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 (1982), Yentl (1983), La Cage Aux Folles (1978), Tootsie (1982), and Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) feature characters who temporarily cross-dress to accomplish something and then stop after getting what they want.
By the 1950s, transgender representation experienced a paradigmatic shift, moving beyond the temporary transvestite film trope. In addition to portraying transgender subjectivity as something that one did, film, news, and other forms of popular media presented it as something one was. Gender variance moved from an act to an identity—a shift largely precipitated by the story of Christine Jorgensen and other real people who publicly transitioned gender. Throughout the early twentieth century, newspapers would occasionally print stories of gender transformation and sex change. For example, in 1931 the European press created a public stir with their coverage of Lili Elbe, a Danish painter who underwent one of the first recorded male-to-female sex changes (as dramatized in the 2015 film The Danish Girl). Sex change stories were also present in the journalism of the American West, as local newspapers were fascinated with gender benders (mainly women presenting as men) surviving and thriving along the country’s wild frontier (Boag 2011).
Yet it was the 1951 front page of the New York Daily News announcing the sexual transformation of Christine Jorgensen that captivated the global cultural imagination and instantiated transgender identity as something one can be and inhabit full time. Headlining with “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty: Operations Transform Bronx Youth,” the story created a massive sensation. In her autobiography, Jorgensen remembers feeling bewildered at the level of publicity she received, recalling that for a time her story overshadowed news coverage of the historic hydrogen bomb tests at Eniwetok Atoll. On the one hand, her journey stoked anxieties about what it meant to be male and female, and the press presented her as a bizarre curiosity. On the other, amid the social and political anxieties of the Cold War era, Jorgensen’s transgender identity was framed as a success story, a triumph of modern science, a daring tale of self-actualization, and a win for Western individuality (Meyerowitz 2002).
Thrust into the spotlight, Jorgensen carefully crafted her image for a 1950s viewing public, styling herself as a classic Hollywood “blonde bombshell.” She also identified as heterosexual and articulated dreams of domestic life. Her gender performance was conventional and she was celebrated for it. Those who followed suit also garnered press attention in 1950s America. As with Jorgensen, Charlotte McLeod and Tamara Rees became public figures and models of the “good transsexual” (Skidmore 2011, 272), embodying whiteness, heterosexuality, domesticity, and conventional femininity. In choosing to highlight these women’s stories—to the exclusion of women of color and women who were less conventionally feminine—media presented a narrow conception of transgender subjectivity (ibid.). Nevertheless, Jorgensen and others gave sex and gender transgression a human face, and for those who felt similarly to them, they served as role models.
Seeking to capitalize from the new public interest in transgender topicality that Jorgensen’s story spurred, film production companies increasingly began to green-light projects with transgender themes. For example, Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda, released in 1953, was marketed with the tagline “I Changed My Sex!.” Financed on a shoestring budget, the movie told the story of a man who agonizes over the consequences of telling his fiancé he is a transvestite. Wood, himself a transvestite, used the film as an attempt to humanize and explain transvestism. In the film, the character Dr. Alton, a psychiatrist, underscores that transvestism is a harmless and sincere condition of healthy heterosexual men with “normal” sex lives. Into the 1960s, film continued to articulate transgender identity as a medical concern but pushed further, framing it as a dangerous and pathological condition. This was most clearly evidenced in Psycho (1960) and Homicidal (1961). Psycho was Alfred Hitchcock’s horror story about a psychopathic cross-dressing murderer. The film became a pop-cultural sensation: “Psycho upstaged the presidential campaign … teenagers turned the showings into rituals—returning with their friends again and again” (Hoberman 2010). Inspired by the success of Psycho, William Castle, another iconic horror director of mid-century America, produced and directed Homicidal one year later, which offered another shocking tale of a transgender killer. Both films captured the American popular imagination and offered up images that associated gender transgression with madness, violence, and emotional instability.
In the counterculture of the 1960s, however, underground and cult films offered alternative and more transgressive imaginings. Reflecting the zeitgeist of
