Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution

by Susan Stryker

Transgender is a word that has come into widespread use only in the past couple of decades, and its meanings are still under construction. I use it in this book to refer to people who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth, people who cross over (trans-) the boundaries constructed by their culture to define and contain that gender.

Intersectional feminism insists that there is no essential “Woman” who is universally oppressed.

To reconcile the relationship between transgender and feminist politics—to create a transfeminism—it is essential simply to acknowledge that how each of us experiences and understands our gendered sense of self, our sense of being a man or a woman or something that resists or mixes those terms, is a very idiosyncratic personal matter, related to many other attributes of our lives.

Because most people have great difficulty recognizing the humanity of another person if they cannot recognize that person’s gender, encounters with gender-changing or gender-challenging people can sometimes feel for others like an encounter with a monstrous and frightening unhumanness.

This takes us into one of the central issues of transgender social movements—the assertion that the sex of the body (however we understand body and sex) does not bear any necessary or predetermined relationship to the social category in which that body lives or to the identity and subjective sense of self of the person who lives in the world through that body.

It’s a cultural belief, not a biological fact, that having a certain kind of reproductive capacity necessarily determines what the rest of your body is like or what kind of person you are, or that some of these biological differences can’t change over time, or that biological differences should be used as a principle for sorting people into social categories, or that these categories should be ordered in a hierarchical way.

many of the genital surgeries that became available to later generations of transgender people were developed by practicing on the bodies of enslaved black women who were subjected to medical experimentation, and that these procedures were used nonconsensually on the bodies of intersex youth.

Adolf Hitler personally denounced Hirschfeld, who was a socialist as well as a gay man, as “the most dangerous Jew in Germany.”

right. Transgender lives are similarly devalued; they are considered neither useful nor happy lives to live, nor are they seen as offering any kind of value to society by virtue of their transness.

The eventual establishment of the Central City Anti-Poverty Program thus represented a singular accomplishment in the history of US progressive politics: the first successful multiracial gay-straight alliance for economic justice.