LGBTQ: History vs Contemporary (Compare and Contrast)

TRANSGENDER HISTORY

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SECOND EDITION

TRANSGENDER HISTORY

THE ROOTS OF TODAY’S REVOLUTION

SUSAN STRYKER

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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 / Susan Stryker. Description: Second edition. | Berkeley : Seal Press, 2017. | Revised edition

of the author’s Transgender history, c2008.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017025964| ISBN 9781580056892 (paperback) | ISBN

9781580056908 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Transgenderism—History. | Gender identity—History. |

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

ISBNs: 978-1-58005-689-2 (paperback), 978-1-58005-690-8 (ebook) LSC-C
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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is book is dedicated to the trans people who lived the lives that made the history I’ve outlined here, and to the trans people, and our friends and allies living today, who continue to make history by advancing the cause of social justice.

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CONTENTS

Prologue ix

CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3 CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 6

Contexts, Concepts, and Terms 1

A Hundred-Plus Years of
Transgender History 45

Trans Liberation 79 The Di cult Decades 115 The Millennial Wave 151 The Tipping Point? 195

Acknowledgments
Reader’s Guide
Further Reading and Resources 245 Sources 255 Index 281

About the Author

239 241

000

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PROLOGUE

ALTHOUGH THE TITLE of this book is simply Transgender His- tory, the subject is both narrower and broader—narrower in that it is primarily a history of the transgender movement in the United States, concentrating mostly on the years after World War II, and broader in that transgender, once a very expansive term, now fails to fully capture the complexity of contemporary gender. And although this book bears the same title as the previous edition first published in 2008, the revisions needed for this second edition to adequately address the remarkable changes of the past decade are extensive enough that the second edition is a substantially new book. e text of the first edition has therefore been updated throughout— particularly in the first chapter—and a new chapter has been added at the end.

Piecing together this story of trans history in the United States was a big focus of my professional life as a historian for nearly twenty years. As a transsexual woman I’ve also been a participant in making that history, along with multitudes of other people. Al- though I try to tell that story in an expansive and inclusive way, what I have to say is unavoidably informed by my own involvement

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x Prologue

in transgender social movements, by my other life experiences, and by the particular ways that I consider myself to be transgender.

I’m one of those people who, from earliest memory, always felt feminine-identified even though I was assigned male at birth, even though everybody considered me to be a boy and raised me as such, and even though my body was apparently a typical male body. I didn’t have any good explanation for those feelings when I was younger, and after a lifetime of reflection and study I’m still open- minded about how best to explain them. Not that I feel the need to explain them in order to justify my existence. I know only that those feelings persist no matter what. I know that they make me who I am to myself, whatever other people may feel about me or do toward me for having them.

The fear of being ridiculed, stigmatized, or discriminated against, as well as my own early uncertainty about how I would act on my transgender feelings, led me to hide them from absolutely everybody until I was in my late teens, in the early 1980s. at’s when I first started opening up privately to my romantic partners about my sense of self. A few years later, in the second half of the 1980s, I found an underground queer community; until then, I’d never knowingly met another trans person. I didn’t come out pub- licly as trans or start my medical and social transition until 1991, when I was thirty years old.

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 wonder- ful it was for me to finally feel right about how I presented my- self 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

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Prologue xi

marginally employed because of other people’s discomfort, igno- rance, 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.

Because for many years I had lived in the world being perceived as a well-educated, able-bodied, cisgender, heterosexual white man before coming out as the woman I felt myself to be, I have a very clear measuring stick for gauging various kinds of oppression re- lated to embodiment, gender, and sexuality. Transitioning put my skin in the game of resisting those oppressions in a new way. Be- cause I have experienced misogyny and sexism, my transgender ex- perience informs the strong commitment I feel to feminist activism that aims to make the world a better place for all women and girls. Because I now live in the world as a woman who loves women, and because there are times (more common in the past than now) when I’ve been perceived as an effeminate gay man, I also have a di- rect experience of homophobia. My transgender experience is thus also part of why I feel a strong commitment to lesbian, gay, and bi rights. Although I have a stable sense of being a woman rather than a man, and have taken a lot of steps to get my body, my state-issued IDs, and other paperwork aligned with my sense of self, I know that I can never align everything the way cisgender people do and that there will always be some discordance and incongruence. For me, that means that, even though I identify as a transsexual woman, I am also, in practice, unavoidably gender nonconforming, gender- queer, and nonbinary.

Being perceived or “passed” as a gender-normative cisgender person grants you a kind of access to the world that is often blocked by being perceived as trans or labeled as such. is lack of access, created by the way the world is organized to benefit people whose embodiments are different from my own, limits the scope of my life

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xii Prologue

activities and can therefore be understood as producing a disability. And just as my transness creates an overlap for me with disability politics whether or not I am otherwise disabled, it intersects as well with other movements, communities, and identities that also con- test the negative effects of living in a society that governs us all by norming our bodies. I feel that being trans makes me kin with in- tersex people, fat people, people who don’t embody beauty norms, people on the neurocognitive diversity spectrum, people who are “enfreaked” for whatever reason—whether or not I am any of those other things apart from the ways they intersect with being trans.

Although I can’t claim that being a white transgender person gives me any special insight into the experience of minoritized communities of color, I do as a transsexual experience the injus- tice of being targeted for structural violence through being labeled a kind or type of person who is not as deserving of life as other people, within a social order that tries to cement me into that often death-dealing hierarchy based on some of my body characteristics. Because transness sticks to my cut flesh even though I am white, it provides me with a basis not just for antiracist white allyship with the struggles of people of color but also with a real commonality of interest in dismantling a system that relentlessly sorts all of us into biologically based categories of embodied personhood deemed more or less worthy of life. I am determined to bring what I know from living my trans life to that larger and deeper struggle. Still, as a white transgender person who has come to this insight only over the past few decades, as one who can still stumble and fumble in my coalitional work in spite of my best intentions, I know I have a lot to learn from the accumulated centuries of experience-based wisdom, social critique, life skills, and freedom dreams that mil- lions of people of color have developed for themselves to survive within colonialism and racism.

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Prologue xiii

Starting in the early 1990s, I’ve had the privilege of using my education as part of a transgender movement for social change. I became a community-based historian, activist, cultural theorist, media-maker, and eventually an academic who has tried to chron- icle various dimensions of transgender experience. e ideas and opinions I share in this book first crystallized more than a quarter century ago when I was part of a very politically and artistically en- gaged queer community in San Francisco, now sadly somewhat dis- persed and depleted by the city’s increasing income disparities, its relentless gentrification, and the displacement of many nonwealthy people. All of this is to say that my point of view is both genera- tionally and geographically specific. I worked for many years at the GLBT Historical Society, one of the world’s great repositories of queer and trans archival materials, and as a consequence the parts of transgender history I know the best are the ones closest to lesbian and gay life. I’ve worked and taught and been a visiting scholar at universities in cities from one end of North America to the other as well as places in between—the Bay Area, Boston, Vancouver, Indi- ana, Tucson—and have had the very great privilege of being able to travel frequently, for work and for play, to countries in Eastern and Western Europe, the Near East, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand. All of these experiences—as well as my incessant snooping around online and participating in social media networks—hopefully help broaden some of the limiting pro- vincialisms undoubtedly embedded in the stories I tell about the things that are most familiar to me.

Writing and revising this book have been ways for me to sum- marize some of what I’ve gleaned from the life I’ve lived over the past few decades and to pass it along to others who might find it somehow life-sustaining, or at least useful, and, if nothing else, in- teresting. I hope it gives you something you need.

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CHAPTER 1

CONTEXTS, CONCEPTS, AND TERMS

Foundations of a Movement

Transgender is a word that has come into widespread use only in the past couple of decades, and its meanings are still under construc- tion. I use it in this book to refer to people who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth, people who cross over (trans-) the boundaries constructed by their culture to define and contain that gender. Some people move away from their birth-assigned gen- der because they feel strongly that they properly belong to another gender through which it would be better for them to live; others want to strike out toward some new location, some space not yet clearly described or concretely occupied; still others simply feel the need to challenge the conventional expectations bound up with the gender that was initially put upon them. In any case, it is the move- ment across a socially imposed boundary away from an unchosen starting place, rather than any particular destination or mode of transition, that best characterizes the concept of transgender that I develop here. I use transgender in its broadest possible sense.

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2 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

Until fairly recently, transgender issues have been presented as personal issues—that is, as something that an individual expe- rienced inwardly, often in isolation—rather than being seen in a wider social context. ankfully, that’s changing. Most of the literature on transgender topics used to come from medical or psychological perspectives, almost always written by people who were not themselves transgender. Such works framed being trans as an individual psychopathological deviation from social norms of healthy gender expression and tended to reduce the complexity and significance of a transgender life to its medical or psychother- apeutic needs. ere have been many autobiographies written by people who have “changed sex,” and an increasing number of self- help guidebooks for people contemplating such a change, or for people seeking a better understanding of what a loved one is go- ing through, or for parents of children who express their gender in ways that run counter to the dominant culture’s expectations. But both the medical and self-help literatures, even when written from a transgender or trans-affirming perspective, still tend to individual- ize rather than collectivize trans experience.

is book takes a different approach. It is part of a rapidly growing body of fiction and nonfiction literature, academic writ- ing, documentary films, television shows, movies, blogs, YouTube channels, and other forms of DIY cultural production by and about trans people that places us in cultural and historical context and imagines us as part of communities and social movements. It fo- cuses specifically on the history of trans and gender-nonconforming social change activism in the United States—that is, on efforts to make it easier and safer and more acceptable for the people who need to cross gender boundaries to be able to do so. It’s not de- signed, however, to be a comprehensive account of US transgender history, let alone a more global history of being trans. My goal is to provide a basic framework that focuses on a handful of key events

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Contexts, Concepts, and Terms 3

and personalities that help link transgender history to the history of minority movements for social change, to the history of sexuality and gender, and to feminist thought and politics.

Back in the 1970s, the liberal feminist movement popularized the slogan “ e personal is political.” Some feminists back then were critical of transgender practices such as cross-dressing, taking hormones to change the gendered appearance of the body, having genital or chest surgery, and living as a member of a gender other than one’s birth-assigned gender. ey often considered such prac- tices to be “personal solutions” to the inner experience of distress about experiencing gender-based oppression—that is, they thought that a person assigned female at birth and passing as a man was just trying to escape the poor pay (or no pay) of “women’s work” or to move about more safely in a world that was hostile to women; a feminine person assigned male at birth, they thought, should work for the social acceptability of “sissies” or “queens” and be proudly effeminate instead of pretending to be a “normal” woman or a “real” one. Feminism, on the other hand, aimed to systematically dismantle the social structures that created gender-based oppression in the first place and that made women the “second sex.” Main- stream liberal feminism wanted to raise women’s consciousnesses about their own private suffering by grounding that experience in a political analysis of the categorical oppression of all women. It wanted to offer men an education in feminist values in order to eradicate the sexism and misogyny they (knowingly or unknow- ingly) directed at women. is sort of feminism was, and still is, a necessary movement to change the world for the better, but it needs to have a better grasp on trans issues.

One of the goals of this book is to situate transgender social change activism within an expansive feminist framework. Doing so requires us to think in different ways about how the personal is political, and about what constitutes gender-based oppression,

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4 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

and about how we understand the historical development of fem- inist movements. Generally speaking, “first wave” feminism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focused on dress reform, access to education, political equality, and, above all, suffrage—the right to vote. “Second wave” feminism, also known as the “wom- en’s movement,” took off in the 1960s and addressed a wide range of issues that included equal pay, sexual liberation, lesbianism, re- productive freedom, recognition of women’s unpaid work in the household, better media representations of women, self-defense, and the prevention of rape and domestic violence. A feminist “third wave” emerged in the 1990s, partly in response to the perceived shortcomings of earlier generational inflections of feminism, and partly to focus on emerging issues. ird wave feminists consid- ered themselves more sex-positive than their mothers and grand- mothers—staging SlutWalks rather than Take Back the Night marches, making feminist porn instead of denouncing all pornog- raphy as inherently degrading to women, supporting sex-worker activism and self-empowerment instead of imagining themselves as rescuing disempowered women from prostitution. ey were more interested in contesting body-shaming politics, in having a subver- sive or ironic relationship to consumer culture, and in engaging in online activism through social media. ere’s even talk of a fourth wave, taking shape in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, that is more attuned than its predecessors to the politics of Occupy, Black Lives Matter, environmental justice, techno-literacy, and spirituality.

More important than parsing the various generational “waves” of feminism, however, is the emergence of what has come to be called “intersectional” feminism. Rooted in black and Chicana fem- inist thought, intersectional feminism calls into question the idea that the social oppression of women can be adequately analyzed and contested solely by concentrating on the category “woman.”

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Contexts, Concepts, and Terms 5

Intersectional feminism insists that there is no essential “Woman” who is universally oppressed. To understand the oppression of any particular woman or group of women means taking into account all of the things that intersect with their being women, such as race, class, nationality, religion, disability, sexuality, citizenship sta- tus, and myriad other circumstances that marginalize or privilege them—including having transgender or gender-nonconforming feelings or identities. Intersectional perspectives emerged in the second wave but divided it into different camps and continue to cut across all subsequent feminist formations. One powerful strain within contemporary trans movements for social change is rooted in intersectional feminist perspectives that first emerged in the sec- ond wave but more often than not finds far more congenial and supportive alliances in third (or fourth) wave movements that are explicitly trans-affirming. Feminisms inclusive of trans people still fight to dismantle the structures that prop up gender hierarchy as a system of oppression, but they do so while recognizing that oppres- sion can happen because of the consequences of changing gender or contesting gender categories as well as being categorized as a mem- ber of the “second sex.”

To reconcile the relationship between transgender and femi- nist politics—to create a transfeminism—it is essential simply to acknowledge that how each of us experiences and understands our gendered sense of self, our sense of being a man or a woman or something that resists or mixes those terms, is a very idiosyncratic personal matter, related to many other attributes of our lives. It is something prior to, or underlying, our political actions in the world and not necessarily in itself a reflection of our political beliefs. It is neither radical nor reactionary to embrace a trans identity. Non- transgender people, after all, think of themselves as being women or men, and nobody asks them to defend the political correctness of their “choice” or thinks that their having a sense of being gendered

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A BIOLOGICAL BASIS?

Many people believe that gender identity—the subjective sense of being a man or a woman or both or neither—is rooted in biology, although what the biological “cause” of gender identity might be has never been proven (in spite of numerous conflicting assertions to the contrary). Many other people understand gender to be more like lan- guage than like biology; that is, although they understand us humans to have a biological capacity to use language, they point out we are not born with a hard-wired language “preinstalled” in our brains. Like- wise, whereas we have a biological capacity to identify with and to learn to “speak” from a particular position in a cultural gender system, we don’t come into the world with a predetermined gender identity.

Evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden suggests a way to blend learned versus innate models of gender identity development. In Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, she writes:

When does gender identity form during development? Gender identity, like other aspects of temperament, presumably awaits the third trimester, when the brain as a whole is growing. . . . The time around birth may be when the brain’s gender identity is being organized. . . . I envision gender identity as a cognitive lens. When a baby opens his or her eyes after birth and looks around, whom will the baby emulate and whom will he or she merely notice? Perhaps a male baby will emulate his father or other men, perhaps not, and a female baby her mother or other women, perhaps not. I imagine that a lens in the brain controls who to focus on as a “tutor.” Transgender identity is then the acceptance of a tutor from the opposite sex. Degrees of trans- gender identity, and of gender variance generally, reflect differ- ent degrees of single-mindedness in the selection of the tutor’s gender. The development of gender identity thus depends on both brain state and early postnatal experience, because brain state indicates what the lens is, and environmental experience supplies the image to be photographed through that lens and

continues

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Contexts, Concepts, and Terms 7 A BIOLOGICAL BASIS? continued

ultimately developed immutably into brain circuitry. Once gen- der identity is set, like other basic aspects of temperament, life proceeds from there.

While researching her book The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activ- ism, and Transgender Rights, science writer Deborah Rudacille became convinced that environmental factors helped explain the seeming increase in the prevalence of reported transgender phenomena. Ru- dacille draws on the 2001 paper “Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals and Transsexualism,” in which author Christine Johnson posits a causal link between the “reproductive, behavioral, and anatomical effects” of ex- posure to chemicals commonly found in pesticides and food additives and “the expression of gender identity and other disorders such as reproductive failure.” Rudacille links transgenderism to falling sperm counts among human males; to rising numbers of alligators with micro- penises and hermaphroditic birds, fish, and amphibians; and to other anomalies purportedly associated with endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the environment.

somehow compromises or invalidates their other values and com- mitments. Being trans is like being gay: some people are just “that way,” though most people aren’t. We can be curious about why some people are gay or trans, and we can propose all kinds of the- ories or tell interesting stories about how it’s possible to be trans or gay, but ultimately we simply need to accept that some minor fraction of the population (perhaps including ourselves) simply is “that way.”

Because members of minority groups are, by definition, less common than members of majority groups, minorities often ex- perience misunderstanding, prejudice, and discrimination. Society tends to be organized in ways that either deliberately or uninten- tionally favor the majority, and ignorance or misinformation about

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a less common way of being in the world can perpetuate harm- ful stereotypes and mischaracterizations. On top of that, society can actually privilege some kinds of people over other kinds of people, with the former benefiting from the exploitation of the lat- ter: settlers benefited from the appropriation of indigenous lands, slaveholders benefited from the labor of the enslaved, men have benefited from the inequality of women. Violence, law, and custom hold these social hierarchies in place.

People who feel the need to resist their birth-assigned gender or to live as a member of another gender have encountered significant forms of discrimination and prejudice, including religious condem- nation. Because most people have great difficulty recognizing the humanity of another person if they cannot recognize that person’s gender, encounters with gender-changing or gender-challenging people can sometimes feel for others like an encounter with a mon- strous and frightening unhumanness. at gut-level reaction can manifest as panic, disgust, contempt, hatred, or outrage, which may then translate into physical or emotional violence—up to and including murder—being directed against the person who is per- ceived as not-quite-human. One has to ask why the typical reaction to an encounter with nonprivileged forms of gender or embodi- ment is not more often experienced with wonder, delight, attrac- tion, or curiosity.

People who are perceived as not-quite-human because of their gender expression are often socially shunned and may be denied such basic needs as housing and employment. ey may lose the support of their families. Within modern bureaucratic society, many kinds of routine administrative procedures make life very difficult for people who cross the social boundaries of their birth-assigned genders. Birth certificates, school and medical records, profes- sional credentials, passports, driver’s licenses, and other such docu- ments provide a composite portrait of each of us as a person with a

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Contexts, Concepts, and Terms 9

particular gender, and when these records have noticeable discrep- ancies or omissions, all kinds of problems can result: inability to cross national borders, qualify for jobs, gain access to needed social services, and secure legal custody of one’s children. Because trans- gender people typically lack the same kind of support that fully ac- cepted members of society automatically expect, they may be more vulnerable to risky or self-harming behaviors and consequently may wind up having more health problems or trouble with the law— which only compounds their already considerable difficulties.

In the United States, members of minority groups often try to oppose or change discriminatory practices and prejudicial attitudes by banding together to offer one another mutual support, to voice their issues in public, to raise money to improve their collective lot in life, to form organizations that address their specific unmet needs, or to participate in electoral politics or lobby for the passage of protective legislation. Some members engage in more radical or militant kinds of activism aimed at overturning the social order or abolishing unjust institutions rather than reforming them, and others craft survival tools for living within conditions that can’t at that moment be changed. Some make art or write literature that feeds the souls of community members or shifts the way others think of them and the problems they face. Some do the intellec- tual and theoretical work of analyzing the roots of their particular forms of social oppression and devising strategies and policies that will bring about a better future. Others direct their attention to- ward promoting self-acceptance and a sense of self-worth among members of the minority community who may have internalized disempowering attitudes or beliefs about their difference from the dominant majority. In short, a multidimensional activist movement for social change often begins to take shape. Just such a movement to address trans social justice issues developed in the United States over the second half of the twentieth century.

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Terms and Concepts

Trans issues touch on existential questions about what it means to be alive and take us into areas that we rarely consciously consider with any degree of care—similar to our attitudes about gravity, for example, or breathing. Usually, we simply experience these things without thinking about them too much. In the everyday course of events, most people have no reason to ask questions such as “What makes a man a man, or a woman a woman?” or “How is my body related to my social role?” or even “How do I know what my gender is?” Rather, we just go about our everyday business without ques- tioning the unexamined perceptions and assumptions that form part of our working reality. But gender and identity, like gravity and breathing, are really complicated phenomena when you start taking them apart and breaking them down.

Because of this complexity, it can be helpful to set out some more technical definitions of words that we use in everyday speech, as well as to define some words that we don’t usually need to use at all, before getting into the historical story. Spending a little time discussing terms and concepts can help bring into view some of the hidden assumptions we usually make about sex and gender and helps introduce some of the arguments that will play themselves out in the chapters ahead.

Please keep in mind that new terms and concepts come into ex- istence all the time, and that words being used when this book was written may well have fallen out of currency, or out of favor, by the time this book is being read. To keep really current on the conver- sation, make the Internet your friend.

* (asterisk): e asterisk is popping up more and more frequently in discussion about transgender issues. Its use originated in database and Internet searches, where the symbol functioned as a wildcard

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Contexts, Concepts, and Terms 11

operator. at is, a query with an asterisk in it would find the specific string of characters being searched for, plus any others. For example, searching for over* would retrieve overkill, overdrive, overtime, or any other words the start with the character string over. Using trans* rather than transgender became a shorthand way of signaling that you were trying to be inclusive of many different experiences and identities rooted in acts of crossing, and not get hung up on fighting over labels or conflicts rooted in different ways of being different from gender norms. e asterisk can also represent a provocation to think about the interconnections between transgender and other kinds of categorical crossings. How does the trans- in transgender relate to the trans- in transgenic or transspecies or transracial? You could image the asterisk as the visual representation of an intersec- tion of innumerable hyphens pointing in different directions, each connecting the idea of crossing with a particular thing to be crossed.

Acronyms: Members of the T section of the LGBTIQQA A (les- bian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, questioning, asex- uals, and allies) community use a lot of acronyms. MTF and FTM refer, respectively, to “male-to-female” and “female-to-male,” indi- cating the direction of gender crossing; it would be more accurate to talk about “male-to-woman” or “female-to-man,” but the fact of the matter is that in practice nobody actually says those things. Some transgender people resent and resist these “directional” la- bels, claiming they make about as much sense as calling someone a “heterosexual-to-gay” man or “heterosexual-to-lesbian” woman, and that they serve only to marginalize transmen and transwomen within the larger populations of other men and women. e two acronyms themselves are much less common than they used to be. CD (or sometimes XD) means “cross-dressing.” TS refers to a transsexual, who might be pre-op or post-op or even no-ho/no-op (electing neither hormones nor surgery but still identifying as a

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member of the gender he or she was not assigned to at birth), while a TG is “a transgender,” used as a noun for a particular kind of person rather than “transgender” as an adjective describing how a person is gendered. e right term to use in reference to any partic- ular person really isn’t in the eye of the beholder—it should be de- termined by the person who applies it to him-, her-, or themselves.

Agender: Feeling that one has no gender identity rather than a gender identity at odds with the gender one was assigned at birth; it can be considered part of the trans rubric to the extent that an agender person has moved away from a gender compulsorily as- signed at birth.

AMAB and AFAB: Acronyms for “assigned male at birth” and “as- signed female at birth.” ese terms point out that when we come into the world, somebody else tells us who they think we are. Mid- wives, ultrasound technicians, obstetricians, parents, family mem- bers, and innumerable others look at our bodies and say what they think our bodies mean to them. ey determine our sex and assign us a gender. We come into self-awareness and grow up in the con- text created for us by these meanings and decisions, which predate our individual existence. Bodily differences are real, and they set us on different trajectories in life, but what people who use these “assigning” terms are trying to point out is that our bodies and the paths they put us on, however unchosen they were initially, need not determine everything about us. Our assigned categories remain situations within which we can make decisions about ourselves and take meaningful actions to change our paths, including reassigning ourselves.

Binary gender: e idea that there are only two social genders— man and woman—based on two and only two sexes—male and

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Contexts, Concepts, and Terms 13 female. e history of trans* people teaches us that both gender and

sex can be understood in nonbinary ways.

Cisgender: A word that gained traction only in the twenty-first century but quickly came to enjoy widespread use as a synonym for “nontransgender.” e prefix cis- means “on the same side as” (that is, the opposite of trans-, which means “across”). It is meant to mark the typically unstated or assumed privilege of being nontrans- gender. e idea behind the term is to resist the way that “woman” or “man” can mean “nontransgender woman” or “nontransgender man” by default, unless the person’s transgender or nonbinary sta- tus is explicitly named. It’s the same logic that would lead some- body to prefer saying “white woman” and “black woman” rather than simply using “woman” to describe a white woman (thus pre- senting white as the unmarked norm) and “black woman” to indi- cate a departure from the norm.

Use of cis- terminology has become prevalent among people, particularly those at colleges and universities or who do community- based activist work, who think of themselves as allies to trans or nonbinary people and who seek to signal their awareness of the privileges they enjoy because they are binary or not trans. But cis- gender is not without conceptual contradictions or weaknesses of its own. Using the term too rigidly can foster another kind of gender binary, cis- versus trans-. It aligns binary and cis- with the cultural politics of normativity and nonbinary and trans- with notions of transgression or radicalness, when in fact the politics of normativity and transgression cut across both cis and trans categories. Rather than using cis and trans to identify two entirely distinct kinds of people, it’s more productive to ask how somebody is cis (that is, how different aspects of their bodies and minds line up on the side of gender divisions in privileged ways) and how they are trans (that is, how they cross the boundaries of their birth-assigned gender in

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14 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

ways that can have adverse social consequences) and to recognize that all people, however they are cis or trans, are subjected to non- consensual social gendering practices that privilege some and dis- criminate against others.

Cross-dresser: A term intended as a nonjudgmental replacement for transvestite, it is usually considered to be neutrally descriptive of the practice of wearing gender-atypical clothing rather than associating that practice with any erotic impulse. e practice of cross-dressing can have many meanings and motivations. Besides being a way to resist or move away from a birth-assigned social gender, it could be a theatrical practice (either comic or dramatic), part of fashion or politics (such as the practice of women wearing pants once was), part of religious ceremonies, or part of celebrating public festivals and holidays (such as Mardi Gras, Carnival, or Halloween). Trans- gender or transsexual people who are dressing in the fashion of the gender they consider themselves to be do not consider themselves to be cross-dressing—they are simply dressing.

Gender: Gender is not the same as sex, though the two terms are often used interchangeably, even in technical or scholarly literature, which can lead to a great deal of confusion when you are trying to be analytically precise. Generally speaking, gender is considered to be cultural, and sex, biological. It’s usually a safe bet to use the words man and woman to refer to gender just as male and female are used to refer to sex. ough we are all born with a certain kind of body that the dominant culture calls our “sex,” no one is born as a boy or girl, a woman or a man; rather, we are all assigned to a gender and come to identify (or not) with that gender through a complex process of socialization.

Gender is derived from the Latin word genus, meaning “kind” or “type.” Gender is the social organization of bodies into different

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Contexts, Concepts, and Terms 15

categories of people. In the contemporary United States, this sorting into categories is based on sex, but historically and cross-culturally there have been many different social systems of organizing people into genders. Some cultures, including many Native American cul- tures, have had three or more social genders. Some attribute social gender to the work people do rather than to the bodies that do that work. In some cultures, people can change their social gender based on dreams or visions. In some they change it with a scalpel or a syringe. e important things to bear in mind are that gender is historical (it changes over time), that it varies from place to place and culture to culture, and that it is contingent—that is, it depends on many different and seemingly unrelated things coming together in a unique and particular way.

One complication in drawing a hard and fast distinction be- tween sex and gender, however analytically and conceptually differ- ent these terms are, has to do once again with our cultural beliefs. Although it’s true that sex typically is used to determine gender cat- egorization, it’s also true that what counts as sex is a cultural belief. We believe that sex is chromosomal or genetic, that it’s related to being able to produce sperm or eggs, that it refers to genital shape and function, that it involves secondary characteristics like beards and breasts. But as we’ve seen, chromosomes, reproductive capac- ity, genital type, body morphology, and secondary sex character- istics shaped by habitus don’t always go together in a biologically predetermined pattern. Some of these characteristics are unchange- able, whereas some are transformable. is leaves us with the collec- tive social task of deciding which aspects of physical embodiment count the most for determining social gender categorization. e criteria used to make that decision are as historical, cultural, and contingent as they are biological—after all, nobody talked about using “chromosomal sex” to determine social gender before the de- velopment of genetics, or using birth certificates as proof of identity

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16 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

before issuing birth certificates became commonplace in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the perceived need to make a deci- sion about someone’s sex and to determine their gender is based as much on aesthetics as on biology; no one would question the sex of an elite female athlete like the South African runner Caster Semenya if she looked conventionally feminine.

It’s therefore possible to understand sex being just as much of a social construct as gender. What this boils down to is saying that we believe sex is a stable basis for determining a fixed social gender, but the reality of the situation is that physical bodies are complex and often nonbinary, and social categories, which are themselves highly changeable, can’t be unproblematically grounded in the flesh. It’s another way of saying that trying to relate sex to gender in some deterministic way always fails at some level and that any correla- tion we do establish has a cultural, historical, and political dimen- sion that must be established, asserted, and reasserted over and over again for it to remain “true.”

is takes us into one of the central issues of transgender social movements—the assertion that the sex of the body (however we understand body and sex) does not bear any necessary or predeter- mined relationship to the social category in which that body lives or to the identity and subjective sense of self of the person who lives in the world through that body. is assertion, drawn from the ob- servation of human social, psychological, and biological variability, is political precisely because it contradicts the common belief that whether a person is a man or a woman in the social sense is fun- damentally determined by bodily sex, which is self-apparent and can be clearly and unambiguously perceived. It’s political in the additional sense that how a society organizes its members into cate- gories based on their unchosen physical differences has never been a politically neutral act.

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Contexts, Concepts, and Terms 17

One of the main points of feminism is that societies tend to be organized in ways that are more exploitative of women’s bodies than of men’s bodies. Without disagreeing with that basic premise, a transgender perspective would also be sensitive to an additional dimension of gender oppression: that our culture today tries to re- duce the wide range of livable body types to two and only two gen- ders, one of which is subject to greater social control than the other, with both genders being based on our beliefs about the meaning of biological sex. Lives that do not conform to this dominant pattern are generally treated as lives that are not worth living and that have little or no value. Breaking apart the forced unity of sex and gen- der, while increasing the scope of livable lives, needs to be a central goal of feminism and other forms of social justice activism. is is important for everybody, especially, but not exclusively, for trans people.

Gender Dysphoria: Literally, a sense of unhappiness (the opposite of euphoria, a sense of joy or pleasure) over the incongruence be- tween how one subjectively understands one’s experience of gender and how one’s gender is perceived by others. Gender dysphoria was a common term among medical and psychotherapeutic professionals who worked with transgender populations in the 1960s through the 1980s, but it was gradually supplanted by the now-discredited diagnostic category Gender Identity Disorder, which was first ad- opted by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980 in the third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) and retained in the fourth edition of 1994 (DSM-IV). Partly in response to transgender activism that contested the pathol- ogization of trans identities, gender dysphoria came back into fashion in the twenty-first century as part of an argument for why trans- gender health care needs should be covered by medical insurance. It

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18 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

suggests that it is the sense of unhappiness that is not healthful and that is susceptible to therapeutic treatment rather than that a trans- gender person is inherently disordered; similarly, it suggests that the feeling of unhappiness about gender could be transient rather than a defining characteristic of a kind of self. Gender Dysphoria replaced GID in the 2013 fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Sta- tistical Manual (DSM-V). e tenth edition of the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), which has been in place since 1992, still uses the GID terminology; the ICD-11, scheduled for release in 2018, is currently expected to revise its nomenclature as well.

GENDER DYSPHORIA

As stated in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association, “Gender dysphoria as a general descriptive term refers to an individual’s affec- tive/cognitive discontent with the assigned gender,” and when used as a diagnostic category “refers to the distress that may accompany the incongruence between one’s experienced or expressed gender and one’s assigned gender.” The clinical focus is on dysphoria as the problem, not—as was the case in the older diagnostic category of Gender Identity Disorder—the psychopathologization of identity, per se. The DSM-V also notes that many individuals who experience gen- der incongruence are not distressed by it, but that considerable dis- tress for gender-incongruent people can occur “if the desired physical interventions by means of hormones and/or surgery are not available.”

Gender Dysphoria in Children 302.6

A. least 6 months’ duration, as manifested by at least six of the fol- lowing (one of which must be Criterion A1):

continues

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Contexts, Concepts, and Terms 19

1. A strong desire to be of the other gender or an insistence that one is the other gender (or some alternative gender dif- ferent from one’s assigned gender). 


2. In boys (assigned gender), a strong preference for cross- dressing or simulating female attire; or in girls (assigned gen- der), a strong preference for wearing only typical masculine clothing and a strong resistance to the wearing of typical feminine clothing. 


3. A strong preference for cross-gender roles in make-believe play or fantasy play. A strong preference for the toys, games, or activities stereotypically used or engaged in by the other gender. 


4. A strong preference for playmates of the other gender. 


5. In boys (assigned gender), a strong rejection of typically mas- culine toys, games, and activities and a strong avoidance of rough-and-tumble play; or in girls (assigned gender), a strong 
rejection of typically feminine toys, games, and activities. 


6. A strong dislike of one’s sexual anatomy. 


7. A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex charac- 
teristics that match one’s experienced gender. 


B. The condition is associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, school, or other important areas of functioning.

Gender Dysphoria in Adolescents and Adults 302.85

A. A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, of at least 6 months’ duration, as mani- fested by at least two of the following:

1. A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/ex- pressed gender and primary and/or secondary sex character- istics (or in young adolescents, the anticipated secondary sex characteristics).

2. A strong desire to be rid of one’s primary and/or second- ary sex characteristics because of a marked incongruence

continues

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20 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

GENDER DYSPHORIA continued

with one’s experienced/expressed gender (or in young ado- lescents, a desire to prevent the development of the antici- pated secondary sex characteristics).

3. A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex charac- teristics of the other gender. 


4. A strong desire to be of the other gender (or some alterna- tive gender different from one’s assigned gender). 


5. A strong desire to be treated as the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender). 


6. A strong conviction that one has the typical feelings and re- 
actions of the other gender (or some alternative gender dif- ferent from one’s assigned gender). 


B. The condition is associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

Gender expression: As noted, we all perform our sense of self through how we comport our bodies to express our gender. In re- cent years, as transgender issues have become the subject of more and more legal attention and bureaucratic regulation, gender expres- sion is often listed as a protected status along with gender identity. e intention here is to protect people who express their gender in nonbinary or nonconformist ways, such as a tech-industry woman who doesn’t wear makeup and who feels more comfort- able in a T-shirt than a strapless floor-length gown, or a young man at art school who has a fondness for glitter nail polish. e idea is that such expressions of self should not be illegal, stigma- tized, discriminated against or result in harm to the persons who express themselves in those ways. Gender expression is also a use- ful term in situations where some members of the public, or some

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Contexts, Concepts, and Terms 21

business owners, might not accept or recognize transgender people as actually belonging to the gender they identify with and persist in thinking of a trans woman as a “man in a dress” or a trans man as a woman with facial hair. It doesn’t matter as much what some- body else thinks you are if you can express yourself without fear in whatever manner feels right to you. Some trans people, partic- ularly those who feel that their transness has a biological basis and requires medical treatment, draw a distinction between gender ex- pression and gender identity to argue that gender identity is more serious, less chosen, and in greater need of protection than gender expression, which is considered more voluntary and less important.

Gender identity: Each person has a subjective sense of fit (or lack of fit) with a particular gender category; this is one’s gender identity. For most people, there is a sense of congruence between the cate- gory one has been assigned to at birth and socialized into and what one considers oneself to be. Transgender people demonstrate that this is not always the case, that it is possible to form a sense of one- self as not like other members of the gender one has been assigned to at birth or to feel oneself to properly belong to another gender category or to resist categorization at all. Many people who have never felt a sense of gender incongruence themselves can’t really understand what it feels like for others, and they may even doubt that transgender people actually experience this or that it can be persistent and intractable and emotionally painful, whereas trans- gender people who do experience this incongruence often have a hard time explaining to others what this feels like or why it’s so im- portant to address. How gender identity develops in the first place and how gender identities can be so diverse are hotly debated topics that go straight into the controversies about nature versus nurture and biological determinism versus social construction. Some people think that gender identity and transgender feelings are caused by

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22 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

inborn physical characteristics; others think that they are caused by how children are raised or by the emotional dynamics in their families; still others consider identity, and the desire to express it differently, to be rooted in spiritual beliefs, aesthetic preferences, or erotic desires. As noted above, it’s more important to acknowledge that some people experience gender differently from how most do than to say why some people experience gender differently from how most do.

Gender-neutral pronouns: English, the most common language in the United States, doesn’t easily allow us to refer indirectly to other individuals without gendering them. We have to choose between he, she, or it, with the latter not considered appropriate for reference to humans precisely because it doesn’t indicate a gender. ere is, however, a long history of gender-neutral third-person pronouns in various English dialects (like the Anglo-Saxon relic a still being used around Yorkshire in the United Kingdom to mean he/she/ it, or yo, an African American vernacular term popularized by hip- hop, being used the same way around Baltimore today). ere is also a long history of attempting to deliberately introduce newly in- vented pronouns (like the word thon, which was proposed in 1858 as a contraction of “that one” and which was seen as similar to the archaic thine for “your”) and of using gender-neutral plurals (they/ them) as a substitute for the binary-gendered singular. e first such uses of plural-for-singular were recorded in the fourteenth century and remain common even now in regional variations like y’all (you all) and y’uns or yinz (you ones), which are sometimes used in ref- erence to an individual. It is increasingly common to use the plu- ral they/them/their in place of a gendered singular pronoun when the sex or gender of the person being referred to is unknown or irrelevant—even to the point of saying something clunky like “the person themself.” Some people who favor gender-neutral English

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Contexts, Concepts, and Terms 23

pronouns might use ze or sie in place of he and she, or the word hir instead of his and her. Sometimes, in writing, people use the unpro- nounceable s/he. None of the solutions to linguistic gendering in English is entirely satisfactory; the newly coined words can sound fake or jarring, and the use of the plural in place of the singular can sound ungrammatical. But language evolves, often in response to historical events (like the Roman and Norman conquests of En- gland, which introduced a lot of Latin vocabulary into English)—if it didn’t, contemporary English speakers would still talk like Chau- cer or Shakespeare. Transgender and nonbinary people are pushing language to evolve today to take into account the new social reality that such people are creating.

Spanish, the second-most common language in the United States, presents even greater difficulties than English when trying to communicate in a nongender-
ing way, given that grammatical
gendering in Spanish, along with
most other Indo-European lan-
guages, is reflected in other parts
of speech than the pronouns.
One recent development, which
works better in writing than in
speaking, is to replace the gen-
dered -o (masculine) or -a (fem-
inine) word endings with the
gender-neutral -x; for example,
Latinx rather than Latino and
Latina. Conversely, in the third
most common language in the
United States, Mandarin Chi-
nese, the third-person pronoun ta
is ungendered; interestingly, the

Anonymous cross-dresser at Casa Susanna, a private resort for cross-dressers in New York’s Catskill Mountains in the 1950s and 1960s.

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24 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

written character for the word is based on the shape that represents the generic concept “human.” Non-gender-specific third-person pronouns are actually the rule rather than the exception in most non-Indo-European languages.

Appropriate use of gender-neutral pronouns can be tricky. On the one hand, gender-neutral language can be a way to avoid sexism (as in not using he or man to refer to people in general) or to avoid making assumptions about a person’s gender identity. On the other hand, some transgender people—often those who have worked very hard to attain a gender status other than the one assigned to them at birth—can take offense when referred to by gender-neutral pro- nouns, rather than the appropriately gendered ones, because they perceive this as a way that others fail to acknowledge how they are obviously and deliberately presenting their gender. A good rule of thumb is to treat gender-neutral terms as more polite and formal, for use when you don’t know the person being referred to very well, and to treat gendered terms as more familiar, for use in situations where you know the person and what they prefer.

Gender-nonconforming, genderqueer, and nonbinary: e terms all refer to people who do not conform to binary notions of the alignment of sex, gender, gender identity, gender role, gender ex- pression, or gender presentation. If there are subtle distinctions to make, they are that gender nonconforming (or gender variant) is more neutrally descriptive of behavior; genderqueer (or gender queer) is associated more with particular subcultural forms of gender expres- sion that have emerged in LGBT communities or in punk-, goth-, or fetish-inspired countercultural fashion that emphasizes piercings, tattoos, and dramatic styles of makeup and hair; and nonbinary is an emerging terminological preference among younger generations who consider binary gender identity to be something more relevant to their grandparents than to themselves. Because transsexual and

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Contexts, Concepts, and Terms 25

transgender people do not conform to the social expectation that people who are assigned male at birth will be men or that people assigned female at birth will be women, they can be considered gender-nonconforming and might be as genderqueer or nonbinary as anybody else. In practice, however, these terms usually refer to people who reject the terms transgender and transsexual for them- selves, because they think the terms are either old-fashioned or too conceptually enmeshed in the gender binary.

Gender presentation: Very similar to gender expression, the term refers to looking and acting like what your culture expects a man or a woman to look or act like (or, alternatively, to present yourself in such a way that you make your gender nonconformity visible). Everybody presents their gender.

Gender role: Gender role refers to expectations of proper behavior and activities for a member of a particular gender. It is an increas- ingly inconsequential term in contemporary secular society because of lessened sex stereotyping, more participation by men in child rearing and domestic responsibilities, and a greater range of em- ployment opportunities for women. But to the extent that the con- cept still has meaning, it often expresses cultural customs, religious beliefs, or assumptions rooted in social-scientific theories. It is the social script that says a man should wear a yarmulke or a woman a hijab, as well as one that says men are aggressive and women pas- sive, or that a man should be a doctor but a woman should be a nurse, or that mothers should stay at home with their children and fathers should have steady jobs outside the home. Although it is certainly possible to live a happy and fulfilled life by choosing to do things that are (or once were) socially conventional such as being a stay-at-home mom, or that express one’s sense of religious duty or ethnic belonging, gender roles tell us that if we don’t perform

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26 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

according to prescribed expectations, we are failing to be proper women or men. Transgender people sometimes experience great social and psychological difficulties when they don’t embody the gender roles other people might expect of them, particularly when these expectations are grounded in either scientific, cultural, or reli- gious beliefs about what is natural, normal, or divinely given.

Habitus: Habitus just means our habitual or customary way of car- rying ourselves and styling our bodies. A lot of our habitus involves manipulating our secondary sex characteristics to communicate to others our own sense of who we feel we are—whether we sway our hips, talk with our hands, bulk up at the gym, grow out our hair, wear clothing with a neckline that emphasizes our cleavage, shave our armpits, allow stubble to be visible on our faces, or speak with a rising or falling inflection at the end of sentences. Often these ways of moving and styling have become so internalized that we think of them as natural even though—given that they are all things we’ve learned through observation and practice—they can be better un- derstood as a culturally acquired “second nature.”

Paying attention to habitus calls our attention to the fact that, although bodies are certainly different from one another, it’s what we do with those bodies, how we use and transform those bod- ies, that is often even more important in making us who we are than what we’re born with. All human bodies are modified bodies: they are bodies that diet and exercise, that get pierced and tattooed, whose feet get shaped by the kind of shoes they wear. Shaping, styl- ing, and moving the body to present oneself to others in a particular way is a fundamental part of human cultures—such an important part that it’s virtually impossible to practice any kind of body mod- ification without other members of society having an opinion about whether the practice is good or bad, or right or wrong, depending on how or why one does it. Everything from cutting one’s nails to

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Contexts, Concepts, and Terms 27

cutting off one’s leg falls somewhere on a spectrum of moral or eth- ical judgment. Consequently, many members of society have strong feelings and opinions about practices deemed to be “transgender” body modifications, often disparaging them as “unnatural,” even though cultivating a particular style of embodiment to express iden- tity is something we all do in some fashion.

Identity: Identity is who you are. It’s a word with a paradox at its core. It means that two things that are not exactly the same can be substituted for one another as if they are the same. In math, to say that (1 + 4) = (2 + 3) is to say that even though the two sets are made up of different numbers, they are mathematically identical because they add up to the same thing. In society and culture, the concept of identity works similarly. When you say, “I am a Social- ist” or “I am a Hindu” or “I am a musician” or “I am a woman,” the “am” is like an equal sign, and you are saying that your indi- vidual sense of being something (an “I”) is described by a category that you consider yourself as belonging to. You and the category are not exactly the same thing, but under certain circumstances one can be substituted for the other. In social life, it’s often quite im- portant to say what categories you identify with or to call attention to categories you get placed in, whether you identify with them or not. Of course it’s possible to have many different, overlapping, or even contradictory personal identities and for people who are sig- nificantly different from one another in some ways to be included in the same category.

Identity politics: Although not limited to the United States, iden- tity politics are very important in understanding contemporary US society, given the country’s history as a democratic republic. Iden- tity politics have to do with claims for belonging and citizenship in relation to some kind of minority status. ey make an appeal

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28 TRANSGENDER HISTORY

to notions of civil society that guard the rights of minorities from abuse by the majority and advance the idea that minority cultural forms, histories, experience, and identities have intrinsic value. In a very real sense, identity politics, which are rooted in the assignment of minority bodies to hierarchical social categories, have always been part of the history of the United States given that it is a nation that has displaced and absorbed native peoples who were categorized as racially different from the settlers, enslaved Africans on the basis of race and non-European origins, controlled immigration by of- fering preferential entry to some ethnicities while denying entry to others, not allowed women to vote, and criminalized gay and trans people. Minorities have always needed to actively engage in the po- litical process to make their needs known, and their voices heard, in relation to socially dominant groups. Since the mid-twentieth century, many minority identity groups have appealed to notions of justice, civil rights, equality, and cultural pride to contest the ways majority society can discriminate against them either knowingly or unknowingly.

Intersex: Typically, being an egg-producing body means having two X chromosomes, and being a sperm-producing body means having one X and one Y chromosome. When egg and sperm cells fuse (i.e., when sexual reproduction takes place), their chromo- somes can combine in patterns (or “karyotypes”) other than the typical male (XY) or typical female (XX) ones (such as XXY or XO). Other genetic anomalies can also cause the sex of the body to develop in atypical ways. Other differences of sex development might take place during pregnancy or after birth as the result of glandular conditions that contribute further differences in the typ- ical development of biological sex. Some of these anomalies cause a body that is genetically XY (typically male) to look typically female at birth. Some bodies are born with genitals that look like a mixture

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Contexts, Concepts, and Terms 29

of typically male and typically female shapes. Some genetically fe- male bodies (typically XX) are born without vaginas, wombs, or ovaries. All of these variations on the most typical organization of human reproductive anatomy—along with many, many more— are called intersex conditions. Intersex used to be called hermaph- roditism, but that term is now usually considered pejorative. Some intersex people now prefer the medical term DSD (for Disorders of Sex Development) to describe their sex status, but others reject this term as unduly pathologizing and depoliticizing. Such people might use DSD to refer instead to “differences of sex development,” or they might hold on to the word intersex—or even hermaphrodite, or the slang word herm—to signal their sense of belonging to a po- liticized minority community.

Intersex conditions are far more common than we tend to ac- knowledge; reliable estimates put the number at about one in two thousand births. Intersex doesn’t really have all that much to do with transgender, except for demonstrating that the biology of sex is a lot more variable than most people realize. is becomes sig- nificant when you have cultural beliefs about there being only two sexes, and therefore only two genders. ese beliefs can lead to in- tersex people becoming the target of medical interventions such as genital surgery or hormone therapy, often while they are still in- fants or young children, to “correct” their supposed “abnormality.” It is being subjected to the same cultural beliefs about gender, and acted on by the same medical institutions, through the same body- altering techniques that give intersex people and transgender people the most common ground.

Some trans people who think that their need to cross gender boundaries has a biological cause consider themselves to have an intersex condition (current theories favor sex-linked differences in the brain), and some people with intersex bodies also come to think of themselves as being transgender (in that they desire to live in a

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gender different from the one they were assigned at or after birth). Still, it’s best to think of transgender and intersex identities, com- munities, and social change movements as being demographically and politically distinct, albeit with some areas of overlap and some shared membership.

Morphology: Morphologymeans“shape.”Unlikegeneticsex,which (at least for now) cannot be changed, a person’s morphological sex, or the shape of the body that we typically associate with being male or female, can be modified in some respects through surgery, hor- mones, exercise, clothing, and other methods. A typical adult male morphology is to have external genitalia (penis and testicles), a flat chest (no breasts), and a narrower pelvis. A typical female morphol- ogy is to have a vulva, vagina, clitoris, breasts, and a broader pelvis. Morphology can also refer to such aspects of body shape as the size of the hips relative to the waist, the circumference of the wrist rela- tive to the hand, the breadth of the shoulders relative to height, the thickness of the limbs or the torso, whether the fingertips are more tapered or more blunt, the relative prominence or absence of boney eyebrow ridges or to other gender-signifying features of the body.

Queer: In the late 1980s and early 1990s, at the height of the AIDS crisis, some people reclaimed the word queer, which had been a de- rogatory term for homosexuality, and started using it in a positive way. Although it’s now often used as a synonym for gay or lesbian, the people who first reappropriated the term were trying to find a way to talk about their opposition to heterosexist social norms; queer was less a sexual orientation than it was a political one, what the “queer theorists” of the day called being “antiheteronormative.” Queer is still usually associated with sexuality, and with gay and lesbian communities, but from the beginning a vocal minority in- sisted on the importance of transgender and gender-nonconforming

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Contexts, Concepts, and Terms 31 practices for queer politics. Many trans people involved in queer

cultural politics took to calling themselves “genderqueers.”

Secondary sex characteristics: Certain physical traits tend to be associated with genetic sex or reproductive potential such as skin texture, body fat distribution, patterns of hair growth, or relative overall body size. Secondary sex characteristics constitute perhaps the most socially significant part of morphology—taken together, they are the bodily “signs” that others read to guess at our sex, at- tribute gender to us, and assign us to the social category they un- derstand to be most appropriate for us. Many of these physical traits are the effects of varying levels of hormones, the “chemical messengers” such as estrogen and testosterone that are produced by endocrine glands, at different moments in the body’s physical de- velopment. Adjusting one’s hormone levels can change some (but not all) secondary sex-linked traits. Hormonal treatments to alter secondary sex characteristics have a greater capacity to effect a wider range of change the earlier in life they are undertaken. Testosterone can give a beard to an adult person who had never been able to grow one before, but it will never make that person’s hips narrower, just as estrogen can promote breast development on the body of an adult who’s never had breasts before but will never make that per- son shorter. But taken in adolescence, while the body is still matur- ing, hormones allow trans people’s bodies to develop many of the same secondary sex characteristics they would have had had their bodies been of another biological sex.

Sex: For such a small word, sex means a lot of different things. We use it as a description of a kind of person (as when we tick off a box on a bureaucratic form), for the act of participating in intercourse (“having sex”), as a synonym for our genitals (imagine the purple prose of a steamy novel that might say that “his sex went limp” or

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that “her sex burned with desire”) as well as to describe biological differences in reproductive capacity (having a body that produces either sperm or eggs).

e Latin root of sex, sexus, means “a division.” Some species reproduce asexually, meaning that each individual organism has all it needs to make another new organism just like it, and some spe- cies reproduce sexually, meaning that not all of the genetic infor- mation needed to make a whole new organism is contained within the body of any one organism of that species: in such cases, repro- ductive capacity is divided, or sexed, between different individual bodies. A few sexed species have more than two divisions, but most, like us, have only two. at much about sex is pretty straightfor- ward, though in practice even this biological understanding of sex can get pretty complicated.

e messiness of sex has to do with our cultural beliefs about what those biological differences of reproductive capacity mean. It’s a cultural belief, not a biological fact, that having a certain kind of reproductive capacity necessarily determines what the rest of your body is like or what kind of person you are, or that some of these biological differences can’t change over time, or that biological dif- ferences should be used as a principle for sorting people into social categories, or that these categories should be ordered in a hierarchi- cal way.

is set of cultural beliefs and practices about what biological sex means can be called “gender” (see entry in this section). It can feel confusing at first to try to think analytically about the differ- ence between sex and gender, and the relationship between them, because one of our strongest unexamined cultural beliefs is that gender and sex are the same thing, which is why most people tend to use sex and gender interchangeably in everyday speech. A good rule of thumb to keep in mind is that sex is generally considered

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biological, and gender is generally considered cultural, and that you should use the words male and female (rather than man and woman) to refer to sex.

Sexuality: What we find erotic and how we take pleasure in our bodies constitutes our sexuality. For most of us, this involves us- ing our sex organs (genitals), but sexuality can involve many other body parts or physical activities as well as the erotic use of sex toys or other objects. Sexuality describes how and with whom we act on our erotic desires. Sexuality is analytically distinct from gender but intimately bound with it, like two lines on a graph that inter- sect. e most common terms we use to label or classify our erotic desires depend on identifying the gender of the person or persons toward whom our desire is directed: heterosexual (toward members of another gender), homosexual (toward members of the same gen- der), bisexual (toward members of either gender in a binary gender system), or polysexual or polyamorous (toward many people of dif- ferent genders). ese terms also depend on our understanding of our own gender—homo- and hetero- make sense only in relation to how our gender is the “same as” or “different from” another’s gender. We can also be asexual (not expressing erotic desire for any- one) or autosexual (taking pleasure in our own bodies rather than in interacting with others) or omnisexual or pansexual (liking it all). Because many transgender people don’t fit into other people’s sex- ual orientation categories (or because they don’t have a clear sense themselves of where they might fit in), there seems to be a relatively high proportion of asexuality and autosexuality in transgender populations, as well as higher rates of polyamory and pansexuality. Some people are specifically attracted to transgender and gender- nonconforming people. Transgender and nonbinary people may be of any sexual orientation, just like cisgender people.

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Subcultural and ethnically specific terms: In an important sense, all the terms mentioned in this section on definitions are subcultural terms—words that originate and circulate within a smaller subset of a larger culture. However, the terms discussed here are also the ones most often used by cultural elites, or within mass media, or within powerful professions such as science and medicine and academia. ey are often derived from the experiences of formally educated white transgender people. But there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other specialized words related to the subject matter of this book that could just as easily be listed in this section on terms and defini- tions. And new terms are emerging all the time, in keeping with the evolving social reality of trans* and nonbinary experience.

A number of these words come out of historic gay and lesbian subcultures; for example, “drag” (clothing associated with a par- ticular gender or activity, often worn in a parodic, self-conscious, or theatrical manner); “drag king” and “drag queen” (people who engage in cross-gender performance, either on the stage or on the street, usually in subcultural spaces such as gay-friendly bars, night- clubs, neighborhoods, or commercial sex zones); “butch” (the ex- pression of traits, mannerisms, or appearances usually associated with masculinity, particularly when expressed by lesbian women or gay men); or “femme” (the expression of traits, mannerisms, or appearances usually associated with femininity, particularly when expressed by lesbian women or gay men). Some words, like “neu- trois” (a person with a gender-neutral gender identity; similar to agender) are specific to emerging trans* and gender-nonconforming subcultures and are most prevalent in online communities.

Many terms, such as “bulldagger” or “aggressive” (for a mascu- line woman or one who takes the lead in initiating sex), originate in queer communities of color. e “house” subcultures of many urban African American, Latino/a, and Asian American communi- ties (such as the ones represented in Jennie Livingston’s film Paris

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Is Burning) have large balls in which participants “walk the catego- ries,” competing for the best enactment of a multitude of highly stylized gender designations, such as “butch queen up in pumps.”

It becomes quite difficult to use the term transgender to talk about gender practices across cultures. On the one hand, the word does circulate transnationally, and many people around the world have taken to using it for themselves in spite of it being an En- glish word that originated in the United States and referred to ways that assigned genders could be moved away from in North Amer- ica. It is used in a transnational context particularly when using the term helps people in the Global South gain access to NGO-funded health care services or become legible in international human rights discourses. On the other hand, using transgender can also function to flatten out and overwrite important cultural differences—even becoming part of the practice of colonization, where Eurocentric ways of making sense of the world are put onto other people. It’s not possible to list here all the various ethnically specific forms of gender that often get associated with the term transgender, but some of the more common ones in the North American context are “two-spirit” (a catchall term for various indigenous American gen- ders), the Indian hijra, the Polynesian mahu, and the Latin Ameri- can travesti.

Tranny: Once a self-applied term used within trans communities to signal familiarity, comfort, casualness, informality, affection, and insiderness, many younger trans people now consider it a dispar- aging term that is most often used by cisgender people to ridicule, trivialize, or sexualize transgender people, particularly trans women. ere is a strong generational difference of opinion about the use of the word, with older trans people often still preferring to use it—albeit no longer in public discourse, and usually out of earshot of censorious younger people.

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Trans man and trans woman: In trans communities, people com- monly use words like transmen, trans men, transgender men, or transsexual men when they are talking about people who were as- signed female at birth but who consider themselves to be men and present themselves as such, or transmasculine person when referring to someone assigned female at birth who has some degree of mas- culine identification or expression. Likewise, the words transwomen, trans women, transgender women, and transsexual women refer to people assigned male at birth who consider themselves to be women and who live socially as such, while transfeminine person refers to someone assigned male at birth who expresses or identifies to some degree with femininity. e “man” and “woman” refer, in keeping with the definition of gender given above, to the social category the person identifies with, lives as, and belongs to, not to biological sex or to birth-assigned gender. When gendered rather than gender- neutral pronouns are used, they similarly refer to social gender and gender identity: she and her for trans women, and he and him for trans men. In a lot of the older medical literature, the reverse is often true. Doctors and psychiatrists tend to use “transsexual male” to refer to transgender women (and will often say “he”) and “trans- sexual female” to refer to transgender men (and often say “she”). In keeping with more general social etiquette, it’s considered polite to call people what they ask to be called and to use the gender terms that best reflect the person’s self-understanding and presentation.

Transgender: As noted earlier, this key term around which the book revolves implies movement away from an assigned, unchosen gender position. Transgender entered widespread use in the early 1990s, although the word has a longer history that stretches back to the mid-1960s and has meant many contradictory things at dif- ferent times. During the 1970s and 1980s, it usually meant a per- son who wanted not merely to temporarily change their clothing

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(like a transvestite) or to permanently change their genitals (like a transsexual) but rather to change their social gender in an ongoing way through a change of habitus and gender expression, which per- haps included the use of hormones, but usually not surgery. When the word broke out into wider use in the early 1990s, however, it was used to encompass any and all kinds of variation from gen- der norms and expectations, similar to what genderqueer, gender- nonconforming, and nonbinary mean now. In recent years, some people have begun to use the term transgender to refer only to those who identify with a binary gender other than the one they were assigned at birth—which is what transsexual used to mean—and to use other words for people who seek to resist their birth-assigned gender without necessarily identifying with another gender or who seek to create some kind of new gender practice. is book usually privileges the 1990s version of transgender, using the word to refer

Popular opinion in the nineteenth century sometimes linked feminist dress reform activism with cross-gender dressing.

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to the widest imaginable range of gender-variant practices and iden- tities. It also relies on abbreviated variants such as trans or trans* to convey that sense of expansiveness and breadth given that contem- porary connotations of transgender are often more limited.

Transsexual: This term is also sometimes traced to Magnus Hirschfeld, who wrote of seelischer transsexualismus, or “spiritual transsexualism,” by which he meant having feelings or emotions or aesthetic sensibilities usually attributed to the binary gender other than the one assigned at birth. For Hirschfeld, what came to be called transsexualism or transsexuality later in the twentieth century was encompassed within his definition of transvestitism. A 1949 article in Sexology magazine by Dr. David O. Caldwell, titled “Psychopathia Transexualis,” described a person assigned female at birth who thought of himself as a man, but the word transsexual was not popularized until Dr. Harry Benjamin starting using it in the 1950s, in the aftermath of the spectacular publicity given to the 1952 surgical “sex change” of Christine Jorgensen. Benjamin used the term to draw a distinction between those “transvestites” (in Hirschfeld’s old sense of the word) who sought medical inter- ventions to change their physical bodies (that is, their “sex”) and those who merely wanted to change their gendered clothing (the “vestments” in the root of transvestite).

Transsexual is now sometimes considered an old-fashioned word, whereas the word transgender—which ironically was coined by people who wanted to distinguish themselves from transsexuals— has become more or less synonymous with what transsexuality used to mean: that is, a one-way, one-time, medicalized transition across the gender binary. Some people nevertheless prefer to still use transsexual to refer to those trans identities, practices, and de- sires that require interacting with medical institutions or with legal bureaucracies, in contrast to those trans practices that don’t. e

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terminology becomes even more confusing, however, given that many people who don’t consider themselves to be transsexual have increasingly started using the same medicalized body modification practices transsexuals have long used—for example, people assigned female at birth who have mastectomies or take testosterone— without using these practices to make a legal or social claim to be- ing a man. In recent years, facial feminization surgery has become increasingly popular among transsexual women, sometimes under- taken along with genital surgery, and sometimes instead of genital surgery, which raises the intriguing question of whether we now need to think of “face” as a determinant of “sex.” To make things even more complicated, trans* activists have worked hard over the last couple of decades to demedicalize the process of changing le- gal gender—that is, getting rid of requirements that a person must have had genital surgery or taken hormones to change their state- issued IDs or legal gender status. As a result, the boundary between transsexual and transgender has become very blurry indeed.

Transvestite: is is an old word, coined in the early twentieth cen- tury by the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. He used it to describe what he called “the erotic urge for disguise,” which is how he understood the motivation that led some people to wear cloth- ing generally associated with a social gender other than the one as- signed to them at birth. Many people now consider the word to be pejorative or pathologizing, but for some it still retains a neutrally descriptive quality. It’s used in this book in its historical sense as well as to refer to people who applied the term to themselves. For Hirschfeld, “transvestites” were one of many different types of “sex- ual intermediaries,” including homosexuals and intersex people, who occupied the middle of a spectrum between “pure male” and “pure female.” Initially, this term was used in much the way that transgender came to be used in the 1990s and afterward, to convey

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the sense of a wide range of gender-variant identities and behaviors. Over the course of the last century, however, to the extent that it has not fallen entirely out of favor, transvestite refers primarily to people who wear gender-atypical clothing but who do not engage in any kinds of body modification. It usually refers to men rather than women and now usually carries with it the stigmatized conno- tation of cross-dressing in a fetishistic manner for erotic pleasure.

RELIGION AND TRANSGENDER

Many religious and spiritual traditions incorporate beliefs about chang- ing gender. Shamanic practices in some cultures may involve shamans taking on other-gendered personalities during rituals or being inhab- ited by the spirit of a differently gendered power or deity; sometimes shamans may live socially in special gender roles. Some religions be- lieve in reincarnation and attribute present-day gender incongruity to past-life experience. Ancient rabbinical texts demonstrate that Juda- ism once recognized seven distinct genders with different religious, social, and legal obligations. In Islam, the only mention of nonnorma- tive gender in the Qur’an occurs in verse 24:3, in a passage that says Muslim women need not follow the usual rules of modesty when in the presence of male attendants who look and act like women and do not desire them sexually. Although the Hadith (a collection of stories and sayings attributed to the prophet Muhammad by later writers) con- tains explicitly transphobic content, many feminist, queer, and trans interpreters of the Islamic tradition argue that the Hadith incorporates patriarchal and heterosexist social views that are not found in the more tolerant Qur’an, which is believed to be divinely inspired.

The Judeo-Christian Bible says a lot of things about sexuality and gender that even observant Christians and Jews no longer pay much attention to; for example, that if a married couple has intercourse during the woman’s menstrual period, both partners should be exe- cuted (Leviticus 18:19). But many people who look for religious justi- fication for their condemnatory views on transgender still point to the following verse, Deuteronomy 22:5: “A woman shall not wear man’s

continues

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RELIGION AND TRANSGENDER continued

clothing, nor shall a man put on a woman’s clothing; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.”

As transgender religious scholar Virginia Ramey Mollenkott points out in Omnigender, her award-winning overview of religious attitudes toward sex/gender variance, many Christians feel they have a deep stake in maintaining the gender binary. The last several popes, includ- ing the current Pope Francis, have been sharply critical of transsexual genital surgeries, which they believe destroy God-given reproductive capacity, and of what they call “gender ideology,” which they claim promotes the false secular-humanist belief that gender is a social con- struct rather than an innate and divinely conferred quality of the body. As Mollenkott’s book makes clear, however, many religious traditions, including many denominations and schools of thought within Christian- ity, adhere to a more tolerant perspective on transgender issues. One organization that promotes acceptance rather than condemnation of gender diversity is the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and the Ministry at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California (clgs.org).

Transgender Issues in the Spotlight

Why the current obsession with all things trans*, which ticked up sharply in the early 1990s, when gender variance seems to be a pretty persistent part of human cultures across time and around the world? Although the mass media have paid nonstop attention to transgender issues since at least the 1950s, the past couple of decades certainly have witnessed a steady increase in transgender visibility, with a strong trend toward increasingly positive represen- tation. When the first edition of this book was published in 2008, a Google search for the word “transgender” retrieved 7.3 million hits, and a search for “transsexual” retrieved 6.4 million. As of 2017, googling “transgender” retrieves 70.7 million hits, and “transsexual”

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nets 56.8 million—a tenfold increase in less than ten years. Back in the 1950s, Christine Jorgensen could generate millions of words of press coverage simply for being transsexual, whereas now the contemporary media are completely saturated with continual refer- ences to and representations of transsexuality and other transgender phenomena—everything from award-winning shows like Transpar- ent to innovative series like the Wachowskis’ Sense8 to trans-youth reality shows like I Am Jazz—not to mention the wall-to-wall cov- erage of Caitlyn Jenner’s gender transition and mainstream print media outlets like Time and National Geographic running highly publicized cover stories on trans issues.

A lot of cultural trends, social conditions, and historical circum- stances have collided to make trans topics hot. Some people think that the numbers of transgender people are on the rise. ose who favor biological theories point often to environmental factors, like the amount of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in our water, soil, and food. Other observers insist that increased visibility is just an artifact of the Internet age—not really a rise in prevalence, just a new way for previously isolated and socially invisible people to link up and disseminate information about themselves. Others point to gender systems themselves transforming in ways that make cis/trans distinctions feel like relics of the twentieth century. Globalization brings us all into increasingly frequent and extensive contact with people from cultures different from our own, including people who have different experiences of gender and sexuality, which can lead to greater familiarity and comfort with gender variation.

e current fascination with transgender also probably has something to do with new ideas about how representation works in the age of digital media. Back in the analog era, a representation (word, image, idea) was commonly assumed to point to some real thing, the same way a photograph was an image produced by light bouncing off a physical object and causing a chemical change on

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a piece of paper, or the way a sound recording was a groove cut in a piece of vinyl by sound waves produced by a musical instru- ment or a person’s voice. A person’s social and psychological gender was commonly assumed to point to that person’s biological sex in exactly the same way: gender was considered a representation of a physical sex. But a digital image or sound is something else entirely. It’s unclear exactly how it’s related to the world of physical objects. It doesn’t point to some “real” thing in quite the same way, and it might in fact be a complete fabrication built up pixel by pixel or bit by bit—but a fabrication that nevertheless exists as an image or a sound as real as any other. Transgender gender representation works similarly. e image and sound of “man” and “woman” are perfectly understandable, however they are produced, whatever ma- terial thing they refer to. For the generation that’s grown up amid the turn-of-the-century digital media and telecommunications revolution and that is thoroughly immersed in video gaming cul- ture and computer-generated movie special effects, transgender of- ten just makes sense intuitively as a possible way of being, even to people who do not feel transgender themselves. “Self ” doesn’t map onto the biological body in quite the way it seemed to in the last century, and being trans simply isn’t as big a deal as it used to be in many contexts.

Probably half a dozen other things also figure into the equation. e end of the Cold War in the late 1980s and early 1990s ushered in an era when it became politically imperative to think outside the totalizing East-West binaries that shaped mass consciousness in the decades after World War II. In the decentralized and global- ized geopolitical era that came after the Cold War, transgender re- flected a similar shift in thinking beyond the binaries of “man” and “woman.” ere was also the sense in the 1990s, so hard to fathom now that we are well into the twenty-first century, that the calen- dar’s impending millennial rollover meant we would soon be living

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in “the future,” when everything would be different, and we would all have flying cars like the Jetsons and Dick Tracy two-way wrist radios (whereas in real life it turned out that we’d have self-driving robot cars and smartphones with video cameras). Transgender in the nineties became one way of imagining that future, where new telecommunications technologies, biotechnology, and medical sci- ence promised to remake what it would mean to be human.

But the reality, quite apart from science fiction fantasies, is that technology really is fundamentally transforming the conditions of human life on earth. Stop for a moment to reflect on some recent (and not so recent) developments in biomedicine: cloning, in vitro fertilization, intrauterine surgeries, sperm and egg banking, surro- gate baby farms, genetic engineering, gene therapy, plant-animal hybrids, artificial DNA, human embryos with more than two ge- netic parents. As these and other biomedical developments con- tinue to coalesce, we are finding more and more ways to separate sex (in the sense of biological reproduction) from one’s psychologi- cal gender identity or social gender role. Contemporary trans issues offer a window into that brave new world.