Trans history: whatever happened to the other T?
I don’t know how universally relevant this is (I guess no part of queer history ever is) but I wonder how many trans people know the history of T&T groups.
Like, in the 90′s and 00′s in the Netherlands almost every trans related groups was a T&T ‘Transsexual and Transvestites’ group and that seemed to also be a quite common thing in other north-west European countries for as far as I can see. Maybe beyond Europe too? I’m not sure.
People who called themselves transsexual and transvestites at the time felt that they had many experiences in common that made organising together valuable and many agreed that there was a large grey area of overlapping identities. With very little information available, a lot of trans women identified as transvestites first, before identifying at trans women (in that period often using the term Male-to-Female transsexual and transwoman without the space between the words).
Then, in about 2007-2012, things changed. Transgender became more popular than transsexual and crossdresser largely replaced transvestite. In those early days, the term transgender was often understood to include crossdressers. The transgender umbrella is from that time:
Back then, the word transgender was seen by many as the umbrella term that would unite all the struggles against gender roles. But that grouping together was far from uncontroversial and a lot of heated debates took place over how broad or narrow the transgender umbrella term should be. Some feared too wide an umbrella would take attention away from transsexuals, others feared it would be confusing, some groups that had previously only had transwomen and transvestites did not appreciate the new presence of transmen and transmasculine people in their transgender community, some felt that it was very important to distinguish binary-identified transsexuals from all sorts of weird non-binary identities.
Those who took part in the debates probably remember the specific standpoints in more detail. For me, I just remember how in 2008-2012 all the T&T groups started changing their names to ‘transgender groups’ and then slowly but surely focussing more on only those transgender people that wanted some kind of transition, physical or social. Eventually, transvestites (or crossdressers, as the common term was by then) disappeared entirely from the transgender groups and a lot of transgender people forgot about the earlier wider meaning of transgender as an umbrella term.
Within that same period, there started to be a LOT of new and fairly positive media attention for transgender issues, specifically transition related atttention. The media was no participant at all in the ‘what does transgender mean’ question but the questions they did ask were ‘are you on hormones yet?’ and ‘did you have the surgery’? Since that was a lot better than ‘so are you mentally ill because you want to be a woman?’ a lot of people who fitted the hormones + surgery narrative eagerly accepted this ‘positive visibility’ and did not question the narrow focus. This further cemented the view that transgender meant transition.
And the transgender activists? Well, let’s just say many of them, knee deep in a struggle against terrible health care and cruel human rights violations, leaped at the opportunity to seize the momentum and finally make some changes and many didn’t really give much thought to the slow disappearance of transvestites from the newly named ‘transgender’ community.
So where are we now, in 2018?
The transgender community seems to have largely forgotten about their T&T history. The terms transvestite and crossdresser both seem to be in decline, as are the communities that meet around those identities. Younger people who don’t fit the gender binary but also do not desire social or physical transition, are now more likely to identify themselves as some kind of genderqueer and nonbinary or just ‘not into labels’ or just to wear whatever they want and rock it. Some of them find their way back under the transgender umbrella after all. Which I guess is some kind of a happy ending.
But then theres the question of recognizing our legacy. I don’t think a lot of these young people realise that, had they been born 20 years earlier, many of them would probably have found a home in the transvestite community. I don’t think a lot of young transgender people recognize older transvestites as their elders, who paved the way for them. I often get the impression that they view the dwindling groups of 50+, 60+, 70+ transvestites with an element of disdain, as people who held on to a regressive binary identity, instead of as like - their badass grandfather-mothers who build parts of trans history.
Over the last 24 hours, some trans people have responded to this with some truly nasty comments about transvestites and crossdressers, mostly accusing them of stuff like ‘degrading femininity’, ‘fetishizing’, or ‘giving trans people a bad name’. Invariably, the people writing these comments were young. Invariably, their only frame of reference seemed to be stigmatizing media portrayals and they clearly have no idea what they’re talking about.
I am not going to dignify these comments with a response because they’re too disgusting to reblog, I do not think they would listen and frankly reading them fills me with far too much emotion to write coherently.
I just wanna say: this is what happens when we are so quick to forget our very recent history. Despite the many debates and divisions that have existed in the past, few trans people could have had these completely off-the-wall misguided ideas 15 years ago because if they travelled in trans spaces they would have met so many transvestites and crossdressers. They would chat and hang out and probably make friends. They would swap experiences, share hardships and learn to recognize transvestites and crossdressers as siblings in the community of gendernonconforming and marginalized people.
My heart breaks for the young crossdresser out there today who might enter a trans space looking for their community of supporting likeminded people, only to find out that they are not welcome and even despised. I can only hope that if this happens, some older trans people will talk some sense into their younger community members and remind them of the long road transgender people and crossdressers have walked together, the battles we fought together, the crossdressers who fought for trans rights and the trans people who fought for their siblings too because we understood those struggles as interconnected.
When we forget where we come from, we fail to recognize members of our own family, and we are all lonelier and more divided as a result.
#huh this is fascinating#does anyone have any sources about this stuff beyond that image?#i mean i believe op just fine but it’d be neat to see more about these sorts of groups#google was….extremely unhelpful
Actually, I have more! But first, a little google advice when researching recent post-internet history: type in phrases from the time you want to find, in this case stuff like ‘transsexual’, ‘transgender’, ‘transvestite’, ‘transgenderist’ (no really that was a word people used). Click Tools > time > custom range and set a range you want. Like maybe 200 to 2010? See if that helps.
ok, now my stuff, ill start with some more from the Netherlands
This is a 1975 party ticket to celebrate the 5 year anniversary of the Transvestite and Transsexual workgroup and contact group (meaning they did activism and community meetings).
This is another 1975 document: a brochure of the National Contact Group for Transvestites and Transsexuals, which, according to the content, strives towards self-acceptance, emancipation and education. Their ‘target groups’ are listed as transsexuals, intersexuals, transvestites and men who wear skirts. Believe it or not, for a while man-in-skirt was treated as an identity label for gendernonconforming men, who formed communities with other men-in-skirts.
There’s more recent stuff to be found too.
This 2012 poster has it all. It announces a transgender information day with information for transvestites, transsexuals, crossdressers and part-time women.
Something in English? Alright, here’s an image from 2014 when, for a short time, people tried to make trans* with a * the most inclusive term like the + in lgbt+:
Something older in English too?
This is a 1994 transgender umbrella, from when the concept was still quite new. You’ll notice that the language here is pathologizing. This is the only source on my list not written by a trans person but by a cis therapist.
And here’s a 1990 leaflet showing some terms considered ‘respectful’ by many community members then.
Even older?
Here’s a beautiful 1971 article from the Detroit Gay Liberator, (Volume 1, issue 8, January 1, 1971) titles ‘transvestite and transsexual liberation’.
There is a gap, as you’ll probably notice. A lot of 70′s stuff has already been archives and a lot of 2010+ stuff is easily accessible online, but the early internet stuff is harder to find and not as prominent in archives yet. Still, there is much more like this out there. www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net has a lot of it.
What you’ll find, again and again, is that the exclusion of transvestites from the language of trans community and trans rights is very recent. We walked most of this road and fought most of this fight together.
I remember not using the asterisk being a big deal. Then using the asterisk became a big deal instead.
‘Part time women’ certainly sounds more like a hobby than an excruciatingly painful sense of dysphoria that requires medical intervention. It sounds kind of like the distancing that lesbians and gay men sometimes do when it comes to bisexuals etc. Meaning, they emphasize the suffering of having no choice over acknowledging people who are or seem to be choosing presenting or living in the same unconventional way.
Why does it matter so much if these things are hobbies though? The whole concept of “cringe” is “I will now proceed to make you feel terrible about your hobby.”
I mean. Yeah, if we’re making some big ranking maybe it’s low, but it’s still a shitty thing for people to be doing.
And the reason people are doing it still relates to that whole ball of “man good woman bad” nastiness that undergirds a lot of much more violent and obvious oppression.
What jumps out of this to me is that a lot of the phrases and concepts that OP describes young critics using against transvestites is very similar to some of the criticisms transphobes level against (more conventionally binary) transgender people. “You’re playing at being a woman/trans.” “This is just a weird sex thing for you, it isn’t worth taking you seriously.” “This is just a stereotypical caricature of being a woman/trans.”
Julia Serrano wrote somewhere in her blog archives that just as many of us now recognize a spectrum of gender identities rather than a binary, she would like to see people recognize that there is a spectrum of experiences with gender between cis and trans. That idea has stuck with me, as I don’t feel I fit neatly into either category and I dislike how a lot of the discourse around this assumes people like me are either unserious fetishists or entitled cis people who don’t want to recognize our privilege.
Honestly, I don’t understand why fetishists have a bad name here. Like… if someone’s reason for body modification is better sex, why should I judge that exactly? I like sex too.
(Yes, I know that there’s a history here of calling people fetishists when they aren’t, and I don’t have a problem with people finding that annoying or devaluing. It sucks when you say “my experience is X” and everyone goes “then clearly you are Y” when that isn’t what you said.
My problem is just that… actually, if that does happen to accurately describe someone, that should be fine too.)
All of this.
Although it has never been ‘my’ label, I’ve always loved the term ‘part time woman’ ever since I first heard it in the 00s. Because between all the medicalized terms, it was such a matter-of-fact and joyfull expression of self. It didn’t rely on ‘suffering enough’. It just meant “Part of my gender is woman, and sometimes I express that and sometimes I don’t.”. It’s so simple and yet so powerful.
And I clearly remember some people in the community getting angry at the idea that someone would have that kind of an experience to gender, that someone in their community wasn’t hating their body.
Those attempts at exclusionism were never truly about ‘keeping out people with ‘privilege’, because at the end of the day transvestites and part time women did lose jobs and families and safety.
It was simply because seeing trans people without dysphoria was difficult. It stung. It felt unfair. And of course it was. Having excruciating dysphoria isn’t fair. But the person without dysphoria isn’t to blame. It’s just bad luck.
That impulse to exclude people for having too much fun was always coming from a place to pain, and bringing pain. It never made anyone actually feel better.
