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SEAL PRESS

Copyright© 2008, 2017 by Susan Stryker

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stryker, Susan, author. Title: Transgender history: the roots of today's revolution I Susan Stryker. Description: Second edition. I Berkeley: Seal Press, 2017. I Revised edition

of the author's Transgender history, c2008. Identifiers: LCCN 20170259641ISBN9781580056892 (paperback) I ISBN

9781580056908 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Transgenderism-History. I Gender identity-History. I

Transgender people-History. Classification: LCC HQ77.9 .S77 2017 I DDC 306.76/8-dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025964

LSC-C

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

1his book is dedicated to the trans people who the lives that made the history I've outlined

trans people, and our friends allies living

who continue to make history by advancing cause of social justice.

CHAPTER 5

THE MILLENNIAL WAVE

TH E TR EM EN D 0 US BURST of new trans gender activism that be-

gan around 1990 came on the heels of a generally dispiriting decade

or two in which transgender people made only small, erratic strides

toward a better collective existence. After years of court rulings in

which discrimination against transsexuals was found not to be il-

legal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (most notably in the

Supreme Court case Ulane v. Eastern Airlines, 1984), the 1989 de-

cision in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, which held sex stereotyping

to be illegal after the well-known accounting firm denied a part-

nership to Ann Hopkins for being "too masculine," opened up im-

portant lines of argumentation for trans rights in the decades ahead.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) passed in 1990 could

have been interpreted as covering transgender people, who, after all,

were considered to have an officially recognized psychopathological

debility, except for the fact that "transsexualism" was specifically

exempted from coverage. A number of states had come to recognize

legal change of sex on birth certificates, change of name and gender

on driver's licenses, and the rights of postoperative transsexuals to

marry in their current gender by the early 1990s. A few (Illinois,

Arizona, and Louisiana) had done so as early as the 1960s; several

151

152 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

others (Hawaii, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan,

New Jersey, Virginia, North Carolina, and Iowa) had followed

suit in the 1970s; and several more (Colorado, Arkansas, Georgia,

Missouri, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Wisconsin, and the Dis-

trict of Columbia) had done so by the 1980s. In addition, three

municipalities-Minneapolis, Minnesota; Harrisburg, Pennsylva-

nia; and Seattle, Washington-had enacted human and civil rights

protections for transgender people before the end of the 1980s. The

Southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union

(ACLU) had formed the Transsexual Rights Committee in 1980,

which had won a few modest victories pertaining to the treatment

of trans people by the Veterans Administration, the California

prison system, and government-funded vocational rehabilitation

programs, but the committee disbanded around 1983. Althea Gar-

rison was revealed as the first trans person to have been elected to

a state legislature when she won a seat in the Massachusetts state-

house in 1992; she was publicly outed two days later, effectively

ending her political career. Transgender-related policy, legislative,

and electoral victories were few and far between until the 1990s.

A few transgender organizations and service agencies had sol-

diered on through the bleakest stretches of the 1970s and 1980s.

The oldest ongoing transgender gathering in the nation, Fantasia

Fair, first met in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1975, under

the leadership of Ari Kane, a transgender mental health educator

who that same year also founded the Outreach Institute of Gen-

der Studies. The weeklong Fantasia Fair, a retreat initially geared

toward male-to-female cross-dressers, has tried with some success

to broaden its appeal to transsexuals and transmasculine people in

recent years. Boston's transgender community also spawned the

International Foundation for Gender Education (IFGE) in 1987 ·

Like Fantasia Fair, it initially focused on the needs and inter-

ests of MTF cross-dressers but aimed for an increasingly general

1he Millennial Wave 153

transgender constituency during the course of its existence. IFGE' s

magazin~, ~ape~try, was once the most widely circulated transgen- ~er pu~hcatton m the United States. The Janus Information Facil- •ty: which had taken over the education and outreach work of the Erickson Educational Foundation in the mt"d 1970 . If d - s, ttse cease operations in the mid- l 980s and transferred its mission to two

stalwarts of the transgender community, Jude Patton ~nd Joanna ~lark, who ran the cryptically named transsexual information dear- mghouse J2PC (derived from the initials of their names) in San

Juan Capistrano, California. Such small-scale, largely self-financed

homegrown resources, which enjoyed a few years of influen d · "fi ce an

s1gm cance before sinking beneath the waves of tt"me h . d , c aractenze the bulk of transgender community organizations into (and even beyond) the 1990s.

. But just as transgender social justice activism made gains in

th~ 1960s when transgender issues resonated with larger cultural shifts related to the rise of feminism the war 1"n v.· t al . ' e nam, sexu liberation, and youth countercultures, the transgender movement

bolt~d forwa~d again in the early 1990s for reasons having little to do directly wtth transgender issues. As suggested earlier, a variety of novel historical factors~the new political concept of h Al . . · queerness, t e

DS ep1dem1c, the rapid development of the Internet, the end of

t~e Cold War, the maturation of the first post-Baby Boomer gener- ation, and the calendrical millennial turn-all plav;ed th . .

. . . / etr parts m rev1tal1zmg transgender politics in the last decade of the twentieth

century. The wave of change that began at that time continued for a quarter century.

The New T ransgender and Queer Feminist Theory

Aroun~ 1990, transgender issues experienced a rapid evolution and expans10n-indeed, it's about this time that the word transgender

154 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

first started to acquire its current definition as a catchall term for

all nonnormative forms of gender expression and identity. V ~dams

of the word had been. popping up since the early 1960s in both

sexological literature and male cross-dresser communities, where

words such as "transgenderal,'' "transgenderist,'' and "transgende-

rism" were used by people . like Ari Kane and Virginia Prince to

describe individuals, such as themselves, who occupied a different

gender category. from either transvestites or transsexuals; Through-

out the 1970s and 1980s, a "transgenderist" was most lik~ly some- body born with a penis and who kept it in spite of living socially

as a woman. Trans activist Holly Boswell made an important con-

tribution toward the expansion of the term with her 1991 article

"The Transgender Alternative,'' published in the community-based

journal Chrysalis Quarterly, which claimed transgender was .a word

that "encompasses the whole spectrum" of gender diversity. a~d lumps together rather than splits apart the many subgroups withi~ a large, heterogeneous set of communities. Leslie Fei~berg ~a~e this expansive sense oftransgender a political charge with their mflu-

ential 1992 pamphlet, Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose

Time Has Come. Feinberg, who had begun transitioning from fe-

male to male in the 1980s before deciding to live again as a mas-

culine woman with some surgical body alterations, became one of

the chief architects of the new transgender sensibility, as s/he strug-

gled to define and occupy a space on the borders and intersectio~s

of conventional gender categories. Their pamphlet took a Marxist

approach to the question of the social, political, and economic op-

pression of nonnormative expressions of gender, ands/he called. for

a "transgender" movement that would link many strugg.les agamst

specific gender-based oppressions together into one radical move-

ment. Feinberg' s autobiographically grounded novel Stone Butch

Blues (1991) communicated the emotional flavor of hir transgender

vision to a large and appreciative international audience.

Ihe Millennial Wave 155

Yet another contribution to the redefinition of transgender came

in the form of a 1992 academic article by Sandy Stone, "The 'Em-

pire' Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.~' Stone, who had , first gained notoriety in transgender circles as the male-to-female

transsexual recording engineer who inspired ] anice Raymond to

lead a boycott of the all-women Olivia Records collective, had since

gotten a PhD in cultural studies, and she made brilliant use of some

of the new theories of gender just then beginning to circulate in the

academy, which she used to help shift the old trans-exclusionary

feminist debates into a productive new register. In calling for "post-

transsexual" theorizing capable of reframing the common narratives

through which trans people were marginalized, Stone helped give

the nascent "transgender" movement an intellectual as well as a po- litical agenda.

There is more than one intellectual genealogy of what came to be

called "queer studies." One story has it emerging from the work of

literary critics Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Moon at Duke

University. Stone, however, was more grounded in the version of

queer feminism that blossomed in Santa Cruz, where she earned

her PhD at the University of California while studying under femi-

nist science studies scholar Donna Haraway. West Coast queer the-

ory was more indebted to feminists of color, primarily the writers

in the anthology This Bridge Called My Back, and most especially to

Gloria Anzaldua' s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Two

crucial insights in this body of work were to be found in its in-

tersectional analyses of race/class/gender/sexuality oppressions-no

one of which could be privileged over the others in the lives of the

women writing about their situations~and in its attention to "hy-

bridity." White feminism often (and often unconsciously) claimed

its moral strength based on some concept of "purity" -notably

(especially in the first wave) some notion of female sexual purity,

but also, more abstractly, in the second wave, on the idea of an

156 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

essential womanhood to be recovered or restored from the taint of

patriarchal pollution. In contrast, Anzaldua' s brand of feminism

valued the power to be found in being mixed, in crossing borders,

of having no one clear category to fit into-of being essel\_tially im-

pure. Haraway drew on this evolving frame of reference in her fa- mous "Cyborg Manifesto," which described a "post-gender" world

of "technocultural" bodies, and added machine/human and ani-

mal/human to the kinds of boundary and mixing questions with

which feminism should be concerned. Stone's "posttranssexual

manifesto," attentive as it was to technologically altered transgender

bodies, was deeply influenced by Haraway' s approach to the inter-

sectionality of gender, embodiment, and technology. However, it

also drew from another new way of thinking about gender then be-

ing explored by another feminist faculty member at the University

of California, Santa Cruz, Teresa de Lauretis, who coined the term

"queer studies" for a conference she organized under that name in

Santa Cruz in 1991. The new "queer" version of gender espoused by de Lauretis and

other like-minded feminist scholars, which de Lauretis laid out

most succinctly in her essay "Technologies of Gender," discarded

the older feminist idea that gender was merely repressive-that it

was only a system for holding women down, turning them into

second-class citizens, exploiting their labor, and controlling their re-

productive capacities. Without denying that gender systems indeed

produced systematic inequalities for women, the new q\.ieer take on

gender also talked about gender's productive power-how "woman"

was also a cultural or linguistic "site" or "location" that its occu-

pants identified themselves with, understood themselves through,

and acted from. The new queer feminism drew heavily from French

philosopher Michel Foucault's concept of social power as decen-

tralized and distributed rather than flowing from a single source;

1he Millennial Wave 157

that is, that each of us has a power particular to our situation and

that power is not just something vested "up there" somewh:re in

the law or the military or capital or the ''patriarchy ,, Q fc . . . . ueer em1- _n,1s~ r.e1magined the status "woman" as not simply a condition of v1ct1m1zation to be escaped from, and it reconceptualized gender

as a network of "relations of power" that, like language, we don't

e~er .get ou~side .of but always express ourselves through and work w1thm-a s1tuat10n that gives feminist women a "d al . . " d (( . u v1s10n an split subjectivity.,, Sometimes womanhood is a binding-in-place

that needs to be resisted and worked against, and sometimes d

Lauretis said, women want womanhood to stick to them "l'k ' e 'lk d ,, 1 e a wet s1 ress.

TRANSSUBJECTIVITY AND REALITY HACKING

A _1995 issue of Wired magazine included an interview with trans th~ or~st S~~dy Stone, who has had an amazingly varied career Amon~ ot er t ings, she has con~ucted early research on digital tele~hones at ~/~)Labs :n~ on neural implants for the National Institutes for Health

' ":or e . as sound engineer for Jimi Hendrix, helped found the womens music scene while working at Olivia Records (where she was

~h_e ta) rget of a transphobic boycott by trans-exclusionary lesbian fem- inists and earned a PhD . H" t f

'. . in is ory o Consciousness at the Universit of Cal1forn1a, Sa~ta Cruz. Her article "The 'Empire' Strikes Back: A PosZ ~anssexual Manifesto," a scathing rebuttal to Janice Raymond's The 1 ranssexual Empire hel d I h h .

, pe aunc t e new interdisciplinary field of transg~nder ~tudies. Stone taught for many years at the Universit of Texas in Austin, where she established the Advanced Communica~on } ech~ology L~boratory (ACT Lab). Most of what Sandy and the Wired interviewer sa~d to each other wound up on the cutting room floor- the convers~t1on below draws on different parts of the conversation than that which was ultimately published.

continues

158 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

,v TRANSSUBJECTIVITY AND REALITY HACKING continued

Wired: You worked in technical fields for many years but now study how that work is done by others. What led you to cultural

studies of science?

Stone: It gave me that common language I'd always dreamed

of. I could bring to it much of my experience with neurolo~y and telephony and sound recording and ~omputer progra~-

. my studies of classics, and my brief encounters with ming, h" f critical theory. I could find ways in which all of those t 1ngs it

together. It started with a piece called "Sex and Death am~ng the Cyborgs." I set out to write an essay on data com~ress1on and wound up writing about phone sex. Sex usually 11rw~lves as many of the senses as possible-taste, touch, s~~ll, sight, hearing. Phone sex workers translate all those mod~lit1es o.f ex- perience into sound, then boil that down into a series of h1~hly compressed tokens. They squirt those tokens down a vo1ce-

grade line and someone at the other end just adds_ water, so

to speak, to reconstitute the tokens into a fully detail1~d set of images and interactions in multiple sensory modes. Sex and

Death among the Cyborgs" was an attempt to explore bound-

aries and prostheses and everything that interests me now.

Wired: What do you mean when you say "boundaries and

prostheses"?

Stone: Subjective boundaries and bodily boundari~s. 'Vl!e're. a culture that likes to preserve the illusion that they re fixed 1~ place. But they move around all the time. For example, where _s

the boundary of an individual human body? Is it skin? Is it

clothes? It's different in different circumstances. I use Stephen

Hawking as an example of how body boundary issues inter~ct with technology. Because Hawking can't speak, he le~tures ~1th a computer-generated voice. Hawking's comput:nzed ~01c: generator is a prosthesis, from the Greek word for extension.

continues

The Millennial Wave 159

It's an extension of his person. It extends his will across the

boundaries of flesh and machinery, from the medium of air mol-

ecules in motion to the medium of electromagnetic force.

Wired: It seems to me that being transsexual significantly in- forms your work. Transsexuality could be considereq a form of reality hacking-you "change sex" by using for your- own pur- poses the codes that regulate how we understand the mean- ing of identity through the body. Hormones and surgery are prostheses that extend a sense of self into a set of physical signs that mean identity in social interactions. Experiencing the transformation of your body through transsexual technologies gives one an acute sense of the issues that come up in trying to understand virtual systems, cyberspace, interface, agency, interaction, and identity. It's hard for many people to grasp this aspect of transsexuality because of the way it's been stigma- tized, pathologized, exoticized, and eroticized.

Stone: I want to move away from the sexuality model for very

much those reasons-that's why I want to talk about transsub-

jectivity rather than transsexuality. This term better helps us

see that the body is an instrument for involvement with others.

When I wrote in an essay called "A Posttranssexual Manifesto"

that transsexuality was a genre rather than a gender, I meant

that the body is a site for the play of language, a generator of symbolic exchange.

Without saying so in quite so many words, de Lauretis and

other queer feminists found a useful way to acknowledge that

feminist women could be committed to feminist politics with-

out therefore necessarily being forced to concede that "woman"

was nothing more than a patriarchal trap for female bodies. This

opened a line of argument that led directly to Stone's essay, which

called upon transse~ual people simultaneously to resist the old ways

160 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

that medical science had encouraged them to behave as the price

for providing services-creating false biographies to conceal their

sex change from others, for example, or trying to pass as a cisgen-

der person-while also soliciting them to speak out in a "hetero-

glossic," Babel-like profusion of tongues about all the imaginable

genres of gender difference there could be, if only the homogeniz-

ing tendencies of the medically dominated discourse of td.nssexu-

ality were shattered. In doing so, trans people could simultaneously

circumvent the pernicious perspective that had become entrenched

over the preceding decade, that transsexuals were either duplicitous,

dupes of the patriarchy, or mentally ill. All genders-all genres of

personhood-would be on the same plane.

Two other developments internal to feminism shook open

spaces within political activism, scholarship, and community for-

mation and allowed transgender feminism to expand and grow in

the 1990s. The first was the so-called sex wars, a pivotal episode of

which was the 1982 Barnard conference on women, which aired

long-standing differences within feminism about female sexuality.

Fierce debates raged around the topics of pornography, prostitu-

tion, and consensual sadomasochism. Could there be feminist po-

sitions on these issues that were not simply condemnatory; that is,

could there be feminist pornography, feminist sex work, feminist

practices of sexual kink, or were such ideas rooted in "internalized

misogyny" and did they constitute "violence against women"? The

"sex-positive" and "sex-negative" camps were every bit as polar-

ized as those names suggest, and the sex wars-like earlier disputes

within feminism about heterosexism, class, and color-further frag-

mented a movement that was never as homogeneous as some femi-

nists wanted to believe.

The "sex-negative" camp consigned cross-dressing and transsex-

ual genital modification to the same discredited territory occupied

by fetish, prostitution, incest, and rape, while the "sex-positive"

The Millennial Wave 161

camp resisted the idea that some sexual practices condemned by

mainstream society were intrinsically antifeminist or that criticizing

some aspects of those practices necessarily entailed a condemnation

of the women who practiced them. The warring perspectives are

succinctly summarized in the names of two feminist publications:

Off Our Backs, which advocated a resistance to sexisi_oppression of women, and On Our Backs, a frank celebration of female sexual

pleasure. Some of the same arguments that the sex-positive femi-

nists made in defense of women who take money in exchange for

sex or who engage in bedroom bondage scenarios or rape fantasies

or intergenerational desire would open a path whereby transgender

practices and perspectives could similarly contest the censure of cer- tain kinds of feminists.

Sex-positive feminism had the disadvantage, however, of re-

garding being trans as an erotic practice rather than an expression

of gender identity. Feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin's influ-

ential article "Thinking Sex," first delivered at the Barnard confer-

ence and published in the anthology of conference-related work,

Pleasure and Danger, clearly demonstrates this point. In charting out the "moral sex hierarchy" shared by "sex-negative" feminism

and mainstream US society, Rubin distinguishes between forms of

sexuality clearly labeled "good" (such as reproductive heterosexual

monogamy) and those clearly labeled "bad" (such as fetishistic

cross-dressing, transsexuality, or street prostitution), and she identi-

fies a "major area of contest" between these poles that encompasses

sexual practices that are morally ambiguous within the dominant

culture (such as promiscuous heterosexuality or long-term, stable,

romantic homosexual couplings). Through time, a practice might

move from a very marginalized position, to one where its status

was contested, to one where it was largely accepted-exactly the

path followed by homosexuality in the aftermath of the gay libera- tion movement.

162 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

One of the main goals of Rubin's argument was to challenge the

way that some schools of feminism (those drawing on the "purity"

tradition) set up hierarchies that placed their own perspective at the

top and claimed the power to judge and condemn other positions

they deemed morally suspect. Rubin's article noted how early sec-

ond wave feminism floundered when it tried to apply the economic

concept of "class" to the category "woman," which has many non-

economic attributes, and succeeded only when it developed a set of

analytical tools that were specific to the situation of women-that

is to say, a gender analysis. She then proposed that feminism, as the

study of gender, was in turn not a sufficient frame of reference for

the analysis of sexuality, and she proposed a new "sexuality stud-

ies" that, without abandoning feminism any more than feminism

had abandoned economic concerns, would take up a new set of

questions about sex. This argument eventually came to be seen as

foundational to the intellectual· project of queer studies. In making

that important argument, however, Rubin clearly categorized trans-

gender practices as sexual or erotic acts rather than expressions of

gender identity or sense of self. As a revitalized transgender move-

ment began to gather force in the early 1990s, it posed a challenge

to the new queer theory similar to the one po'sed by sexuality to

feminism: it asked whether the framework of queer sexuality could

adequately account for transgender phenomena, or whether a new,

additional frame of analysis was also required. These are the ques-

tions that led, in the years ahead, to the development of the new

interdisciplinary academic field of transgender studies.

No account of the new transgender movement and its relation

to· feminism in the early 1990s would be complete without men-

tioning the impact of philosopher Judith Butler's work. In her 1990

book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, But-

ler promoted the concept of "gender performativity," which be-

came central to the self-understandings of many transgender people

The Millennial Wave 163

(along with many cisgender people, too). The main idea is that "be-

ing something" consists of "doing it," a point often misunderstood

in some ·quarters of the transgender community as an assertion that

gender is a merely a performance and therefore not real. For trans

p~ople, who often suffer a great deal to actualize for others the real- ity of their gender identifications, the idea that gender w.:as a game

with no skin in it, just a wardrobe full of possible gender costumes

to be put on or taken off at will, felt galling. But that actually was

never Butler's point; rather, it was that the reality of gender for

everybody is the "doing of it." Rather than being an objective quality

of the body (defined by sex), gender is constituted by all the innu-

merable acts of performing it: how we dress, move, speak, touch,

look. Gender is like a language we use to communicate ourselves to

others and to understand ourselves. The implication of this argu-

ment is that transgender genders are as real as any others, and they

are achieved in the same fundamental way.

Butler clarified and extended some of her arguments in her

next book, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex. "

She argued there that the category of sex, which is conventionally

considered the physical foundation of gender difference (that is,

male and female biology respectively generate the social roles and

personal identities "man" and "woman"), is actually produced by

how culture understands gender. The way a gender system points

to the body as a form of evidence that proves its truth is just a dis-

course, a story we tell about what the evidence supplied by the body

means. Even what "counts" as sex is up for grabs. This discursive

truth achieves its reality by being perpetually "cited" (referred to

over and over again in medicine, law, psychiatry, media, everyday

conversation, and so forth) in ways that, taken all together, make

it real in practice, in the performative sense mentioned above. This

way of thinking about sex, gender, and reality opened up for theo-

rists within the new transgender movement the prospect that new

164 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

"truths" transgender experience, new ways of narrating re-

lationship between gendered sense of self, social role, and embod-

could begin to be told-precisely what Sandy Stone had

called for in her "posstranssexual" manifesto.

The shifting paradigms of gender and sexuality that emerged from

the intellectual workplaces of academe by the 1990s were informed

by the course of the AIDS epidemic, which also played an import-

ant role in revitalizing the transgender movement. From a public

health perspective, transgender populations had come to be seen as

"vulnerable" populations-ones more prone to infection because

of the confluence of poverty, social stigma, job discrimination,

survival prostitution, fewer educational resources, lack of access to

medical information or health care, and other contributing factors.

To prevent vulnerable populations from becoming vectors of in-

fection for other larger and healthier populations, AIDS funding

entities directed money to "culturally competent" prevention and

harm-reduction strategies aimed at trans people. AIDS funding

thus became an important mechanism for bringing needed social

and financial resources to trans communities. Particularly in com-

munities of color, AIDS agencies and service organizations became

centers of transgender activism, hosting support groups, facilitating

community gatherings, and providing employment to trans people

engaged in health outreach and peer support work. Even strictly so-

cial events for trans people who were not HIV-positive were some-

times financially supported through AIDS funding, with the idea

that such events could help provide important safer-sex education

opportunities and could help build self-esteem and cultural pride

that would encourage healthy decision making about potentially

risky behaviors. Several organizations and programs established

1he Millennial Wave 165

in San Francisco in early to

trend, including Projecto ContraSIDA por Vida, Asian and

Pacific Islander Wellness Center, and transgender program at

Brothers Network, an agency primarily serving African American men and transgender women.

history of the AIDS epidemic significantly resh~ped sexual politics. When epidemic first emerged in the United

States, it surfaced among gay men who were mostly One

early name for the syndrome was in fact GRID-Gay-Related Im-

mune Deficiency. But epidemiologists and public health workers

knew that mysterious new disease was not confined to white

gay populations and, however much it affected them, to paint the

immune deficiency syndrome as "gay related" could serve only to

AIDS prevention and educational outreach funding accelerated transgender community formation, especially in communities of color. (PHOTO CREDIT: GLBT HISTORICAL SOCIETY.)

166 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

impede an adequate public health response. AIDS also affected he-

mophiliacs, injection drug users, and· Haitian immigrants in dis-

proportionate numbers, regardless of their sexual orientation or

gender. It soon became clear that AIDS could pass from person

to person through heterosexual intercourse and that in fact it was

the exchange of bodily fluids, rather than the type of sexual act per

se, that created risk of infection. It also quickly became clear that

the prevalence of HIV infection was not uniformly distributed but

rather was structured at the population level by racism and poverty:

poor people of color, particularly African American people, were far

more likely to·. become infected and far less likely to be able to ac-

cess the best lifo-prolonging health care. Black transgender women

living at the intersection of transphobia, misogyny, homophobia,

racism, poverty, and higher rates of incarceration-particularly if

they were involved in commercial sex work-were especially vul-

nerable. The AIDS health crisis thus required gay men, and many

lesbians, to rethink the cultural politics of homosexuality and the

ways in which homosexual communities related to and intersected

with broader social structures~in the same way that it required

many nonhomosexuals to relate differently to gay communities

and subcultures. To adequately respond to the AIDS epidemic de-

manded a new kind of alliance politics in which specific communi-

ties came together across the dividing lines of race and gender, class

and nationality, citizenship and sexual orientation. It also required

gay liberation politics and feminist public health activism to take

transgender issues far more seriously than they had in the past.

The name for this new kind of unabashedly pro-gay, nonsepa-

ratist, antiassimilationist alliance politics to· combat AIDS, which

did not organize itself around identity categories but instead took

aim at the overarching social structures that marginalized those in-

fected by HIV, was queer. The new politics resonated with the new

intellectual paradigms taking shape in the academy, but it drew its

The Millennial Wave 167

forces from unapologetic, confrontational, and media-savvy pro-

test groups such as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power),

which reclaimed an old epithet for gay people, "queer," and turned

it into an in-your-face "So what?" retort to anti-AIDS prejudice.

ACT UP was one of the most successful radical direct action polit-

ical groups in US history, successfully taking on a crim!nally neg-

ligent federal government under President Ronald Reagan, as well

as the multi-billion-dollar pharmaceuticals industry, to develop

treatments, fund programs, challenge prejudice, and save lives. This

newly politicized sense of "queer" first appeared on flyers handed

out by militant AIDS organizations at New York's Gay Pride

march in June'1990, which were emblazoned with the headline

"Queers Read This!" and urged "an army oflovers" to take to the

streets. Within days, and for many months, autonomous "Queer

Nation" chapters started springing up in cities all across the United

States, just as had happened with the Gay Liberation Front in the

1960s. In the two short years that encompassed its waxing and

waning, 1990-1992, Queer Nation transformed public perceptions

of AIDS and homosexuality and shifted internal gay, lesbian, and

bisexual community politics in ways that allowed transgender issues

to come back into the community's dialogue-just as transgender

issues were simultaneously reentering feminism with a new voice.

LGB(T) (and Sometimes I)

The most direct link between the new queer politics and the trans-

gender movement was the formation in 1992 of Transgender

Nation, organized by Anne Ogborn as a focus group within the

San Francisco chapter of Queer Nation. QN-SF was a "group of

groups" that met monthly so that members of its constituent groups

could share ideas, publicize activities, and gather support from other

groups for their own actions. Individual groups within QN varied

168 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

from the women's focus group LABIA (Lesbians

Action) to SHOP (Suburban Homosexual Project),

actions varied from staging queer kiss-ins at shopping malls to play-

ing a lead in massive demonstrations against . Gulf "W_ar. ~f

there was an underlying unity to QN's disparate action strategies, it

was to be found in the sense of urgency driven by the AIDS crisis

and in the conviction that queer people needed to engage imme-

diately in practices that would disrupt the smooth funct~oning of

the heterosexist state and its deadly indifference to queer lives. One

strategy was simply to erupt into visibility in the everyday spaces of

city life through how one dressed. Typical QN styles included (once shocking, now thoroughly commodified and depoliticized) bl~ck

leather biker jackets, Doc Martens boots, T-shirts with provocative

or cryptic political messages printed on them, tattoos, facial pierc-

ings, and copious amounts of Day Glo-colored stickers pla~tere.d on

any available surface (including the backs of black leather biker jack-

ets), with slogans such as "We Are Everywhere" and "We're Here,

We're Queer, Get Used to It." Anne Ogborn had seen a Queer

Nation member at a large public protest wearing another popular

sticker-"Trans Power/Bi Power/Queer Nation"-with the words

"Trans Power" torn off. She asked the woman wearing the sticker if

those words had been accidentally or purposefully removed and was

told that they had been deliberately ripped away because the wearer

didn't consider trans people to be part of her queer movement. Og-

born went to the next monthly QN meeting to protest transphobia

within the group and, in typical QN fashion, was invited to orga-

nize a focus group devoted to transgender concerns.

The announcement in San Francisco's gay and lesbian press of

T ransgender Nation's formation set off a firestorm of protest in the

editorial pages, most of it authored by the same now-aging subset of

lesbian feminists who had attacked Beth Elliott at the West Coast

Lesbian Feminist Conference nearly twenty years earlier. Although

Ihe Millennial Wave 169

term (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) not yet

been coined, is precisely the mind-set that informed the lesbian

feminist attack on Transgender Nation. What was different time around was that

antitransgender rhetoric had come to be seen as a reactionary rather

eration of post-Baby Boom-

ers was reaching adulthood,

a generation whose political

sensibilities had been formed

by the feminist sex wars, the

AIDS crisis, and emerging

theoretical perspectives on

the sex-gender relationship.

Many people who embraced

the queer vision of the early

1990s readily accepted trans-

gender as part of the "anti-

heteronormative" mix. Of

course, not all self-identified

queers were trans inclusive,

nor were all transgender peo-

ple queer friendly. But a large

and previously nonexistent

area of overlap between trans-

gender and queer community

formations quickly emerged.

a progressive stance. A new gen-

OPE.NING RECEPTION Monday May l 7-lOpm Readings by James Green, David Harrison, Susan Stryker

ar 7:30pm and 8:30pm 848 Community Art Space • For information: 4151765-7658

848 Divisadero (between Fulton & McAllisrer) in San Francisco Opening Reception Admission: $5 (donation)

Gallery also OPEN: May l- June I, Sundays l-5pm

Loren Cameron s Body Alchemy was a prominent part of the new wave of visi- bility for transgender men in the 1990s. (PHOTO CREDIT: LOREN CAMERON.)

Transgender Nation erupted with a bang in late 1992, just as QN

was falling apart. It initially drew scores of people to its meetings,

although it quickly dwindled to a small core of regulars. During

its brief existence, its members staged an attention-grabbing protest

at the 1993 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Associa-

tion that landed three activists in jail; provided courtroom support

170 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

for transgender women arrested on sex-work charges; inspired the

formation of a few Transgender Nation chapters in other cities; in-

formed the political sensibilities of an early transgender studies ar-

ticle on "transgender rage"; and made the rounds of LGB groups

in San Francisco, demanding that they take a $tand on transgender

inclusion (thereby demonstrating whether those groups were part

of the new queer movement or the old gay and lesbian movement).

During the next few years, members of variously constituted

queer groups and organizations in cities across the United States

replicated those lively and sometimes heated debates about the re-

lationship between transgender and lesbian, gay, and bisexual com-

munities. The 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and

Bi Equal Rights became. a particular flashpoint for trans-inclusion

struggles after some local organizing committees voted to add

"transgender" to. the title of the march, but a trans-inclusion res-

olution f~iled to pass at the national organizing committee level.

Members of T ransgender Na ti on who thereafter showed up in

Washington, DC, to protest the march introduced their new hy-

brid style of in-your-face queer/transgender politics to transgender

and gay communities alike-and in doing so helped accelerate sub-

sequent transgender organizing nationwide. By 1994, transgender

people played a much larger role in the twenty-fifth anniversary

commemoration of the Stonewall Riots, although they were still

relegated to the "alternative" march and rally rather than the "of-

ficial" one. By 1995, however, many formerly "gay and lesbian" or

"gay, lesbian, and bisexual" organizations and events were begin-

ning to add the T to their names. In the decades ahead, any number

of other initials representing other identities were added to the al-

phabet soup, and their order was perpetually rearranged.

This shift in nomenclature toward an "LGBT +" community,

rather than a "queer" one, marked the beginning of a new phase

in the social history of sexual and gender identity politics ·in the

The Millennial Wave 171

United States. It represented a retreat from the more radical con-

cept of alliance, resistance, and rebellion by different groups against

the same oppressive structures in the dominant culture and the

adoption instead of a neoliberal model of minority tolerance and

i~~lusion-wh~~h sometimes amounted to little more than a "po- litically correct gesture of token inclusion for transgend~r people. Although some "LGBT" organizations genuinely address~d trans- gender concerns in addition to those of sexual orientation minori-

~ies, e~orts at transgender inclusion often failed to grasp the ways m which transgender identity differed from sexual orientation and

misconceptualized how they were alike.

Most transgender advocates used the word transgender as an ad-

jec~i~e to describe a way of being a man or a woman, or as a way of re~i~tmg categorization by those labels. Like class or race or physical

ability, transgender functioned for them as a descriptive term that

cut across the sexual orientation categories, rather than as a noun

describing a separate "species" of sexual identity. A transgender man could be gay or straight or bi, in other words, just as he could

be black or poor or disabled. Many cisgender gays and lesbians,

however, regarded the T precisely as a new species of sexual identity

appended to their own. They considered trans people to be, first

and foremost, trans people rather than members of the L G , , or B groups who also just happened to be trans. This construction of

transgender identity as a noun rather than an adjective-as a kind

of person rather than a descriptive quality attached to another cate-

~ory of personhood-had the unfortunate effect of reinforcing the idea that. homosexuality and bisexuality were by definition "gen-

der normative" and that anyone who deviated from the conven-

~ional definitions of "man" and "woman" automatically belonged m the transgender category. This way of thinking about transgender

tended to reinforce the similarities between homosexual cultures

and mainstream society based on shared concepts of gender and to

172 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

perpetuate the marginalization of transgender people, within both

the mainstream society and the LGBT movement.

One other related development in the early 1990s that de-

serves attention is the emergence of an intersex political move-

ment. Cheryl Chase founded the lntersex Society of North America

(ISNA) in 1993 with the single-minded goal of ending the practice

of performing pediatric genital surgeries on babies b<?rn with am-

biguous genitalia (clearly neither male nor female)-as had been

done to Chase herself. Chase had been assigned male at birth, but

a few years later doct~rs reversed their decision, told her parents to raise her as a girl, and performed surgery to reduce what they had

formerly considered to be a very small penis to an "appropriate"

size for what they now considered to be a too-big clitoris. Chase

did not remember her early childhood gender reassignment, which

is exactly what the medical professionals thought best in terms of

helping intersex youth to develop a "normal" gender in their med-

ically assigned sex. But rather than helping Chase feel normal, the

nonconsensual genital surgeries, which severely compromised her

sexual functioning later in life, left her feeling mutilated and freak-

ish. When she discovered as an adult what had happened to her

as a child, and that it had deliberately been kept secret from her,

Chase felt as if her entire life had been built on a lie. Nothing had

prepared her to accept either her intersex body or the surgeries that

tried in vain to normalize it within the gender binary. After briefly

contemplating suicide, Chase resolved instead that no other chil-

dren should suffer what she herself had experienced. She moved

from Japan, where she ran a computer technology company, to San

Francisco, to learn what she could from the new queer and trans-

gender activism that had erupted there.

The result was ISNA, which made tremendous progress in

changing the way that the medical establishment pays attention to

ambiguous genitalia, in providing peer support for intersex people

The Millennial Wave 173

and their families, and in educating the general public about inter-

sexuality. Chase initially considered intersex politics to be related

to queer and transgender politics not only because they all chal-

lenged heterosexist and gender-normative biases backed by medical

authority, or because they called for the transformation of some of

the same powerful social institutions, but also because the practice

of normativizing genital surgery was such a visceral example of the

idea that beliefs about gender actually produced the sex of the body,

rather than the other way around. Bodies that did not originally

fit the gender binary were literally cut to fit into it, and the process

whereby the operation attempted to produce "normal" bodies as a

result was rendered invisible, and its recipients silenced-just as the

medical establishment had attempted to do with transsexuals. ISNA

also offered a feminist perspective on intersex surgeries. The vast ma-

jority of children with ambiguous genitalia are eventually assigned

as female, because surgeons find it far easier to remove "excess" tis-

sue than to build up new body structures for genitals deemed in-

sufficient for a normal male appearance. This fixation on penis size,

coupled with a cultural devaluation of the feminine that already

conceived of women as "lacking" what men have, conspires to inflict

unnecessary surgeries on intersex children. As feminist sociologist

Suzanne Kessler noted in her work on the biomedical ethics of inter-

sex surgeries, ambiguous genitalia are rarely dangerous for a baby's

health, but they are very dangerous for that baby's culture.

By 2006, ISNA had been largely successful in challenging the

idea that genital surgeries performed on infants represented "best

practices" in intersex care, and in reframing medical practice through

the age-old wisdom that says "first do no harm," to advocate for a

cautious wait-and-see approach that would create greater opportuni-

ties for the intersex person's consent to irrevocable and life-changing

actions. That year, a "Consensus Statement on the Management

of lntersex Disorders" was published in the journal Pediatrics that

174 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

incorporated much of what ISNA had been proposing over· the pre-

ceding decade. In 2007, to the outrage of many intersex activists,

ISNA essentially abandoned its queer, trans, and feminist ~liance

politics to join with medical service providers in the new Accord

Alliance, in which intersex advocates and medical experts would

jointly work to implement the recommendations of the "Consensus

Statement." Consequently, ISNA endorsed the use of the medical

nomenclature "Disorders of Sex Development" (DSD), distanced

itself from "intersex" as an overtly and counterproductively polit-

icized identity term, declared "mission accomplished," and closed

its doors in 2008. Its work is continued by the Alliance Accord,

InterACT for Intersex Youth (formerly Advocates for Informed

Choice), and the Organisation Internationale des Intersexues (OII),

a decentralized global network of local, regional, and national inter-

sex organizations. Although contemporary intersex and transgender

activism have common roots in queer, trans, and feminist politics of

the early 1990s, and still sometimes intersect and overlap with one

another, they have trended in different directions.

Forging a National T ransgender Movement

T ransgender communities, organizations, and activist struggles

grew in so many different directions during the 1990s, in so many

different locations, that it's impossible to place all the developments

into a single chronological narrative. Much of this proliferation

can be attributed to the Internet. Although the Internet had been

around for a long time by then, its use had been mostly confined

to scientists and computer hobbyists, and its content was largely

limited to email and electronic bulletin boards, until Netscape in-

troduced Navigator, the first user-friendly web browser, in 1994.

The Internet and World Wide W eh became ubiquitous seemingly

The Millennial Wave 175

instantly thereafter, radically transforming communication, com-

merce, media, and culture in ways that are still evolving, and which

are hard to grasp for those who have grown up afterward. But one

immediate consequence was that many geographically dispersed

and socially isolated individuals could now connect online with

relative ease. Gradually, a far-flung network of new transgender

groups and campaigns began to influence one another, forging a

more coherent national perspective.

AEGIS (American Educational Gender Information Service) was

founded by Dallas Denny in the Atlanta, Georgia, metropolitan area

in 1990. The seemingly indefatigable Denny was one of the most in-

fluential trans activists of the decade, publishing Chrysalis Quarterly,

establishing a significant archive of historical trans community ma-

terials, and pioneering the development of online resources for trans

people. Denny played a leading role in organizing several import-

ant conferences and annual gatherings, perhaps most notably the

first Southern Comfort transgender conference in Atlanta in 1991, a

large-scale version of the same sorts of activities that have long char-

acterized local transgender group meetings: guest speakers, work-

shops, discussions, entertainment, and socializing. Over the years,

that event grew into one of the largest regular transgender gatherings

in the country. It provided the setting for the award-winning 2001

documentary film Southern Comfort, which chronicled the final years

in the life of trans man Robert Eads, a conference regular, who died

of ovarian cancer after being unable to get health care because of

his transgender status. Southern Comfort moved to Ft. Lauderdale,

Florida, for its 2015 and 2016 conferences, after which it suspended

operations. AEGIS morphed into GEA (Gender Education Associ-

ation) around 1995, before gradually going dormant as more and

more of its agenda to foster transgender depathologization and com-

munity empowerment seemed to have been met.

176 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

One of the first transgender-related events to break out, into na-

tional prominence in the early days of the new transgender move-

ment, even before the Internet took off, was the expulsion of Nancy

Jean Burkholder, a trans woman, from the Michigan Womyn's

Music Festival in 1991. The long-running festival, which combined

outdoor camping with days and days of musical performances, and

which advertised itself as a women-only event, had a tacit policy of

not welcoming transgender women on the grounds that they were

not "womyn-born-womyn" -that is, because trans women did not

share the experience of being raised as girls, and had experienced

early socialization as boys, they therefore could never really under-

stand what it meant to be a woman under patriarchy or appreciate

the need for women-only spaces. Burkholder, who claimed not to

have known of_the policy that excluded transgender women (but

which still accommodated the participation of transgender men,

implying that they were really cisgender women) was deeply trou-

bled by her expulsion and began speaking out in queer and trans-

gender publications. Her case quickly came to function as a litmus

test for whether "queer" was indeed transgender inclusive and for

which side of feminism had won the sex wars. In subsequent years,

transgender activists and allies organized a "Camp Trans" near the

music festival grounds to offer ongoing protest, educational out-

reach, dialogue, alternative community formations, and network-

ing opportunities to .combat feminist transphobia. The debates

about transgender participation at the Michigan Womyn's Music

Festival remained an important touchstone in continually evolving

queer, transgender, and feminist political discussions for nearly a

quarter century, until the festival finally folded in 2015, without

ever formally lifting its "womyn-born-womyn" policy.

In 1992 in Houston, longtime transgender activist and attorney

Phyllis Frye organized the first of six annual transgender law confer-

ences, formally titled the International Conference on T ransgender

The Millennial Wave 177

Law and Employment Policy. The published proceedings of the

co~f~rence did much to inspire a new burst of transgender legal ~cnvism and to connect activists at the national level. Frye was also mstrumental in orchestrating a transgender contingent at the 1993

~GB March on Washington and in beginning to lobby federal leg- islators on transgender legal and policy issues-everrthing from

health care coverage for transgender medical procedur~s to rules gov~rning state-issued IDs to employment nondiscrimination pro- tection to hate crimes legislation. Maryland's Jessica Xavier, who

served on the local host committee for the 1993 march, also took

an act~ve role in transgender political lobbying in the early 1990s, f~undmg both the Washington, DC, chapter of Transgender Na- tion and ~rg~izing another national transgender political lobbying group, Its Time America. Another trans activist from the nation's

capital, Martine Rothblatt, drew parallels between race-based and

transgender oppressions with her 1996 book, The Apartheid of Sex.

Rothblatt, a highly successful telecommunications lawyer who

founded Sirius satellite radio, went on to make a second fortune

i~ pharmaceutical manufacturing, before turning her attention to life-extension and immortality research (and, in the process, be-

coming one of two known transgender billionaires). ,

In New York, activist Riki Wilchins cited lesbian and feminist history-specifically the Lavender Menace and Radicalesbians-

when she launched the T ransexual Menace in 1994 wh d , ose tra e- mark image was a Goth-styled black T-shirt emblazoned with

the group's name in blood-dripping red letters. Wilchins and the

Menace garnered unprecedented media attention by sponsoring

vi~ils outside of courthouses where cases involving antitransgender crimes were being tried, most notably the 1993 rape and murder of

transmasculine teen Brandon Teena in Nebraska, and they became

the subject of iconic gay liberation filmmaker Rosa Von Praun-

heim' s 1996 documentary Transexual Menace. Wilchi~s, who did

178 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

more than any other trans activist in the 1990s to shift the move-

ment away from unfunded grassroots groups toward support by

philanthropic foundations and corporate charity, went on to found

the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition (GenderPAC), one of the

better-staffed national organizations working on gender rights, to

expand transgender lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill, and to serve

as longtime executive director of TrueChild, an organization that

helps donors and policymakers to "reconnect race, class, and gen-

der through 'gender transformative' approaches that challenge rigid

gender norms and inequalities." Wilchins wrote an acerbic primer

on her version of the new transgender politics, Read My Lips: Sexual

Subversion and the End of Gender. In San Francisco, Kiki Whitlock and other transgender activists

worked with the city's Human Rights Commission 1n 1993 and 1994 to produce a landmark report, principally written by FTM

community leader Jamison Green, that documented human rights

abuses against the transgender community at an unprecedented

level of detail. That report became the basis for San Francisco's

1995 transgender antidiscrimination ordinance, one of several such

local measures passed nationwide in the mid-1990s. Around the

same time, in 1994, public health activists launched a program

called "Tranny Tuesday" at the Tom Waddell Health Clinic, which

pioneered a depathologized, harm-reduction, patient-centered ap-

proach to trans health. In the decade ahead, San Francisco built

upon this foundation to begin offering its transgender citizens

greater and greater legal protections against discrimination-and

even offered transgender city employees health care benefits that

covered the cost of their gender transitions more than a decade be-

fore such care became available nationally through the Affordable

Care Act.

Along with political activism, transgender cultural production

picked up pace in the early 1990s. Academic work reflecting the

The Millennial Wave 179

REMEMBERING OUR DEAD

Transgender people as a group experience one of the highest rates of violence and murder in the United States. During the course ofthe

1990s and into the early twenty-first century, several high-profile ho- micides gave the transgender social justice movement a heightened sense of urgency. ~

One of the most notorious incidents took place Ol.Jtside Falls City, Nebraska, on December 31, 1993, during the first flush of the new wave of transgender activism, when John Lotter and Tom Nissen mur-

dered an individual who had been assigned female at birth and who

was just beginning to live as a young man who went by "Brandon" (among several other names). Brandon, who was christened Teena

Brandon at birth, was originally from Omaha but had drifted to rural

Falls City. There he began dating a young woman who claimed initially not to know that he was biologically female, and he was befriended

by Lotter and Nissen. Upon the revelation of Brandon's anatomical

sex, his supposed friends raped him; Brandon reported the rape to the county. sheriff, who took no action. A few days later Nissen and

Lotter tracked Brandon down at another friend's rented farmhouse,

where early on the morning of New Year's Eve they shot and killed him along with two other young people staying in the house. The two killers were eventually convicted of homicide; Lotter received a death

sentence (and is still on death row); Nissen was sentenced to life in

prison without possibility of parole. Brandon gained posthumous ce-

lebrity as the subject of several mass media projects, including Aphro- dite Jones's sensationalistic true crime paperback All She Wanted, the Guggenheim-commissioned web-based multimedia installation Bran- don, the documentary film The Brandon Teena Story, and the feature film Boys Don't Cry.

Although it was the murder of a white transmasculine person that first catapulted deadly antitrans violence into the national spotlight,

by far the most common targets of violence are trans women of color. Tyra Hunter, a twenty-five-year-old African American trans woman

who had transitioned at age fourteen with her family's support, was

on her way to work in Washington, DC, when the car she was riding

continues

180 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

REMEMBERING OUR DEAD continued

in was broadsided on August 7, 1995. As she lay seriously injured in the street, the first responders who initially offered medical care to her

stopped when they discovered she had male genitalia; one remarked, "This bitch ain't no girl. ... It's a nigger, he got a dick." After failing to

receive life-saving assistance in a timely manner, Hunter ~ied shortly thereafter in a hospital emergency room. Her family successfully sued the city for negligence and won a multimillion-dollar settlement. The

murder of Rita Hester, an African American trans woman, in Boston

in 1998 inspired Gwen Smith to found the Remembering Our Dead website that gave birth to Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR).

Although TDOR has done much to call attention to the ongoing ep- idemic of antitrans violence, it is sometimes criticized as an event in

which predominantly white trans people build community for them-

selves by memorializing black trans deaths. In 2001, sixteen-year-old Fred Martinez, a Navajo (Dine) youth who

self-represented to others as "gay," "two-spirit," and "Nadleeh" (a Dine term for a traditional nonbinary gender status), was murdered by

schoolmates in Cortez, Colorado; the story is told in the 2009 docu- mentary Two Spirits. In 2002, Gwen Araujo 1 a California teenager, was be.aten and strangled to death by several male acquaintances, with some of whom she reportedly had been sexually active, after she was

discovered to have male genitalia. Defense lawyers attempted to use

the so-called panic defense, in which heterosexual defendants in an- tigay and antitransgender murder or assault cases claim their actions

are justified because of the panic they experience when confronted

with the possibility of committing an act they consider "homosexual." That argument was not ·successful in the Araujo case, which returned

a guilty verdict; transgender legal activists took cold comfort in the tragedy of Araujo's death that the outcome of her case had the effect

of weakening the panic defense nationwide. A Lifetime cable network movie about the story, A Girl Like Me, first aired on June 19, 2006, and a documentary feature Trained in the Ways of Men came out in 2010.

The Millennial Wave 181

new transgender perspectives and political sensibilities began ap-

pearing in peer-reviewed professional journals, and many of the

new breed of transgender scholars-a number of them struggling

to break into the ranks of tenured professorships but finding in ac-

ademe the same kinds of employment discrimination that trans-

gender people faced everywhere-first met face to face at the 1994

Iowa Queer Studies Conference. The next year, historian of sexu-

ality Vern Bullough organized the First International Conference

on Cross-Dressing, Sex, and Gender at California State University,

N orthridge, which brought the new wave of transgender scholar-

ship into face-to-face engagement with old-school researchers. Sub-

sequent gatherings (which eventually started describing themselves

as "transgender studies conferences") were held in Philadelphia,

Oxford (UK), Perth (Australia), and other cities around the world.

In 1998 the prestigious Chronicle of Higher Education published a

feature article recognizing the emergence of transgender studies as a

new interdisciplinary field. Transgender-related material was being

integrated into college courses in a wide range of disciplines, and

a steady stream of transgender scholarship was starting to roll off the press.

In the arts, playwright and actor Kate Bornstein prodded audi-

ences from coast to coast to think about gender in new ways with

her stage show Hidden: A Gender and her 1995 book, Gender Out-

law: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us-both of which helped

to define transgender style in the 1990s. Trans entertainer Justin

Vivian Bond, a star (along with Kenny Mellman) of the Tony-

nominated Kiki and Herb duet, got her first big break in Born-

stein' s play, while David Harrison, another playwright and actor

who happened to be Bornstein' s life partner at the time, chroni-

cled female-to-male experience in his performance-festival-circuit

crowd-pleaser, FTM The first FTM Conference of the Americas

182 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

was held in San Francisco in 1995 (ironically, at the San Fran-

.cisco Women's Building, which makes meeting spaces available

to a wide variety of progressive causes). Trans men soon received

even more exposure through photographer Loren Cameron's ,,.-for-

traiture work, collected in the 1996 volume Body Alchemy, which

included an arresting self-portrait, God's Will showing Cameron's

own gym-sculpted and testosterone-enhanced physique, a remote

camera-shutter release clutched in one hand, a syringe in the other,

and the artist fully in control of both self-image and the· image-

making process. Another photographer, Mariette Pathy Allen, who

had been documenting the male-to-female cross-dresser and trans-

gender community since the early 1980s, and who has since gone

on to document transgender youth and gender-variant practices in

Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Cuba, also began to document the

flourishing FTM scene in the mid-1990s.

Anohni (formerly Antony Hegarty) of the ensemble Antony and the ]ohnsons (named for transgen- der pioneer Marsha P. Johnson) infuses a trans- gender sensibility into the avant-garde group's musical performances. (PHOTO CREDIT: PIETER M. VAN HATTEM.)

The Millennial Wave 183

Major stories on the new transgender scene started appearing

in high-profile publications such as the New Yorker, the New York

Times, and Mother Jones. Subcultural outlets for transgender cul-

ture erupted at the same time in a spate of new, low-budget, do-it-

yourself zine publications, including Kansas City's TransSisters: The

Journal ofTranssexualFeminism, San Francisco's TNT: 'D.Je Transsex-

ual News Telegraph, and Toronto's Gendertrash. These publications

continued a tradition of small-scale transgender community publish-

ing that stretched back to Virginia Prince's first Transvestia magazine

in 1952. Several of them, particularly Gendertrash, drew inspiration

from the still-flourishing punk zine culture of the later 1970s and

1980s and formed part of the larger subcultural phenomenon some-

times called the "queer zine explosion," a remarkable outpouring of

self-published, sometimes highly ephemeral, periodical publications

about art, culture, and politics that constituted an important facet of

the broader queer movement. The first half of the 1990s represented

a high-water mark in the tradition of such publications, the numbers

and frequency of which dropped off precipitously in the middle of

the decade, in reverse proportion to the rise of the Internet, which

almost overnight became a cheaper distribution outlet than even the

cheapest paper-based, surface-mailed publications.

Mainstream media began paying heightened attention to trans'-

gender themes with the 1992 box-office smash The Crying Game,

whose on-screen story, revolving around the gender ambiguity of

the lead character, Dil, was echoed by off-screen speculations about

the actual gender of the film's star, Jaye Davidson. Even more in-

fluential was Kimberly Peirce's 1999 Boys Don't Cry, which told

the tragic story of Brandon Teena and won Hilary Swank a Best

Actress Oscar for playing a transgender role. Although in recent

years the film has been criticized for starring and being directed by

cisgender women, and for not unambiguously representing Teena

as a trans man with a completely unconflicted gender identity, the

184 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

interpretation offered by Peirce grew from her personal in~?lve­

ment in the Transexual Menace vigils outside the Nebraska court-

house where Teena's murder trial transpired and her own sense· of

lesbian transmasculinity. As the philosopher Jacob Hale noted in

an important early scholarly article on Brandon, one of the deepest

tragedies of his story is that in being killed at such a young age; we

really don't know what path his adult life would have taken. It feels

just as important to acknowledge that his gender expression could

have followed many different trajectories as it does to honor the

way he was expressing his masculinity at the time of his death.

With the new millennium looming just a few years in the fu-

ture, with the stock market racing to then-unheard-of heights in

the speculative frenzy of the dot-com boom, and with technology

transforming everyday life in unprecedented ways, transgender

issues-which seemed to unhinge familiar reality by breaking the

accustomed bonds between bodily sex and gendered appearance-

came to be seen as harbingers of the strange new world beginning to

take shape. This moment of premillennial fantasy was captured as it

happened in experimental filmmaker Monika T reut' s 1999 Gender-

nauts, which cast transgender people as bold adventurers setting out

into the uncharted territory of humanity's technologically and bio-

medically enhanced future. But another film that year by two (not

yet publicly out) transgender filmmakers-siblings Lana Wachowski

and Lilly Wachowski' s The Matrix--developed the implications of

transgender perception into a full-blown aesthetic, one that became

paradigmatic not only for transgender embodiment but for depict-

ing the nature of representation and reality in the digital era.

Early Twenty-First-Century Transformations

The burst of transgender activism in the 1990s was framed, from

beginning to end, by larger historical narratives. The Cold War,

The Millennial Wave 185

which had polarized geopolitics since World War II, had come to

an end with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of

the Soviet Union in 1991, and many residents of the West were

absolutely giddy with the prospect of what then-president George

H. W. Bush called a "New World Order" to be dominated by the

interests of the United States, the sole remaining superf>ower. The

1990s were a period when the growth of neoliberal forms of gov-

ernment accelerated and became more pervasive and entrenched

all around the world. The flourishing of transgender movements

for social change in these years has to be understood not just as

part of a freedom struggle that was gaining strength but also as part

of a broader shift in how societies and state powers managed and

administered the lives of the people who constituted their collec-

tive body politic. Some concrete forms of greater freedom for some

transgender people became possible precisely. because the changes

they needed and worked for also served other ends for other forms of power.

Early twenty-first-century transgender history in the United

States continued many of the trends that characterized the 1990s.

Trans men continued to gain in visibility, to the point that many

younger people (especially those enrolled in traditionally women-

only colleges) came to associate "transgender" more readily with

transmasculinity than they did with trans women. A new crop

of writing by trans men gained audiences larger than could have

been anticipated a decade earlier, including such works as Jamison

Green's Becoming a Visible Man and Max Wolf Valerio' s The Tes-

tosterone Files. Rising-star performers such as Imani Henry, dancer

Sean Dorsey of the Fresh Meat troupe, and hip-hop artist Katastro-

phe all began making names for themselves. Transgender mass

media representation became both mor~ frequent and less preju- dicial, with cable shows such as TransGenerations, the feature film

TransAmerica, and the stage and screen extravaganza Hedwig and

186 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

the Angry Inch finding large and appreciative audiences .. Musical

performers such as Antony Hegarty, who has since come to identify

as a trans woman and is now known as Anohni, pushed transgender

style in unanticipated new artistic directions as lead singer of the

performance ensemble Antony and the Johnsons (named in honor

of transgender hero Marsha P. Johnson). A genderqueer denizen of

New York nightclubs in the 1990s, Anohni' s emotive vocal style

and poignant lyrics expressed the power and pathos of living outside

the gender binary. Their art-which broke out of the underground

club scene thanks to the patronage of perennially cutting-edge art-

ists Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson-linked transgender sensibili-

ties to the cultural avant-garde in ways not seen since the 1960s. A

spate of new authors in the transgender community include mem-

oirists Jennifer Boylan, author of Shes Not There, and Helen Boyd,

author of My Husband Betty and Shes Not the Man I Married, as

well as transfeminist writer Julia Serano.

Gwen Smith's Remembering Our Dead website, first launched in

1999 as a sponsored project of AEGIS, put a spotlight on the chronic

undercurrent of antitransgender violence that left one or two trans-

gender people dead every month since records started being kept. An

annual vigil Smith started in San Francisco in conjunction with the

launch of the website became T ransgender Day of Remembrance,

which is now observed at hundreds of high school and college cam-

puses and LGBT community centers throughout North America

and Europe. It has become an annual opportunity to publicize the

persistence of antitransgender prejudice and violence, particularly di-

rected against trans women of color, in spite of decades of civil rights

gains. At the outset of the 1990s, only three municipalities in the

country offered any kind of legal protection for transgender people

living and working in their jurisdictions, and only one state, Min-

nesota, offered protections at the state level, beginning in 1993. By

the time the new century began, there were twenty-six localities with

The Millennial Wave 187

some form of transgender protections, and before the first decade

of the twenty-first century came to a close there were more than a

hundred, in addition to thirteen states and the District of Columbia.

In 2007, a hate crimes bill, the first piece of federal legislation ever

to address transgender concerns, passed both the Senate and House

of Representatives. In 2008, Allen Andrade became the first person ~

to receive enhanced punishment for an antitransgender hate crime,

when he was sentenced for the first-degree murder of Angie Zapata,

a trans woman he beat to death in Greeley, Colorado, after discover-

ing she had been assigned male at birth.

A great deal of credit for early twenty-first.-century legislative vic-

tories is due to a new wave of legal activist organizations, including

the Sylvia Rivera Law Project in New York; the Transgender Law

Center in San Francisco (which began as a project of the National

Center for Lesbian Rights); the National Center for Transgender

Equality (the lead transgender lobbying organization in Wash~,

ington, DC); and the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition

(NTAC), which draws its leadership from nonmetropolitan and

noncoastal parts of the country. Two historically gay organizations,

Lambda Legal and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (now

known simply as The Task Force), have provided invaluable support

for transgender legal campaigns undertaken by community leaders

and allies such as Shannon Minter, Paisley Currah, Kylar Broadus,

Cecilia Chung, Chris Daley, Monica Roberts, Autumn Sandeen,

Marti Abernathey, Dean Spade, Pauline Park, Masen Davis, Kris

Hayashi, and many others. In the international arena, GATE-

Global Action for Trans* Equality-founded by Justus Eisfeld in

the United States and Mauro Cabral in Argentina, helped keep

transgender issues on the agenda at the United Nations and with

the World Health Organization.

However much some aspects of early twenty-first-century trans-

gender activism represented a steady continuation of longer-term

188 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

trends, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, represented a

sharp inflection point for trans* politics. It brought about height-

ened border surveillance, increased attention to travel documents,

and more stringent standards for obtaining state-issued identifica-

tion, all of which made life more complicated for many transgender

people. Depending on such variables as where one happened to be

born or what levels of health care one might have been able to af-

ford, some transgender people found it impossible to obtain tightly

controlled identity documents (such as passports) that accurately

reflected their current name or gender appearance-which made

travel impossible in some circumstances and risky or dangerous

in others. The restrictions on movement in the post-9/11 United

States gave transgender people more in common with immigrants,

refugees, and undocumented workers than they might have with

the mainstream gay and lesbian movement. Pursuing transgen-

der justice increasingly involved joining campaigns and struggles

that might seem at first to have little to do with gender identity or

expression-but ·everything to do with how the state polices those

who differ from social norms and tries to solve the bureaucratic

problems that arise from attempting to administer the lives of atyp-

ical members of its population.

A striking example of how transgender interests diverged from

legal activism related to sexual orientation can be found in the

debates about transgender inclusion in the federal Employment

Non-Discrimination Act that took place in late 2007. First intro-

duced for consideration by Congresswoman Bella Abzug in the

1970s, ENDA, as the bill is known, aimed to prohibit employment

discrimination based on sexual orientation. The proposed legisla-

tion didn't make it out of committee for a full congressional debate

until 1994, when the measure failed to pass by a single vote. At

that time, the transgender movement did not have sufficient polit-

ical clout to have gender identity or gender expression provisions

The Millennial Wave 189

added to the language of the bill-indeed, ENDA' s primary lob-

byist, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), actively undermined

transgender activists who were just then beginning to lobby Con-

gress for transgender inclusion within the bill. But as the Tbecame

more and more integrated into the fabric of an LGBT community,

major political organizations such as The Task Force, PFLAG (Par- d

en ts, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), and other groups

began to advocate for transgender inclusion. Over the course of a

decade, virtually every national and state organization representing

LGBT interests came to support transgender inclusion in federal

employment protection legislation. They argued that transgender

people were in fact the most severely discriminated against of all

the LGBT communities, and that, moreover, most discrimination

against gay, lesbian, and bisexual people who were not transgen-

der was rooted in prejudices about gender-normative appearances

and behaviors-that is, it was the too-effeminate gay man, or the

too-masculine woman, who were more vulnerable to employment

discrimination than straight-looking, straight-acting gay men and

lesbian women. A gradual consensus emerged among those most

active in advancing the LGBT legislative agenda that adding em-

ployment protections for gender identity and expression was a

necessary amendment to ENDA, one that would protect all US

residents from being fired for failing to live up to a stereotype of

masculine or feminine social roles but that would be especially ben-

eficial for transgender people.

When Democrats took control of both houses of Congress after

the midterm elections in 2006, ENDA was poised for passage for

the first time since 1994. In the spring of 2007, even the HRC-

long a holdout on a transgender-inclusive legislative strategy-

finally got on board and lobbied in support of a version of ENDA

that protected gender identity and expression as well as sexual ori-

entation. All seemed to be going well until September 2007, when

190 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

the bill's longtime sponsor, the openly gay Massachusetts congress""'

min Barney Frank, decided, on the basis of an informal poll of his

colleagues, that a sexual-orientation-only version of ENDA could

pass, but that a transgender-inclusive version would fail. Rather

than wait to gather additional support or conduct more extensive

education and lobbying efforts, Frank took it upon himself to split

ENDA into two separate bills-one for sexual orientation and the

other for gender identity.

US CITIES AND COUNTIES WITH TRANSGENDER ANTI-DISCRIMINATION PROTECTIONS IN 2016

Alaska Alachua (County) Sandpoint

Anchorage Broward (County) Victor

Arizona Gainesville Illinois

Phoenix Gulfport Aurora

Tempe Key West Carbondale

Tucson Lake Worth Champaign

Arkansas Leon (County) Chicago

Fayetteville Miami Beach Cook (County)

Eureka Springs Miami-Dade (County) Decatur

California Monroe (County) DeKalb

Los Angeles Palm Beach (County) Evanston

Oakland Pinellas (County) Peoria

Palm Springs Orlando Springfield

Sacramento Tampa Indiana

San Diego Volusia (County) Bloomington

San Francisco West Palm Beach Evansville

Santa Cruz (County) Georgia Indianapolis

West Hollywood Atlanta Marion (County)

Colorado Idaho Monroe (County)

Boulder Boise South Bend

Denver Coeur d'Alene Iowa

District of Columbia Idaho Falls Ames

Washington Ketchum Cedar Rapids

Florida Moscow Council Bluffs

Atlantic Beach Pocatello Davenport

continues

r

Des Moines Iowa City Johnson (County) Sioux Waterloo Kansas Lawrence Roeland Park Kentucky Covington Danville Frankfort Jefferson (County) Lexington Lexington-Fayette (County) Louisville Morehead Vicco Louisiana New Orleans Shreveport Maryland Baltimore Baltimore (County) College Park Howard (County) Hyattsville Montgomery (County) Massachusetts Boston Cambridge Northampton Salem Worcester Michigan Ann Arbor Detroit East Lansing Ferndale Grand Rapids

Ihe Millennial Wave 191

Huntington Woods Ohio Kalamazoo Athens Lansing Bowling Green Pleasant Ridge Cincinnati Saugatuck Cleveland Sterling Heights Columbus Traverse Coshocton Ypsilanti ~ Dayton ·- Minnesota East Cleveland Minneapolis Newark St. Paul Oxford Missouri Summit (County) Columbia Toledo Clayton Yellow Springs Kansas City Oregon Kirkwood Beaverton Olivette Bend St. Louis Benton (County) St. Louis (County) Corvallis University City Eugene Montana Hillsboro Bozeman Lake Oswego Butte-Silver Bow Lincoln City Helena Multnomah (County) Missoula Portland Nebraska Salem Omaha Pennsylvania New York Abington Township Albany Allegheny (County) Binghamton Allentown Buffalo Bethlehem Ithaca Cheltenham Township New York Doylestown Rochester East Norriton Suffolk (County) Easton Syracuse Erie (County) Tompkins (County) Harrisburg Westchester (County) Hatboro North Carolina Haverford Township Chapel Hill Jenkintown Borough

Lansdowne Borough

continues

192 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

US CITIES AND COUNTIES WITH TRANSGENDER ANTI-DISCRIMINATION PROTECTIONS IN 2016 continued

Lower Merion Township South Carolina Springdale New Hope Borough Myrtle Beach Summit (County) Newton Borough Texas Taylorsville Philadelphia Austin West Valley City Pittsburgh Dallas Washington Pittston Dallas (County) Burien Scranton Fort Worth King (County) Reading Plano Seattle c:; Springfield Township Utah Spokane State College Borough Alta Tacoma Susquehanna Township Grand (County) West Virginia Swarthmore Harrisville Charleston Upper Merion Township Logan Huntington West Chester Borough Midvale Wisconsin Whitemarsh Township Moab Dane (County) York Murray City Madison Rhode Island Ogden Milwaukee Providence Salt Lake City Wyoming

Salt Lake (County) Laramie

The reaction in the LGBT community was swift and unprece-

dented: more than three hundred national, state, and local organiza-

tions formed an ad hoc campaign, United ENDA, to demand that

transgender-inclusive language be restored to the bill. LGBT activ-

ists across the country felt that more than a decade's worth of work

to build an expansive movement had been betrayed at the last min-

ute by the movement's congressional leadership. At the same time,

many lesbian and gay people who had not felt entirely comfortable

being linked to transgender issues since the mid-1990s gave voice

to long-suppressed antitransgender attitudes they'd formerly con-

sidered too "politically incorrect" to express publicly and supported

splitting ENDA into two bills. HRC, which had only recently come

to support transgender-inclusive language in ENDA, lost what little

The Millennial Wave 193

credibility it' had with the transgender community when it made an

abrupt about-face and endorsed the sexual-orientation-only version

of the bill. In the end, the trans-inclusive version of ENDA died

in committee, while the sexual-orientation-only version passed the

House of Representatives-a Pyrrhic victory, given that the Senate

never considered it, and President Bush promised to veto any ver-

sion of ENDA that made it to his desk. ~

As a result of the ENDA controversy, the trans-inclusive queer

and LGBT movements that transgender people had worked to

build since the early 1990s threatened to split apart. There were

stark divisions between "homonormative" gay and lesbian people

who seemed poised for mainstream acceptance and trans and

gender-nonconforming people who were still targeted by discrim-

inatory legislation and burdened by administrative practices that

made their lives more precarious. At the same time, trans activ-

ists in the LGBT movement began foregrounding trans issues as

the movement's most pressing concern, demanding accountabil-

ity from their fellow social change agents and launching more in-

dependent and narrowly focused trans-activist projects. With the

growing presence of positive transgender representation in mass

media, and the increasing acceptance younger people seemed to

exhibit toward transgender and gender-nonconforming identities

and behaviors, the stage seemed set for dramatic breakthroughs or

setbacks on transgender rights as the 2008 presidential campaign

headed toward a historic electoral outcome and the nation plunged

into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.