Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution

by Susan Stryker

It is important to recognize that we still know very little about the social history of cross-dressing or the public expression of transgender feeling in earlier periods. And yet, the same circumstances that supported the development of same-sex social worlds also would have applied to people who sought different ways to express their sense of gender. People assigned female at birth who could successfully present themselves as men had greater opportunities to travel and find work. People assigned male at birth who identified as women had greater opportunities to live as women in cities far removed from the communities where they had grown up. In practice, the distinctions between what we now call “transgender” and “gay” or “lesbian” were not always as meaningful back then as they have since become. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, homosexual desire and gender variance were often closely associated. One common way of thinking about homosexuality back then was as gender “inversion,” in which a man who was attracted to men was thought to be acting like a woman, and a woman who desired women was considered to be acting like a man.