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. Some sexologists became advocates for the trans community. In 1919, Magnus Hirschfeld created the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, a social and intellectual nerve center for queer and gender-nonconforming people that developed some of the earliest surgical procedures for altering the body’s sex characteristics. Through the institute, Hirschfeld created a support system for queer and transgender people and arranged surgeries for individuals who wanted sex transformation. His work, as Stryker (2008) notes, “set the stage for the post–World War II transgender movement” (39).
One of the legacies of the early sexological tradition was the complex taxonomy of sex and gender it produced. The field multiplied the categories available to individuals who fell outside the gender binary. For example, Hirschfeld coined the word “transvestite” to describe those who cross-dressed and had cross-gender desires. By the middle of the twentieth century, Harry Benjamin, one of Hirschfeld’s contemporaries and a trailblazing advocate for transgender people, began promoting use of the word “transsexual” to describe individuals who did not just wish to cross-dress but also wanted to change their sexual morphology via surgical procedures. Yet in the 1950s, the word “transsexual” left the medical world and became “a household term” in America (Meyerowitz 2002, 51). This historic turning point was the result of a highly publicized sex change that sparked intrigue and headlines in the popular press across the United States and the globe.
Figure 1.1. Christine Jorgensen, February 1953. The press swarms around Jorgensen as she returns from Denmark. Credit: Photofest.
Christine Jorgensen, a Danish American from the Bronx, was born George Jorgensen and served in World War II as a private. After her service, Jorgensen traveled to Denmark in the early 1950s to privately undergo a series of sexual reassignment surgeries and hormone treatments only available in Europe at the time. When the New York Daily News learned about her procedures, they published the story of her transformation on the cover of the December 1, 1952 issue. The story catapulted Jorgensen into the global limelight and she became an instant celebrity. This attention made her the public face of transsexuality.
Following the global news storm around Christine Jorgensen, transsexuality became part of the American imagination and psychotherapists increasingly saw it as a legitimate object of inquiry (Meyerowitz 2002). As a result, the 1950s witnessed one of the first major professional symposiums on transsexuality led by Harry Benjamin, which was covered in the American Journal of Psychotherapy. Also in the late 1950s, psychologist John Money (a colleague of Benjamin) coined the word “gender identity” to differentiate between genital “sex” and one’s belonging to a social group that expresses masculine or feminine expressions and behaviors.2 Money’s conceptualizations of “gender identity” and also “gender roles,” or what a society expects from its men and women, articulated gender as multiple and unsettled.
By the 1960s, amid the growing social movements of the time—such as the women’s, civil rights, and anti-war movements—and within the burgeoning hippie counterculture, gender itself became a site of political and social contestation. Younger Americans began experimenting with sexuality and challenging gender norms, embracing more unisex, androgynous styles (Meyerowitz 2002). On the ground, as Hill (2013) reminds us, there was a large, loosely connected social formation of gender and sexual misfits including transvestites, transsexuals, drag queens, street queens, radical fairies, butch lesbians, sissy gay men, female impersonators, and clothing fetishists. Representative of the political zeitgeist, the spirit of defiance was in the air in the ’60s as “a wave of increasingly militant resistance on the part of transgender street people” emerged in the cities (Stryker cited in Currah 2008b, 96). For example, during the summer of 1966, an organization of queer, disenfranchised San Francisco youth called “Vanguard” began organizing to improve the social climate of their local community. Vanguard staged public protests, held social functions, and published a magazine featuring poems, essays, and political writing meant to mobilize queer individuals and reach out to young sexual and gender minorities. Members of the group often met at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria—a local hotspot for gays, drag queens, street queens, and transgender sex workers. In August 1966, law enforcement raided Compton’s, yet its patrons banded together and fought back, collectively resisting the recurring pattern of police brutality and oppression that haunted their lives. The incident has since been named the “Compton’s Cafeteria Riot,” an early touchstone of transgender political history.3
Three years later a similar act of resistance occurred in downtown New York City’s Greenwich Village. The now famous 1969 Stonewall riots also brought together disenfranchised queer people in an act of political rebellion, and street queens were again on the vanguard of this uprising.4 Young, poor, trans people of color such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were leading protagonists at Stonewall, and would continue to be throughout the Gay Liberation Movement. Talking about Stonewall
