Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution

by Susan Stryker

The Central City Anti-Poverty Program Office opened that fall as a result of the Tenderloin neighborhood organizing campaign. This multiservice agency included an office for the police community-relations liaison officer to the homophile community, a police sergeant by the name of Elliott Blackstone. One afternoon shortly after the agency opened, a transgender neighborhood resident named Louise Ergestrasse came into Blackstone’s office, threw a copy of Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon on his desk, and demanded that Blackstone do something for “her people.” Blackstone was willing to be educated on the matter, and he soon took a leading role in changing police treatment of transgender people. Another group of transgender Tenderloin activists, led by a trans woman named Wendy Kohler, a patient of Harry Benjamin, started working with activist doctor Joel Fort at a unit of the San Francisco Public Health Department called the Center for Special Problems. A few months later, in early 1967, a group of transgender people began meeting at Glide Memorial Methodist Church, where they formed the first known trans support group, Conversion Our Goal (COG).