A Timeline Of Our Visibility

I have not forsaken my promise to write more about the Lost Generation of Transgenders.  Sooner or later, though, I think it will turn into a project that will extend well beyond the boundaries of this blog.

With LGT in mind, I thought I'd post this Transgender Visibility Timeline:

From Christine Jorgensen To Jan Morris

It's been a while since I wrote about the Lost Generation of Transgenders.  In this post, I'm going to talk about something related:  Specifically, two of the world's best-known male-to-female transsexuals. One of them was at the vanguard of the first generation of transsexuals, while the other was its rearguard or, perhaps, on the front line of the following generation.

I am speaking of Christine Jorgensen and Jan Morris.  In reading an article about the latter, I found out that she's 87 years old and, interestingly, was born only five months after Ms. Jorgensen.  

The reason why those facts are interesting (at least to me) is that Jorgensen, being one of the first trans women to become publicly known, conformed completely (perhaps even more so than most cisgender women) to the gender norms of her time, while Jan Morris was able to define her own womanhood and femaleness to a much greater degree than Jorgensen could or would have.

Although they were born in the same year, they underwent their surgeries two decades apart.  The fact that gender roles had changed between 1952 and 1972 cannot be overstated.  What's even more important, though, is the way the generational difference affected Jorgensen's and Morris' paths to living as women.

Jorgensen began her transition just after World War II, in which she served as a soldier. She had even fewer precedents than Morris had, let alone than I or transsexuals of my generation had.  And, because the Internet was decades away, accessing information about hormones and surgery, and accounts of transgender people, was even more laborious than it would later be. 

That may be a reason why she modeled herself after the ideals of femaleness--or, more precisely, femininity--that prevailed in the immediate postwar years.  She studied to be a nurse because that was one of the few career options available to women of that time. Her mannerisms, dress and lifestyle were in line with what was considered "ladylike."  While she may have had the natural physical features to become the Marilyn Monroe-like blonde bombshell she would become, it's hard not to think she also did everything she could to enhance and maintain that image, especially after she found herself working as an entertainer.  Finally, she married a man and followed him in moves to suburban Long Island and southern California.

Morris, on the other hand, did not begin her transition until 1964.  By then, treatments--and, some would argue, societal notions about womanhood--were more advanced. Perhaps even more important, she had already established herself as an historian and travel writer, and had been married fifteen years, when she began her transition.  In fact, she went to Morocco for her surgery, which Dr. George Bourou performed, because in her native England she would not be allowed to have her surgery unless she divorced her wife, something she wasn't prepared to do at the time.  They eventually did divorce, but remained in contact and reunited in a civil union in 2008.

Christine Jorgensen died nearly two decades before that union was consummated. She was just three weeks short of 63 years old.  Somehow I have the feeling that the lurid jokes and other ridicule and ostracism directed at her shortened her life.  That's not to say Morris had an easy time, but even she has admitted that she didn't have to endure what Jorgensen and other early transsexuals experienced.

I don't know how much longer Morris has in this world.  Whatever the amount of time, I hope young trans people learn more about her, and the way she was a bridge between two generations of trans people who made their lives and mine possible.

Trans-Positive Images From The Lost Generation

After yesterday's post, I thought today's should be something more positive and hopeful.

It just happens that someone passed along something I never even would have imagined:  something trans-positive from the era of the Lost Generation of Transgenders.

Even more interesting, it's anime.  

I love the way it ends.

Same-Sex Marriage And The Lost Generation Of Transgenders

In previous posts, I've said that I am glad that same-sex marriage has been legalized in New York and other states, and hope that it will be recognized by the Federal Government of the US, mainly because it's the best solution we can achieve under the current social and economic system.  

That situation, I believe, has at least a little to do with what I have described as the Lost Generation of Transgenders.  It also has to do with the fact that, early in the modern gay-rights movement (or "gay liberation", as it was called in those days), transgender people were allied with gays and lesbians.  To some degree, trans people chose such an alliance, but the media and the general public (to the extent they were thinking about us) lumped us with gays and lesbians simply because most people, at that time, conflated gender identity with sexuality.

Whether or not Sylvia Rivera actually threw her red stiletto-heeled shoe at police officers who raided the Stonewall Inn on that fateful early summer night in 1969 (I have spoken with people who claim to have been there and insist that it didn't happen), there can be little doubt that transgender people were active in, and integral to, the Gay Rights movement in its early years.  Rivera herself, while participating in various marches and demonstrations for gay equality, drew attention to the plight of trans people.  

However, two things happened to marginalize trans people within the LGBT movement--and to leave us further marginalized than we already were within larger society. The first, as I have mentioned in other posts, was the rise of Second-Wave Feminism, spearheaded by Janice Raymond.  The second was the AIDS epidemic, which led to LGBT movements being dominated (some would say hijacked) by affluent gay white men.

Now, I will not deny the importance of AIDS activism:  After all, sixteen people who were friends or acquaintances of mine have died from illnesses generated by the disease, and every one of their deaths was horrific.  However, once ACT UP and other organizations dedicated to the effects of the epidemic--most of whose victims, at the time, were gay men or intravenous drug users--came to be dominated by affluent gay white men, there would be no turning back.  No other part of the LGBT rainbow can even come close to matching the financial power, not to mention the organizational ability, of the men of Christopher Street or the Castro district.  And trans people were far behind even lesbians of color, as there are fewer of us and, then as now, we are more likely to be unemployed and living in poverty.

The more affluent and integrated people are, the more they are likely to try to use the system, as it's constructed, to further their own interests.   In the case of gay men, the ones who were white and working as in the FIRE industries or as advertising art directors wanted (understandably) to enjoy the same sorts of tax benefits, and to be "respectable" in the same ways, as their heterosexual peers. 

What I've described in the previous paragraph led to a nearly singular drive, among LGBT organizations, for "marriage equality"--at times, nearly to the exclusion of every other issue.  While some trans people want to enter same-sex marriages (or are, in fact, in them), many more are preoccupied with day-to-day survival and the issues that are part of it, e.g., employment, health insurance, homelessness and being victims of violent crime and other forms of discrimination.  

However, discussion of--let alone advocacy for--such issues was largely absent during the days of AIDS activism and the drive for same-sex marriage. In the meantime, those who could gain from marriage "equality" pushed for a parallel system to the one most heterosexual people take for granted, i.e., same-sex marriage that followed the heterosexual (and hetero-normative) model. Rarely, if ever, was any consideration given to the idea of getting the government out of marriage altogether, and of taking away the churches' (and other houses of worship's) power to decide, for the (nominally secular) government, who is and isn't married.  

Instead, organizations like the Human Rights Campaign focused their efforts on allowing gays and lesbians to have the same kinds of marriages as straight people. I can't help but to think that if trans people had been more influential, we would have fought for the the separation of Church and State in matters of matrimony, and to have other kinds of relationships (including ones that don't follow the heteronormative script of marriage).  But that didn't happen, in part, because one of the results of a Lost Generation of Transgenders is that because we are far fewer in number (and, proportionally, far less wealthy) than we might have been otherwise.  So, while we were able to get language protecting us into the New York City Human Rights Law in April of 2002, we were (arguably) further from having similar language included in New York State's or the Federal Government's laws and policies than we were in 1972.

I still hope that we will have fair and equitable policies for trans people everywhere.  Then, perhaps, we will be able to move beyond the effects of losing a generation of our people.