This will apply, too, with the discussion of surgery, which will recur in the pages that follow. We will see that many trans people eschew such accounts because they objectify and pathologize the trans body and pander (again) to the medical model. In his account of his trans journey, Nick Krieger consciously edited out descriptions of the immediate results of his top surgery in an effort to avoid a ‘trans narrative cliché’.66 Yet, either in its practice or in its absent presence (its denial), surgery has always been part of trans history.67 As Eric Plemons frames it, ‘I am an ethnographer of trans- surgical practice not because surgery defines us as trans- people but because it is so very important to so many of our lives.’68
We have to be wary of essentializing categories. Just as we should avoid subsuming transvestism under transsexuality, we should resist transgender as a master category for all aspects of trans history: the danger of the Transgender Studies Readers is that they may do just that. When Megan Davidson interviewed over 100 transgender activists in 2004 and 2005, well into the second decade of the transgender turn, she found conflict as well as shared values.69 There were those for whom the medical model of transsexuality, with its binary and surgical certainties, was imbricated in their sense of self. Then there were those for whom fluidity was the key. The former sometimes saw the latter, especially those self-identifying as gender queer, as the province of white, privileged, college students. Davidson encountered an activist who clearly resented what they called the ‘girl in a tie with a crew cut who now feels male and yet is not willing to manifest it other than [with] a tie and a crew cut’.70 Raewyn Connell’s deft history of transsexual women for a feminist readership demonstrates both an awareness of the emergence of transgender and her own preference for transsexuality as the more meaningful category, presumably because it best fits the centrality of the body to that history.71
Something strange is happening in some strands of trans studies: the erasure of much of trans history. Of course, historical frames of reference vary. For Zackary Drucker, one of the current trans generation, the mid-1990s were formative, and she spoke of discovering the words ‘queer’ and ‘transgender’ as a ‘fourteen-year-old queer youth’. Kate Bornstein was her ‘gender pioneer’. But Bornstein, Zackary’s inspiration, had different influences and perspectives, other historical reference points: Christine Jorgensen, Lou Sullivan, Tula’s 1982 book I Am Woman.72 Writing in the early 1990s, Gordene Olga MacKenzie identified the influence of the TV talk shows – mainly negative – on trans ‘coming out’.73 For Rhyannon Styles, on the other hand, history is compressed even more. Her inspiration, as a gay club kid, was reality television. Before that, ‘Men could only be women in pantomimes, or when using drag to entertain’!74
The most recent trans generation, of course, turns to the Internet, to varied online communities, Gaming, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and YouTube.75 Tiq Milan has said that in the early 2000s he thought that he was the only ‘Black trans man in existence’ until he found a Yahoo discussion group.76 ‘Computer games were my mirror’, writes Shane McGriever, a trans boy, ‘showing me the truth of myself while giving me the purest escape from truth’.77 For Harlow Figa, it was YouTube’s trans male vloggers (‘up to ten hours a day’) who were his big influence: ‘I learned how to speak about my transness through YouTube.’78 The queer, gender-nonconforming, and trans youth at the drop-in centre studied by Mary Robertson found their sexual scripts on Google, and in anime and fan fiction.79 Not surprisingly, Genny Beemyn and Susan Rankin’s survey of nearly 3,500 transgender people has argued that the Internet was crucial to transgender identity work among the younger transgender participants.80
But, whatever the favoured medium, narrative, or cited forerunner, the tendency has been to obscure what this book will argue was a contested and troubled – even provisional – past. In Drucker’s representation, the 1960s seem lost in the mists of time: ‘For the 1960s, that was so forward thinking.’81 For genderqueer, nonbinary Jacob Tobia, the 2000s – inconceivably, given all that you will read in this book – provided no language to describe their genderless feelings, and 2009 is almost ancient history: ‘no one knew who Laverne Cox was yet (can you imagine?)’.82 Or take the historical introduction to Vanity Fair’s 2015 special edition, Trans America, that denies any ‘smooth continuum’ from trans rejection to acceptance, yet which demonstrates the precise opposite by moving quickly to what it terms the ‘sustained high’ for transgender in contemporary US culture and to the celebrity trans promoted by that magazine.83 Lest it be argued that these are examples of popular rather than academic culture, consider Jack Halberstam’s recent book Trans* (2018), which, apart from a discussion of 1970s feminism, has almost nothing from the period before the 2000s.84 Of course CN Lester must be excluded from my criticism, for they have read widely in the historical literature and are thoughtful about the value of the past for the trans community: ‘What I have learnt about our histories shows me that the gendered bars and limits placed around us need not be permanent.’85 Similarly, many of the contributors to the edited collection Trap Door (2017) are committed to recovering a useable trans history.86 But they are the exceptions that prove the rule.
When did this neglected history actually begin? Was it in the 1950s as already intimated? Or does this Jorgensen-inspired focus on those years distort a longer story? Julian Gill-Peterson has convincingly argued for ‘displacing the 1950s as a default starting point for trans history’.87 If it is possible to think of heterosexuality before heterosexuality, and homosexuality before homosexuality, why not think of transgender before transgender?88 What is the history of trans feelings, tendencies – it is difficult to find the right term – before transsexuality and transgender were named in the second half of the last century? How useful is it to claim transsexual subjectivities for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Chapter 1, ‘Before Trans’, deals with these issues.
Chapters 2 to 4 examine the so-termed transsexual moment. Janice Irvine, one of the most perceptive observers of the twentieth-century historical sociology of sex, has written of transsexuality’s ‘widespread public and professional acceptance’ by the 1970s, ‘an accepted syndrome, buttressed by a vast medical armamentarium of research, publications, and treatment programs’.89 But how seamless, really, was the triumph of transsexuality in the 1960s and 1970s? Chapter 2, ‘The Transsexual Moment’, discusses this ostensibly successful establishment of a new medical diagnosis and entity, arguing for the importance of cross-dressing (then known as transvestism) during this period of trans history. There is a case that the rather more fixed definitional qualities of the earlier 1960s and 1970s regime of transsexuality were necessary to establish a new category and to distinguish it from homosexuality and transvestism. However, we will see in Chapter 3, ‘Blurring the Boundaries’, that this sexual certainty masked a world of far more ambiguous alliances and practices. Chapter 4, ‘Backlash’, deliberates a neglected aspect of trans history, a period of intense critique right at the point where transsexuality had seemed to have become established.
Chapter 5, ‘The Transgender Turn’, considers the shift from transsexuality to transgender, and it assesses claims about the speed with which transgender has