal point for the mainstream LGBTQ movement and a target of the Right.
Just a note about definitions in this “B” and “T” discussion: First, it is important to note that gender categories – like transgender – and sexual categories – like bisexual – are not mutually exclusive. Bisexuality refers to sexual orientation, while transgender refers to gender identity. And people vary widely in the way they understand and make meaning of the various parts of their identity, and definitions of social categories are historically specific and change with time. So, of course, a person can identify as both bisexual and transgender. My separation of these identities for this chapter is for the purpose of discussing politics and efforts for social change that have been mobilized around one of these identities or another.
A good working understanding of bisexuality comes from Robyn Ochs, a bisexual activist and writer, who offers a popular definition that has been widely adopted among bi writers and activists: “I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge in myself the potential to be attracted, romantically and/or sexually, to people of more than one sex, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree” (2009b, p. 9). This definition recognizes that gender may be multiple, not just binary, and that bisexuality can mean the capacity for a range of romantic and sexual attractions over the course of a lifetime. It also recognizes that one’s relationship to people of different genders – capacity for sexual attraction or romantic connection – may not be equal. Another recent reinterpretation of the “bi” in bisexual is the attraction to one’s own gender and other genders.
The meaning of transgender can be complicated and quite varied. The Latin prefix “trans” means across or through, and “transgender” has become “a catchall term for gender variation” (Stryker & Currah, 2014, p. 6). It has been in broad use as a political and identity term since the early to mid-1990s (Valentine, 2007; Stryker, 2008; Williams, 2014a). As with any broad identity marker, some people appreciate the power and collective nature of the umbrella label, while some feel it skates over too many differences and complexities (for discussion, see Davidson, 2007; Valentine, 2007).1
A number of other identity markers either fall under the trans umbrella or exist in relationship to it. Transsexual is still sometimes in use and generally refers to a trans person who has undergone medical (often surgical) transition of some kind. It is less broad than the “transgender” umbrella term (see, e.g., Meyerowitz, 2002). In addition, many people prefer not to identify with the binary male/female gender designations or even the “trinary” male/female/transgender model (Beemyn & Rankin, 2011, p. 166). For example, 6 percent of the sample of respondents in the 2008 National Transgender Discrimination Survey identified as genderqueer (Harrison et al., 2011/2012) and 35 percent of respondents on the 2015 National Center for Transgender Equality’s national survey identified primarily as non-binary or genderqueer (James et al., 2016).2 Genderqueer is an identity that challenges the male/female binary as well as what some see to be the maintenance and reproduction of the binary by some trans people themselves. These identity labels are often set against the term cisgender (from the Latin prefix meaning “on this side of”). Cisgender refers to people who are not transgender and whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth. Use of the term cisgender is a way to depathologize trans identity and to denaturalize cis identity and experience (see, e.g., Aultman, 2014). It calls attention to the social privileges that come with the alignment between birth-identified sex and gender identity.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when noted biologist and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey developed a scale along which to measure human sexual attraction and sexual behavior, he moved the understanding of human sexuality from a binary (hetero/homosexual) to a spectrum. As noted in chapter 2, his finding that many more people than had previously been assumed had had same-sex sexual experience made headlines and turned his books into bestsellers. He famously wrote of the sexual binary for men: “Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual … The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats” (Carey, 2005, n.p.; also see Garber, 2000; Angelides, 2001). But while there was relatively widespread bisexual practice, there was not yet widespread bisexual political identification, and bisexuality as an identity was largely left out as the full-fledged movement for gay and lesbian equality grew through the middle of the twentieth century. In fact, bisexual identity may even have been an early casualty of the post-Stonewall movement. As one scholar recently noted: “One of the byproducts of the gay liberation movement is this … solidifying of the [sexual] binary” (quoted in Allen, 2017, n.p.).
Bisexual exclusion worked differently and held different meaning for men and women in the post-Stonewall era. While there is little written about this, some posit that, historically, the political relationship between gay and bisexual men has not been particularly fraught. One explanation for this, as Armstrong offers, is that for gay men, generally, their identity has not been strongly connected to the rejection of women and women’s spaces. So, “when gay men are with women it poses less of an identity threat” (1995, p. 209).
The political rift between lesbian women and bisexual women had its roots, in part, in the homophobic exclusion of lesbians from mainstream feminist organizing in the 1960s and early 1970s, as we saw in chapter 2, and in the sexism of the general American culture and of the gay rights movement. Some theorize that, in response to their exclusion, some lesbian feminists developed the assumption that lesbianism – more specifically, women in intimate relationships with each other rather than with men – was better feminist practice and was an important response to both a mainstream feminism that excluded lesbian-identified women and the sexism of mainstream American culture (Armstrong, 1995; Udis-Kessler, 1995). From some lesbian feminist perspectives, particularly white radical feminist lesbians, bisexuality represented a problematic connection to men and male privilege. For some, it connoted a wavering commitment to both feminism and queer women’s liberation (for discussion, see Armstrong, 1995; Rodríguez Rust, 2000a; Rust, 2000). From this point of view, at a time in the 1970s when lesbian feminists were developing “women’s culture” and turning to “cultural feminism” in the form of alternative institution-building (Echols, 1989; Stein, 1997), bisexual women and their potential intimate connection to men represented a threat to the entire community (Udis-Kessler, 1995).
This negative view of mixed-sex love, desire, and connection was not the case, however, for everyone within the burgeoning social justice movements of the 1960s. Historian Paula Giddings argues that Black women activists during the 1960s, for instance, generally did not feel the need or desire to separate from men in their activist work and did not see Black men as a primary source of oppression in the way that many white feminists viewed white men and patriarchy. Their analysis of racism, Giddings writes, generally drew them to collaborate with Black men and to view men as generally being more victimized by the intersection of racism and sexism than they themselves were (1984, ch. 17; also see hooks, 1984).
During the heady post-Stonewall moment of the 1970s, bisexual organizing began – and flourished – with the founding of groups like the National Bisexual Liberation Group in New York City, the Bisexual Center in San Francisco, and Chicago Bi-Ways (Donaldson, 1995; Trnka with Tucker, 1995; Udis-Kessler, 1995; Yoshino, 2000; San Filippo, 2013; Burleson, 2014).3 Early social and political bi organizing accompanied a 1970s pop cultural focus on bisexuality in the popular press. In May 1974, Newsweek ran a story called “Bisexual chic: Anyone goes,” which noted the American Psychiatric Association’s recent removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), quoted folk singer Joan Baez on her relationship with a woman, and obliquely referenced Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger. Such coverage raised bisexuality as a popular trend, separating it from and possibly even working against a political understanding of it, but raising the visibility of bisexuality as an identity and a practice. The article quoted a Vassar sophomore who had previously had relationships with women and who sounded as if she could just as easily have been talking about the rising popularity of bell-bottom jeans or Birkenstocks: “Coming out into the straight world blew my mind … But everybody does bisexuality now. It’s really big” (“Bisexual chic,” 1974, pp. 554–555).
While singers David Bowie and Janis Joplin and other pop cultural icons gave bisexuality a new popular cache in the mainstream, when the 1970s gave way to the horrible days of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, the narrative blaming bisexual men for the spread of AIDS to heterosexual people dramatically changed the status of bisexuality. Within straight America, a prevalent narrative was that bisexual men had been the conductors of HIV and AIDS to straight women and communities, the “‘gateway’ through which HIV could spread from the gay population into the heterosexual population” (Rodríguez Rust, 2000c, p. xiv). Just as gay men had been framed as the menacing dangers of the McCarthy era and of Anita Bryant’s campaign to take away civil rights protections, so bisexual men emerged as the demonized other in the age of AIDS.4
Gamson cites an example of this 1980s narrative, describing how activists protested the proposed script of an episode of an NBC television series, Midnight Caller for a storyline that played to this portrayal of bisexual men: “In that script a bisexual man with AIDS purposely infects others and is shot and killed in the end by one of his female partners. It was objected to by ACT UP members as playing on ‘the great fear of the “killer queer”’” (1989, p. 360). AIDS, as we saw in chapter 3, was largely ignored as long as it was identified primarily with gay men, for whom mainstream media, policymakers, and the general public showed little concern. But a narrative of the virus crossing over to heterosexual people featured the image of menacing bisexual men.
Both biphobia within the broader movement and the vilification of bisexual men in mainstream American culture that accompanied the early days of AIDS provided a catalyst for the growth of the bisexual movement in the 1980s. As one bisexual activist who was also an HIV/AIDS educator said: “As horrible as it is, I think AIDS brought bisexuality out of the closet” (quoted in Tucker, 1995, p. 54). The possible role of bisexuality in the spread of AIDS, however problematic this narrative, also increased academic focus on bisexuality and bi identity through the 1980s (Rodríguez Rust, 2000d; Burleson, 2014). On the activist front, bi political organization continued to thrive, with a focus on visibility and community-building. In the mid- and late 1980s, activists founded hundreds of local and college-based bi-specific groups (Hutchins & Ka’ahumanu, 1991; Trnka with Tucker, 1995; Serano, 2010).
The growth of a national lesbian and gay movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as we saw in chapter 3, also provided an important political opportunity for bisexual activists. The 1987 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights was a turning point in bi visibility and political organizing (Udis-Kessler, 1995). A statement by two organizers of a bi contingent of march participants asserted the need to articulate an explicitly bisexual identity and presence: “We can’t let gays represent us in D.C. We have to go there ourselves, as bisexuals, to speak openly and vociferously as a separate and vital contingent. We must achieve some visibility on our own terms instead of passing as heterosexuals or gays. It’s a matter of pride, and survival” (quoted in Hutchins & Ka’ahumanu, 1991, p. 365). The occasion of the march and the failure to include bisexuality in its name led to unprecedented national and international bi organizing. By 1993, when the next national march took place in the capital city, bisexuality had gained a place at the national political table. Bi activists and their supporters made a successful case for a name change for the upcoming march: it was ultimately called the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. By the mid-1990s, as well, campus organizing had become central to bi organizing, and there were more than 1,000 bi-focused groups (campus and otherwise) in the US.5
People who exhibit gender nonconformity or complicate the gender binary have long been the subject of derision and harassment and have suffered as targets of medical, psychological, and legal intervention.6 For instance, a number of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American laws made cross-dressing illegal. One 1863 San Francisco law made it a misdemeanor for a person to appear in public “in a state of nudity, or in a dress not belonging to his or her sex, or in an indecent or lewd dress” (Stryker, 2008, p. 32). Like gay and lesbian people who fought against being defined as “sick” after World War II, so transgender and gender nonconforming people have fought against medical and psychiatric pathologizing.7
“Gender scientists” (Califia, 1997, p. 52) have played a complicated role in relation to gender nonconforming people for generations – from the earliest advocacy and medical practice of German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who introduced the term “transvestite” in 1910; to the development, in mid-century, of expansive treatment in the United States by German endocrinologist Harry Benjamin, who had worked with Hirschfeld in Germany and moved to the US in 1913; to the debate among experts in the middle of the twentieth century about the role that surgery and psychotherapy should play in the diagnosis, treatment, and support of transgender people (Meyerowitz, 2002; Stryker, 2008).
Christine Jorgensen inspired a cultural turning point in American transgender visibility and the politics of medicine/psychiatry (Stryker, 2008). The ex-soldier, who had been assigned male at birth, commanded international media attention in the early 1950s after her medical transition. The New York Daily News first reported Jorgensen’s story in December of 1952, under the headline “Ex-GI Becomes Blond Beauty.” The then-performer drew more attention in 1959 when she applied for a license to marry her male fiancé, which was denied in New York City because she could not adequately satisfy concerns that she was, in fact, female. As historian Joanne Meyerowitz wrote: “With the Jorgensen story, the floodgates broke. A torrent of new stories on other transsexuals made sex change a constant feature in the popular press” and popular culture (2002, pp. 52–53).
It was around this time, in the 1960s, that scientists began to separate gender variation and transsexuality, a term developed at this time, from both homosexuality and forms of intersex. An early focus on gender identity came from the “rise of universitybased sex change programs during the late 1960s and early 1970s” (Stryker, 2008, p. 93). The term Gender Identity Disorder (GID) was added to the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM in its fourth edition in 1980. Among its diagnostic criteria is the following: “A strong and persistent cross-gender identification” and “persistent discomfort” with one’s birth sex “or sense of inappropriateness in the gender role of that sex” (quoted from the 2000 DSM update, in Stryker, 2008, pp. 14–15). In 2013, the fifth edition of the DSM replaced GID with the designation gender dysphoria, a diagnosis that signifies “a marked difference between the individual’s expressed/experienced gender and the gender others would assign him or her” (quoted in Engdahl, 2014, p. 267).8 Associated with these designations, protocols and standards of care developed that have informed the medical and psychiatric treatment of trans people since Dr. Benjamin’s time in the mid-twentieth century.9
Within the political movements of the time, new gay and lesbian organizations in the post-Stonewall years confronted the politics of gender identity and the existence of trans- and gender nonconforming people, as well. In one particularly evident case of privilege and intra-movement division, some radical feminists – lesbian and otherwise – came to articulate and defend a particularly exclusionary politics. Within the broader feminist and lesbian movements, those who practice personal and political transphobia and transmisogyny10 have come to be known as “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” or TERFs. In the late 1970s, the TERFs built their feminism and lesbian activism around what critics would identify as a very narrow definition of what it meant to be a woman. Julia Serano (2007) and Susan Stryker (2008) both relate this important history; Stryker writes that some feminists in this period perpetuated the “‘transsexual rapist’ trope” (2008, p. 105). This trope represented trans women as nefarious, conniving false women who used their purported male privilege and their bodies to figuratively “rape” women by taking their bodies. Janice G. Raymond’s 1979 The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (reissued in 1994) remains the exemplary and foundational TERF text (Califia, 1997). Raymond completely discounted transgender women and their authenticity, labeling them “male-to-constructed-females” throughout the book and writing: “Rape, of course, is a masculinist violation of bodily integrity. All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves” (1994, pp. 103–104).11
The example of TERF politics that I want to spend some time on here is the Michigan Womyn’s12 Music Festival – Michfest – an iconic annual gathering in the Michigan woods. I include this example not because I believe that feminists have been historically any worse in their treatment of trans-identified people than others who are outside these political movements, but because I believe this offers a well-known and highly contentious example of the ways in which privilege and exclusion work within the broader LGBTQ movement.
In 1976, Michfest became a center of lesbian feminist culture and community building (Taylor & Rupp, 1993). Founded and organized by Lisa Vogel, the festival, in Vogel’s words, “has been the crucible for nearly every critical cultural and political issue the lesbian feminist community has grappled with for four decades” (Ring, 2015, n.p.). For decades, Michfest continued to draw thousands of women and a wide range of performers (Greenfield, 2006). It was, according to Vogel, “a space to gather in celebration and exploration of the experiences of females … a welcoming space for revolutionary womyn and girls who personify a broad spectrum of gender” (2014, n.p.). This kind of community – emblematic of the kind of alternative cultural institutions that the lesbian and gay movement produced in the 1970s – developed out of a felt need for safe space, separate community, self-determination over bodies and relationships, and celebration of a kind of culture that was not represented in the American mainstream or in the male-centered gay movement at the time.
Michfest always was exclusive to women and was intentionally a women’s space, even designating separate childcare for boys between 5 and 10 years of age and separate camping areas for women who brought their boy children (who must not be older than 10) (Michfest, n.d.). Vogel demonstrated her view that there is a fixed essence to womanhood by signing on to an open letter in 1977 that read, in part: “We do not believe that a man without a penis is a woman any more than we would accept a white woman with dyed skin as a Black woman” (Williams, 2014b, n.p.).
In a high-profile incident in August 1991, trans woman Nancy Burkholder was near-forcibly removed from Michfest under cover of night. She was told that the festival was for “natural, women-born-women” only and that trans women were not allowed or welcome, for their own safety and for the safety of other festival attendees (Williams, 2013, n.p.). This became a “catalyzing moment” in the movement to oppose TERF practices and to support trans inclusion in feminist spaces, both within and outside the festival (Valentine, 2007, p. 180; also see Stryker, 2008; Beemyn, 2014). One local response in the following years was Camp Trans, a camp set up by trans people and their allies across the road from Michfest that worked to build awareness among Michfest attendees that this beloved festival was excluding trans women. Camp Trans participants’ slogan became: “Camp Trans: For Humyn-Born Humyns” (Serano, 2007; 2013; Williams, 2014b).
In addition to the Michfest example, intra-LGBTQ movement trans exclusion has taken many forms over the years. Lesbians, bisexual people of all genders, and transgender people of all sexual orientations have long condemned the mainstream LGBT rights movement for marginalizing gender politics. Critically coined the “GGGG” movement by Eisner (2013), the name refers to the movement’s focus on just the Gay Gay Gay Gay in its aim to be palatable to mainstream people and voters. In particular, the critique highlights the lack of attention to gender and gender identity politics. For example, even as bisexual activists were beginning to claim a place in the national LGBT movement in the early 1990s, winning the right to be included by name in the 1993 national march, transgender activists were still explicitly excluded (Ghaziani, 2008). Even just including trans people explicitly by name was controversial. The march’s organizing committee voted down a proposal for trans inclusion in the march’s title (Stryker, 2008).
In another central example of intra-movement trans exclusion, the behemoth LGBT civil rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign, has long been criticized for casting aside trans people in the legal fight for nondiscrimination legislation and hate crimes protections. The controversy around HRC’s relationship to trans people and politics centered for years on the proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a federal bill targeting workplace discrimination that had been stalled almost every year in Congress since 1994. Iterations of the bill, until 2007, focused on sexual orientation and did not include protection for gender identity (National LGBTQ Task Force, n.d.). By 2007, as trans-inclusivity became more of a norm in the broader movement, hundreds of LGBT groups supported a trans-inclusive ENDA, making HRC an outlier (Heywood, 2008; Stryker, 2008; Roberts, 2013). Instead, HRC was willing to support a bill that was gaining traction in the House but explicitly left gender identity protections out. The then-president of HRC, Joe Solmonese, claimed that political expediency was called for in the name of incremental gains: “What was best for our community was that the bill pass rather than fail. Sometimes it is hard for people to see the whole picture, but sometimes you are faced with choices” (Heywood, 2008, n.p.; also see Juro, 2013). In this case, we see a mainstay of the LGBT civil rights movement willing to make political gains at the expense of continued trans exclusion, to make civil rights headway on sexual orientation protections while leaving gender identity discrimination firmly in place.
But what about now? Does the broader American LGBTQ movement still exhibit cisgender privilege and a kind of monosexual privilege by excluding, erasing, or marginalizing bisexual and transgender people? And does mainstream American culture erase, ignore, or devalue the “B” and the “T” more than the “L” and the “G”?
The numbers vary, but bi-identified people make up a sizable proportion of the broader LGBTQ community. The Williams Institute, compiling data from five US-based surveys conducted in recent years, found that approximately 1.8 percent of US adults identify as bisexual, while 1.7 percent identify as lesbian or gay.13 The numbers are much higher for those US adults who report any experiences of “same-sex sexual behavior” (8.2 percent) or same-sex attraction (11 percent) (Gates, 2011, p. 1). An early 2016 report on recent national survey data of adults ages 18 to 44 found that the proportion of both men and women who explicitly identified as bisexual has risen in recent years: from 3.9 percent of women and 1.2 percent of men in 2006–10 to 5.5 percent of women and 2.0 percent of men in 2011–13 (Copen et al., 2016).14 A recent study of young people under the age of 30 in the US puts these numbers even higher: 31 percent of respondents indicated that they were not “100% heterosexual” (Cruz, 2015, n.p.).
Yet, despite these numbers, there is evidence that bisexuals may experience more invisibility, prejudice, and discrimination (than their gay and lesbian peers) from both gay and straight people (Denizet-Lewis, 2014). In part, at least, because bi identity can be stigmatized in both straight and gay and lesbian communities, bi people also are less likely than gay men and lesbians to be out to anyone in their lives (Movement Advancement Project et al., 2014). A Pew study found that only 28 percent of those surveyed responded that “all the important people in their life know they are bisexual,” while 71 percent of lesbians and 77 percent of gay men reported they were out to the same core group (cited in Movement Advancement Project et al., 2014, p. 2). This holds for visibility in the workplace as well: 92 percent of lesbians and 86 percent of gay men – yet only 48 percent of bisexuals – are out to colleagues at work (Mize, 2016).15 This disparity in coming out to family, friends, and others also exists for bi teenagers (Andre et al., 2014).
The San Francisco Human Rights Commission (2011) report identifies bi invisibility as the cause of a wide range of negative economic, health, and mental health outcomes for bi-identified people. Sociologist Trenton Mize notes that another cause of negative outcomes for bisexuals are the “assumptions of choice to their sexual orientation” – the misperception that bisexuals, because they can experience love and attraction for more than one gender, have control and responsibility over their sexual orientation in a way that gay men and lesbians do not (2016, p. 1137). Many studies report higher negative outcomes in physical and mental health for bisexuals as compared to gay men and lesbians, and higher again as compared to the general population (see, e.g., San Francisco Human Rights Commission, 2011; Movement Advancement Project et al., 2014; Mize, 2016). We do not have a lot of data, yet, on the experiences of bisexual people. A national Canadian study found that men who identified as gay were 4.1 times more likely than their straight male peers to attempt or seriously consider suicide in their lifetime, while bisexual men were 6.3 times more likely to do so.16 In this study, lesbians were 3.5 times more likely, while bisexual women were 5.9 times more likely to consider or attempt suicide when compared with straight women. A recent study of US respondents found that rates of diagnosed depression were higher for bisexual people than for gay, lesbian, or straight respondents (MentalHelp.net, 2016).
There is also evidence that rates of sexual violence are higher among bisexual women than they are among straight- or lesbianidentified women. One study of 2010 US national data indicates that bisexual women experience rape at much higher rates than their lesbian and heterosexual female peers: 46.1 percent of bisexual women have experienced rape by any perpetrator in their lifetime, compared with 13.1 percent of lesbians and 17.4 percent of straight women (Walters et al., 2013).17 Intimate partner violence also occurred at higher rates for both bisexual women and men. Reporting lifetime incidents of rape, physical violence, and/ or stalking by a partner were 61.1 percent of bisexual women, 43.8 percent of lesbians, and 35.0 percent of straight women; 37.3 percent of bisexual men, 26.0 percent of gay men, and 29.0 percent of straight men (Walters et al., 2013).18
Concerning economic issues, one national study of wages indicates that “bisexual men and women face broad disadvantages in the labor market” (Mize, 2016, p. 1152). And one California study indicates that bisexual workers in the state earn less than both their straight peers and their gay and lesbian peers. Gay men earned 2–3 percent less than straight men, while bisexual men earned 10–15 percent less; lesbians earned 2.7 percent less than straight women, while bisexual women earned almost 11 percent less. Furthermore, two studies of California data indicate that poverty levels are much higher among bisexual men and women when compared with their gay and lesbian counterparts: 17.7 percent of bisexual women versus 7.8 percent of lesbians and 9.7 percent of bisexual men compared with 6.2 percent of gay men lived in poverty (for discussion of these studies, see San Francisco Human Rights Commission, 2011, p. 27) Other studies (of national data) have found poverty levels not to differ statistically by sexual orientation (Badgett et al., 2013).19
Bisexuals continue to face and to fight against continued invisibility and scorn, both inside and outside the broader LGBTQ movement. Bisexuals have suffered from two myths: the first is that everybody is at least a little bit bisexual. The second is that bisexuality does not exist. These myths erase bisexual identity by claiming that it is either universal or nonexistent. Bisexuals continue to confront pop cultural tropes and everyday presumptions that they are promiscuous, indecisive, in a transitional phase, or not fully committed to the lesbian and gay community.20 Bluntly put by two bisexual writers and activists, “bisexual people face the apolitical sexually insatiable swinger stereotype” (Hutchins & Ka’ahumanu, 1991, p. 220). Bisexual men may also still be suffering from the “HIV stigma” trope of the 1980s: that they are the carriers of HIV and AIDS to straight people (Allen, 2017).
We can see an example of bisexual invisibility in one of the most visible national conversations about LGBTQ politics in our lifetime. As late as the summer of 2015, when the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage was a constitutional right, there was a broad, enthusiastic embrace of the new nationwide right to “gay marriage.” By using this term, this new marriage right is framed in a way that assumes that people in same-sex relationships are necessarily gay, rather than (among other sexual identities) possibly bisexual instead. With this one important legal step forward, the public discourse – in this case tied to the legal discourse, and including gay and lesbian activists and allies – further cemented bi invisibility (Cruz, 2014b). This is not just obscure semantics. It is leaving bisexuals out of the discussion, the celebration, and the politics of current LGBTQ civil rights.
It is this issue of invisibility – and its more active framing as erasure (as something that is actively being done to bisexuals) – that is a substantial focus of bisexual advocacy and activism today, alongside a focus on coming out to help increase bi visibility and build bi community (e.g., RichardsFink, 2013). In the twenty-first century, just as it is for gay and lesbian efforts, pop culture is a central arena for bi politics (Eisner, 2013; San Filippo, 2013). In part, this means a focus on increasing visibility through the coming out of celebrities. A number of high-profile people have come out as bisexual or have become part of the conversation about bisexual visibility by acknowledging that they have had relationships with people of more than one gender, even if they do not embrace a bi identity. These celebrities include the über-visible Lady Gaga; the hip-hop/R & B singer Frank Ocean; actors Alan Cumming, Evan Rachel Wood, Cynthia Nixon, and Anna Paquin; British Olympic diver Tom Daley; and Chirlane McCray, the wife of New York City’s mayor Bill de Blasio (Schulman, 2014).
Some of these pop cultural actors actively use their platform to increase bi visibility and respond to the pervasive misconceptions of bisexuality in the broader culture. For example, in 2014, on CNN, a seemingly perplexed interviewer Larry King asked bi actor Anna Paquin about her sexuality and whether she was a “non-practicing bisexual.” The actor, who is married to a man with whom she co-starred on HBO’s campy vampire show True Blood, had to explain to King that just because she is married to a man does not mean that her bisexuality is a “past-tense thing” (Cruz, 2014a, n.p.): bisexuality as an identity is not contingent on the gender of one’s current partner.
Inside the broader LGBTQ movement, bi activists work to combat erasure and assert identity, as well. Bi-identified LGBTQ sports activist and athlete Anna Aagenes wrote that identifying as bisexual was not always easy within the broader LGBTQ community, and that it required a “double coming out” to both gay/lesbian and straight people:
Many bisexual people can relate to my experience of finding that many of my gay and lesbian friends harbor a lot of biphobic beliefs, consciously or subconsciously, and make hurtful statements about the “B” in “LGBT.” Finding the LGBT community was like joining a new club that I (technically) belonged to, but when I arrived to pick up my towel and complimentary gym pass, my membership was called into question. (2013, n.p.)
In another example, young bi activist Eliel Cruz works specifically on LGBTQ inclusion in faith-based communities. He has an active social media presence, particularly on bi issues. He writes, in his Twitter bio, that he is – among other things – a “Professional Bisexual” and has spoken about the importance of positive bi representation and visibility in pop culture.21 These two examples of young activists illustrate the ways in which bi activism today can both sit in the broader pan-identity LGBTQ movement and assert the importance of explicitly bisexual visibility both within the movement and in the general American culture.
The Williams Institute finds that 0.6 percent of US adults – or approximately 1.4 million people – are transgender, a number that has doubled since the early 2000s (Flores et al., 2016). The National Center for Transgender Equality’s latest national survey of 27,715 transgender adults found that survey respondents were twice as likely to be living in poverty than the general US population and three times as likely to be unemployed. Attempted suicide rates were tragically high: 40 percent among survey respondents versus 4.6 percent of the general US population over the course of a lifetime.22 So, too, were transphobic assault rates: 9 percent of respondents reported that they had been physically attacked in the previous year (James et al., 2016).
Respondents to this national survey revealed discrimination in every facet of their lives (James et al., 2016; also see Schilt, 2010). In the workplace, 30 percent of respondents who had been working in the previous year reported some form of mistreatment due to their gender identity or expression. In housing, 23 percent of respondents reported facing discrimination in the past year. In public accommodations, 31 percent had been mistreated and a full 59 percent reported that they had avoided using a public restroom in the past year for fear of how they would be treated. Public attention has been drawn recently to the fact that trans women and trans women of color are particularly vulnerable to fatal violence. In 2015, for instance, 23 trans women were reported victims of transmisogynistic murders in the US, prompting the advocacy and attention of high-profile trans women like Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, and Caitlyn Jenner (Blumm, 2015; Kellaway & Brydum, 2015; Mock, 2015). Of these victims, 21 were women of color and 13 were under the age of 25 (Tourjee, 2015a; 2015b).
Trans people and activists have made some significant progress in confronting exclusion within the broader LGBTQ movement, as trans issues have become more mainstream. In cultural spaces, for example, prominent cisgender lesbian allies began to take note of the trans exclusion at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. The Indigo Girls – the legendary feminist, lesbian, activist singing duo of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers – had been enthusiastic, A-list performers at Michfest for years. But they eventually publicly indicated that they could no longer abide by the trans-exclusiveness of Michfest. They made their protest known in an open letter:
Although we are playing the festival, we honor the current protest against MWMF and hope that it will help move the community towards change. Any money that we make playing the Festival will go towards Trans Activism. We will make a statement from stage at the Festival in support of Trans Inclusion. We have made it clear that this will be our last time at the Festival until MWMF shows visible and concrete signs of changing their intention…. We love Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and hope for it’s [sic] continued presence and power in our lives. (2013, n.p.)
The Indigo Girls presented their view from the stage, as promised, and the next year, with no change in Michfest policy, they dropped out of the festival completely (Malloy, 2014b). Other allies joined in calling for a change to Michfest’s practice (Kim, 2013; Ring, 2015). In 2014, Lea DeLaria, the self-identified butch lesbian actor and activist behind one of the most iconic lesbian roles of recent years, Big Boo of Orange Is the New Black, also said that she would no longer participate, because “[w]e queers need to find a way to stop this fighting and work together towards our common goal…. I truly look forward to the time when all LGBTQ stand as one” (Brydum, 2014, n.p.).
For her part, Michfest organizer Lisa Vogel maintained that the “womyn-born-womyn” requirement at Michfest was an “intention” that relied on self- and community-policing rather than a hard and fast exclusionary policy (Malloy, 2014b):
We have said that this space, for this week, is intended to be for womyn who were born female, raised as girls and who continue to identify as womyn. This is an intention for the spirit of our gathering … It is not a policy, or a ban on anyone…. [W]e trust the greater queer community to respect this intention. (Vogel, 2014, n.p.)
The issue of this rule or norm became increasingly divisive. Finally, in 2015, amid growing attention to its trans-exclusion but not citing this as a direct cause, Michfest announced that it would be ending its 40-year run (Vogel, 2015).
Elsewhere in the movement, particularly in the more high-profile civil rights world, at least nominal trans inclusion in the LGBTQ mainstream civil equality agenda has become more common. Throughout the 1990s, as trans politics gained traction in the mainstream LGBT movement, protections for transgender people were added to more than two dozen local nondiscrimination ordinances across the country (Stone, 2009). The Human Rights Campaign, for its part, has sought to repair its past negative reputation on trans issues. In 2014, its president, Chad Griffin, publicly acknowledged that “HRC has done wrong by the transgender community in the past, and I am here to formally apologize.” Griffin promised that his organization would fight for an inclusive ENDA and, beyond that, would “lead the campaign for a fullyinclusive, comprehensive, LGBT civil rights bill” (quoted in Juro, 2014b, n.p.; also see Bernstein, 2015).
Within the broader LGBTQ movement today, the cultural and political conversations about the inclusion of trans women and men in historically women-only spaces is taking place in a number of sites, from lesbian softball leagues to women’s colleges (Travers, 2006; Quart, 2008; Padawer, 2014). Within feminist movements, as well, pro-choice and longstanding women’s health advocacy groups and service providers are beginning to work through how to become trans-inclusive in their language and their practice: to recognize that trans men may become pregnant, need abortions, and seek out a range of health services typically associated with cisgender women and to advocate and provide health care for people who were assigned female at birth but who do not identify as women (Carmen, 2014a; Hempel, 2016).
From outside of the LGBTQ movement, there have been important and unprecedented federal transgender civil rights gains in recent years. In 2014, President Obama signed an executive order barring employment discrimination by sexual orientation and gender identity in federal contracting, and he granted gender identity protections to all federal employees, covering about 20 percent of the American workforce (Stern, 2014). Also in 2014, Obama’s Justice Department reinterpreted federal sex discrimination protections to include gender identity and “transgender status” (Geidner, 2014). The administration also reinterpreted Title IX, which bars sex discrimination in schools, to protect transgender students, as discussed in chapter 5. The Obama administration also took affirmative steps to ensure that federal employees have the right to use the bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity (Avery, 2016).
At the federal legislative level, as well, lawmakers have considered trans-inclusive nondiscrimination efforts. In 2015, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act was replaced with a much more comprehensive federal bill, the Equality Act. Reclaiming the name of a broad nondiscrimination bill that was originally proposed in 1974, the Equality Act covers not just employment but also protections in housing, public accommodations, education, among other areas of public and private life. In these new iterations of federal protections, “[r]emoving gender identity,” writes National Center for Transgender Equality Executive Director Mara Keisling, “is now completely unthinkable” (2015, n.p.). While the Equality Act is not yet law – a new iteration of it was introduced in May 2017 by more than 200 senators and US representatives (O’Hara, 2017b) – it seems that trans inclusion in these broad civil rights politics has been secured.
Along with these civil rights gains, and connected to them, transgender visibility has gone mainstream and has been building in popular culture for almost a decade (Stryker, 2008). In 2011, Chaz Bono, the already-famous only child of singers Cher and Sonny Bono, wrote a bestselling book about his experience and his transition (Bono, with Fitzpatrick, 2012; also see Wilson, 2011). In 2013, Fallon Fox told her widely publicized story as a trans woman professional mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter (Hunt, 2013; Zeigler, 2013); and almost 50,000 people signed on (albeit unsuccessfully) to a petition for Victoria’s Secret to hire former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant Carmen Carrera as the store’s first trans model (Rodriguez & Santana, 2013).23
By 2014, Time magazine had declared a “transgender tipping point” in pop culture and politics (Steinmetz, 2014). Laverne Cox, the trans actress who plays trans character Sophia Burset in the celebrated Netflix show Orange Is the New Black, was the first out trans woman to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award (Malloy, 2014d) and became the face of trans visibility on the Time cover story. That same year, Time included a well-known trans teen girl, Jazz Jennings, on its list of the 25 Most Influential Teens of 2014 (Ennis, 2014). Also that year, author and trans activist Janet Mock published her memoir, became a contributing editor to Marie Claire fashion magazine, spoke widely in the press about her experience and her advocacy work, and urged a conversation about trans women of color and the race and class politics of LGBTQ visibility (Juro, 2014a). In the world of fashion, Barneys New York introduced a widely publicized spring 2014 campaign featuring 17 trans models (Carmen, 2014b), and models Andreja Pejic and Geena Rocero came out as trans women (Dominus, 2014; Zarrella, 2014). Also in 2014, the acclaimed Amazon show Transparent and the high-profile role of trans woman Rayon, in the film Dallas Buyers Club, for which Jared Leto won an Oscar, opened up an active and heated conversation about trans representation in mainstream popular culture, including the question of whether cisgender actors should play transgender characters (Addams, 2014; Brodesser-Akner, 2014; Keegan, 2014; O’Donnell, 2014; Zeigler, 2014).
Transgender pop cultural visibility reached even greater heights when Caitlyn Jenner came out in print and on television news (People Magazine, Us Weekly, Vanity Fair, and ABC TV’s 20/20), and became a seemingly omnipresent media figure in the spring and summer of 2015.24 Although she has not been an active athlete for decades, the coming out and celebration of Jenner, the former college football player and 1976 Olympic gold medal decathlete who, for years, was “one of the icons of American masculinity” (Talusan, 2015, n.p.), has significantly raised trans visibility and prompted an unprecedented national conversation about what it means to be transgender (Kahrl, 2015; Zirin, 2015).25
Jenner aside, athletics has become an important part of the current pop cultural conversation about transgender inclusion and visibility. Chris Mosier is the most celebrated and recent example as the first out transgender man, in 2015, to make a US men’s national team, Team USA, for the sprint duathlon (a run-bike-run event). Mosier is an advocate and activist for LGBTQ sports inclusion and equity. He is currently vice president of the You Can Play Project, an organization dedicated to sports inclusion, and founder of TransAthlete.com, the most comprehensive resource for information about trans athlete policies, participation, and best practices. He also served as executive director of a national LGBTQ student athlete network, GO! Athletes. After he qualified for his national competition, he was unsure about whether he was going to be able to compete as a member of Team USA in his June 2016 World Championship event in Spain, because the team followed the International Olympic Committee (IOC) guidelines about trans athlete participation. At the time, these were restrictive, including a requirement (that was not always enforced) for both trans men and trans women to have undergone a series of gender confirmation surgeries, including internal and external genital reconstruction. Yet these surgeries are both inaccessible and undesired by many trans people and have no bearing on athletic performance (Malloy, 2014a; O’Hara, 2014).26 Mosier challenged these guidelines and, in January 2016, the IOC announced a change that no longer included the surgery requirement, and Mosier was able to compete. In the summer of 2016, Mosier’s visibility crossed over even further, when he became the first transgender athlete to be included in the ESPN The Magazine’s “Body Issue” and to be featured in a Nike commercial. The 30-second Nike spot, called “Unlimited Courage,” ran during primetime coverage of the 2016 Summer Olympics.27
In theory, the transgender politics of recent years rests on a broad understanding of transgender identity that not only includes people who have physically or socially transitioned from one binary gender designation to another, but also those who are genderqueer or nonbinary or who in some other way do not identify with the gender that they were assigned at birth. But there are some ways in which policy conversation has kept the binary in place. For instance, Title IX and more local protections for transgender students do not abolish the binary gender segregation of bathrooms. The pop cultural explosion of recent years also has primarily focused on trans-identified people who have transitioned physically and/or socially. But, it is in the pop cultural space that I believe we are seeing signs of increasing diversity of trans identity and politics, especially connected with the complex ways in which young people tend to understand their sexual and gender identity. Australian model and Orange Is the New Black actor, Ruby Rose, for instance, identifies as “gender fluid” and “gender neutral” and has spoken publicly about her gender identity and how it has changed over time (see, e.g., Jarvis, 2015; Molloy, 2015). Actor Asia Kate Dillon, of Orange Is the New Black and, more recently, Billions, self-identifies as “non-binary gender.” Their Billions role was the first gender nonbinary character on a major television show.28 They made headlines in April 2017 when they petitioned the Television Academy to reconsider the binary, segregated awards categories used for the Emmys. The Academy responded that Dillon was “free to choose the category they wish to enter.” While this did not eliminate the gender-designated categories, it did raise the issue of why these categories are necessary and how gender is defined for purposes of these awards (Wong, 2017, n.p.).
Beyond cultural visibility and inclusion, trans activists and advocates have articulated a broad political agenda for the future that includes a focus on changing laws to secure basic human and civil rights as well as changing hearts and minds. These issues include access to facilities and public accommodations, prison justice, Medicaid/Medicare and private health insurance coverage, gender-affirming health care, standing up against racist and transmisogynistic violence, military inclusion, sports inclusion, combatting poverty and homelessness, marriage and family rights, educational trans equality in K-12 schooling and higher education, and addressing the role of the state in defining gender through state-issued identification like drivers licenses and passports.29
The recent significant uptick in trans pop cultural and celebrity visibility does not connote political or human rights progress, per se, or stem the epidemic of anti-trans violence (Malloy, 2014e; Mock, 2015; Rodriguez, 2015). And, in fact, with mainstream visibility and some policy progress has come a new onslaught of anti-trans campaigns. Despite – and perhaps because of – some significant political and cultural gains, transgender Americans have found themselves victimized by the Right in recent years. In addition, it seems that, with Donald Trump’s election, transgender people have become one of many early targets of a fortified conservative movement.
Even before Trump’s win, after taking a loss on marriage, the anti-LGBTQ Right has turned to vitriolic anti-trans campaigns and laws, mostly at the state level, that generally seek to block and even roll back broad nondiscrimination measures (Peters, 2016). These campaigns paint transgender people as dangerous, particularly portraying trans women as deceptive men in women’s clothes who seek access to women’s bathrooms for nefarious purposes like rape and pedophilia.30 This narrative mobilizes the assumption that trans women are really men who identify as trans because they are interested in violating women’s spaces.
In one notorious example, in March 2016, the North Carolina legislature passed HB2, which the Republican then-Governor Pat McCrory signed into law.31 The ACLU called HB2 the “most extreme anti-LGBT measure in the country” (quoted in Gordon et al., 2016, n.p.). The law negated a Charlotte anti-discrimination ordinance passed the month before and went much further to prohibit public entities in the state from passing nondiscrimination laws that would explicitly protect LGBTQ people on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity (Epps, 2016). In addition, the law, also dubbed a “bathroom bill,” explicitly indicated that people must use the multiple-occupancy, single-sex bathrooms that correspond with the sex that is listed on their birth certificates.32 This bars many trans people from using the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity and their gender presentation (Skinner-Thompson, 2016). Debate about this law relied on the narrative that these broad anti-discrimination laws are really about protecting menacing men who would use women’s facilities in order to prey on women and girls. In fact, there are exactly no reported cases of violence in a public bathroom when trans people are the perpetrators, and too many to count when they are the victims of transphobic violence (Michelson, 2016). Forcing trans people to use bathrooms that do not correspond with their gender presentation and identity will put them further in harm’s way.
The anti-trans North Carolina law and the controversy it stirred up has been the occasion for celebrities and other high-profile people and businesses, once again – as many did with marriage – to use their public platform and their resources for LGBTQ support. PayPal announced that it would not go forward with its planned expansion to North Carolina because of HB2, and many issued economic boycotts of the state. New York State, for instance, became one of a number of municipalities to ban work-related, publicly funded “non-essential” travel to the state. The NBA pulled the 2017 All-Star Game out of Charlotte, noting: “[W]e do not believe we can successfully host our All-Star festivities in Charlotte in the climate created by HB2” (Bontemps, 2016, n.p.). In addition, entertainers like Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen canceled concerts in the state, and Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson and his fiancée, singer Ciara, moved their wedding from North Carolina to London because of their opposition to the law (Heller, 2016; Kapadia, 2016; Berman, 2017). Forbes estimated that the law cost North Carolina approximately $630 million in lost business revenue (Jurney, 2016).
The legal future of these state-level anti-trans laws is up in the air. The Obama administration issued a strongly worded directive, followed by a lawsuit, indicating that states should allow students to use the locker rooms and bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity, as doing otherwise would be a violation of civil rights (US Department of Justice, 2016). Trump, however, has reinterpreted this Title IX directive, indicating that instead of providing federal protections for trans people, public facilities access decisions should be left up to the individual states (Peters et al., 2017). As many as 15 states have recently introduced anti-trans bills of this kind, many focusing specifically on young people’s access to school facilities (O’Hara, 2017a). The Supreme Court – which passed up an opportunity to rule on an interpretation of Title IX when it decided not to take up trans student Gavin Grimm’s case – will eventually need to settle the matter (Farias, 2017).
As the new president and the emboldened Right that elected him turn their attention increasingly to anti-trans efforts – from removing safeties for trans young people, to considering trans-exclusive health care policy, to flippantly announcing a policy (via Twitter) to ban transgender people from the US military (Lubold, 2017; Ring, 2017) – we will have the opportunity to see if and how the mainstream LGBTQ movement mobilizes around the transgender people and politics that it has historically marginalized.