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We Can No Longer Hide in Plain Sight

From the Cultural Margins to the Tipping Point

“The days of that brown wrapper are definitely over,” explained Allyson, a white trans woman in her late fifties from the Midwestern United States. Throughout the 1980s, Allyson received a monthly newsletter published by the local cross-dressing organization. It was mailed to her home wrapped in brown paper to conceal its contents. Each time she saw the newsletter sitting in her mailbox, she shuddered with excitement. Flipping through its pages made her feel part of something bigger than herself, and made her look forward to the organization’s next meeting. To ensure the safety and anonymity of its members, the cross-dressing organization operated under a veil of secrecy. Mailed correspondence was camouflaged, meeting times and locations circulated by word of mouth, and there were rules about how members should and should not communicate outside the walls of group meetings. Given the group’s covert nature, Allyson felt fortunate to have found it. She remembered, “At the time, finding support groups was a major issue for everyone. It took so much effort and many whispers. I found out about the group I went to through word of mouth. It was all very secretive.” She continued to explain her experiences with the group. “It met once a month at a hotel. The manager there was understanding and gave us a room to change in … I was married at the time and had to hide it from my wife. But I think she might have known. When we would have dinner parties and such, I would end up in the kitchen talking to the women. That’s where I fit in the best.”

For Allyson, as well as for many trans people living through the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, transgender organizations and their newsletters were some of the only connections they had to a sense of community and their sole source of trans visibility. “There was nothing out there,” Allyson insisted, “an occasional something on TV, but that’s it.” This was, as many of my participants called it, the “pre-Internet age,” the mid- to late twentieth century, the era of the mass media dominated by print, radio, film, and television. This media environment was structured around a broadcasting model, where media texts were produced by a small group of elite creators and imparted to a mass audience. Space was finite. There was only so much radio-frequency spectrum available, only so many books that could stock bookstore shelves. Production costs and barriers to entry were high. Audiences were conceptualized as a “mass” (Nightingale and Ross 2003) and overwhelmingly imagined by the media industries as white, heterosexual, and middle class. Audiences themselves had limited capacity to communicate with producers of 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 and the role transgender individuals played in the gay liberation movement, Sylvia Rivera (2007), a Latina activist, sex worker, and lifelong advocate for trans people, recalled, “We were front liners. We didn’t take no shit from nobody. We had nothing to lose” (118). However, members of the gay community did not always return the favor and advocate on behalf of their trans allies. Trans individuals were not always welcome in gay bars and gay rights organizations, specifically those organized around white, middle-class concerns. Following the Stonewall rebellion, Rivera and Johnson decided to provide structures of support and care for their own community, which led to their founding of STAR, the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, in 1970 and creation of STAR House, a refuge for homeless NYC transgender youth.5

Meanwhile, alongside the growing political consciousness and mobilization of transgender people, the 1960s saw another historic development: the publication of Harry Benjamin’s (1966) book The Transsexual Phenomenon. A critical and thoughtful polemic, the book turned conventional wisdom regarding gender on its head. It argued that transsexualism cannot be cured; that transsexuals should seek psychiatric help; that in some cases hormonal therapy and surgery may be necessary; and finally, that medical professionals have a responsibility to help transgender people achieve self-realization. Benjamin (1966) suggested that in a modern, technological, and scientifically advanced society, the male/female gender binary was inadequate. Instead, he argued that what we think of as “sex” actually encompassed numerous entities. He advocated thinking about individuals as exhibiting different kinds of sex, such as “endocrine sex,” “anatomical sex,” “psychological sex,” “social sex,” “sex of rearing in childhood,” and “legal sex” (3–9).

While transgender individuals were not necessarily the target audience for books like Benjamin’s Transsexual Phenomenon, many read them and learned about current scientific developments and discourses (Meyerowitz 2002). For Amanda St. Jaymes, a trans woman living in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District during the 1960s, Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon was “a guidebook for us” (Silverman and Stryker 2005). The book delineated a transsexual identity and taught Amanda and her friends about the language of gender variance. Armed with this discourse, they were able to articulate their wishes for identity and transformation to family, friends, and doctors using the language sanctioned by the medical field.

The 1960s also marked the beginning of the first transgender advocacy organizations with national and international reach, and the start of a print culture that spoke directly to trans communities. In 1960, Virginia Prince, a pharmacologist, medical researcher, and transgender advocate, spearheaded the first trans-themed publication, Transvestia: The Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress. In 1962, she founded the “Society for Second Self” or “Tri-Ess,” a support and social organization for cross-dressers still active today (Stryker 2008). Geared toward heterosexual cross-dressers, the magazine started off small with a mailing list of only 25 people, and was eventually sold via subscription and in adult bookstores (Ekins and King 2005). Published bimonthly from 1960 to 1980, Transvestia featured articles, photos, life stories, fictional narratives, and letters from readers. Within its pages, Prince, along with her writers and readers, theorized cross-dressing and developed various taxonomies for emerging trans identities. Notably, Prince and her staff sought to distinguish more “respectable,” mainly heterosexual “full-time transvestites” from other gender identities. They created distance between themselves and, for example, part-time cross-dressers, transvestites, drag queens, kinky clothing fetishists, and transsexuals who desired sexual reassignment (Hill 2013). To describe herself and her readers, Prince developed the word “femmepersonation” as an alternative and later, in the 1970s, began to use the word “transgenderist,” which she defined as “a third way between transvestism and transsexuality” (Hill 2013, 377). Transgenderists, as Prince wrote, were “people who have adopted the exterior manifestations of the opposite sex on a full-time basis but without surgical intervention” (cited in Hill 2013, 377). The term “transgenderist” would be taken up, resignified, and modified to “transgender” by scholars and activists in the 1990s.

Throughout the 1960s, print media expanded its purview, addressing diverse trans communities. Some periodicals such as Transformation Magazine (1969) were examples of erotically charged adult entertainment, while others focused on the art and craft of female impersonating. Generally published by commercial entities specializing in fetish culture, they were circulated on the margins of society, sold in adult bookstores and pornography shops. Magazines including Female Mimics, which premiered in 1963, Female Impersonators, which began in 1969, and Drag, which debuted in 1970, depicted the world of professional female impersonators. They reported on drag balls and contests, published photo essays of professional performers, offered “how-to” guides and tips for female impersonation, printed fantasy fiction, and included listings of clubs and venues where performances could be seen. These magazines were visually stirring and brimming with photos. But even more, they operated as nascent public spheres and counterpublics. Their classified sections allowed individuals to post personal ads and reach across time and space to communicate with like-minded others for friendship, companionship, dates, sex, and love. For example, in a 1976 issue of Drag magazine, one reader placed a classified ad looking “to hear from tvs [transvestites] and tss [transsexuals]. I like to read tv stories, especially like to hear from those who can pass in public” (44). Other ads expressed desires for “mature men for dates” (43), “new friends, TVs, females, bi-males and gays” (43), and “exotic get-togethers” (44). Letters to the editor sections revealed just how important these magazines were to readers. In a 1969 issue of Female Impersonators, Myrtle from London requested that the letters to the editor section “be extended to five or six pages … This is my favorite feature.” Likewise, another letter asked the magazine to create a “pen pal section” so readers could learn about each other’s everyday lives and experiences.

In 1964, Reed Erickson, a wealthy transgender man, started one of the largest and most well-funded organizations for transgender advocacy: the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF). The group worked on a variety of socially progressive projects, but its mission was centered on the cause of transsexuality. EEF funded medical research, held conferences, arranged public relations events, and published newsletters and educational leaflets to promote greater understanding of transsexuality (Meyerowitz 2002; Devor and Matte 2007). The organization’s pamphlets, small booklets on various topics of transsexuality, were an authority on the topic written to be accessible to a general audience. EEF also offered emotional support and referral services, circulated resource lists, and furnished medical and legal information. They sponsored speaker series, conducted public talks at colleges and universities, and consulted with medical professionals. In 1964, they funded Harry Benjamin’s research institute, the Harry Benjamin Foundation. Notably, EEF supplied all of the initial funding for the first university Gender Identity Clinic to provide sex change operations in North America at Johns Hopkins University, which opened in 1966 (Devor and Matte 2007). The establishment of the clinic made national news headlines and granted much needed legitimacy to sexual reassignment surgery.

Into the 1970s, trans advocacy and print culture continued to evolve. In 1970, Angela Davis, a transgender woman, activist, and reporter for the underground Los Angeles press, formed TAO, the Transsexual Action Organization, which published the newsletters Moonshadow and Mirage. Her organization became one of the first national transsexual advocacy groups. Davis, a former member of the Gay Liberation Front in LA, brought an ethics of transsexual liberation and countercultural philosophy to both her organization and its publications. In the late 1970s, Merissa Sherrill Lynn founded the New England support group the Tiffany Club, which published its own newsletter in 1978 called the Tapestry. The magazine addressed issues across the gender spectrum. In fact, the word “tapestry” was chosen for the newsletter because it meant a “ ‘weaving’ of all orientations into one.”6 The Tapestry was circulated to other transgender organizations and sold in adult bookstores. Over time the Tapestry would be renamed Transgender Tapestry, and the Tiffany Club would become the International Foundation for Gender Education. Transgender Tapestry covered politics, health, and well-being; featured film and book reviews; and published one of the most comprehensive resource lists spanning everything from doctors to support groups. Leaving the confines of the adult world, the magazine was eventually sold in major bookstores such as Barnes & Noble.

Alongside these developments in transgender advocacy and print culture, “a new generation” (Meyerowitz 2002) of trans individuals emerged in the 1960s and ’70s. For one, gay communities in the West began to distance themselves from gender nonconformity and “forced transsexuals to find their own point of reference outside gay lifestyles” (Perkins 1996, 55). Moreover, with greater knowledge of and access to information and medical treatment, different subcultures under the transgender umbrella began to take shape. Ekins and King (1996) identify two different communities emerging at this moment. The first were “full-time ‘outsiders,’ ” which included female impersonators, cross-dressers, transgender strippers, showgirls, and sex workers. These were marginal figures on the economic fringe and generally communicated face-to-face. The second community inhabited “ ‘respectable’ worlds” and were “more concerned with individual being or identity” (Ekins and King 1996, 50). Similar to Virginia Prince and her organization, this community was highly literate, engaged with the medical literature on gender variation, and rather than shared space, connected with each other through print culture. Esther Newton’s Mother Camp, one of the first major ethnographic studies of female impersonators, made similar distinctions between “street” and “stage” performers. Living lives of “confrontation, prostitution, and drug ‘highs’ ” (Newton 1979, 8), “street” impersonators were generally younger people who worked as impersonators part-time and lived their everyday lives as trans, fighting stigmatization and struggling to make a living. “Stage” impersonators were older and better-paid performers who identified as gay men and cross-dressed primarily as a job (akin to professional “drag queens” today).

While many of the performers in Newton’s study self-identified as gay men, her work bears witness to the emergence of what she calls “hormone queens,” those who used hormone shots to modify the shape of their body to achieve conventional female physicality. In the 1970s, legal and underground access to hormones became more widely available. Importantly, those individuals who took them were often exiled from gay subcultures and condemned by stage performers who no longer viewed them as authentic female impersonators (Newton 1972). Anne Bolin’s (1988) work focused on this emerging community, one that sought out surgical intervention and sexual reassignment surgery. Bolin explored the process of gender transition as a rite of passage, a highly stylized practice “with all the facets of a ritualistic and symbolic transformation of status” (8). One of the more compelling insights that emerged from Bolin’s (1988) work is that by the late 1970s many transsexuals had developed both formal and informal communication networks and communities of support. They had a collective consciousness, cultivating and circulating knowledge about effective practices for securing hormones, receiving sex change operations, and maintaining a transsexual identity. Indeed, at this time, medical professionals were creating best practices to serve this community. In 1979, the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA) approved “the standards of care,” a set of principles that guides the medical treatment and care of transgender people.

As the 1980s approached, the tensions between transgender and gay communities grew.7 The solidarity that had once bound them together—albeit a historically uneven and conditional one—became even more tenuous. For example, while gay activists sought to distance homosexuality from medical and psychiatric definitions, transsexuals were unable to divorce themselves from the medical field. They needed psychological services, hormone therapies, and surgical procedures to transition. At the same time, some in the feminist movement viewed transgender women as inauthentic intruders of female space. Further, the same kinds of white, middle-class, respectability politics that shunned individuals like Sylvia Rivera during Gay Liberation placed transgender issues low on the agenda of state and national gay rights groups.

Within this context, the trans community began to more actively organize on its own behalf. Their concerns involved, but were not limited to workplace and housing discrimination, homelessness, dress-code policies, access to healthcare and medical treatment, anti-transgender violence, de-pathologizing gender variance, and police brutality. They advocated for self-authorship in the determination of legal sex and for the ability to change gender markers on official documents such as drivers’ licenses, birth certificates, and passports. Taking on these challenges, the number of transgender-oriented political and advocacy organizations proliferated beginning in the mid-1980s: FTM International in 1986, International Foundation for Gender Education in 1987, American Educational Gender Information Service (AEGIS) in 1990, Gender Public Advocacy Coalition in 1995 (GPAC), National Transgender Advocacy Coalition in 1999, Transgender Law Center in 2002, National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) in 2003, and Trans Youth Family Allies in 2006. Particularly notable among this group is FTM International. Historically, transgender organizations and the print cultures they spawned were geared toward transgender women. In 1986, when Lou Sullivan, a transgender activist, created FTM International, he filled the void of information and politics that existed for transgender men. Along with offering education and referral and support services, the organization published the FTM Newsletter, which would become one of the most widely known and read publications on the FTM experience.

Decidedly, the 1990s was a game-changing moment for transgender mobilization and identity as new possibilities were forged. For one, the AIDS crisis that decimated gay male communities throughout the 1980s drew transgender individuals back into the fold with their gay counterparts. In order to combat the disease, new social and political alliances across sexual orientation, gender identity, age, race, class, among others, were needed (Stryker 2008). Using the word “queer” as a marker of collective identity, groups such as Act Up, Queer Nation, and Outrage brought together gay men, lesbians, trans people, and allies to engage in direct-action political protests to combat homophobic violence, police brutality, and institutional apathy during the outbreak of AIDS. Groups such as Transgender Nation and Transsexual Menace who advocated for transgender liberation enacted similar direct-action politics. Meanwhile, the tragic deaths of young trans people such as Brandon Teena in 1993 (who was murdered for being trans) and Tyra Hunter in 1995 (who was refused medical care following a car accident because she was trans) sparked national outrage and mobilized transgender and gender variant communities.

As with the word queer, the word “transgender” in the 1990s became widely used as a center of identification.8 Many refer to a 1991 article written by Holly Boswell, a transgender writer, advocate, and spiritualist, called “The Transgender Alternative” as a launching pad for the word’s popularity (Denny 2006). Originally published in Chrysalis Quarterly and Tapestry, both transgender magazines, the essay was a sort of spiritual manifesto for self-actualization that validated a middle path between cross-dressing and transsexualism. It advocated for androgyny, and urged readers to explore gender identities that felt honest and authentic—even if culturally unintelligible.

As it was conceptualized from the ground up, the category “transgender” was intended to rescue ideas about gender diversity from the medical and mental health communities. The aim of transgender discourse in the ’90s was to “replace an assumption of individual pathology with a series of claims about citizenship, self-determination, and freedom from violence and discrimination” (Valentine 2007, 33). Capturing the structure of feeling at this moment, Wilchins remembers:

Surrounded by scores of transsexuals and hundreds of cross-dressers at conventions, it was impossible for differently gendered people to feel the same shame … Transsexuals and cross-dressers began to see themselves less as social problems and more as the next oppressed minority. (2004, 23)

Transgender activists urged LGBT coalition groups to more actively recognize them. As a result, the 1990s saw the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) begin to advocate more vociferously on behalf of transgender Americans, including them in their mission statements. The “T” was added to the LGBT acronym, which symbolized the alliance between sexual and gendered minorities. Activists also set their sights on media. Realizing the importance of transgender visibility, organizations such as GLAAD began holding the media accountable for their treatment of transgender people and lobbied them for socially responsible representations.

During the 1990s, transgender discourse also escalated with the development and institutionalization of queer theory in the academy, which problematized and politicized gender and sexuality and legitimated non-normative modes of desire and embodiment. The growth of queer theory also helped bring a readership to a rising cohort of transgender writers and intellectuals. Authors including Sandy Stone (1991), Kate Bornstein (1995), Leslie Feinberg (1996), Loren Cameron (1996), Pat Califia (1994), Riki Anne Wilchins (1997), and Susan Stryker (1998) all contributed to queer intellectual thought. Their work combined autoethnography, life history, photo essay, gender theory, historical analysis, and critical, cultural critique to comment on trans issues and politics.

However, even with its political and personal utility, transgender, like all categories, is problematic. It was created in a Western context by mainly white educated people living in urban areas (Stryker 2008; Stryker and Currah 2014). As Valentine (2007) has shown, the category transgender can fail to include and make sense to those it was intended to capture under its purview. In his research on transgender communities in New York City, Valentine (2007) discovered that many individuals who were identified as transgender by medical professionals, social service providers, and academics did not claim that category for themselves. Crucially, these were often the young, the poor, people of color, and the undereducated; those who would benefit most from the services and support provided by these organizations.

Despite these limitations and the classed and racial politics that undergird them, the term “transgender” emerged as a discursive powerhouse in the 1990s. It operated as a sociopolitical adhesive, bringing together individuals who experienced similar modes of oppression and marginalization in order to speak with a collective voice. By the start of the twenty-first century, transgender, like its predecessor transsexuality, was well on its way to becoming a household term.

A Very Brief History of Trans Visibility

Throughout twentieth-century America, glimmers of gender variance hid out in the nooks and crannies of media culture, and at times even shined at its center. Stories and imagery that articulated gender as unstable and malleable appeared on the television screen, on the pages of comic books and novels, and in the self-performances of musicians, celebrities, and public figures. From its early days, film was populated with scenes of cross-dressing men and women. In fact, according to Horak (2016), cross-dressing was a routine and fairly unexceptional phenomenon in early twentieth-century American film, something associated with “wholesome entertainment” (2). When set on the frontier or battlefield, for example, images of cross-dressed women represented American strength, individualism, and vitality. Over time, however, transgender imagery took on new meanings. By the 1930s, cross-dressing women represented not American wholesomeness, but rather European savoir-faire. Hollywood’s leading ladies such as Marlene Dietrich, Josephine Baker, and Greta Garbo employed cross-dressing in their films and in their celebrity personas. Their looks were daring, communicating a sense of cosmopolitanism and bold sexuality. Marlena Dietrich’s cross-gendered performance in Morocco (1930) is perhaps most iconic. Donning a tuxedo with top hat and tails, she performs at a Moroccan nightclub, tempting men and women alike. Dietrich had always been fond of tailored men’s suits, wearing them to the transvestite cabarets she frequented in 1920s Berlin as a young person (Riva 1993).

Early films such as Queen Christina (1933) and Sylvia Scarlett (1935) also featured some of Hollywood’s most famous female actresses—Greta Garbo and Katherine Hepburn respectively—cross-dressing as men. Yet within these films, the act was performed to secure access to masculine power, privilege, and authority. As Garber (1992) has detailed, characters engaging in gender masquerade to achieve things outside their reach has long been employed as a plot device in art, literature, and popular film. These “temporary transvestite films” (Straayer 1996, 42) such as Some Like It Hot (1959), Victor/Victoria (1982), Yentl (1983), La Cage Aux Folles (1978), Tootsie (1982), and Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) feature characters who temporarily cross-dress to accomplish something and then stop after getting what they want.

By the 1950s, transgender representation experienced a paradigmatic shift, moving beyond the temporary transvestite film trope. In addition to portraying transgender subjectivity as something that one did, film, news, and other forms of popular media presented it as something one was. Gender variance moved from an act to an identity—a shift largely precipitated by the story of Christine Jorgensen and other real people who publicly transitioned gender. Throughout the early twentieth century, newspapers would occasionally print stories of gender transformation and sex change. For example, in 1931 the European press created a public stir with their coverage of Lili Elbe, a Danish painter who underwent one of the first recorded male-to-female sex changes (as dramatized in the 2015 film The Danish Girl). Sex change stories were also present in the journalism of the American West, as local newspapers were fascinated with gender benders (mainly women presenting as men) surviving and thriving along the country’s wild frontier (Boag 2011).

Yet it was the 1951 front page of the New York Daily News announcing the sexual transformation of Christine Jorgensen that captivated the global cultural imagination and instantiated transgender identity as something one can be and inhabit full time. Headlining with “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty: Operations Transform Bronx Youth,” the story created a massive sensation. In her autobiography, Jorgensen remembers feeling bewildered at the level of publicity she received, recalling that for a time her story overshadowed news coverage of the historic hydrogen bomb tests at Eniwetok Atoll. On the one hand, her journey stoked anxieties about what it meant to be male and female, and the press presented her as a bizarre curiosity. On the other, amid the social and political anxieties of the Cold War era, Jorgensen’s transgender identity was framed as a success story, a triumph of modern science, a daring tale of self-actualization, and a win for Western individuality (Meyerowitz 2002).

Thrust into the spotlight, Jorgensen carefully crafted her image for a 1950s viewing public, styling herself as a classic Hollywood “blonde bombshell.” She also identified as heterosexual and articulated dreams of domestic life. Her gender performance was conventional and she was celebrated for it. Those who followed suit also garnered press attention in 1950s America. As with Jorgensen, Charlotte McLeod and Tamara Rees became public figures and models of the “good transsexual” (Skidmore 2011, 272), embodying whiteness, heterosexuality, domesticity, and conventional femininity. In choosing to highlight these women’s stories—to the exclusion of women of color and women who were less conventionally feminine—media presented a narrow conception of transgender subjectivity (ibid.). Nevertheless, Jorgensen and others gave sex and gender transgression a human face, and for those who felt similarly to them, they served as role models.

Seeking to capitalize from the new public interest in transgender topicality that Jorgensen’s story spurred, film production companies increasingly began to green-light projects with transgender themes. For example, Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda, released in 1953, was marketed with the tagline “I Changed My Sex!.” Financed on a shoestring budget, the movie told the story of a man who agonizes over the consequences of telling his fiancé he is a transvestite. Wood, himself a transvestite, used the film as an attempt to humanize and explain transvestism. In the film, the character Dr. Alton, a psychiatrist, underscores that transvestism is a harmless and sincere condition of healthy heterosexual men with “normal” sex lives. Into the 1960s, film continued to articulate transgender identity as a medical concern but pushed further, framing it as a dangerous and pathological condition. This was most clearly evidenced in Psycho (1960) and Homicidal (1961). Psycho was Alfred Hitchcock’s horror story about a psychopathic cross-dressing murderer. The film became a pop-cultural sensation: “Psycho upstaged the presidential campaign … teenagers turned the showings into rituals—returning with their friends again and again” (Hoberman 2010). Inspired by the success of Psycho, William Castle, another iconic horror director of mid-century America, produced and directed Homicidal one year later, which offered another shocking tale of a transgender killer. Both films captured the American popular imagination and offered up images that associated gender transgression with madness, violence, and emotional instability.

In the counterculture of the 1960s, however, underground and cult films offered alternative and more transgressive imaginings. Reflecting the zeitgeist of the space age and a daringness to push boundaries, these films ventured into new, previously unexplored territories. Jack Smith, an early pioneer of queer cinema, screened gender chaos and queer sexual performance in his art piece Flaming Creatures (1963). Andy Warhol’s taboo-saturated experimental films featured the transgender “Warhol Superstars”: Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis, and Candy Darling, all of whom became legends of avant-garde culture and cinema. Holly Woodlawn, for instance, became the inspiration for Lou Reed’s 1972 hit song “Walk on the Wild Side.” John Waters introduced the world to the fearless and unforgettable drag queen Divine in his early films Roman Candles (1966), Eat Your Makeup (1968), and Mondo Trasho (1969). Divine would later star in Waters’s better known works, including Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974), and Hairspray (1988), a film that was by far his most popular. Collectively, these more fringe films depicted gender variance within a queer subcultural celebration of sexual nonconformity, “dramatic artifice,” and “a theatrical sense of the absurd” (Bell-Metereau 1993, 119). Made by and for queer people, they created a sense of community among moviegoers who marveled in the self-confident and norm-smashing performances of the trans figures.

The 1960s also produced one of the first serious, non-fiction cinematic investigations of gender variance in the documentary The Queen (1968). The independently produced and unusually poignant film revolves around the 1967 Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant held in New York City. The film takes audiences behind the scenes, offering a cinema vérité glimpse at Manhattan’s drag balls, which have a long and rich history dating back to late nineteenth-century Harlem (Garber 1989). We witness the artistry of drag as the queens apply their makeup and wigs, perfect their costumes, perform in dress rehearsals, and compete in the pageant. During offstage moments, we hear about their everyday lives and learn about their relationships. We view the gritty and unglamorous side of drag, and watch the fierce conflict that arises among contestants. As a matter of fact, imagery from The Queen has been recycled for contemporary usage, appearing in the opening credits of Amazon’s hit transgender-themed series Transparent.

Moving into the 1970s, two films about transsexuality, Myra Breckenridge (1970) and The Christine Jorgensen Story (1970), inaugurated the decade. In popular culture, it “was a period of liberalization in the industry,” Diffrient (2013) argues, “when new previously verboten subject matter, such as sex-reassignment surgery, penis transplants, sodomy, and transvestitism, could be presented to an inquisitive public” (55). Inspired by Gore Vidal’s best-selling novel, Myra Breckenridge (1970) was an X-rated, trashy, sexually explicit romp that featured Raquel Welch as a transsexual woman, Myra. In the film, Myron Breckenridge visits Europe to have a sex change operation, becoming Myra. Upon returning to the United States, he visits his wealthy Uncle Buck, who runs an acting school. Pretending to be Myron’s widow, Myra asks Uncle Buck for money, and he puts her to work at his school. The film is a nonlinear and at times nonsensical farce that was well received among queer audiences who appreciated its camp value, but lampooned by critics and the mainstream press (Diffrient 2013). The second transgender-themed film, The Christine Jorgensen Story (1970), was a fictionalized melodrama loosely based on Jorgensen’s life. Whereas the film portrays Jorgensen as a sympathetic and sincere individual, to a contemporary audience it feels campy and melodramatic, exuding emotional excess and garish sentimentality. Nevertheless, at the time some acclaimed the film for its portrait of Jorgensen. The New York Times review maintained, “Here is a quiet, even dignified little picture, handled professionally and tastefully, minus a touch of sensationalism. Compared to a glittery garbage pail like “Myra Breckinridge,” the film is downright disarming” (Greenspun 1970).

Into the late 1970s and 1980s, a corpus of films continued to treat gender variance in more serious and humane terms, albeit within the ideological and imaginative limitations of the time period. Outrageous (1977), an independent Canadian film about a gay hairdresser who becomes a drag queen and his friend Liza who suffers from schizophrenia, offered an unexpected story of friendship and compassion. As film critic Roger Ebert (1977) wrote at the time, “Almost any description of ‘Outrageous!’ makes it sound like a sensational exploitation film but that’s exactly what it isn’t. It’s a bittersweet, endearing, sometimes funny little slice of life.” In Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Al Pacino plays a gay man who robs a bank in order to pay for his lover’s sexual reassignment surgery. Both characters were fully realized with compelling backstories, and were depicted as vulnerable and humanly raw. The World According to Garp (1982) featured the character Roberta Muldoon, played by John Lithgow, a white trans woman and former professional football player who works at a center for troubled women. She is an altruistic and grounded caregiver, although her character has little depth. Perhaps the most serious, even devastating, treatment of transgender subjectivity was In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), a German melodrama. Produced, written, and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the film follows the final days in the life of the character Elvira (formerly Erwin), who changes sex for a love that never materializes and becomes a lost-soul.

One of the most notable, and widely seen, transgender-themed films of the 1970s was not a serious drama but rather a wildly campy sci-fi musical. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) introduced the world to the character of Dr. Frank-N-Furter, an eccentric, transgender scientist and self-proclaimed “sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania.” In the film, a straight-laced heterosexual couple’s car breaks down and they find themselves stranded at Frank-N-Furter’s mansion—an alternative universe of misfits and mischief. Delighted by his new guests, he performs for them dressed in a black corset, stockings, and high heels, effectively staging the erotics of gender transgression. As with Myra Breckenridge, Rocky Horror created a brazen queer world, an alternative reality that upended conventional norms and embraced freaks of all kinds. But unlike Breckenridge, Rocky Horror appreciated high-quality production values, a compelling and linear storyline, and fabulous music. It appealed to both queer and non-queer audiences alike and has become one of the most celebrated and widely known cult classics of all time.

Whereas popular film offered visually striking displays of gender variance throughout the twentieth century, literature provided textual counterparts. Science fiction in particular offered some of the earliest and most imaginative visions of gender crossing. In Gregory Casparian’s An Anglo-American Alliance: A Serio-Comic Romance and Forecast of the Future (1908), a woman in a lesbian relationship undergoes a sexual reassignment surgery to escape discrimination and lives out her life happily with her partner. In Isidore Schneider’s Doctor Transit (1925), a struggling couple switches sex to find happiness by drinking a potion handed to them by the mysterious Dr. Transit. Indeed, body switching, identity exchange, forced gender transformations, magical gender reversals, and gender fluidity populated the world of science fiction throughout the twentieth century. Novels such as Robert Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil (1970), Fred Pohl’s Day Million (1966), and Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness (1969), along with fantasy pulp magazines such as Weird Tales (1923–1954) and Science Wonder Stories (1929–1930), trafficked in these themes.

Like the science fiction genre, comics have also been cultural sites where transgender possibilities have abounded. As Fawaz (2016) argues, postwar American comics had a distinctly queer sensibility that celebrated difference, outsider status, the supernatural, and self-transformation. Expanding the terms of what it meant to be human, popular texts such as The Fantastic Four, starting in 1961, and X-Men, in 1963, affirmed the biological outlaw and presented the body as a site of transition and mutation. Although these texts did not specifically engage with transgender identity, “bodily vulnerability and gender instability constituted the postwar superhero as a figure in continual flux, visualized on the comic book page as constantly moving among different identities, embodiments, social allegiances, and psychic states” (Fawaz 2016, 10).

In early twentieth-century print culture, two novels in particular offered intimate portraits of gender transgression, albeit with different affective structures and tones. The first was Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928), a fictionalized biography about an English nobleman, Orlando, who wakes up one morning as a woman. Beginning during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and ending in 1928, Orlando lives more than four hundred years with a subjectivity that is in constant change and a body in constant transition. Woolf uses the character’s escapade through historic time to comment on Victorian-era norms, gender roles, and sexism. The novel, which became a best seller, was highly poetic and struck a spirited and comical tone. By contrast, Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness (1928), released the same year as Orlando, was a deeply controversial and somber novel about lesbianism and gender liminality. The book chronicled the life of Stephen Gordon, a sexual “invert” born into the British upper class. When compared to Orlando, The Well is far more overcast, tortured, and forlorn. Steeped with insights from the growing field of sexology, it constructs a portrait of Gordon’s uphill search for identity, love, and happiness. Whereas most critics and scholars have focused attention on the character’s sexuality, others have highlighted Gordon’s transgender aspects. Taylor (1998) argues Stephen Gordon “irresistibly solicit[s] a transgender reading” because the character occupies a complex gendered domain, assigned female but is masculine-identified (288). Other noteworthy popular novels that centered trans figures in Western literature were Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge (1968) and The World According to Garp (1978) by John Irving, both of which were turned into films (discussed above).

Perhaps the most treasured texts of the twentieth century for trans people were memoirs and autobiographies of gender transition. These books were highly coveted by virtue of being some of the only cultural sites to reflect the lived realities of trans people. As such, they were precious resources for self-making and belonging, and were shared between individuals (Hausman 2006; Stone 1991). Some early examples include Earl Lind’s 1918 Autobiography of an Androgyne and The Female Impersonators (1922). However, the most widely known trans autobiography of the early twentieth century was Man Into Woman (1933), documenting the life of Danish artist Lili Elbe (born Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener). The book was a compilation of her personal writings and recollections, an attempt by Elbe who, after being sensationalized in the press, wanted to reflect her life as she experienced it. The next major autobiography was Christine Jorgensen’s A Personal Autobiography (1967), which sold 450,000 copies and was later turned into a film (Schilt 2009). On the heels of public interest in Jorgensen’s book, several other transgender autobiographies were published. Notable were Jan Morris’s Conundrum: From James to Jan, An Extraordinary Personal Narrative of Transsexualism (1974), written by the famous travel writer, and Mario Martino’s Emergence: A Transsexual Autobiography (1977), the only autobiography to be penned by a trans man before the 1990s.

The next autobiography to receive the kind of mass attention that Jorgensen’s attracted was Renée Richards’s 1983 Second Serve. In 1976, when Renée Richards, a successful New York ophthalmologist, competed in a California women’s tennis competition, a journalist revealed that she was born a man and had previously played in men’s competitions. Although Richards planned to compete in the US Open, the United States Tennis Association prevented her from doing so by instituting a chromosomal test for female competitors. In 1977, Richards won a much-publicized court battle that allowed her to compete in the women’s event at the US Open. Her story and the court case that ensued became a global controversy, as she recalled, “much of the population of the world had my name on their lips. It was as if someone had dropped an atom bomb” (Richards and Ames 2007, 48). In 1983, Richards released her autobiography titled Second Serve, and three years later a made-for-television film of the same name premiered on network television. As with Christine Jorgensen, Richards’s story brought the concept of sex change into the national conversation and captivated the world. One transgender activist remembered reading her book in high school:

I found her autobiography, and I bought it immediately. I’d never read a book about a transsexual before. Back then, each of us was left to our own devices. I kept it in my locker. I read it surreptitiously. I’d only had experiences with media depictions and other unflattering portrayals. But here was someone healthy, someone multidimensional, and all she wanted to do was compete. (Weinreb 2011, 4)

For both writer and reader, the transgender autobiography is a tool of self-knowledge and discovery. The genre’s narrative structure—with a beginning (undesirable or wrong gender identity), middle (transition), and end (arrival at desired or authentic gender identity)—offers a sense of plausibility and coherence to transgender life (Prosser 1998). “To learn of transsexuality,” Prosser writes, “is to uncover transsexuality as a story and to refigure one’s own life within the frame of that story” (124).9

Beyond print culture, gender transgression has long been a feature of popular music; from the cross-dressing of early jazz and blue singers such as Gladys Bentley and Frankie Jaxon to the gender play of glam rockers. Indeed, in the 1970s, outrageous gender performance became a defining feature of mainstream music. The New York Dolls, Queen, and T. Rex playfully blurred gender lines. While pop singer David Bowie introduced the world to Ziggy Stardust, his androgynous space alien alter ego. As Stryker (2008) argues, throughout the decade a “transgender aesthetic” flourished, forging “a new relationship between gendered appearance and biological sex” (91–92). Beyond glam rock, the world of disco also ushered glittering queerness and gender play into the 1970s global mainstream. Defined by “strangeness, gayness, mixing, dress-up, drugs, androgyny, and excess” (Gamson 2005, 141), disco revolved around fantasy, dance floor pageantry, and the thrill of living in the moment. Artists such as Sylvester, the gender- bending disco diva, and Grace Jones, the severely masculine and angular supermodel and singer, were queer countercultural heroes, representative of disco’s turn toward gender experimentation.

In the early 1980s, gender transgression also became a mainstay of one of the decade’s most iconic brands: MTV. As Zoonen (1995) surmises, “MTV seems to be the only part of mainstream culture in which subversions of gender are no exception or a sign of marginality” (314). The advent and rise of MTV brought gender-bending representations to a national and eventually global audience. Subverting the norms of dress and embodiment allowed artists to produce the kinds of fantastic spectacles warranted by the new medium. As a technological form with particular biases and affordances, the music video made “direct address and personal display necessary for a star persona” (Straayer 1996, 87). The performance of a heightened and visually compelling self was paramount in branding and marketing one’s music. Some of the most successful names of the MTV era boldly traversed gender norms. The romantic femininity of Prince, the colorful costuming of Boy George, and the seductive gender play of Annie Lennox, for example, rebelled against an established gendered order. In their music videos and performances, notions of sex and gender were turned upside down and gender signifiers were appropriated across bodies without concern for physical sex. Performances of drag were also included into the mix. In 1985, Divine released the music video “Walk Like a Man,” a queer and irreverent take on the classic by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.

But it was not until 1993 that drag made its biggest splash with RuPaul, a professional drag queen living in New York City. RuPaul’s massive hit song “Supermodel (You Better Work)” turned her into a cultural sensation. The infectious, upbeat lyric topped US dance charts and its MTV music video brimmed with drag subcultural references. After the success of “Supermodel,” RuPaul’s fame surged in the 1990s. She published the memoir Lettin’ It All Hang Out (1995), earned a seven-year contract for M.A.C. cosmetics to be the “Face of M.A.C. Cosmetics” (the first drag queen to ever do so), covered the song “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” with Elton John, and became a radio personality on New York City’s WKTU morning show. On cable television, RuPaul also hosted her own talk show, The RuPaul Show, on VH1 from 1996 to 1998, a flashy throwback to 1970s variety programming.

Indeed, cross-dressing has been a fixture of American television from the beginning. In Texaco Star Theater (1948–1956), an early and popular television comedy-variety series, Milton Burle frequently cross-dressed in his skits.10 These gender masquerades became a trademark of his comedy throughout the 1950s. Not surprisingly, his inspiration to cross-dress came from observing New York City’s gay drag queens (Nesteroff 2015). Burle’s cross-dressing was only the start of a practice that would soon become a reliable comedic device on television. Cross-dressing continued to appear in variety and sketch comedies across the televised landscape including The Flip Wilson Show (1970–1974), Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–1974), Saturday Night Live (1975–present), In Living Color (1990–1994), and MADtv (1995–2009).

Paralleling film, it was during the 1970s that television turned toward more sober, everyday transgender narratives. Norman Lear’s All in the Family (1971–1979) and The Jeffersons (1975–1985), sitcoms known for addressing contemporary social issues, were two series that handled transgender topicality with a sense of earnestness—as well as a touch of comedy. In “Archie the Hero” (1975), All in the Family’s notorious conservative curmudgeon, Archie Bunker, saves the life of a self-described transvestite and female impersonator named Beverly LaSalle. The episode is filled with the typical sitcom pratfalls and antics involving her gender identity, and in a later episode she is set up with Archie’s friend on a date as a joke. Still, the couple befriends Beverly and their relationship crosses episodes and moves beyond the superficial.

In the episode titled “Edith’s Crisis of Faith” (1977), Beverly is murdered during a mugging at Christmastime. The murder, which occurred in part as a result of Beverly’s transgender identity, devastates Edith and causes her to question her faith. Fighting back tears, she exclaims, “I’m mad at God … All I know is Beverly was killed because of what he was and we’re all supposed to be God’s children. It don’t make sense.”

Figure 1.2. All in the Family (CBS) Season 6, 1975–1976. Episode: “Archie the Hero.” Air date: September 29, 1975. Archie and Beverly chat in his living room. Credit: CBS/Photofest.

In a 1977 episode titled “Once a Friend,” The Jeffersons also engage the issue of transsexuality. During the storyline, George Jefferson’s pal from the navy, Eddie, reconnects with him. Only now Eddie is a trans woman who uses the name Edie. During their first encounter, George asks his old friend why he dresses as a woman, questioning, “If you ain’t gay and you’re not a weirdo, then what are you?” With coolness and confidence, Edie responds, “I had the operation. I had a sex change. George, I’m a woman now … I feel good about myself.” Given the time period, the conversation is surprisingly tame and sincere. By the end of the episode, and in quintessential sitcom fashion, George overcomes his initial shock and confusion regarding his friend’s transition. He addresses her by her correct name, Edie, and warmly reaffirms their friendship.

Another surprisingly measured and heartfelt treatment of transsexuality for the time appeared in the hospital drama Medical Center (1969–1976). In a special two-part episode “The Fourth Sex” (1975), a renowned surgeon named Dr. Pat Caddison, played by Robert Reed who starred as Mike Brady in The Brady Bunch, receives a sexual reassignment surgery. Caddison is a well-respected physician and her desire for sexual reassignment is treated as unusual but also genuine and legitimate. The narrative focuses on the difficulty of Caddison’s decision and its impact on her relationships with friends, colleagues, wife, and son. Reed plays the part with sensitivity and nuance, which earned him an Emmy nomination for his performance.