Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution

by Susan Stryker

The name Erickson chose for ISHR, his foundation to promote the study of “human resources,” was grounded in his own perception of having more potential for making a positive contribution to the world than circumstances would allow. He thought that transgender people such as himself represented a vastly underused resource of talent, creativity, energy, and determination. Although he was able to work on a scale that most people can only dream of, Erickson in fact did what most transgender people find themselves needing to do—working to create the conditions of daily life that allow them to meet their needs and pursue their dreams.

In 1968, Mario Martino, a female-to-male transsexual, founded Labyrinth, the first organization in the United States devoted specifically to the needs of transgender men.

Marsha P. (for “Pay It No Mind”) Johnson was a veteran of the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York and cofounder, with Sylvia Rivera, of STAR—Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.

The “Stonewall Riots” have been mythologized as the origin of the gay liberation movement, and there is a great deal of truth in that characterization, but—as we have seen—gay, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people had been engaging in militant protest and collective actions against social oppression for at least a decade by that time.

The Stonewall Riots provided that very spark, and they inspired the formation of Gay Liberation Front groups in big cities, progressive towns, and college campuses all across the United States.

The Stonewall Inn was a small, shabby, Mafia-run bar (as were many of the gay-oriented bars in New York back in the days when being gay or cross-dressing were crimes).

A large crowd of people gathered on the street as police began arresting workers and patrons and escorting them out of the bar and into the waiting police wagons. Some people in the crowd started throwing coins at the police officers, taunting them for taking “payola.” Eyewitness accounts of what happened next differ in their particulars, but some witnesses claim a transmasculine person resisted police attempts to put them in the police wagon, while others noted that African American and Puerto Rican members of the crowd—many of them street queens, feminine gay men, transgender women, or gender-nonconforming youth—grew increasingly angry as they watched their “sisters” being arrested and escalated the level of opposition to the police. Both stories might well be true. Sylvia Rivera, a transgender woman who came to play an important role in subsequent transgender political history, long maintained that, after she was jabbed by a police baton, she threw the beer bottle that tipped the crowd’s mood from mockery to collective resistance. In any case, the targeting of gender-nonconforming people, people of color, and poor people during a police action fits the usual patterns of police behavior in such situations. Bottles, rocks, and other heavy objects were soon being hurled at the police, who, in retaliation, began grabbing people from the crowd and beating them. Weekend partiers and residents in the heavily gay neighborhood quickly swelled the ranks of the crowd to more than ...

Gay Liberation Front (GLF), which modeled itself on radical Third World liberation and anti-imperialist movements. The GLF spread quickly through activist networks in the student and antiwar movements, primarily among white young people of middle-class origin. Almost as quickly as it formed, however, divisions appeared within the GLF, primarily taking aim at the movement’s domination by white men and its perceived marginalization of women, working-class people, people of color, and trans people. People with more liberal, less radical politics soon organized as the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), which aimed to reform laws rather than foment revolution. Many lesbians redirected their energy toward radical feminism and the women’s movement. And trans people, after early involvement in the GLF (and being explicitly excluded from the GAA’s agenda),

In 1970, Sylvia Rivera and another Stonewall regular, Marsha P. Johnson, established STAR—Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.

Some STAR members, particularly Rivera, were also active in the Young Lords, a revolutionary Puerto Rican youth organization. One of the first times the STAR banner was flown in public was at a mass demonstration against police repression organized by the Young Lords in East Harlem in 1970, in which STAR participated as a group. STAR House lasted for only two or three years and inspired a few short-lived imitators in other cities, but its legacy lives on even now.

A trans woman named Judy Bowen organized two extremely short-lived groups: Transvestites and Transsexuals (TAT) in 1970 and Transsexuals Anonymous in 1971. More significant was the Queens’ Liberation Front (QLF), founded by drag queen Lee Brewster and heterosexual transvestite Bunny Eisenhower. The QLF formed in part to resist the erasure of drag and trans visibility in the first Christopher Street Liberation Day march, which commemorated the Stonewall Riots and is now an annual event held in New York on the last Sunday in June.

QLF’s most lasting contribution, however, was the publication of Drag Queen magazine (later simply Drag), which had the best coverage of transgender news and politics in the United States, and which offered fascinating glimpses of trans life and activism outside the major coastal cities. In New York, QLF founder Lee Brewster’s private business, Lee’s Mardi Gras Boutique, was a gathering place for segments of the city’s transgender community well into the 1990s.

Angela K. Douglas. Douglas had been involved in the countercultural scene in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, where she mingled with many soon-to-be-famous filmmakers and rock musicians. She herself, before her transition in 1969, played in the obscure psychedelic rock band Euphoria. Douglas covered the birth of gay liberation politics for the Los Angeles underground press and joined GLF-LA, which she soon left because of the transphobia she perceived in that organization. (It should also be noted that Morris Kight, the principal architect of the gay liberation movement in Los Angeles, suspected Douglas of being an FBI informant.) She subsequently formed TAO (Transsexual Activist Organization) in 1970, which published the Moonshadow and Mirage newsletters—

TAO was the first truly international grassroots transgender community organization, with a worldwide mailing list and loosely affiliated chapters in various cities, including one in Birmingham, England, that shaped the sensibilities of activist attorney and professor of law Stephen Whittle, who would later lead a successful campaign for transgender legal reform in the United Kingdom in the 1990s and establish himself as one of the leading international authorities on transgender legal and human rights issues.

autobiography, Triple Jeopardy (self-published in 1982),

Donn Teal’s as-it-happened history, The Gay Militants.

musical acts such as the Cockettes and Sylvester (on the West Coast) and Wayne (later Jayne) County and the New York Dolls (on the East Coast) inspired the better-known gender-bending styles of glam rocker David Bowie and filmmaker John Waters’s cult movie star Divine. High art and lowlife swirled around pop artist Andy Warhol’s Factory, helping popularize countercultural icons such as Lou Reed and the transgender Warhol superstars Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, and Holly Woodlawn, and infusing the glam, glitter, and early punk music scenes in venues such as Max’s Kansas City and CBGB.

In San Francisco, the National Transsexual Counseling Unit was wrecked by reactionary members of the police department, who entrapped one of the peer counselors there in a drug bust; a police informant pretended to be sexually and romantically interested in the NTCU employee and then, after dating her for a few weeks, asked her to score cocaine for him and to bring it to work, where he would buy it from her. Once the drugs were on the premises, officers swooped in for the arrests. They also planted narcotics in Elliott Blackstone’s desk, unsuccessfully attempting to frame him.

In gay male culture, 1973 was the year that the masculine “clone look” of denim, plaid, and short haircuts replaced radical hippie or fairy chic, signaling the return of a more gender-normative expression of male homosexuality. It is possible to trace the current “homonormativity” of mainstream gay culture (an emphasis on being “straight-looking and straight-acting”), as well as the perceived lack of meaningful connection to transgender communities among mainstream gays and lesbians, to the shifts of 1973.

Medical drawing of a male-to-female genital conversion operation (1958), included in the text Homosexuality, Transvestitism, and Change of Sex, by Eugene de Savitsch.

1971 in the Trans Liberation Newsletter.

The oppression against transvestites and transsexuals of either sex arises from sexist values and this oppression is manifested by homosexuals and heterosexuals alike in the form of exploitation, ridicule, harassment, beatings, rapes, murders and the use of us as shock troops and sacrificial victims.

Trans Lib began in the summer of 1969 when Queens formed in New York and began militating for equal rights. In 1970 the Transvestite-Transsexual Action Organization (TACO) formed in Los Angeles, the Cockettes in San Francisco, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in New York, Fems Against Sexism and Transvestites and Transsexuals (TAT) also formed in New York. Radical Queens formed in Milwaukee—all in 1970. Queens became Queens Liberation Front.

In many respects, the transgender movement’s politics toward the medical establishment were more like those of the reproductive justice movement than those of the gay liberation movement. Transgender people, like people seeking abortion or contraception, wanted to secure access to competent, legal, respectfully provided medical services for a nonpathological need not shared equally by every member of society, a need whose revelation carried a high degree of stigma in some social contexts, and for which the decision to seek medical intervention in a deeply personal matter about how to live in one’s own body was typically arrived at only after intense and often emotionally painful deliberation.

The second wave of feminist activism in the United States is generally considered to have begun in the early 1960s, with the publication of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique in 1963 and the formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966. Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, published in France in 1949,

In 1973, black feminists in New York, some of whom had been involved in the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, and the Black Lesbian Caucus of the GLF, recognized the necessity of forming a separate group, the National Black Feminist Organization. Inspired by this activism, Boston-area black feminists formed the Combahee River Collective the next year. The Combahee River Collective Statement, crafted over the next few years, remains a touchstone of black and intersectional feminism and provides an important foundation for trans-inclusive feminist politics. Collective members noted that they felt “a great deal of criticism” of male sexism and “loathed” that many men were socialized to be macho and oppressive toward women, but they also stated: “We do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness per se—i.e., their biological maleness—that makes them what they are. As black women, we find any kind of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis on which to build a politic.”

New Yorker Robin Morgan played an important role in launching WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) in 1968, a loose network of socialist-feminist collectives, and her views would have a powerful influence on early white radical feminist views of transgender issues. Many lesbians associated with gay liberation began meeting in feminist consciousness-raising groups. One of these groups, the Radicalesbians, which included Rita Mae Brown, Karla Jay, and others, played a pivotal part in the political development of lesbian feminism through its influential pamphlet, “The Woman-Identified Woman.” At the Second Congress to Unite Women, held in New York in 1970, the Radicalesbians and their paradigm-shifting pamphlet burst onto the scene in response to recent pejorative comments by Betty Friedan about the “lavender menace”—the question of lesbian participation in feminist politics. Friedan opposed associating lesbian concerns with feminism because she feared that society’s homophobia would limit feminism’s appeal and hamper its progress. The Radicalesbians staged what has come to be known as the “Lavender Zap” when, just as the conference was about to begin, they cut power to the microphones, killed the lights, and stormed the stage. When the lights came back up and the microphones came back on a few moments later, Radicalesbians members wearing Lavender Menace T-shirts had commandeered the attention of all present. They passed out copies of “The Woman-Ident...

Transsexual lesbian singer and activist Beth Elliott in the 1970s.

San Francisco’s first Gay Pride parade in 1972 (which commemorated the Compton’s Cafeteria riot along with Stonewall and welcomed drag participation) degenerated into fistfighting when the Reverend Raymond Broshears, one of the gay male organizers, punched a member of a lesbian separatist contingent that insisted on carrying signs that said “Off the Pricks!” in violation of the parade’s “no violence” policy. At the postparade rally, feminists and some of their gay male supporters denounced the fight as an example of stereotypical gender roles and patriarchal oppression of women, and they announced that they never again would participate in a Gay Pride event organized by Broshears or in one that permitted drag queens to “mock” women. In 1973, two separate San Francisco Pride events were organized, one by Broshears, and the other by gays and lesbians who opposed drag and expressly forbid transgender people from participating. Broshears never organized another Gay Pride event, while the anti-drag event became the forerunner of the current San Francisco LGBTQ Pride celebration. That same year, across the continent in New York, event organizers tried to prevent Sylvia Rivera, the founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, from addressing the annual commemoration of Christopher Street Liberation Day. Rivera took the stage anyway and issued a devastating critique of the cisgender whiteness of the gay and feminist movements: I’ve been trying to get up here all day. I h...

summer of 1973 was directed against transsexual lesbian singer Beth Elliott, by Robin Morgan, at the West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference.

Elliott subsequently threw herself into community activism by participating in the hippie folk music scene, becoming an antiwar activist, and serving as vice president of the San Francisco chapter of the pioneering lesbian organization the Daughters of Bilitis.

lesbian separatist Gutter Dykes Collective, publicly accused Elliott of having sexually harassed her years earlier—a charge Elliott vigorously and vehemently denied, but which, by the very nature of things, could never be extricated from the circular round of “she said/she said” accusations, denials, and counteraccusations. In retrospect, these accusations of harassment appear to be an early instance—perhaps the first—of an emerging discourse in feminism that held all male-to-female transsexuals to be, by definition, violators of women, because they represented an “unwanted penetration” into women’s space.

Morgan’s speech, titled “Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?” was subsequently published in her memoir Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist and was widely reprinted in the feminist press. More than twelve hundred women at the conference—which turned out to be the largest lesbian gathering to date—

In 1977, for example, Sandy Stone, a male-to-female transsexual recording engineer who had worked with Jimi Hendrix and other rock luminaries before joining the Olivia Records collective to help launch the women’s music industry,

In her book, The Dialectic of Sex: A Case for Feminist Revolution, Firestone

Lesbian Tide publisher Jeanne Cordova

lesbian activist the Reverend Freda Smith of Sacramento “stepped up,” in the words of Candy Coleman,

Psychologist Deborah Feinbloom and her colleagues in Boston wrote an article for the Journal of Homosexuality, “Lesbian/Feminist Orientation among Male-to-Female Transsexuals,”

C. Tami Weyant wrote to the feminist publication Sister

Jude Patton, with the Renaissance group in Los Angeles, and Rupert Raj of Toronto, with his Metamorphosis magazine,

1977, their fellow trans activist Mario Martino’s memoir Emergence became the first full-length autobiography of a trans man to be published in the United States.

Steve Dain, an award-winning former high school physical education teacher in Emeryville, California. In 1976, Dain had informed his principal that he would be transitioning genders during the school’s summer vacation, and he asked to be reassigned to teach science rather than girls’ gym. The request was granted, but because of a change in the school’s administration, a new vice principal was unaware of Dain’s plan. During the first day of classes, the administrator panicked when he learned that the new science teacher was none other than the old PE teacher, and he had Dain arrested in his classroom—in front of his students—for “disturbing the peace.” Dain successfully sued the Emeryville

1985 HBO documentary What Sex Am I?

One of Dain’s most significant protégés was Lou Sullivan, who became the hub of the organized FTM community in the United States in the 1980s. Born in 1951, Sullivan started keeping a journal as a ten-year-old girl growing up in the Milwaukee suburbs and continued journaling regularly until a few days before his untimely death at age thirty-nine, in 1991. In his journal, Sullivan described his early childhood thoughts of being a boy, his confusing adolescent sexual fantasies of being a gay man, and his teenage participation in Milwaukee’s countercultural scene. He read John Rechy’s novels and dreamed of running away to live with the drag queens of Los Angeles. By the time he graduated high school, he was dressing in men’s clothes and was active in the Gay People’s Union (GPU) at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where he found a job as a secretary in the Slavic Languages department.

publication of “A Transvestite Answers a Feminist,” an article that appeared in the GPU News, in

Another article, “Looking Towards Transvestite Liberation,” published in the GPU News in 1974,

Sullivan continued to contribute reviews and articles to the GPU News through 1980, many of them historical vignettes of people assigned female at birth who lived their lives as men.

Lou Sullivan’s journals constitute one of the most complete, and one of the most compelling, accounts of a transgender life ever set to page. These excerpts, from ages eleven to twenty-two, chart the trajectory of his emerging gay male identity.

What can become of a girl whose real desire and passion is with male homosexuals? That I want to be one? I still yearn for that world, that world I know nothing about, a serious, threatening, sad, ferocious stormy, lost world.