Describe historical narratives that have been used to justify the marginalization of LGBTQ+ groups.

Overview

This journal assignment allows you to explore historical context and how different populations in society are viewed as “normal,” whereas others are viewed as “abnormal,” specifically regarding race, sexuality, gender, and/or socioeconomic status. Using the resources from Module Four, you will reflect on how these different populations have been constructed in different historical contexts.

Directions

Review the resources from Module Four:

Reading: Transgender History, The Difficult Decades

Reading: Diverse Historical Narratives: Selected Readings, Dude, You’re a Fag: Adolescent Male Homophobia

Reading: Diverse Historical Narratives: Selected Readings, Sexual Orientation and Sex in Women’s Lives: Conceptual and Methodological Issues

Video: Understanding the Complexities of Gender (16:29)

Then, reflect on those resources to explore the historical contexts of various members of the LGBTQ+ population.

Specifically, you must address the following rubric criteria:

Describe historical narratives that have been used to justify the marginalization of LGBTQ+ groups.

What are some of the dominant narratives that have been used to explain LGBTQ+ sexuality?

How do LGBTQ+ narratives differ from the dominant narrative?

Explain how dominant groups have created a power structure over marginalized groups.

How have dominant groups throughout history benefited in ways marginalized groups did not?

What to Submit

Submit your journal as a one- to two-page Microsoft Word document with double spacing, 12-point Times New Roman font, and one-inch margins. Sources should be cited according to APA style.

Requirements: 1 page

By the early 1970s, American culture—especially popular culture—had undergone some startling transformations due to the upheavals of the 1960s. One of the most visible differences was a sudden proliferation of gender styles that broke free from the more rigid codes still in place in the early 1960s. In those earlier years, a woman wearing pants in public would still raise eyebrows, and a man with hair long enough to touch the collar of his shirt would be looked at with suspicion. After a decade of “sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” more unisex fashions had become common, and there was a greater acceptance of traditionally masculine clothing on women. Men did not have the same license to embrace traditionally feminine clothing, but even so, society allowed them a greater range of expression in their appearance. On the cultural fringe, avant-garde transgender theatrical and musical acts such as the Cockettes and Sylvester (on the West Coast), and Wayne (later Jayne) County and the New York Dolls (on the East Coast), inspired the better-known gender-bending styles of glam rocker David Bowie and filmmaker John Waters’s cult movie star Divine. High art and lowlife swirled around pop artist Andy Warhol’s Factory, generating countercultural icons such as Lou Reed and the transgender Warhol superstars Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn, infusing the glam, glitter, and early punk music scenes in venues such as Max’s Kansas City and CBGB. For the first time in U.S. history, what could be described as a “transgender aesthetic,” a new relationship between gendered appearance and biological sex, was becoming hip CHAPTER THE DIFFICULT DECADESTransgender3rdpages.indd 913/6/08 12:12:06 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

TRANSGENDER HISTORY and cool for mass audiences. But these stylistic innovations did little to alter institutionalized forms of sexism and social oppression based on gender. Even as transgender styles began inching toward the cultural mainstream, people who lived transgender lives from day to day began to experience a profound backlash against the recent gains their community had made.Backlash and WatershedThe transgender community was not alone in experiencing a political backlash. By the early 1970s, reactionary tactics by the government had violently shut down many countercultural tendencies that had emerged in the 1960s. The escalation of the war in Vietnam continued; antiwar activism and racial unrest roiled the streets of the nation from coast to coast, and the FBI’s domestic surveillance program infiltrated many antiestablishment groups and movements. Members of the Black Panther Party were murdered by the police in Chicago, and antiwar student protesters were killed by National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio. In San Francisco during these years, a genital-mutilating serial killer began preying on transgender sex workers in the Tenderloin. Some transgender community members believed the killer or killers to be connected with the police vice squad, but these rumors were never substantiated, and no suspect was ever identified. Well documented, however, was the crippling of the National Transsexual Counseling Unit by reactionary members of the police department, who entrapped one of the peer counselors there in a drug bust. A police informant pretended to be sexually and romantically interested in the NTCU employee and then, after dating her for a few weeks, asked her to score cocaine for him and to bring it to work, where he would buy it from her. Once the drugs were on the premises, officers swooped in for the arrests. They also planted narcotics in Elliott Blackstone’s desk, unsuccessfully attempting to frame him. The peer counselor was convicted on drug charges and spent two years in jail, and Blackstone, though he remained on the police force for a few more years until qualifying for his retirement pension, was reassigned to a new job in Transgender3rdpages.indd 923/6/08 12:12:07 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

THE DIFFICULT DECADES which he didn’t interact with the city’s transgender scene. The NTCU limped along for a while longer, but the agency (which renamed itself the Transexual Counseling Center, opting for the alternate spelling “transexual,” using only one “s”) closed in 1974, after losing its funding when the Erickson foundation wound down its operations.The rise of university-based sex change programs during the late 1960s and early 1970s illustrates the complex cultural politics of transgender issues at this historical juncture. Some university-based research on transgender identification had been conducted at the University of California in the early 1950s, and the Gender Identity Research Clinic had been established on the UCLA campus in 1962. Within months of the publication of Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon in 1966, however, the Johns Hopkins University opened the first medical program in the United States to combine scientific research into the biology and psychology of gender with the expert evaluation of transgender individuals for hormone treatment and genital surgery. Similar programs quickly followed at the University of Minnesota, Stanford University, and the University of Texas’s medical campus in Galveston, and still other programs developed at other universities and research hospitals in the years ahead. These years, between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s, represent what could be called the “Big Science” period of transgender history.On the one hand, this heightened level of attention represented a welcome development for transgender citizens of the United States who wanted to physically change their sex. Before the development of these programs, U.S. trans people who sought surgery usually had to leave the country to find services overseas or in Latin America, and many simply could not afford to do so. These new programs, some of which were free of charge to qualified research participants, made “sex change” domestically available for the first time. On the other hand, as trans people seeking surgery and hormones quickly discovered, the new university-based scientific research programs were far more concerned with restabilizing the gender system, which seemed to be mutating all around them in bizarre and threatening directions, than Transgender3rdpages.indd 933/6/08 12:12:07 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

TRANSGENDER HISTORY they were in helping that cultural revolution along by further exploding mandatory relationships between sexed embodiment, psychological gender identity, and social gender role. Access to transsexual medical services thus became entangled with a socially conservative attempt to maintain traditional gender, in which changing sex was grudgingly permitted for the few of those seeking to do so, to the extent that the practice did not trouble the gender binary for the many.The elaboration of an elite university-based medical research culture around “sex change” had significant consequences for transgender political activism. Transgenderism and homosexuality had been conceptually interrelated since the nineteenth century, and transgender politics, the homophile movement, and gay liberation had run alongside one another and sometimes intersected throughout the 1950s and ’60s. The early 1970s, however, represented a watershed moment in this shared history when the transgender political movement lost its alliances with gay and feminist communities in ways that did not begin to be repaired until the early 1990s, and which, in many ways, have yet to be fully overcome. Although gay liberation and feminism Medical drawing of a male-to-female genital conversion operation (1958), included in the text Homosexuality, Transvesticism, and Change of Sex, by Eugene de Savitsch.© Heinemann BooksTransgender3rdpages.indd 943/6/08 12:12:08 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

THE DIFFICULT DECADES are typically considered politically progressive developments, for transgender people they often constituted another part of the backlash, in large part because of the different relationships these movements and identities had to government policy and to institutionalized medical, scientific, and legal powers.Consider, for example, how the course of the war in Vietnam affected gay male and transgender community dynamics. Direct U.S. involvement in Southeast Asian military conflicts began to escalate after the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which communist North Vietnamese boats were accused of firing on the vessels of U.S. military advisers; major commitments of U.S. ground troops followed in 1965. The countercultural hippie style popular among both gays and straights—with its bright, flowing fabrics, long hair, and love beads—represented a deliberate reversal of the gender conventions of militaristic masculinity and signaled political opposition to the war. One popular sexual liberation slogan from the height of the antiwar movement was “Fuck, Don’t Fight”; an unstated but equally apropos slogan for many draft-age men would have been “Genderfuck, Don’t Fight.” It should not be surprising that the period when male-to-female transgender people made their most significant political gains overlapped with a period in which public gender transgression by nontransgendered men had the broadest and deepest sense of political urgency. Significantly, however, when major U.S. involvement in Vietnam began to wind down, after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, the gender coding of men’s clothing styles simultaneously began to shift. In gay male culture, 1973 was the year that the masculine “clone look” of denim, plaid, and short haircuts replaced radical hippie/fairy chic, signaling the return of a more gender-normative expression of male homosexuality. At the cultural level, it is possible to trace the current “homonormativity” of mainstream gay culture (an emphasis on being “straight-looking and straight-acting”), as well as the perceived lack of meaningful connection to transgender communities among mainstream gays and lesbians, to the shifts of 1973.Another marker of the growing divergence of transgender and Transgender3rdpages.indd 953/6/08 12:12:08 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

TRANSGENDER HISTORY homosexual communities can be seen in the campaign to depathologize homosexuality, which was considered a psychological illness in the United States until the early 1970s. Starting in the 1950s, homophile groups had worked with sympathetic straight or closeted members of the legal, medical, and psychiatric professions to delist it from the In the early 1970s, trans people voiced their hopes for a liberation move-ment, using the same language and arguments that other liberation struggles drew from. Militant trans liberationists rejected the idea that they were simply enacting gender stereotypes and they resented the idea that they were expendable “shock troops” in feminist and gay liberation struggles. The following article, though it contains a few errors of his-torical fact, captures the spirit of early trans liberation sentiment; it docu-ments both the nationwide scope of organizing and the perception among some trans people that their struggles were part of a larger movement for social change. The article originally appeared in 1971 in the Trans Libera-tion Newsletter.Transvestite and Transsexual LiberationThe oppression against transvestites and transsexuals of either sex arises from sexist values and this oppression is manifested by homo-sexuals and heterosexuals alike in the form of exploitation, ridicule, ha-rassment, beatings, rapes, murders and the use of us as shock troops and sacrificial victims.We reject all labels of “stereotype,” “sick,” or “maladjusted” from non-transvestic and non-transsexual sources and defy any attempt to repress our manifestations as transvestites or transsexuals.Trans Lib began in the summer of 1969 when Queens formed in New York and began militating for equal rights. In 1970 the Transvestite-Transsexual Action Organization (TACO) formed in Los Angeles, the Cockettes in San Francisco, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in New York, Fems Against Sexism and Transvestites and Trans-sexuals (TAT) also formed in New York. Radical Queens formed in Mil-waukee—all in 1970. Queens became Queens Liberation Front.Transvestism, transsexuality, and homosexuality are separate Trans LibTransgender3rdpages.indd 963/6/08 12:12:08 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

THE DIFFICULT DECADES American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). One of the first major accomplishments of the gay liberation movement that took shape in the wake of Stonewall was to achieve this long-term goal. Building on the foundation of homophile activism, gay psychologists who “came out” within their entities. Sexist values incorrectly classify any male who wears feminine attire as a homosexual, and to a lesser degree, any female who wears masculine attire is also classified as a homosexual.We share in the oppression of Gay women. Trans Lib includes trans-vestites, transsexuals, and hermaphrodites of any sexual manifestation and of all sexes—heterosexuals, homosexual, bisexual, and asexual. It is becoming a separate movement as the great majority of transves-tites are heterosexual, and many transsexuals (post-operative) are also heterosexual, and because the oppression directed toward us is due to our transvestism and transsexualism and for no other reason. We unite around our oppression, as all oppressed groups unite around their par-ticular oppression. All power to Trans Liberation.WE DEMAND1. Abolition of all cross-dressing laws and restrictions of adornment.2. An end to exploitation and discrimination within the gay world.3. An end to exploitation practices of doctors and physicians in the fields of transvestism and transsexualism.4. Free hormone treatment and surgery upon demand.5. Transsexual assistance centers should be created in all cities with populations of one million inhabitants, under the direction of postop-erative transsexuals.6. Full rights on all levels of society and full voice in the struggles for liberation of all oppressed peoples.7. Immediate release of all persons in mental hospitals or prison for transvestism or transsexualism.Transvestites who exist as members of the opposite anatomical gender should be able to obtain full identification as members of the opposite gender. Transsexuals should be able to obtain such identification com-mensurate to their new gender with no difficulty, and not be required to carry special identification as transsexuals. Transgender3rdpages.indd 973/6/08 12:12:09 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

TRANSGENDER HISTORY profession succeeded in having their peers remove homosexuality from the DSM in 1973. As a result, because gays were now “liberated” from the burden of psychopathology, homosexual and transgender communities no longer had a common interest in working to address how they were each treated by the mental health establishment. Gay liberationists who had little familiarity with transgender issues came to see transgender people as “not liberated” and lacking in political sophistication, as being still mired in an old-fashioned “preliberation” engagement with the establishment, as still trying to “fit in” with the system when what they should really be doing was freeing themselves from medical-psychiatric oppression.In many respects, the transgender movement’s politics toward the medical establishment were more like those of the reproductive freedom movement than those of the gay liberation movement. Transgender people, like people seeking abortions, wanted to secure access to competent, legal, respectfully provided medical services for a nonpathological need not shared equally by every member of society, a need whose revelation carried a high degree of stigma in some social contexts, and for which the decision to seek medical intervention in a deeply personal matter about how to live in one’s own body was typically arrived at only after intense and often emotionally painful deliberation. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the landmark Roe v. Wade case in 1973, guaranteeing a woman’s right to an abortion; transgender medical needs, however, were not viewed through the same set of rationales that won Roe, in large part because an emerging feminist position on transgender issues proved even more hostile to transgender interests than the gay liberation perspective.The second wave of feminist activism in the United States is generally considered to have begun in the early 1960s, with the publication of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique in 1963 and the formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966. Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, published in France in 1949, had prepared the ground by placing the question of feminism squarely at the forefront of post–World War II intellectual life. Early second wave Transgender3rdpages.indd 983/6/08 12:12:09 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

THE DIFFICULT DECADES feminism quickly came to be seen by those on the cultural and political left as white, middle class, heterosexual, and establishment oriented in its worldview, however, and more radical and countercultural versions of feminism critiqued the feminist mainstream almost from the beginning. New Yorker Robin Morgan played an important role in launching WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) in 1968, a loose network of socialist-feminist collectives, and her views would have a powerful influence on early radical feminist views of transgender issues. Also, shortly after the formation of the Gay Liberation Front in 1969, many lesbians associated with gay liberation began meeting in feminist consciousness-raising groups. One of these groups, the Radicalesbians, involving Rita Mae Brown, Karla Jay, and others, played a pivotal part in the political development of lesbian feminism through its influential pamphlet, “The Woman-Identified Woman.”At the second Conference to Unite Women, held in New York in 1970, the Radicalesbians and their paradigm-shifting pamphlet burst onto the scene in response to recent pejorative comments by Betty Friedan about the “lavender menace”—the question of lesbian participation in feminist politics. Friedan opposed associating lesbian concerns with feminism because she feared that society’s homophobia would limit feminism’s appeal and hamper its progress. The Radicalesbians staged what has come to be known as the “Lavender Zap” when, just as the conference was about to begin, they cut power to the microphones, killed the lights, and stormed the stage. When the lights came back up and the mics came back on a few moments later, Radicalesbian members wearing Lavender Menace T-shirts had commandeered the attention of all present. They passed out copies of “The Woman-Identified Woman” and facilitated a discussion of feminism, homophobia, and lesbian baiting that changed the direction of feminist politics in the United States.“The Woman-Identified Woman” famously begins with the statement, “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.” Its major conceptual accomplishment was to Transgender3rdpages.indd 993/6/08 12:12:09 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

00 TRANSGENDER HISTORY create linkages between straight and lesbian women through a shared understanding of gender oppression—for all feminist women, in other words, to be “woman-identified,” to give strength to each other, rather than reflecting back to each other the “self-hate and the lack of real self” that were “rooted in our male-given identity” as patriarchally defined women. The idea of women’s having their primary emotional ties to each other, regardless of their sexual orientation, rather than to men, was a major milestone in the historical development of feminist consciousness, as was the sense that gender roles were male defined and functioned strictly as a form of repression to keep women in a subordinate position relative to men.As vital, however, as these moves were for nourishing an incipient feminist sense of pride and strength, and however much they cleared conceptual space for redefining and politicizing gender, they nevertheless also precipitated a significant recontextualization of some lesbian sexual subcultures, a development not necessarily beneficial for all concerned. The traditional organization of lesbian erotic life around “butch” and “femme” identities fell under suspicion as examples of “male identification” and “patriarchal gender” that pathetically imitated heterosexual male/female couplings, and that did not further the revolutionary goal of overthrowing gender itself. As a result, butches, who expressed an unwelcome masculinity, as well as femmes, who embraced a feminine gender presentation deemed politically reactionary, were marginalized within a lesbian feminist political community whose “androgynous” style was seen as gender neutral.One consequence of this shift away from “roles” and toward androgyny in lesbian and feminist culture was the foreclosure of social space that tolerated female-bodied masculine-identified people (some of whom might now be characterized as transgender), along with the women who loved them, who had previously had a place in women’s and lesbian communities. The erosion of that space directly influenced the formation of FTM (female-to-male) transgender communities by the middle years of the 1970s. Before pursuing that story, however, it seems important to document the emergence of new transphobic Transgender3rdpages.indd 1003/6/08 12:12:09 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

THE DIFFICULT DECADES 0discourses based on gay liberation and lesbian feminist analyses of gender. Most of this discourse initially addressed male-to-female transsexuals who were involved in feminist communities, but, as the female-to-male community grew in the 1980s and ’90s, older arguments were revised, expanded, and adapted to take greater account of female-bodied gender variance.Feminist TransphobiaAs the preceding paragraphs suggest, 1973 represented a low point in U.S. transgender political history. Trans people, when they transitioned from one gender to another, still routinely faced loss of family and friends, housing and employment discrimination, high levels of social stigma, and greater risks for experiencing violence. Long-standing antitransgender prejudices meshed with new levels of medical attention to make pathologization the readiest path to healthcare services and a better quality of life. Progressive political movements, rather than critiquing the medical system that told transgender people they were sick, instead insisted that transgender people were politically regressive dupes of the patriarchal gender system who, at best, deserved to have their consciousnesses raised. A “perfect storm” of hostility toward transgender issues was beginning to gather force.Some transgender people of the post–World War II Baby Boom had been drawn to gay liberation, radical feminism, and New Left politics, just like many other members of their generation, but their welcome there tended to be short-lived. San Francisco’s first Gay Pride parade in 1972 (which commemorated the Compton’s Cafeteria riot along with Stonewall and welcomed drag participation) degenerated into fistfighting when the Reverend Raymond Broshears, one of the gay male organizers, punched members of a lesbian separatist contingent who insisted on carrying signs that said Off the Pricks! in violation of the parade’s “no violence” policy. At the postparade rally, feminists and some of their gay male supporters denounced the fight as an example of stereotypical gender roles and patriarchal oppression of women, and they announced that they never again would participate in a gay pride Transgender3rdpages.indd 1013/6/08 12:12:10 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

0 TRANSGENDER HISTORY event organized by Broshears, or in one that permitted drag queens to “mock” women. In 1973, two separate San Francisco Pride events were organized, one by Broshears, and the other by gays and lesbians who opposed drag and expressly forbid transgender people from participating. Broshears never subsequently organized another Gay Pride event, while the antidrag event became the forerunner of the current San Francisco LGBT Pride celebration. That same year, across the continent in New York, Stonewall veteran and STAR founder Sylvia Rivera was forcibly prevented from addressing the annual commemoration of Christopher Street Liberation Day. But perhaps the most consequential incident in the rising tide of hostility toward transgender people in the summer of 1973 was directed against transsexual lesbian singer Beth Elliott by Robin Morgan at the West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference.Beth Elliott discovered her feminism, lesbianism, and womanhood in the context of a college friendship in the late 1960s with a young woman who was also in the process of coming out. After transitioning from male to female in her late teens, Elliott subsequently threw herself into community activism by participating in the hippie folk music scene, becoming an antiwar activist, and serving as vice president of the San Francisco chapter of the pioneering lesbian organization the Daughters of Bilitis. Her formative teenage relationship came back to haunt her in the early 1970s, however, when her former college friend, by now a member of the lesbian separatist Gutter Dykes Collective, publicly accused Elliott of having sexually harassed her years earlier—a charge Elliott vigorously and vehemently denied, but which, by the very nature of things, could never be extricated from the circular round of “she said/she said” accusations, denials, and counteraccusations. In retrospect, these accusations of harassment appear to be an early instance—perhaps the first—of an emerging discourse in feminism that held all male-to-female transsexuals to be, by definition, violators of women, since they represented an “unwanted penetration” into women’s space. Elliott, for her part, claims her former friend made false accusations to save face within her separatist clique once her adolescent friendship with Elliott became known, but whatever Transgender3rdpages.indd 1023/6/08 12:12:10 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

THE DIFFICULT DECADES 0the circumstances might have been, the public accusation of sexual misconduct served as a lightning rod for discharging years of gathering unease about the participation of transgender women in lesbian space. It devastated Elliott, derailed her career in the early women’s movement and music scene, and became the basis for one of the most pernicious and persistent characterizations of transgender people to be found in all of feminism.The fallout began in December 1972 when Elliott was ousted from the Daughters of Bilitis, not because of any accusations against her but on the grounds that she wasn’t “really” a woman; several other members resigned in protest over that decision. Meanwhile, Elliott also served on the organizing committee of the West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference, planned for April of 1973 in Los Angeles, and she had been asked to perform as a singer in the conference’s entertainment program. The Gutter Dykes leafleted the conference to protest the presence there of a “man” (Elliott), and keynote speaker Robin Morgan, recently arrived from the East Coast, hastily expanded her address to incorporate elements Transsexual lesbian singer and activist Beth Elliott in the 1970s.© Richard McCaffreyTransgender3rdpages.indd 1033/6/08 12:12:10 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

0 TRANSGENDER HISTORY of the brewing controversy. All of her incorporations seem to have come from separatist material, and none from Elliott and her supporters. Morgan’s speech, titled “Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?” was subsequently published in her memoir Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, and it was also widely anthologized. More than twelve hundred women at the conference—which turned out to be the largest lesbian gathering to date—listened to the speech firsthand. For many attendees, the controversy over Beth Elliott’s participation in the West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference was their first encounter with the “transgender question,” and what transpired there would inform opinions nationwide.“All hell broke loose that very first night, caused by the gate-crashing presence of a male transvestite who insisted that he was 1) an invited participant, 2) really a woman, and 3) at heart a lesbian,” Morgan wrote in the introductory notes to Going Too Far. “It was incredible that so many strong angry women should be divided by one smug male in granny glasses and an earth-mother gown.” In the 1973 speech itself, Morgan asked her audience why some of them felt compelled to defend the “obscenity of male transvestism” and to “permit into our organizations . . . men who deliberately reemphasize gender roles, and who parody female oppression and suffering.” “No,” she continued, displaying her inability to distinguish between male-to-female transsexual life contexts and episodic gay drag or heterosexual cross-dressing: “I will not call a male ‘she’; thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society and of surviving, have earned me the title ‘woman’; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister.”Morgan then went on to identify Elliott as “the same man who four years ago tried to pressure a San Francisco lesbian into letting him rape her; the same man who single-handedly divided and almost destroyed the San Francisco Daughters of Bilitis Chapter.” She accused Elliott of “leeching off women who have spent entire lives as women in women’s Transgender3rdpages.indd 1043/6/08 12:12:10 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

THE DIFFICULT DECADES 0bodies” and ended her personal attack by declaiming: “I charge him as an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a destroyer—with the mentality of a rapist.” Morgan then called upon the conference attendees to vote on ejecting Elliott, saying, “You can let him into your workshops—or you can deal with him.” According to writers for the Lesbian Tide, more than two-thirds of those present voted to allow Elliott to remain, but the antitranssexual faction refused to accept the popular results and promised to disrupt the conference if their demands were not met. Eventually, after much rancorous debate, Beth Elliott went on to perform but thereafter left the remainder of the conference.Conference attendees brought news of the Elliott controversy (and of course much else) back to women’s communities across the country, and, throughout the middle years of the 1970s, the “transsexual rapist” trope began to circulate in grassroots lesbian networks as the most extreme version of an antipathy toward transgender people rooted in the concepts of “woman identification” and “women-only space.” In 1977, for example, Sandy Stone, a male-to-female transsexual recording engineer who had worked with Jimi Hendrix and other rock luminaries before joining the Olivia Records collective to help launch the women’s music industry, became the target of an antitranssexual campaign among some women who threatened to boycott Olivia if Stone did not resign, arguing that consumers were being deceived in the claim that Olivia was “women-only.” Although the collective was willing to stick by Stone on principle, she voluntarily left to pursue other opportunities in order not to damage Olivia’s business. By 1978, Boston University feminist theologian Mary Daly had elevated transphobia to a metaphysical precept by labeling transsexuality a “necrophilic invasion” of vital women’s space in the section of her book, Gyn/Ecology, called “Boundary Violation and the Frankenstein Phenomenon.” But it was Daly’s doctoral student, Janice G. Raymond, who, in 1979, consolidated the many strands of antitransgender discourse circulating within the feminist community into one grand narrative, published as The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male.Transgender3rdpages.indd 1053/6/08 12:12:11 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

0 TRANSGENDER HISTORY Because Raymond’s book has played such an important role in transgender political history—serving both as a sourcebook for antitransgender opinion and a goad for transgender theorizing—it merits discussion here at some length. As the debates about transgender issues have shifted during the 1990s and the 2000s, Raymond’s attitudes—never representative of all feminist opinion—have been caricatured and derided by people friendly to transgender concerns, while those hostile to transgender interests hold her work up as a sound argument in their favor, sometimes without having actually read her book. Because what she actually wrote has been obscured by the heated arguments of others, and because her own arguments continue to be referenced in contemporary community debates, it seems useful to quote Raymond extensively.First, Raymond explicitly identifies the practice of transsexuality with rape, unequivocally stating: “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves”; she asserts that the mere presence of male-to-female transsexuals in women’s space “violates women’s sexuality and spirit.” Rape, she claims, is usually accomplished by force, but it can also be accomplished by deception; male-to-female transsexuals who seek to be involved in women’s and feminist communities “merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women,” but they continue to rape women, as she claims Sandy Stone did via her work at Olivia, whenever they do not declare themselves to be transsexuals.Furthermore, Raymond claims that male-to-female transsexuals are agents of the patriarchal oppression of women, comparing them to the eunuchs (castrated males) who once guarded the harem tents for Eastern potentates. “Will the acceptance of transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists who have lost only the outward appendages of their physical masculinity lead to the containment and control of lesbian-feminists?” Raymond asks. “Will every lesbian-feminist space become a harem?” Just because some “men” are castrated doesn’t make them “un-men,” she continues; it just means they can be used as “‘keepers’ of woman-identified women when the ‘real men,’ the ‘rulers of Transgender3rdpages.indd 1063/6/08 12:12:11 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

THE DIFFICULT DECADES 0patriarchy,’ decide that the women’s movement . . . should be controlled and contained.” In this way, she claims, eunuchs, too, “can rise in the Kingdoms of the Fathers.” Combining Orientalist stereotypes with a thinly veiled Islamophobia, Raymond thus constructs the transsexual as a tool of alien powers bent on the subjugation of progressive Western feminism.One of the more lurid yet logically incoherent sections of The Transsexual Empire is called “Learning from the Nazi Experience.” “In mentioning the Nazi experiments,” Raymond writes, “it is not my purpose to directly compare transsexual surgery to what went on in the camps but rather to demonstrate that much of what went on there can be of value in surveying the ethics of transsexualism.” She then constructs a string of false syllogisms, inferences, and analogies that work to associate transsexuality with Nazism without actually asserting that transsexuals are Nazis or Nazi collaborators. Raymond quotes countercultural antipsychiatry guru Thomas Szasz to the effect that sometimes profit-hungry doctors have collaborated with governments and corporations in ways that seem to violate their professional ethics to “first do no harm,” and then she notes that Nazi science was government funded. “Not so incidentally,” she points out, “some transsexual research has been funded by government grants.” Nazi doctors conducted experiments such as comparing the skulls of Aryans and non-Aryans to gain racial knowledge, whereas doctors in the 1970s experimented on transsexual bodies to learn whether it was “possible to construct a functional vagina in a male body” to gain sexual knowledge; therefore, Raymond claims, “What we are witnessing in the transsexual context is a science at the service of patriarchal ideology of sex-role conformity in the same way that breeding for blond hair and blue eyes became a so-called science at the service of Nordic racial conformity.” The section ends with a series of statements and inferences bearing no logical relationship to one another: The Nazis were Germans; the first physician on record to perform a sex conversion surgery was a German who worked at Hirschfeld’s institute in Germany; Harry Benjamin, a German, visited the Hirschfeld institute many times in the Transgender3rdpages.indd 1073/6/08 12:12:11 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

0 TRANSGENDER HISTORY 1920s; the institute’s confidential files reputedly held compromising information on prominent homosexual or cross-dressing Nazis; and Nazis conducted medical experiments in the concentration camps that sometimes involved castration and hormone treatments aimed at “curing” homosexuality. Therefore? Transsexuality has something to do with Nazism.Raymond, who has just spent so many words condemning eugenic arguments, begins the “Suggestions for Change” appended to her book Second wave feminism was not uniformly hostile to transgender and transsexual people. Shulamith Firestone, a socialist feminist, was in-volved in some of the same radical feminist groups as Robin Morgan but broke with her over a number of political differences. Firestone took a different stance on the relationship between feminism and biomedical science from the views presented by Janice Raymond in The Transsexual Empire. In her book, The Dialectic of Sex: A Case for Feminist Revolution, Firestone wrote:Just as to assure elimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underclass (the proletariat) and . . . their seizure of the means of pro-duction, so to assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of reproduction. . . . And just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimina-tion of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself. . . . The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would be born to both sexes equally, or independently of either.In the controversy about Beth Elliott’s participation at the West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference, Lesbian Tide publisher Jeanne Cordova drew parallels between antitransgender prejudice and other forms of Trans-Positive Second Wave FeminismTransgender3rdpages.indd 1083/6/08 12:12:12 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

THE DIFFICULT DECADES 0with the statement: “I contend that the problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence.” She does not want to actually outlaw transsexual surgeries but rather to control and limit access to them (the way one would regulate methadone access to heroin addicts) and to promote legislation against sex-role stereotyping, “where it would be possible for the law to step in at the beginning of a destructive sexist process that leads ultimately to consequences such as transsexualism.” In The Transsexual Empirediscrimination such as sexism, homophobia, and racism. She and lesbian activist the Reverend Freda Smith of Sacramento “stepped up,” in the words of Candy Coleman, to speak “loud and strong in defense of Beth Elliott”; Coleman, who identified herself as a “Gaysister,” deplored the attacks on Elliott, whom she considered “right-on” and of whom she said, “I, like so many other women and Gaysisters, are proud to call her sister.”Deborah Feinbloom and her colleagues wrote an article for the Journal of Homosexuality, “Lesbian/Feminist Orientation Among Male-to-Female Transsexuals,” in which they interviewed transgender women involved in lesbian feminism and found them to be not significantly different from nontranswomen in their political beliefs, activist philosophies, and gender ideology.In the controversy about Sandy Stone’s involvement with the all-women Olivia Records collective, C. Tami Weyant wrote to the feminist publica-tion Sister and asserted that asking both MTF and FTM transsexuals to struggle against male privilege “as part of their feminist consciousness” was “fair,” but that “rejecting them as transsexuals, period, will make us part of the oppression. . . . I strongly believe,” she noted, “that only feminism can offer them safe harbor from that oppression, and that the shared issues they have struggled with demand that we struggle to accept all transsexuals who desire to be feminist.”As the foregoing statements suggest, there was nothing monolithic about second wave feminist attitudes toward trans issues. The feminist second wave simultaneously espoused some of the most reactionary at-titudes toward trans people to be found anywhere while also offering a vision of transgender inclusion in progressive feminist movements for social change.Transgender3rdpages.indd 1093/6/08 12:12:12 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

0 TRANSGENDER HISTORY and related presentations shortly after its publication, Raymond further recommended gender reorientation for transsexuals by means of feminist consciousness-raising therapy, which would explore “the social origins of the transsexual problem and the consequences of the medical-technical solution,” and public education campaigns in which ex-transsexuals would speak of their dissatisfactions with changing sex, and in which former providers of medical services to transsexuals would discuss why they decided to stop providing services.Transgender community members have asked since the 1970s how anyone could fail to see that Raymond’s rhetoric and policy recommendations replicate arguments made by ex-gay ministries, antiabortion activists, bigots, and fearmongers of many stripes. In spite of these protestations, antitransgender discourses continued to proliferate in the 1980s, when it became common to denounce transsexuality as a “mutilating” practice and, if anything, the level of vitriol directed against transgender people actually increased. A 1986 letter to the editor published in the San Francisco lesbian newspaper Coming Up captures the vehemence with which transsexuals could be publicly vilified:One cannot change one’s gender. What occurs is a cleverly manipulated exterior: what has been done is mutation. What exists beneath the deformed surface is the same person who was there prior to the deformity. People who break or deform their bodies [act] out the sick farce of a deluded, patriarchal approach to nature, alienated from true being. . . . When an estrogenated man with breasts loves women, that is not lesbianism, that is mutilated perversion. [Such an individual] is not a threat to the lesbian community, he is an outrage to us. He is not a lesbian, he is a mutant man, a self-made freak, a deformity, an insult. He deserves a slap in the face. After that, he deserves to have his body and his mind made well again.Transgender3rdpages.indd 1103/6/08 12:12:12 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

THE DIFFICULT DECADES Raymond herself has remained completely convinced of the correctness of her position. When The Transsexual Empire was reissued in 1994, with a “New Introduction on Transgender,” Raymond reasserted her key points that “transsexualism constitutes a sociopolitical program that is undercutting the movement to eradicate sex-role stereotyping and oppression,” that transsexuals are “so alienated from their bodies that they think little of mutilating them,” and that accepting transsexual people as members of the social genders they live in and are perceived to be by others amounts to collusion with a “falsification of reality.” When transgender people accuse some feminists of transphobia, it is to attitudes and statements such as these that they refer.GID and HIVMedical attention to transgender issues culminated in the creation of a new category of psychopathology, Gender Identity Disorder (GID), which was first listed in the fourth revised edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980—the first edition published after the 1973 version that had removed homosexuality. The move toward creating this new category had begun many years earlier with the work of Harry Benjamin. In 1966, after the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon, Benjamin’s friends and colleagues had organized HBIGDA—the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (“dysphoria,” the opposite of “euphoria,” being a term that meant “unhappiness”). HBIGDA became the main organization for medical, legal, and psychotherapeutic professionals who worked with transgender populations, and its membership consisted primarily of the surgeons, endocrinologists, psychiatrists, and lawyers affiliated with the big university-based programs that provided transgender healthcare and conducted research into gender identity formation. By the later 1970s, a decade of research had produced a set of treatment protocols for transgender patients, called the “Standards of Care,” as well as a set of diagnostic criteria, which became formalized as GID.With the “problem” of transsexuality now seemingly solved and Transgender3rdpages.indd 1113/6/08 12:12:12 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

TRANSGENDER HISTORY contained, several of the university-based programs—notably the one at Johns Hopkins—closed down, and those at several other universities—such as Stanford—spun off into privately run clinics operated by doctors affiliated with the universities’ medical schools. Responsibility for ensuring that professional standards of care were being met devolved onto a second tier of psychotherapists in private practice who were members of HBIGDA. Thus, by 1980, a routine set of procedures and protocols for medically managing transgender populations had fallen into place. A person seeking to change genders would need several months of psychotherapy for a diagnosis of GID before being referred to an endocrinologist for hormone therapy, followed by at least a year of living socially as a member of the desired gender. At that point, a psychiatrist would evaluate the suitability of the person seeking to change gender for surgery, after which legal changes in gender identity could be pursued.As mentioned earlier, the construction of transgender identity as an official psychopathology recognized by accredited expert medical opinion would presumably mean that medical treatment of transsexuality would be considered a fully legitimate healthcare need. This proved, however, not to be the case. Insurance companies continued to consider transsexual healthcare treatments to be “experimental,” “cosmetic,” or “elective” and therefore ineligible for insurance coverage or reimbursement. Transgender access to government-funded social services, which had been more readily available during the Democratic administrations of Johnson and Carter, was drastically curtailed under Reagan—in part, it seems, in response to antitransgender feminist arguments that dovetailed with conservative politics. When antipornography feminists in this period, such as Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, allied themselves with conservative government policies in order to criminalize pornography (which they considered, often with some justification, to constitute violence against women), Janice Raymond hammered home the connections with transgender issues by suggesting that the “same socialization that enables men to objectify women in rape, Transgender3rdpages.indd 1123/6/08 12:12:13 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

THE DIFFICULT DECADES pornography, and ‘drag’ enables them to objectify their own bodies,” treating a penis a thing to “get rid of” and a vagina as something to acquire.In briefly tracing the history of the emergence of GID, it is possible to see how the social power of science shifted, during the course of a few years in the 1970s, from a concern with sexual orientation to a preoccupation with gender identity. To a certain degree, the effectiveness of gay liberation and the successes of lesbian and gay civil rights activism had made it politically impossible for responsible medical professionals to continue treating homosexuality as a mental illness. At the same time, the success of feminism in destabilizing conventional means of social control over women’s bodies made gender—rather than sexuality—into an even more important social battleground. The intensified interest of medical science in trying to understand, engineer, and “fix” gender in these years needs to be seen, in part, as an attempt to stuff the feminist genie back into its bottle. The result, for transgender people, was a lose-lose situation. All across the political spectrum, from reactionary to progressive and all points in between, the only options presented to them were to be considered bad, sick, or wrong. Consequently, transgender communities became very inwardly focused by the 1980s. They tended to concentrate more on providing mutual aid and support to their members than on broader social activism.On top of this dismal situation, a devastating new threat to transgender communities appeared in 1981—the first visible manifestation of the AIDS pandemic. Transgender populations that relied on sex work for survival, that shared needles for injecting hormones, or that participated in the gay male sexual subcultures where the epidemic first gained widespread attention in the United States were especially hard-hit. Poor access to healthcare services due to poverty, stigma, and social isolation, as well as additional barriers to access created by the fear many transgender people have of disclosing their transgender status to healthcare providers (which could potentially reexpose them to social vulnerabilities they had Transgender3rdpages.indd 1133/6/08 12:12:13 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

TRANSGENDER HISTORY worked hard to overcome), only served to compound the problem. As a result, the transgender community—especially poor, transgender women of color—now suffers one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world.FTM CommunitiesThe shifts in lesbian and feminist gender ideology that focused on “woman identification” and provided the conceptual underpinnings for some women to engage in transphobic attacks also encouraged some former butches and femmes to maintain the erotic dynamics of their relationships by leaving the homosexual subcultures they had once considered home and to blend into the dominant heteronormative population once the former butch had transitioned to life as a man. This is not to suggest that transmen would be lesbians given the opportunity but rather to point out that as one possible way of life for masculine-identified female-bodied people was becoming less available, other possibilities were expanding. These changes in the cultural landscape unavoidably affected the life paths many gender-questioning people followed. It’s also important to note that not all FTMs have a lesbian history, and that many female-bodied people who were oriented toward men also found their way into female-to-male communities in increasing numbers by the mid-1970s and sometimes embraced gay male identities as they continued to be involved with men after transitioning. Jude Patton, with the Renaissance group in Los Angeles, and Rupert Raj of Toronto, with his Metamorphosis magazine, provided support for hundreds of transmen in the 1970s and ’80s. In 1977, their fellow trans activist Mario Martino’s memoir, Emergence, became the first full-length autobiography of an FTM man to be published in the United States, and it helped create even more visibility for transgender men.One of the first pieces of media attention to draw attention to civil injustices encountered by transmen—and thus a key moment in the politicization of the FTM community—involved Steve Dain, an award-winning former high school physical education teacher in Emeryville, Transgender3rdpages.indd 1143/6/08 12:12:13 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

THE DIFFICULT DECADES California. In 1976, Dain had informed his principal that he would be transitioning genders during the school’s summer vacation, and he asked to be reassigned to teach science rather than girls’ gym. The request was granted, but because of a change in the school’s administration, a new vice principal was unaware of Dain’s plan. During the first day of classes, the administrator panicked when he learned that the new science teacher was none other than the old PE teacher, and he had Dain arrested in his classroom for “disturbing the peace.” Dain successfully sued the Emeryville school district for a large but undisclosed sum and subsequently left teaching to pursue a career as a chiropractor. He became a highly visible spokesperson for FTM issues, appearing in the 1985 HBO documentary What Sex Am I? and serving as a lay counselor for many gender-questioning female-bodied people.One of Dain’s most significant protégés was Lou Sullivan, who became the hub of the organized FTM community in the United States in the 1980s. Born in 1951, Sullivan started keeping a journal as a ten-year-old girl growing up in the Milwaukee suburbs and continued journaling regularly until a few days before his untimely death at age thirty-nine, in 1991. In his journal Sullivan described his early childhood thoughts of being a boy, his confusing adolescent sexual fantasies of being a gay man, and his teenage participation in Milwaukee’s countercultural music scene. He read John Rechy’s novels and dreamed of running away to live with the drag queens of Los Angeles. By the time he graduated high school, he was dressing in men’s clothes and was active in the Gay People’s Union (GPU) at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, where he found a job as a secretary in the Slavic Languages department.By 1973, Sullivan self-identified as a “female transvestite” who was sexually attracted to gay and bisexual men. That same year, he launched a career of transgender community activism with the publication of “A Transvestite Answers a Feminist,” an article that appeared in the GPU News, in which he recounted his conversations with a coworker who was critical of his cross-dressing. The argument Sullivan laid out—that all people represent their sense of themselves to others by means Transgender3rdpages.indd 1153/6/08 12:12:13 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

TRANSGENDER HISTORY Lou Sullivan’s journals constitute one of the most complete, and one of the most compelling, accounts of a transgender life ever set to page. These excerpts, from ages eleven to twenty-two, chart the trajectory of his emerging gay male identity.When we got home, we played boys.—January 6, 1963, age elevenMy problem is that I can’t accept life for what it is, like it’s presented to me. I feel that there is something deep and wonderful underneath it that no one has found.—December 12, 1965, age fourteenNo one looks deeper than the flesh.—February 22, 1966, age fourteenI want to look like what I am but don’t know what someone like me looks like. I mean, when people look at me I want them to think, there’s one of those people . . . that has their own interpretation of happiness. That’s what I am.—June 6, 1966, age fifteenMy heart and soul is with the drag queens. This last week or so I’ve wanted to go and leave everything and join that world. But where do I fit in? I feel so deprived and sad and lost. What can become of a girl whose real desire and passion is with male homosexuals? That I want to be one? I still yearn for that world, that world I know nothing about, a seri-ous, threatening, sad, ferocious stormy, lost world.—November 22, 1970, age nineteenI know now that I can get exactly what I want—to fantasize is no longer enough. Before it was beyond my dreams. It was the worst perversion that I wished I had a penis, to fuck a boy, to be on top and inside! But now it’s only a matter of time. —December 11, 1973, age twenty-two Lou Sullivan: Recording a LifeTransgender3rdpages.indd 1163/6/08 12:12:14 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

THE DIFFICULT DECADES of certain recognizable gender conventions, and that transgender representations of masculine or feminine identities are no more nor no less “stereotypical” than those of anyone else—anticipated a line of thinking that became well established in transgender community discourses in the decades ahead. Another article, “Looking Towards Transvestite Liberation,” published in the GPU News in 1974, was widely reprinted in the gay and lesbian press and remains a landmark article on the topic. Sullivan continued to contribute reviews and articles to the GPU News through 1980, many of them historical vignettes of female-bodied people who lived their lives as men. In doing so, he became an important community-based historian of FTM experience.Sullivan had come to self-identify as a female-to-male transsexual by 1975, and he moved to San Francisco to seek sex reassignment at the Stanford University gender dysphoria program. He found work, as a female, as a secretary for the Wilson Sporting Goods Company, Lou Sullivan, the leading organizer of the female-to-male (FTM) community in the 1980s. © Mariette Pathy AllenTransgender3rdpages.indd 1173/6/08 12:12:15 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

TRANSGENDER HISTORY but he spent most of his time cross-dressed as a young man, cruising the Castro neighborhood’s gay enclave for anonymous sex. In 1976, Sullivan was rejected by the Stanford program on the basis of his openly declared gay male identity and spent the next four years continuing to live as a woman. During these years, in which he tried to make peace with his female embodiment, he participated in feminist consciousness-raising sessions (where he admits he worked through some internalized misogyny but never wavered in his gay male identity), learned to repair cars in an effort to combat limiting female stereotypes, and became active in San Francisco Bay Area MTF cross-dresser groups, where he worked to develop peer support for female-to-male individuals. Sullivan had read and been inspired by the 1976 newspaper coverage of Steve Dain’s tribulations, but he first had a chance to meet his hero in 1979, after meeting a psychotherapist who happened to know Dain at a cross-dresser support organization.Steve Dain offered Sullivan important validation and encouraged him to pursue transitioning if it was what he really wanted to do. By 1979, as noted earlier, the framework for transgender medical services was shifting away from university-based research programs and becoming considerably more decentralized. As a result, Sullivan was able to find psychotherapists, endocrinologists, and surgeons in private practice who were not concerned with his identification as a gay man and who were willing to help him transition. Sullivan started hormones in 1979, had chest surgery in 1980, and thereafter starting living full-time as a man. At this point, he threw himself even more fully into transgender community activism. He volunteered as the first FTM peer counselor at the Janus Information Facility, a private organization that took over the Erickson Educational Foundation’s transgender information and referral activities after the Transexual Counseling Service folded. As a result, he found himself in contact with a multitude of gender-questioning female-bodied people from around the English-speaking world.Sullivan simultaneously redoubled his efforts as a community-based historian. He gathered the vignettes he had published through the years in the GPU News and incorporated them into the guidebook Transgender3rdpages.indd 1183/6/08 12:12:15 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

THE DIFFICULT DECADES he developed based on his work at Janus, Information for the Female-to-Male Cross-Dresser and Transsexual, which remained an essential guide for the FTM community well into the 1990s. In 1986, Sullivan became a founding member (and newsletter editor) of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society (now the GLBT Historical Society), whose archives now comprise one of the best collections of material on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender history anywhere in the world. As a result of Sullivan’s early involvement, the organization’s transgender holdings are particularly rich. Sullivan also started work on a book-length biography of Jack B. Garland, a nineteenth-century San Franciscan who had been born female but lived as a man in the Tenderloin, and who eroticized his relationships with the young men he met there and whom he helped out by offering food, shelter, and gifts of money. Eventually published in 1990, Sullivan’s book argued that, contrary to the then-prevailing wisdom in gay and feminist scholarship, Garland did not live as a man to escape the conventional limitations of womanhood but because of his identification as a man and his homoerotic attraction to other men.In 1986, while Sullivan was working to establish the GLBT archives in San Francisco, he also organized the first FTM-only support and education organization in the United States. Called simply “FTM,” the organization held monthly “FTM Gatherings,” featuring educational programs and opportunities to socialize, and also published the FTM Newsletter, which quickly became the leading source of information in the nation for female-to-male issues. Because of Sullivan’s leadership role and his own gay identity, the San Francisco FTM group has always attracted a sexually diverse core membership and has avoided many of the divisions that had plagued similar MTF organizations since the 1960s. This openness was reflected in the newsletter’s editorial slant and helped shape group sensibilities in the community of transmen that started blossoming in the 1980s under Sullivan’s guidance. That organization became FTM International, the largest FTM group in the world; its San Francisco chapter is now called the Lou Sullivan Society.Transgender3rdpages.indd 1193/6/08 12:12:15 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

0 TRANSGENDER HISTORY Lou Sullivan’s life tragically was cut short by an opportunistic illness contracted as a result of AIDS. It’s likely that Sullivan became HIV-infected in 1980, just after his chest surgery, when he first felt comfortable visiting gay sex clubs; his diaries that summer record what he thought was a bad case of the flu, but which in retrospect was probably the moment when his body first started trying to fight off the HIV infection. He apparently remained asymptomatic for several years, until 1986, when complications from his genital surgery severely stressed his immune system. In the course of his long postsurgical recovery, Sullivan suddenly developed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, an especially virulent form of pneumonia closely associated with AIDS. At the time that his diagnosis was confirmed, survival rates for people with AIDS averaged somewhere in the vicinity of three years. Sullivan survived for five, in reasonably good health until the very end. In his final years he participated in AIDS drug trials, finished his book on Jack Garland, and continued to nurture the FTM group and the Historical Society. Sullivan’s final campaign, however, was to persuade HBIGDA members and the committee revising the definition of GID for the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to drop “homosexual orientation” as a contraindication in the diagnostic criteria, which held that homosexual transgender people did not exist. Sullivan did not live to see that change take place in 1994, but he took comfort in knowing that his efforts were contributing to a revision of the sexological literature.In one of his journal entries after his AIDS diagnosis, Lou mused about writing to the staff of the Stanford gender dysphoria program to say, “You told me I couldn’t live as a gay man, but now I am going to die like one.” He died in the company of friends and family on March 6, 1991, just as a new phase of transgender history was beginning to erupt.Transgender3rdpages.indd 1203/6/08 12:12:16 PMStryker, S. (2009). Transgender history. Seal Press.Created from snhu-ebooks on 2023-09-23 02:50:02.Copyright © 2009. Seal Press. All rights reserved.

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