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March 14 - March 18, 2022
As a transsexual woman I’ve also been a participant in making that history, along with multitudes of other people.
Because I have experienced misogyny and sexism, my transgender experience informs the strong commitment I feel to feminist activism that aims to make the world a better place for all women and girls.
when I’ve been perceived as an effeminate gay man, I also have a direct experience of homophobia.
“enfreaked”
Although I can’t claim that being a white transgender person gives me any special insight into the experience of minoritized communities of color, I do as a transsexual experience the injustice of being targeted for structural violence through being labeled a kind or type of person who is not as deserving of life as other people, within a social order that tries to cement me into that often death-dealing hierarchy based on some of my body characteristics.
GLBT Historical Society,
My goal is to provide a basic framework that focuses on a handful of key events and personalities that help link transgender history to the history of minority movements for social change, to the history of sexuality and gender, and to feminist thought and politics.
One of the goals of this book is to situate transgender social change activism within an expansive feminist framework.
To understand the oppression of any particular woman or group of women means taking into account all of the things that intersect with their being women, such as race, class, nationality, religion, disability, sexuality, citizenship status, and myriad other circumstances that marginalize or privilege them—including having transgender or gender-nonconforming feelings or identities.
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.
visions. In some they change it with a scalpel or a syringe. The important things to bear in mind are that gender is historical
It’s another way of saying that trying to relate sex to gender in some deterministic way always fails at some level and that any correlation we do establish has a cultural, historical, and political dimension that must be established, asserted, and reasserted over and over again for it to remain “true.”
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.
The idea is that such expressions of self should not be illegal, stigmatized, discriminated against or result in harm to the persons who express themselves in those ways.
Transgender and nonbinary people are pushing language to evolve today to take into account the new social reality that such people are creating.
the people who first reappropriated the term were trying to find a way to talk about their opposition to heterosexist social norms;
According to historian John D’Emilio, modern gay and lesbian communities weren’t possible until the middle of the nineteenth century, with the rise of modern industrial cities and their large working-class populations. It wasn’t until men could leave tight-knit rural communities, characterized by intimate and interlocking forms of familial and religious surveillance, that they had the opportunity to form different kinds of emotional and erotic bonds with other men.
To understand the historical conditions for contemporary transgender activism, we thus have to take into account race, class, culture, sexuality, and sexism, and we have to develop an understanding of the ways that US society has fostered conditions of inequality and injustice for people who aren’t white, male, heterosexual, and middle class—in addition to understanding the difficulties particularly associated with engaging in transgender practices.
But since the end of the eighteenth century, science has gradually come to replace religion as the highest social authority, and since the middle of the nineteenth century medical science has played an increasingly central role in defining everyday life.
used for very conservative social purposes—“
Medical practitioners and institutions have the social power to determine what is considered sick or healthy, normal or pathological, sane or insane—and thus, often, to transform potentially neutral forms of human difference into unjust and oppressive social hierarchies.
It’s also important to recognize that 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.
biological theories about gender variance and homosexuality are used to argue that gay and transgender people are physically and psychologically degenerate, and that these conditions therefore should be corrected or eliminated.
The period’s leading scientific authority on sexuality, Richard von Krafft-Ebing,
One early psychiatrist, Albert Moll, wrote about conträre Geschlechtsempfindung (contrary sexual feeling) in 1891;
Max Marcuse, described a Geschlechtsumwandlungstreib (drive for sex transformation) in 1913.
British psychologist Havelock Ellis coined “sexo-aesthetic inversion” (wanting to look like the other sex) and later, in 1928, “Eonism,” ...
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1910 he had written The Transvestites, the first book-length treatment of transgender phenomena.
Autobiography of an Androgyne (1918) and The Female Impersonators (1922).
How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States, Joanne Meyerowitz describes how the staff and clients of the Langley Porter Psychiatric Clinic at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF),
During World War II, Bowman conducted research on homosexuality in the military, using as test subjects gay men whose sexuality had been discovered while they were serving in uniform, who were being held in a military psychiatric prison at the Treasure Island Naval Base in San Francisco Bay.
concerns. In spite of her open disdain for gay people, her frequently expressed negative opinion of transsexual surgeries, and her conservative stereotypes regarding masculinity and femininity, Prince (who began living full-time as a woman in 1968) has to be considered a central figure in the early history of the contemporary transgender political movement.
school. She was pursuing a career as a photographer and film editor without any great success when she learned in 1949 that hormonal and surgical “sex change” was possible—in Europe.
and the more open-minded ethos of the youth counterculture that took shape among the post–World War II Baby Boomer generation.
Their increasingly serious plight was directly related to very broad-scale social and economic changes.
Martino and his wife, who both worked in the health care field, helped other transsexual men navigate their way through the often-confusing maze of transgender-oriented medical services just then beginning to emerge, which (despite being funded primarily by Reed Erickson)
These years, between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s, represent what could be called the “Big Science” period of transgender history.
campaign to depathologize homosexuality, which was considered a psychological illness in the United States until the early 1970s. Starting in the 1950s,
peers remove homosexuality from the DSM in 1973.
The new queer feminism drew heavily from French philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of social power as decentralized and distributed rather than flowing from a single source; that is, that each of us has a power particular to our situation, and that power is not just something vested “up there” somewhere in the law or the military or capital or the “patriarchy.”
I meant that the body is a site for the play of language, a generator of symbolic exchange.
This opened a line of argument that led directly to Stone’s essay, which called upon transsexual people simultaneously to resist the old ways that medical science had encouraged them to behave as the price for providing services—creating false biographies to conceal their sex change from others, for example, or trying to pass as a cisgender person—while also soliciting them to speak out in a “heteroglossic,” Babel-like profusion of tongues about all the imaginable genres of gender difference there could be, if only the homogenizing tendencies of the medically dominated discourse of
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The “sex-negative”
Sex-positive feminism
gender is constituted by all the innumerable acts of performing it: how we dress, move, speak, touch, look. Gender is like a language we use to communicate ourselves to others and to understand ourselves. The implication of this argument is that transgender genders are as real as any others, and they are achieved in the same fundamental way.
The formal depathologization of transgender identity in 2013, when the DSM-V officially dropped the diagnostic category Gender Identity Disorder,
Clinical psychologist Diane Ehrensaft’s 2016 book, The Gender Creative Child: Pathways for Nurturing and Supporting Children Who Live Outside Gender Boxes, provides one of the latest and most comprehensive resources.
As children are allowed to express transgender feelings or gender-nonconforming behaviors at increasingly earlier ages, and as parents and other caring adults become increasingly accepting of those feelings and behaviors, what it means to be “transgender” in the future will be something drastically different from what it has meant in the past or what it means in the present.
Manning’s was undoubtedly the most high-profile transgender incarceration case, but the difficulties she encountered are far from unique.
The Digital Transgender Archive was established in 2015 by K. J. Rawson, a trans studies professor at College of the Holy Cross, with support from the American Council of Learned Societies. It contains many digitized copies of rare transgender materials from archives throughout North America.
