“The men are testing me as much as I’m testing them. They want to see if I’m softer than my father. I have to show them I’m not.’
Hephaistion shot him a scathing look. ‘Most of them have known you since you were a boy. Where in all Hades would they have got the idea that you’re soft?”
My girlfriend and I talk a lot about our different generations of queerness, because she was doing queer activism in the 1990s and I wasn’t.
And she’s supportive of my writing about queerness but also kind of bitter about how quickly her entire generation’s history has disappeared into a bland “AIDS was bad, gay marriage solved homophobia” narrative, and now we’re having to play catch-up to educate young LGBTQ+ people about queer history and queer theory. It gets pretty raw sometimes.
I mean, a large part of the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.
“Excuse us,” she said bitterly the other day, not at me but to me, “for not laying the groundwork for children we never thought we’d have in a future none of us thought we’d be alive for.”
“the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.”
thank you for giving me a good reason to finish my dissertation and try to make it in the academy
Wait, idk LGBTQ+ history, but they died of AIDS cause, what, hospitals refused to treat them or…?
Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic took six years to be recognized by the CDC (1975-1981) because at first the only people dying were intravenous drug users, which is to say, heroin addicts; when it was recognized, President Reagan’s government pressured the CDC to spend as little time and money on AIDS as possible, because they literally didn’t think gay lives were important. So yes, hospitals refused to treat them and medical staff treated them as disgusting people who deserved to die, but also, there was very little funding for scientists to understand what this disease was, what caused it, where it came from, how it spread, or how to stop it. The LGBTQ+ community had to organize and fight to get hospitals to treat them, to fund scientific research, to be legally allowed to buy the drugs that kept them alive, and to have access to treatment. An effective treatment for AIDS wasn’t found until 1995.
And it’s ongoing; a lot of the difficulty of fighting AIDS in Africa is that it’s seen as “the gay disease” (and thanks to European colonialism, even African societies that used to be okay with us were taught to think LGBTQ+ people are bad). Even now that we have medications that can treat or prevent AIDS, they’re incredibly expensive and hard to get; in 2015, New York businessman Martin Shkreli acquired the exclusive right to make a drug that treats an AIDS-related disease, and raised its price from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill.
Here’sone history on what it was like to have and fight AIDS,one history on how politicians responded to the epidemic, and if you can get a copy of the documentary How to Survive a Plague, it’s a good introduction, because it’s about how AIDS patients had to fight for their lives. A lot of these histories are imperfect and incomplete, because privilege played a big part in whose lives and deaths were seen as important–Poor people, people of colour, trans people, and drug addicts were less likely to be able to afford or access medical care, and more likely to die without being remembered; histories often tend to focus on straight people who got AIDS through no fault of their own, and then white cis gay men who seem more “respectable” and “relatable”.
I mean, people who will talk about how homophobia led to neglect of AIDS still find ways not to mention that AIDS isn’t just sexually transmitted; it’s hugely a disease of drug addicts, because sharing needles is a huge way the disease spreads. But because society always thinks, oh, drug addicts are bad and disgusting people and of course criminals, that often gets neatly dropped from the histories, and it’s still hard to get people to agree to things that keep drug addicts alive, like needle exchanges and supervised injection sites. But if you want my rant about how the war on drugs is bullshit used to control poor people and people of colour, and drugs shouldn’t be criminalized, you’ll have to ask for that separately.
They died of AIDS because
Hospitals refused to treat them, and when they did get admitted, treated them like dirt so their will-to-live was eroded - refused to let long-term partners visit them, staff acted like they were disgusting nuisances, etc.
Very little funding was put into finding causes or cures - AIDS was considered “god’s punishment” for immoral behavior by a whole lot of people.
Once causes were understood (effective treatments were a long ways off), information about those causes weren’t widely shared - because it was a “sex disease” (it wasn’t) and because a huge number of the victims were gay or needle-drug users, and the people in charge of disease prevention (or in charge of funding) didn’t care if all of those people just died.
Not until it started hitting straight people and superstar celebrities (e.g. Rock Hudson) did it get treated as A Real Problem - and by that time, it had reached terrifying epidemic conditions.
Picture from 1993:
We lost basically a whole generation of the queer community.
As a current AIDS survivor, this is really important information. I was diagnosed not only HIV positive in 2014, but I had already progressed to an AIDS diagnosis. Knowing how far we’ve come with treatment and what the trials and tribulations of those who came before cannot and must not ever be forgotten. Awareness is the number one goal. I often speak to the microbiology students at my university to explain what it’s like to live with, how the medications work, side effects, how it’s affected my daily life, and just raise general awareness.
Before my diagnosis, I, like many others, was clueless to how far treatment has come. I was still under the belief my diagnosis was a death sentence. Moving forward, even if only one person hears my story, that’s one more person that’s educated and can raise awareness.
I believe it’s time for us as a society to start better education of this disease. The vast majority of the people I’ve spoken to are receptive to the knowledge of my status, and I’ve received lots of support from loved ones, friends, and total strangers. It’s time to beat the stigma.
This is slightly off-point, but as for the cost, I wanted to mention that some pharmacies have specialties that let them get special coupons/programs and stuff to save money.
A bottle of Truvada (a month supply commonly used for treating this) is at least $3,000 out of pocket and insurance doesn’t usually take a lot off of that. But the pharmacy I work at is an HIV specialty and we always get te price down to less than $10.
If you’re on HIV meds and they’re ludicrously expensive, ask your local pharmacy manager if there are any local HIV specialty pharmacies that they know of. They might be able to help.
I think it’s important to emphasize that, while the diagnosis is no longer a death sentence, it is also true that people dying of AIDS because of homophobia is not history only.
My brother’s first boyfriend was kicked out/disowned by his parents for being queer, got AIDS, couldn’t afford treatment, and died. He died in 2019, at around 20 years old.
In 2019.
Barely more than a kid.
Of a treatable disease.
Because of homophobia.
Because his parents cared more about not being associated with a queer person than they cared about their son’s literal life.
AIDS is not just history. Neither is homophobia.
Back to history: When AIDS patients held die-ins, they went to hospitals, lay down in front of them, and literally waited to die.
If you’re young & either queer or queer-adjacent, think about the number of people out of the closet you know your own age & think about how many you know your parents age. They’re not stamping us out of the mould any quicker these days than in the ‘60s, except in lockstep with population growth.
I think, growing up, my picture of relative numbers of queer people & straights was unavoidably impacted by the number of empty seats at our table. That might be the case for you too. The number of elders you never got to meet.
Remember this when people talk about how small the LGBTQIA+ population is. That it’s “such a small percentage of the population to be catered too”. Remember this and tell them, “that’s because homophobia killed them”.
This picture of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus is often included with the “The men facing the camera/in white are the surviving members” but it leaves out something extremely important:
By 1996, all of the men facing the camera in the picture were dead.
By 1996 the obituary list was almost 50 names longer than the entire choral roster. All of the positions plus four dozen more, gone. The obituary list continued to grow, too. The cost and availability of any treatments in the mid-late 90s continued to cause more death.
If you were queer in the 80s and 90s, you knew someone who had it and knew people who died from it. Period. I cannot stress the impact this had on the queer community and those of us who were alive at the time, and I know the scope of it is almost unimaginable to younger people today.
By 1996, there were NO surviving original members of the SFGMC. You need to know that when you see this picture.
Dozens of the men turned away from the camera here in this shot were also dead alongside the men in white. It is vital to recognize that.
There is no hope in this picture, it isn’t a display of a lucky few who avoided death. There is no “Well at least some of them survived” because no, they didn’t, and this time was so fucking bleak and painful it’s astonishing that anything got done. They’d march one week and die the next. Their friends would bury them in the morning and march in the afternoon. This went on for years.
Bigotry and hate and ignorance killed generations of queer people. It speaks to the sheer resilience of the community that from that all but state-sanctioned genocide, we have gained so much ground in the last few decades. Much is owed to the people who refused to stay quiet and who fought even on their deathbeds, so please consider learning about LGBTQ+ history as a way of continuing the fight and showing respect. Many of us coming of age at that time didn’t have that opportunity, and made it a point to learn and get involved as teenagers and young adults because we saw what we were losing.
Sing for two.
My fave part of this post is the repeated usage of the word “queer”. In a discussion about the hatred of LGBT people and how they were left to die by the government, it’s always a great idea to call them all a slur. Can you switch it up a bit and use “fag” next time?
There’s a really obvious reason why we’re using “queer”.
When talking about LGBTQ+ history, often we have to be really careful with the language we use, because how we understand things now is not how the people we’re talking about understood themselves at the time. We end up using phrases like, “People who we would now understand as gay or lesbian” or “experiences which modern transgender people often identify with”.
In this case? It’s because that’s the word they used.
(Many of them also used the words “fag” or “dyke”, but “queer” is more inclusive.)
When I talk about “the leading lights of queerness” I mean Queer Nation. I mean the people who contributed to Queer Theory. I mean people who deliberately chose to use that word. I mean me and my ex-girlfriend. We exist.
During the AIDS crisis especially, homophobia was so bad that a lot of people didn’t want to be known by any word associated with the gay community: Not gay, not homosexual, not queer, not anything.Epidemiologists had to create the category of “men who have sex with men” because there was literally no existing term that didn’t carry the weight of a slur. The purpose of using the word “queer” was for people to say, “Let’s stop running from the things society is calling us; let’s pick up the weapons they’ve hurled at us and start hurling them back. There is no level of socially acceptable we can be that will make them suddenly decide our lives matter. We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” It meant very specifically embracing and defending their/our marginalized position.
Every word we’ve ever been known by has been a slur. We all have our own histories and flinch reactions. I grew up with “gay” and “lezzo” being used really hatefully around me, as well as “queer” and “dyke” and “fag”, and I have different comfort levels with all those different words.
/shrug emoji You can dislike the word all you like and ask that it not be used for you. But historically and today, a lot of us do use it for ourselves, and we constitute “the queer community” or “queerdom”. Which we don’t think is a bad thing. If you don’t want to join us, fine, but that doesn’t make us stop existing, and any other word you can call us would also be a slur, because our community is predicated on saying, “We are that thing you’re so afraid of. Get used to it.”
Speaking to the MSM point in the final addition.
Functionally a problem in trying to get studies going in the 80s and 90s that tried to figure out what in hell was going on was trying to get people into studies. To answer questions. Because you could lose your job, home, family, life if you incautiously admitted to being gay/queer/homosexual. So among the men who were terrified of being on any kind of record as being gay because they self identified that way there were a whole host of people who didn’t actually see themselves as gay.
Because it was just not something they could accept.
But what always fascinated me was in the studies we did (I’m out of Vancouver, BC and have been part of an HIV/AIDS research organization since 96, for context) at one point we had a staunch group of individuals who were predominantly immigrants from other cultures who culturally had definitions of behaviour that didn’t align with North American behaviour labels.
Insertive partners in some cultures are not gay as they were/are not mechanically different from “the normal male” sexual actor. Receptive partners were. Basically the thinking in some people’s minds is that women=receptive and insertive=male. And if your sex didn’t match the sexual position…
Now.To be clear. I’m not saying these things as a point of “this is what I think”. This is what had been captured in interviews and conversations and studies over the years. Some people aligned themselves these ways.
I’ve always seen it as part and parcel of the gender issues and misogyny that we’re still, 30 years later, arguing about.
As to the rest… I’ve written about this (and lectured and written and lectured and written) before. In this particular thread even. It will never stop amazing me the revisionism that happens around queer. Those of us who were in large protesting crowds, remembering “We’re Here! We’re Queer! Get Over It!” being told “it’s never not been a slur/been used by us” just…wigs me out.
What I remember? What I remember is my now husband and then friends (and myself) knowing that the straight culture we lived in equated holding hands with a sexual act. Holding hands in public as queer people was fucking. It was viewed the same. Today that seems ludicrous but it’s how it was. Our being was an act of aggression, of sexual acts, of a political agenda. A spiritual and moral violence.
And we knew. Like everyone has known: the fear behind that was potentially a tool we could use.
So standing in rooms with scientists and physicians who had decided we were dirty queers with sick fucking lives and minds, prone to acts of perversion and inhumanity? We wore shirts with QUEER in big bold letters so when they talked to us, met our eyes, it was over the words they were whispering in their heads. It was under the leather we wore, the sexualized outfits with no room for misinterpretation about FUCKING. And SEX. And in these meetings discussing policy and funding and science we stood there in our entirety on display, forcing them to look at us in all of this - to see we felt all of it was normal and not something we were ashamed of?
How could the idea that sex was enjoyable be a topic of debate that had implications on our fundamental humanity? Apparently people did, and do, think so.
This all put us in positions of power in those negotiations. Negotiations, do not ever forget often that were about whether or not their largess would allow us to live. So while people were embarrassed to be confronted with their prejudices that they were comfortable expressing out of sight and hearing of us, we stood and HELD their eyes and their attention.
Queer fuckers. Fags and perverts. And we refused to fucking die quietly.
(shrug) So to those that dislike the word, outside of the fire of my own history I will calmly discuss it and follow their instructions not to call them queer. But if you step into my history, into the graveyard of the men and women I know who are now gone due to apathy and disinterest and hatred and homophobia… you’re going to hear queer. In great swelling chants from the throats of thousands of people in the streets. You can like it or hate it but you cannot argue it’s existence and the lever it was that shifted the world we’re arguing in the middle of, today.
Also.
Do you know what TERFs were fighting for in the 1990s, while queers were fighting for AIDS research and the right to be in the hospitals with their friends and lovers as they died?
TERFs were fighting (and finally succeeded) to change the acronym from GLBT to LGBT because they felt lesbians weren’t getting enough attention during a pandemic that was primarily affecting gay men.
Yeah.
I had heard that it was a thank you/acknowledgement to the lesbians who helped in the fight for folk with AIDS but I am unsurprised that TERFS were pushing for it while the lesbians who were actually helping had more important things to do.
sometimes old sources use “outdated” language because “they didn’t know better” (bigotry was more normalized) but sometimes that is literally just. the date when the term we now consider “outdated” was entirely indated. not all language that we now consider harmful or disrespectful has always been so. a proud transsexual in the 80s was not sadly unequipped with the appropriate, modern language to describe themself or forced or coerced into embracing the degrading language of their oppressor. that was just. the word they preferred at the time. and that they may continue to prefer even after younger generations become uncomfortable with it. it’s their fucking identity. not yours. being queer yourself doesn’t give you the right to tell other people who they are
thinking about how frustrating it is that some people will weaponise every new piece of good queer rep against previous pieces of rep to paint them as not enough or no longer valuable instead of appreciating each positive piece of rep as a necessary stepping stone to the next
don’t break the ladder rungs that carried you this high
when first you grasped them every one was the highest you could reach
We lost almost an entire generation of queers to the AIDS epidemic. I was born during that time, and grew up knowing nothing about it, being told that gay and trans people were a relatively new thing. Later being fed a commercialized, watered down, “safe” version that includes cops and corpos at Pride™, and alienates us from our history. And now that I’m closer to 30 than I am to 20, I’m going through the crushing realization that many who died of AIDS died younger than I am now. And that fills me with so much anger and sorrow, mourning everything that was taken. They took away the future of nearly an entire generation of queers, and then they tried to take our past. Even in the present, trans people are being buried under their dead names, their lived experience and legacy being overwritten with lies and revisionism. We all must continue to exist as proof that we have always existed. Remember the fallen and fight like hell for the living~
They took away the future of nearly an entire generation of queers, and then they tried to take our past.
I am a Gen Xer, and I’ve been having some conversations about photography and selfies lately, and I want to share a little bit, because I think younger queer people don’t quite understand what things used to be like.
I have no snapshots of the era of my life in which I was smootching girls behind the tilt-a-whirl at a shitty traveling carnival in a dusty empty lot. In fact, I have no pictures of any of my friends from that era aside from yearbook pictures of the friends who were in my school. I was a little goth teenager and many of my friends were also punk queers. We could not take pictures of each other.
Why? Because pictures were taken on film. And film needed to go somewhere to be developed. And if there were pictures of people “being gay” then sometimes your whole roll would disappear at the photo processor. Or your 36 exposure roll would return only 32 pictures to you. Because the processor would censor it. And aside from that, you had to be cautious about whether a photograph would somehow be seen by parents, who could kick your friend out of their house. Just because someone was holding hands in the background of a photo.
Snapshots were for kids who did sports and wholesome activities.
A little later, I had a friend who took photography and had access to the school photo lab (the art teacher didn’t care as long as no one was developing nudity), and there were some photographers who hung out with the skater kids. But prior to that, there was a whole era of my life, people who were super important to me for a time, that I just don’t have pictures of. At all. Because it wasn’t safe.
I found myself recently explaining this to a younger coworker and another colleague in the meeting, a gay man about my age, was nodding along. This was an important facet of life if you were a queer teen in the 80s. You didn’t have pictures of your people until you knew someone with use of a darkroom.
The issue I have with the whole “make period dramas about masculine/androgynous women!” is that our modern understandings of masculinity, femininity, and androgyny are not ubiquitous across history.
[ID: “weird how all swooning, beloved-by-the-new-yorker lesbian dramas are set just far enough in the past that both parties will be as feminine as possible, based on the sartorial standards of the time. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.”]
There were absolutely instances of queer women (or even dubiously heterosexual women) who dressed in what was at the time a “masculine” style. There is even popular media that portrays them. One example would be Jo March from Little Women, who wore dresses tailored to have a “menswear” aesthetic and silhouette, and who eschewed contemporary standards of femininity through her aspirations, opinions, and presence, beyond just her fashion sense. The recent adaptation of Little Women decided to go the exhaustingly simplistic route of having her wear men’s clothes (Laurie’s, specifically), which is not something that was done. It wouldn’t have given the impression that she was more masculine, it would’ve given the impression that she was a crazy person. Today, women wearing men’s clothes is considered “butch” or “masculine,” but at the time, women could achieve the same effect in different ways.
Not only is the idea that media depictions of feminine queer women aren’t important discrediting to actual feminine queer women, it’s also simply not reflected in reality. Again, the modern eye might see skirts and pinned-up hair and think oh, that’s femme, but that simply doesn’t translate. Much in the same way that we today don’t think of, for example, bras as exclusively feminine (butch women can still wear bras without losing their butch cred!), queer women of the past did not always view things like skirts or corsets or long hair as restrictive in the same way a modern viewer might assume.
I’ve seen similar complaints arising about, for example, Gentleman Jack, wherein people claim that the show makes Anne Lister out to be more feminine than she was, or that it shows a femme/femme couple, or that there’s nothing “revolutionary” about two feminine queer women being portrayed onscreen… none of which is the case. The Anne Lister of Gentleman Jack is incredibly masculine… for the time, where masculinity presented itself differently than it does today. No, Anne Lister does not have a buzz cut, she doesn’t wear tank tops or work boots or eschew makeup entirely, because that’s not how masculinity presented itself when she was alive.
And, unfortunately, I’ve seen a few people starting to complain about Ammonite, which isn’t even out yet! One complaint I saw specifically said that GNC women would be more harshly punished then than they would be now, and that Ammonite would show women dressed and acting “super femininely.” None of that is correct! The film is about Mary Anning, who was during her lifetime considered to be an incredibly masculine figure, not just in the way she dressed but also in the way she behaved and the choices she made. She had a reputation for being “man-like” even during her lifetime! Nowadays there might be nothing unusual about a woman choosing to be a scientist, and it might not even cross our minds that a female paleontologist would be considered “masculine,” but at the time, it was a very different situation. Not only were gender roles defined and enforced differently, but subverting those gendered expectations was undertaken in a way that might not, to the modern eye, appear at all revolutionary. That doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, negate the strength of those women, just because we in the modern day don’t think that a female scientist is something to gawk at. Progress is incremental, and looks differently according to the time period.
I’ve also seen people complaining that they’re not interested in period dramas about “feminine white women” who happen to be queer women. That is a very disappointing stance to take. Personally I am not a huge fan of the idea that racial diversity is the only, or best, form of diversity in media; I don’t think that, for example, media such as The Witcher, which is set in Poland, has an obligation to include racial diversity. I think it’s more important for that particular piece of media to represent an underrepresented culture, i.e., the Polish people. Similarly, there’s a trend on social media specifically where people will take characters from anime and “diversify” them by making them dark-skinned, specifically African-American. One example of this is the characters from Avatar: The Last Airbender, who unfortunately had their actual racial and ethnic identities erased in favour of what was considered more “woke.” On a more mainstream example, the recent adaptation of Dune cast its leads with a lot of racial diversity… but no Arab actors in the starring roles, which renders the diversity for naught, since it’s a very Middle Eastern, and specifically Muslim, story.
Anyway, none of that is to say that we shouldn’t be promoting more stories about diverse characters, obviously. But it’s also important, in my opinion, to make sure that your perceived ideal of diversity does not trample all over other underrepresented groups, because that’s not actually progressive.
Actually, watching folks continue to insist that any queer relationship that isn’t explicitly and overtly romantic or sexual in media is “cowardly” is not only exhausting, but genuinely fucking infuriating.
First, queer coding is not the same as queerbaiting, and queer coding absolutely had and still has its place in all types of art, second, it’s restricting to the types of characters and stories that queer artists can create, especially queer creators who are not out, professionally or at all, and third, your conceptualization of what is queer enough is exclusionary. End of story.
explicitly, overtly, and specifically a particular sort of queer, can’t forget that part
which, one reason the word for me is “queer” is so that I don’t have to get that specific about myself, so I’m really not getting why stories should need to get that specific either
Having separate flags is good bcos it’s good to have a symbol for your particular identity to embrace but it also important to remember the rainbow flag unites us all. All LGBT+ people can use it. I feel like it’s somehow become assumed by a lot of younger lgbt+ people that it’s only fr gay men, which it isn’t and never has been
The rainbow flag when originally created by Gilbert Baker in 1978 actually contained 8 stripes that were assigned values and specific meanings that were meant to show what unites us and what we value as a community,
It took 30 people to hand dye AND hand stitch the first 2 pride flags- 30 people of various identities came together to create the first symbol of pride. Hot pink was removed due to fabric shortages and turquoise was mixed with indigo to have the darker blue we have today.
Having individual flags is great to show your identity but I think we shouldn’t forget that the rainbow flag isn’t reserved for gay men, it was created to show what we all have in common regardless of identity.
“This is an important book, speaking to some of the most contemporary queries and issues relating to LGBTQ people, cultures, and our histories. Carefully attentive to the ways in which race, ethnicity, class, and gender (among other identities and power systems) speak to and with LGBTQ identities of various stripes, the book delivers a persuasive challenge to continuing presumptions that the South has never been a space or place in which LGBTQ people or cultures or communities could emerge, let alone survive and thrive. Rather than a book ‘of history’ it is ultimately a book about history—how it is made, what gets missed or elided by even the most well-meaning of scholars.”
If a cis person, a straight person, a gamer, a white person, or a member of another non-oppressed group asks, “Where’s MY pride parade? Where’s MY special flag? Where’s MY exclusive club?” Then they must also ask…
“Where’s my fabric patch that my people were forced to wear on their clothing during the Holocaust?”
“Where are the laws that deny me being able to adopt children, marry my partner, or freely use the public bathroom that makes me feel safest?”
“Where are the politicians and religious figures that openly murder and imprison my people?”
If none of these questions make any sense in regard to their group, then perhaps they should next ask, “Why am I trivializing the traumatic history of oppressed people trying to survive in a world that violently tries to make them disappear?”
Leslie Feinberg on trans exclusion in feminist spaces.
“We’re in danger of losing what the entire second wave of feminism, what the entire second wave of women’s liberation was built on, and that was ‘Biology is not destiny’. ‘One is not born a woman,’ Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘one becomes one’. Now there’s some place where transsexual women and other women intersect. Biological determinism has been used for centuries as a weapon against women, in order to justify a second-class and oppressed status. How on Earth, then, are you going to pick up the weapon of biological determinism and use it to liberate yourself? It’s a reactionary tool.”
From TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism, issue 7, volume 1. 1995.
My autistic ass is wondering if truscum realize medicalization and gatekeeping are the first two stops on the “How do we make people like this stop existing?” train.
nope, that’s actually incorrect!
medicalization allows for transsexual individuals to undergo transition specific surgeries and go on hormones without it being considered as cosmetic. if the transsexual condition was demedicalized, insurance would no longer cover it, which would mean many transsexual people would not be able to get the procedures they need in order to live a happier life. the goal of medicalization isn’t to make sure that trans people stop existing, it’s actually the exact opposite. only dysphoric people should be transitioning. people without dysphoria will of course feel uncomfortable in their transitioning bodies, because they were content with the bodies of their biolgical sex. i’ve heard stories of non dysphoric trans people (or cis people) lying to medical professionals in order to obtain hormones, and later regretting it. medicalization is one of the only ways we can prevent transition regret.
Context: Being transgender was demedicalized in 2013. I began hormone treatment in 2016. It was not considered cosmetic, and in fact it cost me zero dollars at the point of access to get my HRT prescription - because it was covered by insurance as a necessary medical procedure to treat my dysphoria.
Further context: Literally nowhere in the OP did anybody say anything about who should or should not transition, or about dysphoria.
Still further context: I am autistic. I have actually witnessed the straight line from “This is a Psychological Disorder” to “We are the only ones who can properly tell who has this condition and how to treat it (and we’ll use that to conveniently delegitimize anyone who disagrees with us)” to “What exactly causes this condition?” to “How do we make people like this stop existing?”
And to top it all off, you are literally telling me stories of how medicalization failed… as an argument for medicalization.
Now that you have at least some understanding of what’s going on here, would you like to try lecturing someone who has actually been through the gates about how they work again? Or would you perhaps like to try something less embarrassing?
That also presents an extraordinary burden on trans people to solve the problem of inaccessible healthcare, having the condition pathologised in order to oblige insurers to cover it, rather than actually improving the accessibility of healthcare. At the very least this should be argued as a flawed, pragmatic solution to the immediate problem—“no, being trans is not a medical condition, but there is immediate benefit to us having it recognised as one, despite the long term harm.”
Also, ‘cosmetic’ does not mean ‘insignificant’.
The funny thing is, “flawed, pragmatic solution to the immediate problem” is exactly where this entire line of argument came from.
Gather ‘round, kids, it’s time for a queer history lesson.
So first off: Remember seeing this image in trans history posts?
That’s Christine Jorgensen. She was a pioneer in trans rights and in transition, and deserves respect for that. See, she transitioned beginning in 1949 - not exactly an easy time for queer people of any description.
From what I can gather, it appears that she always intended to be an activist about this - she spent several years preparing a documentary she intended to bring to the US. And, sure enough, news about her spread, and by 1952 articles like these were circulating.
Two years later, she would have her vaginoplasty under a doctor by the name of Harry Benjamin.
Dr. Benjamin, too, was a huge pioneer for trans rights. The treatment regimen of hormones and surgery that we know today? He developed part of it, and formalized it as a single course of treatment.
But.
But Dr. Benjamin was also a cishet man, and an authority figure. And that meant that he was phenomenally bad at knowing what trans people need or… anything about women.
You know how trans folks occasionally joke about how The System wants you to be a 1950s housewife?
That’s because “1950s housewife” is literally the template.
As a result, there were very stringent conditions on what you had to look like to be considered a True Transsexual. You had to be socially transitioned, effectively passing, not getting enough relief from hormones, wanting surgery now, and if you weren’t Straighty McStraight that counted against you very strongly.
(Oh, as an aside, this cishet man who was considered one of the greatest authorities on human sexuality? Specifically classed asexual people as not “true and full-fledged transsexuals.”)
And a key point of Harry Benjamin’s model? The “true and full-fledged transsexual” feels nothing but revulsion for her body and an immediate desire for surgery.
Now obviously this model leaves a lot of trans people (particularly trans men, who Dr. Benjamin did not work with) out in the cold. But some of us could look like we fit, if we worked hard at it.
So trans women lied. We lied our asses off to literally anybody who looked too cis or het to trust with the truth. We said everything they wanted to hear, we shared tips about which lines worked with each other… fuck, we still do this. Meanwhile, among ourselves, we were playing around with the boundaries of gender, forming connections, developing terminology… if only hyperdysphoric feminine white het trans women were going to be considered “true transsexuals,” then screw it, the rest of us were transgender.
However, what the medical community saw? Was a whole lot of trans women smiling and nodding and going “Yep, you sure do understand us perfectly, Mr. Doctor Man!” So of course this theory continued basically unchallenged for a long-ass time.
In the meantime, North American trans history basically has a generation-long gap, populated by the occasional cis doctor writing about us. You can thank Janice Raymond for that one - her work was instrumental in getting trans health care classified as cosmetic, and thus dropped by insurers.
Fast forward to 2005. Raymond’s work was finally undone less than a decade ago, but… all that gatekeeping around turning trans women into 1950s housewives? It’s had all this time going unchallenged. By now, it’s just institutional knowledge that That’s What Trans Women Are Like.
So of course, we lie our asses off again. And we use this wonderful new Internet thing to help each other lie our asses off. Which means that, eventually, two groups of people find out about it and double down hard on screwing us.
The first is doctors, who see an opportunity to build stronger gates, and thus stronger positions of authority and respect.
The second is trans women who actually are described by Dr. Benjamin’s theory. There’s a ton of social capital and easing of transition available if you just vocally buy into oppression.
And of course, since this is the first either group was hearing about it, it looked like a sudden explosion of “fake” trans people lying their way into medical treatment that these poor women desperately needed.
And thus, Harry Benjamin Syndrome was born. Its proponents actively and violently distanced themselves from the rest of us (I’ve actually seen HBSers say things like “I have a medical condition, I’m not a fucking queer.”) and worked their asses off to strengthen the gates, on the theory that they could have their treatment quicker and easier and be taken more seriously if they just got all the “fakers” out.
Over the last 13 years, we’ve made a lot more progress in trans visibility and rights - but the HBS movement has over sixty years of institutional inertia behind it, as well as a shrinking-but-still-active core of vocal proponents. And HBSers aren’t just useful patsies for cis doctors, either. There’s another group that benefits strongly from painting the vast majority of trans women as predatory fakers who are just trying to shove their way into spaces they don’t belong.
TERFs, of course. The same group who have been using tumblr as a controlled environment to figure out exactly how to pass their ideology to people without getting caught.
And that, kiddos, is how you get regurgitated Harry Benjamin Syndrome bullshit on tumblr, spewed by someone who’s too young to even remember what HBS was, in this the year 5778.
I think I may have solved a mystery that I didn’t even know was one.
So. In Peter Pan, the novel, this is the first mention of Captain Hook:
“Who is captain now?”
“Hook,” answered Peter, and his face became very stern as he said that hated word.
“Jas. Hook?”
“Ay.”
Then indeed Michael began to cry, and even John could speak in gulps only, for they knew Hook’s reputation.
“He was Blackbeard’s bo’sun,” John whispered huskily. “He is the worst of them all. He is the only man of whom Barbecue was afraid.”
Later, we learn this:
Hook was not his true name. To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in a blaze; but as those who read between the lines must already have guessed, he had been at a famous public school; and its traditions still clung to him like garments, with which indeed they are largely concerned.
“Barbecue” is Long John Silver from Treasure Island. Jas. is short for James, but in “Captain Hook at Eton,” he’s also called Jacobus. The biblical figure Jacob was renamed Israel.
Blackbeard’s historical boatswain, and also a character in Treasure Island, was Israel Hands.
I’m just saying, if I got a hand chopped off and my last name was Hands… I might want to change it.
Many kudos to OP, I’m still processing Captain Hook = Israel Hands. Because of this post, I stumbled upon this 2020 article. It is a fascinating and bittersweet read about Barrie, Stevenson, and the Peter Pan+Treasure Islandconnections.
Now, the letters of JM Barrie to Robert Louis Stevenson – presumed to be lost by several key Barrie biographers for over 70 years - will be published for the first time in a forthcoming book. The letters reveal how ardently the young Barrie both adored and admired Stevenson, who was an older and more established writer. A year into their friendship, which was initiated by Stevenson, Barrie wrote to him: “To be blunt I have discovered (have suspected it for some time) that I love you, and if you had been a woman…” He leaves the sentence unfinished.
and
Barrie has a real desire to incorporate Stevenson and his affection for Stevenson in his works, he believes. “I think what Barrie is saying is: if I can never meet Stevenson, because he has unfortunately died, then I want to create the opportunity for our characters to meet.
“I think he liked that idea that they could occupy the same world, and could potentially bump into each other.”
Dagger: On Butch Women is a collection of writings by and/or about Butch lesbians and surrounding subcultures, edited by Lily Burana and Roxxie Linnea Due. It is available to read for free on archive.org
