Transgender History Essay

Within Transgender History, written by Susan Stryker, is the context of persons that know themselves to be of a gender contradicting to their sex at birth. While transgender people have existed for most of human history, they were not recorded in legalized terms until the early 20th Century. The progressive politics of today were mostly formed in the 20th Century and still have room for improvement since they do not legally protect discrimination against gender identity. Although many oppressed groups fought for equal rights through protests and riots in the mid-1900’s, transgender people are continuously striving for civil rights despite their growing presence in politics after World War II because of prejudice from both majority and minority

“Transgender social justice made gains in the 1960s, when transgender issues resonated with larger cultural shifts related to the rise of feminism, the war in Vietnam, sexual liberation, and youth countercultures” (Stryker 122). Transgender activists were able to fight along others if their cause intersected with someone else's, such as civil rights, a social desire for gender role reformation, socialism, and discrimination for housing or jobs. However, once one group got what they wanted, they cared little for the transgender movement: “gays were now ‘liberated’ from the burden of psychopathology, homosexual and transgender communities no longer had a common interest in working to address how they were treated by the mental health establishment” (Stryker 98). Even if their arguments were sound, many still had quarrels toward their existence claiming them to be conforming to the heterosexual society instead being gay or pretending to be a different gender to act out their sexual fantasies. This conflict between the gays and transgenders significantly affected their progress as a movement since they had little support throughout the 60s and 70s from various anti-transgender activists. It wasn’t until the 1980s that transgender groups began to focus on their own members rather

The AIDS epidemic at first infected mostly white gay males, but also “hemophiliacs, injection drug users, and Haitian immigrants” (Stryker 133). While most people thought it could not affect them, the disease could spread quickly through “‘vulnerable’ populations-ones more prone to infection because of the confluence of poverty, social stigma, job discrimination, survival prostitution, fewer educational resources, lack of access to medical information or health care and other contributing factors” (Stryker 132). The funding was used to help educate and provide social events to motivate transgender communities to make safe-sex decisions, thus encouraging the socialization of transgenders and gays. In 1990, Queer Nation was established, and it consisted of the sexual identity activists. After transphobia was addressed, the organization created a transgender inclusive group to aid the activists pursuing change and equality for gender identity. Anne Ogborn, founder of Transgender Nation, is a key exception showing that a transsexual can fight for her own minority group while many others may oppose her, despite fighting for the same rights. With the support of a new post-Baby Boomer generation--whose adolescence was shaped by the AIDS epidemic, Feminist sex wars, and a fresh perspective of the relationship between sex and gender (Stryker