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      We Can No Longer Hide in Plain Sight

      From the Cultural Margins to the Tipping Point

      “The days of that brown wrapper are definitely over,” explained Allyson, a white trans woman in her late fifties from the Midwestern United States. Throughout the 1980s, Allyson received a monthly newsletter published by the local cross-dressing organization. It was mailed to her home wrapped in brown paper to conceal its contents. Each time she saw the newsletter sitting in her mailbox, she shuddered with excitement. Flipping through its pages made her feel part of something bigger than herself, and made her look forward to the organization’s next meeting. To ensure the safety and anonymity of its members, the cross-dressing organization operated under a veil of secrecy. Mailed correspondence was camouflaged, meeting times and locations circulated by word of mouth, and there were rules about how members should and should not communicate outside the walls of group meetings. Given the group’s covert nature, Allyson felt fortunate to have found it. She remembered, “At the time, finding support groups was a major issue for everyone. It took so much effort and many whispers. I found out about the group I went to through word of mouth. It was all very secretive.” She continued to explain her experiences with the group. “It met once a month at a hotel. The manager there was understanding and gave us a room to change in … I was married at the time and had to hide it from my wife. But I think she might have known. When we would have dinner parties and such, I would end up in the kitchen talking to the women. That’s where I fit in the best.”

      For Allyson, as well as for many trans people living through the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, transgender organizations and their newsletters were some of the only connections they had to a sense of community and their sole source of trans visibility. “There was nothing out there,” Allyson insisted, “an occasional something on TV, but that’s it.” This was, as many of my participants called it, the “pre-Internet age,” the mid- to late twentieth century, the era of the mass media dominated by print, radio, film, and television. This media environment was structured around a broadcasting model, where media texts were produced by a small group of elite creators and imparted to a mass audience. Space was finite. There was only so much radio-frequency spectrum available, only so many books that could stock bookstore shelves. Production costs and barriers to entry were high. Audiences were conceptualized as a “mass” (Nightingale and Ross 2003) and overwhelmingly imagined by the media industries as white, heterosexual, and middle class. Audiences themselves had limited capacity to communicate with producers of media and with each other.

      Time and again, the participants in my study explained that the media environment within which they grew up was largely a desert of transgender representation, information, and discourse. In trying to locate resources for exploring their identities, they searched libraries, walked the aisles of bookstores, visited video rental stores, and scanned magazine racks. These hunts were conducted in public spaces, so they had to be careful. Showing too much interest in a taboo topic such as cross-dressing or transsexuality was risky to one’s reputation and safety. For the most part, their searches were fruitless. Yet every now and then, they would come across a jewel, something that resonated with them. This discovery justified the risk.

      In this chapter, I provide a brief overview of transgender visibility in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on key moments and decisive historical junctures. I try to show what might have been available to the participants in my study as they perused their media environment. But first, I explore various historical processes that stirred alongside this visibility. These include the construction of gender as a non-binary category, the expansion of transgender discourse and communication networks, and the growing collective consciousness and political mobilization of transgender people throughout the twentieth century.1 These historical developments help account for the nature of transgender visibility in media culture and offer context to the experiences of those who shared their stories with me.

      Gender Expansion, Political Mobilization, and Self-Definition

      The word “transgender” brings together—sometimes neatly, sometimes not—a diverse set of gender variant practices, expressions, sensibilities, experiences, and modes of embodiment under one umbrella (Davidson 2007; Stryker 1998). On an individual level, it facilitates the construction of identity and feelings of belonging. Socially and politically, it allows those who experience similar oppressions to organize around a shared identity and speak with a collective voice. But the work that the category accomplishes is contingent on it being recognizable and meaningful, on having epistemic legitimacy. This legitimacy has been achieved over time and is the result of converging discourses: elite discourses developed by scientists, medical authorities, social service providers, and academics as well as the everyday discourses that have emerged on the ground from trans subcultures and ordinary people living their lives.

      With respect to scientific discourse, the history of the category “transgender” stretches back to the end of the nineteenth century, a time when sex and sexuality entered the purview of European sexologists, a group of psychiatrists and medical professionals interested in non-normative sex and gender. As they investigated what they called “sexual perversion” and “sexual inversion,” their writings increasingly transformed alternative modes of gender and human sexuality into discourse (Foucault 1990). Pioneers in the field of sexology such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and Magnus Hirschfeld were interested in non-procreative, non-heterosexual sex and forms of gender “deviance.” Starting from a place that considered gender variance to be largely pathological and immoral, the field advanced and its practitioners eventually developed a more sophisticated understanding of gender.