A Quick and Dirty History of Modern Trans Identity

North America during the 1950s was an environment where homosexuality and crossdressing were illegal, the lavender scare had pushed all the gay people out of government jobs, and arrest for “deviant behaviour” would result in the publication of your name and address in the newspaper. In short, it was not a fun time to be gay. This resulted in queer people forming their own communities, separate from the gender-policed mainstream, where they could be out of the closet without facing violence. It was from these communities that modern conceptions of various queer identities and gay activism emerged, including the terms we use today to describe diversities of gender and sexuality. Back then, however, the distinctions between different identities and sub-communities were less defined. A lesbian was any woman attracted to women, there was no real division between gay men and crossdressers, and transness as a distinct concept didn’t exist.

Trans people, however, were often excluded from those movements. Examples range from the harassment campaign against Sandy Stone, sound engineer of the lesbian music label Olivia Records, to the exclusion of trans protections from New York City’s Gay Rights Bill in a series of shady backroom deals. The gay mainstream, largely white and middle class, was willing to leave trans people, as well as people of colour and sex workers, behind in their campaigns for gay rights.

As such, a transgender identity distinct from the overarching gay identity began to emerge. The terms first used, like drag queen or transvestite, slowly fell out of use, and those who identified with them started to use transsexual instead, and sometimes transgender. Trans activism grew as a force, and trans people began to make some strides into academia, creating trans studies as a distinct subset of queer studies.