Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution

by Susan Stryker

the state’s actions often regulate bodies, in ways both great and small, by enmeshing them within norms and expectations that determine what kinds of lives are deemed livable or useful and by shutting down the spaces of possibility and imaginative transformation where people’s lives begin to exceed and escape the state’s uses for them. This is a deep, structural problem within the logic of modern societies, which essentially perform a cost-benefit analysis when allocating social resources. People are expected to work in the ways demanded by the state—paying taxes, serving in the military, reproducing a population that will serve as the nation’s future workforce, and performing socially useful services. Those who don’t or can’t function this way—whether through physical impairment, denial of opportunity, or personal choice—have a harder time sustaining themselves and justifying their very existence. Their situations—being black or female or disabled or queer—are not deemed to be valuable or worthy in their own 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.