Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution

by Susan Stryker

Looking at Chuck and Miss Destiny—as she rushes on now about the Turbulent Times—I know the scene: Chuck the masculine cowboy and Miss Destiny the femme queen: making it from day to park to bar to day like all the others in that ratty world of downtown L.A. which I will make my own: the world of queens technically men but no one thinks of them that way—always “she”—their “husbands” being the masculine vagrants—fleetingly and often out of convenience sharing the queens’ pads—never considering theyre involved with another man (the queen), and only for scoring (which is making or taking sexmoney, getting a meal, making a pad)—he is himself not considered “queer”—he remains, in the vocabulary of that world, “trade.”