5.5 KiB
Second edition transgender history: the roots of today’s revolution
- Prologue
- Chapter 4: The Difficult Decades
- Chapter 5: The Millennial Wave
- Chapter 6: The Tipping Point?
An account of Transgender history in the United States from the 1800s through 2017.
Prologue
Coming Out
When I started living full-time as an openly transsexual lesbian woman in San Francisco in the early 1990s, I was finishing my PhD in United States history at the University of California, Berkeley. Transitioning was something I needed to do for my personal sense of well-being, but it wasn’t a great career move. However wonderful it was for me to finally feel right about how I presented myself to others and how others perceived me, making the transition from living as a man to living as a woman had negative effects on my life. Like many other transgender women, I spent years being marginally employed because of other people’s discomfort, ignorance, and prejudice about me. Transitioning made relationships with many friends and relatives more difficult. It made me more vulnerable to certain kinds of legal discrimination, and it often made me feel unsafe in public.
Chapter 4: The Difficult Decades
The Transexual Empire
Janice Raymond's inflammatory book "The Transexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male" is covered, in which a connection between transexualism and naziism is imagined through some curious leaps of imagination. Citing Magnus Hirschfeld being German as a link, somehow, despite his institute and its literature being the highlight of nazi book burnings. That nightmare of a book came out in 1979. Meanwhile, the BBC continues to host nutjobs making the same exact claims.
Sylvia Rivera's speech
Susan does a real nice job of contextualizing Sylvia Rivera's short impassioned speech in 1973, which was featured in Netflix's "Disclosure" documentary, regarding divisions and tensions with cis and white members of the gay and feminist movements.
Pathology and treatment
The contradiction is pointed out between the pathologization of queer and trans identities (there is something wrong that needs to be treated) vs. labeling treatment as cosmetic or otherwise not medically necessary (don't treat it).
In spite of it being recognized by psychomedical professionals as a legitimate and diagnosable psychopathology, treatments for GID were not covered by health plans in the United States because they were considered “elective,” “cosmetic,” or even “experimental.” This was a truly inexcusable double bind—if GID was a real psychopathology, its treatment should have been insurable as a legitimate health care need; if treating it was not considered medically necessary, it should not have been listed as a disease.
Chapter 5: The Millennial Wave
AIDS and the reclamation of "Queer"
Interesting. It's now gotten into the reclamation of the "queer" slur as part of the various LGBT communities coming together to deal with the AIDS epidemic. Not the most fun way to pull disparate communities together, but certainly an effective one. Diseases, it turns out, are quite impactful on disadvantaged minorities, and aggressively intersectional.
ENDA
The federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act. Controversy over gender identity protections that were added (and subsequently stripped) from the failed bill sparked division in the LGBT movement.
Chapter 6: The Tipping Point?
Participation in uprisings
Trans people have played significant roles in activist and anarchist groups, such as those who registered OccupyWallStreet.org and the Philadelphian "Trans World Order" group that ran its servers.
There is also the case of Chelsea Manning and the information she released to Wikileaks. Her treatment was appallingly cruel. ACLU attorney Chase Strangio (also trans) handled her case until her sentence was communted by President Obama.
The Black Lives Matter movement is itself highly intersectional in its mission.
Incarceration and sex work
Trans people face possible arrest on the assumption that they are involved in sex work. Jails and prisons are also often sex-segregated, effectively holding transgender men with women and vice-versa, or in solitary confinement. They may also be denied their hormone medication, and are at high risk of sexual assault.
Transgender studies
Transgender civil rights
Trans civil rights made great strides, particularly during the Obama administration, but faced massive setbacks as the Trump administration began. It feels though that now we're very much still embroiled in the backlash from those gains, with the behavior of the Trump administration and its emboldening of groups with conservative agendas alongside "Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists". Accusations fly of a "transgender lobby" pushing "gender ideology".
If there is a lesson to be learned from US transgender history at the dispiriting moment in which these words are being written, it is that trans people have a long record of survival in a world that is often hostile to us.