I think it’s time to consider the fact that Isabelle Eberhardt, writer and explorer, lived life as a male and that by consistently referring to him as “she” and a “cross-dressing explorer” we are missing out on a very important part of history. Isabelle Eberhardt changed his name to Si Mahmoud Saadi, and yes- dressed as a man, but also lived as a man, wrote as a man, and was accepted by his community as a man. His whole life, no matter where he lived, he lived as a man. When asked why he did this he said “It is impossible for me to do otherwise.” (Abel-Jaouad, Isabelle Eberhardt: Portrait of the Artsist as a Young Nomad”). Let’s respect who this brave, brilliant, and intrepid explorer was.
Portrait of Sylvia Rivera (1951-2002) posing in front of her altar to Marsha P. Johnson (1944-1992), by Valerie Shaff, ca. 2000
In the early 1970’s Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson co-founded S.T.A.R., Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, an organization designed to achieve rights for her community, and provide social services to this largely ignored and stigmatized group. For a short while she and Marsha P. Johnson ran S.T.A.R. House which provided shelter for homeless young street queens. Lack of funds and problems with the certificate of occupancy for S.T.A.R. House, forced the abandonment of the venture at that time, but Rivera never lost the dream of creating a supportive and safe living space for young transgender people.
Rivera was greatly disillusioned with the desire of many early gay and lesbian activists to distance the gay movement from transvestites, drag queens, and other gender variant people, in spite of the fact that these people were often the “shock troops” for the entire gay community.
A veteran of the 1969 Stonewall uprising, Sylvia was a tireless advocate for all those who have been marginalized as the “gay rights” movement has mainstreamed. Sylvia fought hard against the exclusion of transgender people from the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act in New York, and was a loud and persistent voice for the rights of people of color and low-income queers and trans people.
A snippet on what German reunification would mean for trans rights that appeared in Lou Sullivan’s FTM Newsletter in June 1990.
one day i’m gonna write a veeery long post about what the reunification meant for lgbt people bc I have talked to many lgbt ossis about it and it’s SOOO interesting.
like for example in the cities the young “queer scene” is very… americanized if that makes sense? like using almost exclusively english vocabulary for lgbt related things, focusing on a western/ american centric line of lgbt history etc - it’s very alienating for many people who grew up with russian as their main foreign language…
or like look at charlotte von mahlsdorf, probably east germany’s best known trans woman, who was attacked by neo nazis in the early nineties (the east german neo nazi culture started directly after the reunification) and then left germany for sweden because of that…
there’s just so much stuff like this and it’s SO super interesting but it’s rarely talked about
History generally speaks of the Stonewall Inn Riots as the first queer riot and turning point for LGBTQ liberation but before June 1969, two other riots broke out years before and some 3,000 miles away: The 1959 riot at Cooper’s Donuts in Los Angeles and a 1966 riot at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco.
Though knowledge of both has faded over the years, they provide an important illustration of where trans folk, queens and sexual outlaws figure into the modern LGBT rights movement and what led them to finally stand up to abuse and discrimination.
In the ’50s and ’60s, Los Angeles cops made a habit of screwing with queers: They would raided gay bars, marching the queers out in a line and arresting anyone whose perceived gender didn’t match what was on their ID. Occasionally, they’d even single out a few lucky victims for special attention in the form of insults and beatings. Entrapment was common: Attractively dressed vice cops would cruise gay bars, bathrooms and hook-up spots, pick up tricks and arrest them as soon their target leaned in for a kiss. In other cases, plainclothes cops would wait outside of gay hangouts, trail two men as they walked home and burst into their residence to catch them in the act.
As bad as gay men had it, trans people had it worse: With laws against cross-dressing on the books in California, police kept an eye out for them entering or leaving gay bars—any excuse to raid and shut the place down. (Many gay hangouts rejected trans folk for this very reason.)
Many in the trans community couldn’t get decent jobs (hell, they still can’t) and some resorted to hustling, giving the whole community the reputation of being prostitutes. The media often conflated homosexuals with cross-dressers, drag queens and trans people, making gay men and lesbians resent trans visibility even more.
So what better place to kick back than Cooper’s Donuts, an all-night eatery on Main Street in downtown L.A.? Smack dab between two gay bars—Harold’s and the Waldorf—Cooper’s become a popular late-night hangout for trans folk, butch queens, street hustlers and their johns.
Two cops entered the donut shop that night, ostensibly checking ID, and arbitrarily picked up two hustlers, two queens, and a young man just cruising and led them out. As the cops packed the back of the squad car, one of the men objected, shouting that the car was illegally crowded. While the two cops switched around to force him in, the others scattered out of the car.
From the donut shop, everyone poured out. The crowd was fed up with the police harassment and on this night they fought back, hurling donuts, coffee cups and trash at the police. The police, facing this barrage of [pastries] and porcelain, fled into their car calling for backup.
Soon, the street was bustling with disobedience. People spilled out in to the streets, dancing on cars, lighting fires, and generally reeking havoc. The police return with backup and a number of rioters are beaten and arrested. They also closed the street off for a day.
The Cooper’s Donut riot often gets confused with the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot some years later: There were similar political circumstances leading up both riots. And like Cooper’s, Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district was a popular all-night hangout for trans people (called “hair fairies” at the time), hustlers and assorted sexual renegades.
And both stories involve coffee cups.
In August 1966, a cafeteria worker called the police when some transgender customers at Compton’s became unruly. When a police officer attempted to arrest one trans woman, she threw a cup of hot coffee in his face. Within moments, dishes were broken, furniture was thrown, the restaurant’s windows were smashed and a nearby newsstand was burned down.
Trans people, hustlers and disenfranchised gay locals picketed the cafeteria the following night, when the restaurant’s windows were smashed again. Unlike the Stonewall riots, the situation at Compton’s was somewhat organized—many picketers were members of militant queer groups like the Street Orphans and Vanguard.
Also, the city’s response was quite different from the reaction in New York: A network of social, mental and medical support services was established, followed in 1968 by the creation of the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, overseen by a member of the SFPD. Directors Victor Silverman and Susan Stryker’s recount the historic two-day incident in their 2005 film, Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria.
TheHijra of South East Asia and India are “…a traditional community of people usually assigned male at birth who may or may not undergo castration and live as women or as a third gender. The hijra are distinct from the more modern, Western understanding of transsexual women. Their identities and status, changeable across time, have a considerably longer heritage, which is grounded in religious practice and spiritual belief”.
Ella Wesner, male impersonator. circa 1880. Photos by Napoleon Sarony. George Eastman House Collection, and Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
There are three web pages. The first is an introductory autobiographical sketch video. The second explains the interactive timeline and the installation in the current physical exhibition space. The third page houses the timeline itself.
If you visit the site, please consider leaving a comment here with your impressions or anything you might have learned from it.
As part of my doctoral dissertation, I am still searching for ways to publish this work, preferably without separating it from the rest. When I do, I will certainly repost.
Today’s episode is on the life and trial of early 20th century Australian transgender man Harry Crawford. Join us to learn what court records, newspaper articles and modern biographies can tell us about a century of Australian attitudes to transgender experiences.
[Image: Mugshot of Harry Crawford, taken by the New South Wales Police Department in 1920. It is a black and white photo Harry Crawford, a white man in a three piece suit looking at the camera with a serious expression.]
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.
In 1934-1936, trans brothers Mark and David Ferrow of Yarmouth, UK, both transitioned at age 13 with full parental support. Mark medically transitioned first in 1939 at 17 and his brother soon followed. “Though we have been girls, we have both felt men at heart,” Mark told a reporter. Their stories show that trans youth can grow up to be happy, celebrated adults.
David lived in their hometown of Great Yarmouth, UK for the rest of his life. He became a local icon. At 15, he started selling books. He later ran a wildly successful bookshop until death in 2006, age 81, 68 years after transitioning. He had a daughter, Jan, who supported his work. The whole town adored him. Why, yes, that is a mug of his face.
Mark, always passionate about art, joined the Kirby Muxlue Players troupe as a writer and traveled throughout the UK. His David Gower painting is currently in the UK’s National Portrait Gallery! His art still hangs in collections all over the country - although it’s almost never recognized as being by a trans artist. Mark married Edna Hall in 1942 and died in 1991, age 68, in Leicester.
It’s important to mention that it’s unclear if both men are intersex despite the reports. At the time, it was customary for non-intersex trans people to claim intersex conditions in order to access care (e.g. Roberta Cowell). Regardless if they were trans or intersex and trans, I would hate their underreported stories to be forgotten!
When I speak of our Transgender Ancestors, you must know there’s an actual Roman Empress in that legacy.
She was a Syrian Priestess. She didn’t give a **** about the Patriarchal Roman Elite/Establishment. Created Rome’s first Women’s Senate and they were NOT happy about it.
…and a bunch of “scholars” came out of the wood works attempting to diss her saga, and caution me from spreading “dangerous” information, so as not to inappropriately influence the youth.
At that time, NYC’s Bellevue Hospital followed prevailing thought that sexuality and gender identity that did not correspond to a narrow and binary view of normative behaviors was a sign of mental illness. Like many institutions they practiced Electroshock Therapy to “cure”bisexual as well as gay/lesbian people and mistreated LGBTQ patients who were simply there for routine medical complaints.
“the meaning of Stonewall has shifted as the assimilations in favor of a ‘we’re just like them’ gay politics have struggled against the radical activists over the legacy of the riot and the broad, multi issue based activism which accompanied it.” ~“History or Myth? Writing Stonewall” by Benjamin Shepard in Lambda Book Report;Aug/Sep2004, Vol. 13 Issue ½
[clutches my pearls]Trans people in 1921?!??! But I thought trans people were trendof today’s youth!
I’d like to add my great great aunt Flora!
Y'all wanna know why we don’t see or hear about trans people from that era?
That’s because that picture was taken at what is known in its native language as Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, it is the place where the first trans healthcare was developed, where the term transsexual was coined.
Do you want to know what happened to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft?
It was the victim of the very first Nazi book burning. Their teachings were outlawed and their books destroyed. Their leaders - such as Magnus Hirschfeld - were criminalized and exiled, if not outright murdered.
The fascists exterminated not just a generation of trans people, but they erased our history from the books almost entirely. It took us almost a century to get back to where we are now.
We’ve always been here, but our future is not guaranteed. We have to fight for our survival, because it’s happening again.
Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson New York City December 20, 1970
image description: a black & white photograph of sylvia rivera and marsha p. johnson marching with a large banner on a crowded new york street. the banner reads, “street transvestites action revolutionaries.” there is a large star also on the banner.
STAR was an organization co-founded by the two, run from 1970–1973. STAR provided housing and resources to homeless LGBT youth and sex workers, and developed much of the intersectional politics in activism at the time. the money used to keep STAR running usually came out of their own pockets.
I don’t know how universally relevant this is (I guess no part of queer history ever is) but I wonder how many trans people know the history of T&T groups.
Like, in the 90′s and 00′s in the Netherlands almost every trans related groups was a T&T ‘Transsexual and Transvestites’ group and that seemed to also be a quite common thing in other north-west European countries for as far as I can see. Maybe beyond Europe too? I’m not sure.
People who called themselves transsexual and transvestites at the time felt that they had many experiences in common that made organising together valuable and many agreed that there was a large grey area of overlapping identities. With very little information available, a lot of trans women identified as transvestites first, before identifying at trans women (in that period often using the term Male-to-Female transsexual and transwoman without the space between the words).
Then, in about 2007-2012, things changed. Transgender became more popular than transsexual and crossdresser largely replaced transvestite. In those early days, the term transgender was often understood to include crossdressers. The transgender umbrella is from that time:
Back then, the word transgender was seen by many as the umbrella term that would unite all the struggles against gender roles. But that grouping together was far from uncontroversial and a lot of heated debates took place over how broad or narrow the transgender umbrella term should be. Some feared too wide an umbrella would take attention away from transsexuals, others feared it would be confusing, some groups that had previously only had transwomen and transvestites did not appreciate the new presence of transmen and transmasculine people in their transgender community, some felt that it was very important to distinguish binary-identified transsexuals from all sorts of weird non-binary identities.
Those who took part in the debates probably remember the specific standpoints in more detail. For me, I just remember how in 2008-2012 all the T&T groups started changing their names to ‘transgender groups’ and then slowly but surely focussing more on only those transgender people that wanted some kind of transition, physical or social. Eventually, transvestites (or crossdressers, as the common term was by then) disappeared entirely from the transgender groups and a lot of transgender people forgot about the earlier wider meaning of transgender as an umbrella term.
Within that same period, there started to be a LOT of new and fairly positive media attention for transgender issues, specificallytransition related atttention. The media was no participant at all in the ‘what does transgender mean’ question but the questions they did ask were ‘are you on hormones yet?’ and ‘did you have the surgery’? Since that was a lot better than ‘so are you mentally ill because you want to be a woman?’ a lot of people who fitted the hormones + surgery narrative eagerly accepted this ‘positive visibility’ and did not question the narrow focus. This further cemented the view that transgender meant transition.
And the transgender activists? Well, let’s just say many of them, knee deep in a struggle against terrible health care and cruel human rights violations, leaped at the opportunity to seize the momentum and finally make some changes and many didn’t really give much thought to the slow disappearance of transvestites from the newly named ‘transgender’ community.
So where are we now, in 2018?
The transgender community seems to have largely forgotten about their T&T history. The terms transvestite and crossdresser both seem to be in decline, as are the communities that meet around those identities. Younger people who don’t fit the gender binary but also do not desire social or physical transition, are now more likely to identify themselves as some kind of genderqueer and nonbinary or just ‘not into labels’ or just to wear whatever they want and rock it. Some of them find their way back under the transgender umbrella after all. Which I guess is some kind of a happy ending.
But then theres the question of recognizing our legacy. I don’t think a lot of these young people realise that, had they been born 20 years earlier, many of them would probably have found a home in the transvestite community. I don’t think a lot of young transgender people recognize older transvestites as their elders, who paved the way for them. I often get the impression that they view the dwindling groups of 50+, 60+, 70+ transvestites with an element of disdain, as people who held on to a regressive binary identity, instead of as like - their badass grandfather-mothers who build parts of trans history.
Over the last 24 hours, some trans people have responded to this with some truly nasty comments about transvestites and crossdressers, mostly accusing them of stuff like ‘degrading femininity’, ‘fetishizing’, or ‘giving trans people a bad name’. Invariably, the people writing these comments were young. Invariably, their only frame of reference seemed to be stigmatizing media portrayals and they clearly have no idea what they’re talking about.
I am not going to dignify these comments with a response because they’re too disgusting to reblog, I do not think they would listen and frankly reading them fills me with far too much emotion to write coherently.
I just wanna say: this is what happens when we are so quick to forget our very recent history. Despite the many debates and divisions that have existed in the past, few trans people could have had these completely off-the-wall misguided ideas 15 years ago because if they travelled in trans spaces they would have met so many transvestites and crossdressers. They would chat and hang out and probably make friends. They would swap experiences, share hardships and learn to recognize transvestites and crossdressers as siblings in the community of gendernonconforming and marginalized people.
My heart breaks for the young crossdresser out there today who might enter a trans space looking for their community of supporting likeminded people, only to find out that they are not welcome and even despised. I can only hope that if this happens, some older trans people will talk some sense into their younger community members and remind them of the long road transgender people and crossdressers have walked together, the battles we fought together, the crossdressers who fought for trans rights and the trans people who fought for their siblings too because we understood those struggles as interconnected.
When we forget where we come from, we fail to recognize members of our own family, and we are all lonelier and more divided as a result.
![bihistorygroup: [Know Your Bisexual History]: Photos from joint Street Transvestite Action Revolutio](https://64.media.tumblr.com/dab9dbb7cc9019c8079ae95eede7e59a/tumblr_mwovuolHcn1t37nr2o2_500.jpg "bihistorygroup: [Know Your Bisexual History]: Photos from joint Street Transvestite Action Revolutio")
![bihistorygroup: [Know Your Bisexual History]: Photos from joint Street Transvestite Action Revolutio](https://64.media.tumblr.com/07d40cac5ff0f0ca87d6db8ee4c94166/tumblr_mwovuolHcn1t37nr2o6_r1_640.jpg "bihistorygroup: [Know Your Bisexual History]: Photos from joint Street Transvestite Action Revolutio")
![socialistexan:emdots:thattallnerdybean:[clutches my pearls] Trans people in 1921?!??! But I thought](https://64.media.tumblr.com/995b65701b7602bc1e4061c13204950c/tumblr_ot75q086AK1s9c6nao1_1280.jpg "socialistexan:emdots:thattallnerdybean:[clutches my pearls] Trans people in 1921?!??! But I thought")
