Struggling for Ordinary. Andre Cavalcante
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on the agenda of state and national gay rights groups.
Within this context, the trans community began to more actively organize on its own behalf. Their concerns involved, but were not limited to workplace and housing discrimination, homelessness, dress-code policies, access to healthcare and medical treatment, anti-transgender violence, de-pathologizing gender variance, and police brutality. They advocated for self-authorship in the determination of legal sex and for the ability to change gender markers on official documents such as drivers’ licenses, birth certificates, and passports. Taking on these challenges, the number of transgender-oriented political and advocacy organizations proliferated beginning in the mid-1980s: FTM International in 1986, International Foundation for Gender Education in 1987, American Educational Gender Information Service (AEGIS) in 1990, Gender Public Advocacy Coalition in 1995 (GPAC), National Transgender Advocacy Coalition in 1999, Transgender Law Center in 2002, National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) in 2003, and Trans Youth Family Allies in 2006. Particularly notable among this group is FTM International. Historically, transgender organizations and the print cultures they spawned were geared toward transgender women. In 1986, when Lou Sullivan, a transgender activist, created FTM International, he filled the void of information and politics that existed for transgender men. Along with offering education and referral and support services, the organization published the FTM Newsletter, which would become one of the most widely known and read publications on the FTM experience.
Decidedly, the 1990s was a game-changing moment for transgender mobilization and identity as new possibilities were forged. For one, the AIDS crisis that decimated gay male communities throughout the 1980s drew transgender individuals back into the fold with their gay counterparts. In order to combat the disease, new social and political alliances across sexual orientation, gender identity, age, race, class, among others, were needed (Stryker 2008). Using the word “queer” as a marker of collective identity, groups such as Act Up, Queer Nation, and Outrage brought together gay men, lesbians, trans people, and allies to engage in direct-action political protests to combat homophobic violence, police brutality, and institutional apathy during the outbreak of AIDS. Groups such as Transgender Nation and Transsexual Menace who advocated for transgender liberation enacted similar direct-action politics. Meanwhile, the tragic deaths of young trans people such as Brandon Teena in 1993 (who was murdered for being trans) and Tyra Hunter in 1995 (who was refused medical care following a car accident because she was trans) sparked national outrage and mobilized transgender and gender variant communities.
As with the word queer, the word “transgender” in the 1990s became widely used as a center of identification.8 Many refer to a 1991 article written by Holly Boswell, a transgender writer, advocate, and spiritualist, called “The Transgender Alternative” as a launching pad for the word’s popularity (Denny 2006). Originally published in Chrysalis Quarterly and Tapestry, both transgender magazines, the essay was a sort of spiritual manifesto for self-actualization that validated a middle path between cross-dressing and transsexualism. It advocated for androgyny, and urged readers to explore gender identities that felt honest and authentic—even if culturally unintelligible.
As it was conceptualized from the ground up, the category “transgender” was intended to rescue ideas about gender diversity from the medical and mental health communities. The aim of transgender discourse in the ’90s was to “replace an assumption of individual pathology with a series of claims about citizenship, self-determination, and freedom from violence and discrimination” (Valentine 2007, 33). Capturing the structure of feeling at this moment, Wilchins remembers:
Surrounded by scores of transsexuals and hundreds of cross-dressers at conventions, it was impossible for differently gendered people to feel the same shame … Transsexuals and cross-dressers began to see themselves less as social problems and more as the next oppressed minority. (2004, 23)
Transgender activists urged LGBT coalition groups to more actively recognize them. As a result, the 1990s saw the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) begin to advocate more vociferously on behalf of transgender Americans, including them in their mission statements. The “T” was added to the LGBT acronym, which symbolized the alliance between sexual and gendered minorities. Activists also set their sights on media. Realizing the importance of transgender visibility, organizations such as GLAAD began holding the media accountable for their treatment of transgender people and lobbied them for socially responsible representations.
During the 1990s, transgender discourse also escalated with the development and institutionalization of queer theory in the academy, which problematized and politicized gender and sexuality and legitimated non-normative modes of desire and embodiment. The growth of queer theory also helped bring a readership to a rising cohort of transgender writers and intellectuals. Authors including Sandy Stone (1991), Kate Bornstein (1995), Leslie Feinberg (1996), Loren Cameron (1996), Pat Califia (1994), Riki Anne Wilchins (1997), and Susan Stryker (1998) all contributed to queer intellectual thought. Their work combined autoethnography, life history, photo essay, gender theory, historical analysis, and critical, cultural critique to comment on trans issues and politics.
However, even with its political and personal utility, transgender, like all categories, is problematic. It was created in a Western context by mainly white educated people living in urban areas (Stryker 2008; Stryker and Currah 2014). As Valentine (2007) has shown, the category transgender can fail to include and make sense to those it was intended to capture under its purview. In his research on transgender communities in New York City, Valentine (2007) discovered that many individuals who were identified as transgender by medical professionals, social service providers, and academics did not claim that category for themselves. Crucially, these were often the young, the poor, people of color, and the undereducated; those who would benefit most from the services and support provided by these organizations.
Despite these limitations and the classed and racial politics that undergird them, the term “transgender” emerged as a discursive powerhouse in the 1990s. It operated as a sociopolitical adhesive, bringing together individuals who experienced similar modes of oppression and marginalization in order to speak with a collective voice. By the start of the twenty-first century, transgender, like its predecessor transsexuality, was well on its way to becoming a household term.
A Very Brief History of Trans Visibility
Throughout twentieth-century America, glimmers of gender variance hid out in the nooks and crannies of media culture, and at times even shined at its center. Stories and imagery that articulated gender as unstable and malleable appeared on the television screen, on the pages of comic books and novels, and in the self-performances of musicians, celebrities, and public figures. From its early days, film was populated with scenes of cross-dressing men and women. In fact, according to Horak (2016), cross-dressing was a routine and fairly unexceptional phenomenon in early twentieth-century American film, something associated with “wholesome entertainment” (2). When set on the frontier or battlefield, for example, images of cross-dressed women represented American strength, individualism, and vitality. Over time, however, transgender imagery took on new meanings. By the 1930s, cross-dressing women represented not American wholesomeness, but rather European savoir-faire. Hollywood’s leading ladies such as Marlene Dietrich, Josephine Baker, and Greta Garbo employed cross-dressing in their films and in their celebrity personas. Their looks were daring, communicating a sense of cosmopolitanism and bold sexuality. Marlena Dietrich’s cross-gendered performance in Morocco (1930) is perhaps most iconic. Donning a tuxedo with top hat and tails, she performs at a Moroccan nightclub, tempting men and women alike. Dietrich had always been fond of tailored men’s suits, wearing them to the transvestite cabarets she frequented in 1920s Berlin as a young person (Riva 1993).
Early films such as Queen Christina (1933) and Sylvia Scarlett (1935) also featured some of Hollywood’s most famous female actresses—Greta Garbo and Katherine Hepburn respectively—cross-dressing as men. Yet within these films, the act was performed to secure access to masculine power, privilege, and authority. As Garber (1992) has detailed, characters engaging in gender masquerade to achieve things outside their reach has long been employed as a plot device in art, literature, and popular film. These “temporary transvestite films” (Straayer 1996, 42) such as Some Like It Hot (1959), Victor/Victoria