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 But Bornstein, Zackary’s inspiration, had different influences and perspectives, other historical reference points: Christine Jorgensen, Lou Sullivan, Tula’s 1982 book I Am Woman.72 Writing in the early 1990s, Gordene Olga MacKenzie identified the influence of the TV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 become established in the American cultural psyche. How, and in what ways, has that shift occurred? Has there been both a 1990s turn and a 2010s tipping point? Is trans culture really experiencing a cultural high?
Categories like transvestite, transsexual, transgender, and trans itself are good to rethink US history, but this book will demonstrate that it is the slippages and overlaps between these types that can be the most informative. As most dictionaries will explain, trans means across, beyond, over, and between; it can also denote change, transformation.90 The history that follows will include those with transgender bodies before transgender emerged as a descriptor; those who cannot be categorized as either transvestite or transsexual; cross-dressers who modify their bodies but who are not transsexual; those who wanted to be homosexual rather than heterosexual after their bodily reconstruction; and those who consider themselves beyond classification. This book will locate and contest some of the more significant structural and conceptual weaknesses in trans history: the neglect of an important period of critique in transsexuality’s early years; a claimed recognition of systems of technology and therapy and notions of sexual identity that I will suggest were far more tentative, contested, and fragmentary; and a neglect of other forms of trans expression both before and after the transsexual moment of the 1960s and 1970s. This book will attempt a new history of transsexuality and transgender in modern America.
Notes
1 1. M. L. Brown and C. A. Rounsley, True Selves: Understanding Transsexualism – For Families, Friends, Coworkers, and Helping Professionals (San Francisco, 1996), p. 25; J. F. Boylan, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders (New York, 2003), p. 174.
2 2. R. Erickson, ‘Foreword’, in R. Green and J. Money (eds.), Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment (Baltimore, 1969), p. xi.
3 3. M. W. Valerio, The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal and Social Transformation from
