Transgender history. The roots of today’s revolution

Podcast Review: American Hysteria

“…Throughout the podcast, Weber-Smith does an excellent job of addressing issues of inequality and bringing in discussions of gender, class, race, sexuality, and religion. The episode "Gender Lies and Liberation with Trans Historian Susan Stryker" (season four, episode 29) features a discussion between Chelsey Weber-Smith, Miranda Zickler, and Susan Stryker about the past 100 years of trans history based on Stryker's (2017) book Transgender History. This episode would be an excellent addition to a course about gender or trans studies, especially when using Stryker's book or one of her articles.…”

Accounting for Cisnormativity: Understanding Transgender and Non-Binary Young People’s Strategies to Resist and Reduce Inequality in Healthcare

“…As Schilt and Lagos (2017) note, sociologists are only beginning to systematically examine the lives, experiences, outcomes, and issues faced by TGNB communities despite references to people who would now be referred to as transgender (hereafter trans) at least as early as the mid-1800s in scientific texts (Stryker, 2017). Although TGNB populations occasionally showed up in the field as far back as the mid-1960s (Sumerau and Mathers, 2019), such studies typically assumed TGNB people were problematic and sought to make sense of such individuals through cisgender or binary-based frameworks (Westbrook and Schilt, 2014).…”

Has There Been a Transgender Tipping Point? Gender Identification Differences in U.S. Cohorts Born Between 1935 and 2001

“…Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Identities in U.S. Historical Contexts While transgender and gender nonconforming are terms that have developed in the twentieth and twenty first century, many people across extant recorded history in the present-day United States and around the world have lived with identities that do not conventionally correspond to the sex they were assigned or assumed to have at birth (Driskill 2016;Feinberg 1996;Meyerowitz 2004;Stryker 2017). Scientific research and medical practice also played an important role in the development of transgender and gender nonconforming identities from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, as psychiatric diagnoses, legal frameworks, and surgical techniques developed to address what was then conceived of as "sex change" (Gill-Peterson 2018;Meyerowitz 2004;shuster 2021;Stryker 2017).…”

“…One of the first events recognized by historians as a major inflection point in transgender history during the lifespan of the cohorts covered in this study is the popular media coverage of the transition of Christine Jorgensen in 1952, representing the first instance of major mass media coverage of a transgender person (Skidmore 2011;Stryker 2017). Coverage of Jorgensen, an American-born veteran of World War II who underwent hormone and surgical treatment in Denmark, sparked an unprecedented wave of media coverage and popular interest in gender transitions, with Jorgensen's cover story in the New York Daily News becoming its most read story of 1953, and "made sex change a household term" in the 1950s (Meyerowitz 2004, 51).…”

“…Three years later, National Geographic released a special issue declaring that a "gender revolution" was underway around the world, marked by major changes in approaches to gender in legal frameworks, science and technology, media visibility, particularly among the "millennial" generation (Goldberg 2017). While assessments made by popular media may not always map on accurately to periods of social change, historians, sociologists, and other scholars in transgender studies have tended to agree that transgender visibility and civil rights activism increased dramatically at some point in the mid-2010s (Stryker 2017;Taylor, Lewis, and Haider-Markel 2018;Travers 2018). This potential change in the distribution of gender itself may also intersect with the unequal distributions of outcomes and opportunities along other social dimensions.…”