Transgender History (seal Studies)

Transgender History is the third edition (2026) of a work first published in 2008 and revised in 2017. Historian and trans woman Susan Stryker traces the history of transgender social-change activism primarily in the United States after World War II, situating that history within a longer arc of global gender variance. She defines "transgender" expansively as movement away from one's birth-assigned gender and centers the book on collective action rather than individual experience: efforts to make crossing gender boundaries easier, safer, and more acceptable, as well as the forces that resist those movements.

Stryker opens by defining key terms. She distinguishes gender (a social construct for categorizing people) from sex (biological characteristics), noting that the two are frequently conflated. She defines cisgender (nontransgender), gender dysphoria (unhappiness over the gap between one's subjective gender and how others perceive it), and intersex (naturally occurring variations in reproductive anatomy). She traces how the word "transgender" originated in medical texts in the mid-1960s, was adopted by transfeminine people (those moving toward feminine gender roles) in the late 1960s and 1970s, and expanded in the 1990s to encompass any variation from gender norms.

The historical narrative begins with gender variance across deep time. Prehistoric cave paintings depict figures with mixed male and female attributes, ancient religions feature deities who change sex, and written records from the past 5,000 years document gender-variant statuses across major cultural traditions. After 1492, European colonizers often violently suppressed indigenous gender-variant practices. In colonial America, Stryker documents cross-gender living, including Thomas/Thomasine Hall, an intersex indentured servant in 1620s Virginia whom a court declared to be both a man and a woman. By the 1840s, US cities began passing laws criminalizing appearing in public in clothing of the opposite sex, reflecting broader efforts to regulate gender through new institutional tools such as policing, photography, and birth certificates.

Stryker traces medical science's growing power to define gender variance, from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs's 1860s biological theory of female psychology enclosed in a male body to Magnus Hirschfeld's founding of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin in 1919. Hirschfeld arranged the first documented male-to-female genital surgery in 1931. Among his colleagues was a young Harry Benjamin, who would become the leading US authority on transsexuality. In 1933, Nazis destroyed Hirschfeld's institute and burned his library. He died in exile in 1935, and many European trans people perished in the Holocaust.

The mid-twentieth-century section begins with psychologist John Money, who, working at Johns Hopkins University, developed a model of gender as a bio-psycho-social system distinct from biological sex. Stryker argues that Money did not invent this concept but popularized terminology rooted in cultural anthropology, particularly the work of Margaret Mead. Louise Lawrence, a trans woman living full-time as a woman from 1942, built a correspondence network linking trans people nationwide with medical researchers. Christine Jorgensen, a trans woman, made international headlines with her 1952 surgery in Copenhagen, which became a watershed in trans history. Virginia Prince, a cross-dressing organizer connected to Lawrence, published the newsletter Transvestia in 1952 and in 1961 founded the Hose and Heels Club, which became the Foundation for Full Personality Expression (FPE), the first enduring US transgender organization. Prince limited membership to married heterosexual men, and Stryker contrasts Prince's privileged suburban constituency with the drag ball subcultures of transgender people of color.

Stryker covers the emergence of trans liberation movements in the 1960s. In May 1959, an ethnically mixed crowd at Cooper Do-nuts in Los Angeles spontaneously resisted a police roundup. In August 1966, the Compton's Cafeteria riot erupted in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood when police targeted trans patrons, igniting street fighting involving hundreds. Stryker contextualizes the riot within the Tenderloin's function as a containment zone where housing and employment discrimination forced trans women into sex work. Harry Benjamin's 1966 book The Transsexual Phenomenon argued that gender identity could not be changed, and the first US gender reassignment program opened at Johns Hopkins within months. Reed Erickson, a wealthy trans man, established the Erickson Educational Foundation in 1964, bankrolling the institutional framework for trans medicine for decades. The 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York, in which trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera participated, inspired the Gay Liberation Front. Trans people felt marginalized within the new movement, however, and Rivera and Johnson established Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in 1970.

The 1970s and 1980s brought serious setbacks. University-based gender programs made surgery available but entangled access with conservative attempts to enforce the gender binary. The creation of gender identity disorder (GID) as a psychiatric diagnosis in 1980 pathologized trans identity, yet insurance companies refused to cover treatment. Some strands of second-wave feminism developed pronounced antitrans positions. At the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference, keynote speaker Robin Morgan denounced trans woman Beth Elliott, characterizing trans women broadly as infiltrators and associating them with sexual violence. Janice Raymond's 1979 book The Transsexual Empire recommended policies to eliminate transsexuality through curtailed medical access and conversion therapy. Stryker notes, however, that feminism was not uniformly hostile. The formation of transmasculine communities, comprising people assigned female at birth who move toward masculine identities, also accelerated. Lou Sullivan, a gay trans man rejected by Stanford's gender dysphoria program in 1976 because his homosexual orientation was deemed disqualifying, eventually transitioned and in 1986 founded the first FTM (female-to-male) support organization. Sullivan contracted HIV, likely in 1980, and died in 1991.

Around 1990, a new burst of transgender activism emerged, coinciding with the rise of the internet and the AIDS epidemic. Trans activist Holly Boswell's 1991 article and trans activist and writer Leslie Feinberg's 1992 pamphlet Transgender Liberation gave the word "transgender" its current broad meaning. Sandy Stone's 1992 article helped launch transgender studies as an intellectual field, while philosopher Judith Butler's 1990 Gender Trouble introduced gender performativity, the idea that gender is something people do rather than something they inherently are. The 1993 murder of transmasculine youth Brandon Teena in Nebraska drew unprecedented attention to antitrans violence. Between the early 1990s and 2016, the number of US jurisdictions offering legal protections for trans people grew from three municipalities to over 200. New national organizations formed, trans arts and culture flourished, and the Transgender Day of Remembrance, launched in 1999, grew into an international event.

The final chapter covers 2008 through January 2025. During the Obama era, the Affordable Care Act expanded health-care access, executive orders advanced trans rights, and the 2013 fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) formally dropped GID as a diagnostic category. By the mid-2010s, trans visibility had permeated mass media and everyday life. Antitrans forces organized in response: North Carolina's 2016 House Bill 2 mandated that trans people use bathrooms matching their birth-assigned sex, and Donald Trump's 2016 election began the process of undoing recent gains. The Supreme Court's 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County ruling, which held that trans people are constitutionally protected from employment discrimination, was one of the few positive legal developments during the first Trump presidency. During the Biden years, trans-supportive executive orders were restored, but antitrans legislation surged in Republican-controlled states, rising from 21 bills introduced in 2015 to at least 738 by early 2025. Republicans spent more than $215 million on anti-trans television advertising in the final stretch of the 2024 campaign. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention issued a warning in January 2025 that the targeting of trans people had crossed the threshold of genocidal practices.

On January 20, 2025, Trump issued an executive order decreeing that only two biological sexes exist, revoking trans and nonbinary people's ability to obtain gender-appropriate federal documents, and mandating the exclusion of trans women from women's prisons and shelters. In the epilogue, Stryker describes further deterioration, including the Supreme Court's June 2025 decision in United States v. Skrmetti upholding Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors. She affirms that transness remains a persistent feature of human life and invokes Martin Luther King Jr.'s faith that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, insisting that people must actively work to bend it.