How We Got Here, For Transgender People in a Hurry
This is a short story about how we got here as free transgender people with political and economic rights. It is an overview of from a much longer, more detailed story. Although our pursuit of freedom and rights has not yet reached perfection, we have made great progress. This story involves philosophy which may be a turn off for some but variations of philosophy influence human decisions and shape human behavior. Because transgender people are a little different from other people we are a stressing case for any philosophy.
Our story begins in the mid 1600s with the radical Enlightenment boys—Decartes, Locke and Bacon. Their thing was reason and their goal was happiness. Descartes, a French philosopher and mathematician (you remember x-axis and y-axis “Cartesian” coordinates). He coined the term, “I think, therefore I am” to cut through the many useless philosophical debates about the human condition. He and the others came up with the idea that individuals were truly free to use their own rational faculties to decide for themselves what to do with their lives in order to be happy. The trio believed that there was an objective reality which could be observed by applying reason to collected evidence about nature. This reality was consistent wherever you went. They bracketed religion as something each individual should decide and tolerate others beliefs.
The Enlightenment was the beginning of the Modernist philosophy. It espoused freedom, reason and, as the Declaration of Independence said, the pursuit of happiness. This was in contrast with previous beliefs in mysticism where reality was created by supernatural forces embodied in Premodernism. Premodernism times starting with the fall of Rome, featured the Middle Ages, poverty, suffering, continual war and rampant death. Transgender people still experience harassment from religious organizations believing that that we do not exist by denying the scientific differences between sex and gender. And we would be much worse off in a society ruled by theocracy. We know all about those who would prioritize religion over individual rights in order to make transgender people invisible in the law. Indeed, the U.S. State Department has elevated religious rights among many others in their recent report by their Commission on Unalienable Rights.
Legal precedents in the U.S., starting in the 1850s, overturned laws against crossdressing based on the rationale that there was a large overlap of dress and presentation between gender categories. Most of these laws had not been passed to enforce gender categories but rather to discourage criminal disguises.
Applied Postmodernism appeared in the 20th Century. The goal of this philosophy is to pursue collectivist political power and it has borrowed tools from a variety of sources. In order to be free to pursue their goal, the first tool they use is to deny that objective reality exists at all. But in contradiction to this tool they also contend that issues of racism, sexism, ableism and transphobia are real. Applied Postmodernism has taken over parts of academia and spread to other parts of our society. Applied Postmodernists would use transgender people as poster children and victims in pursuit of political power. In the 20th Century, Postmoderns were responsible for the deaths and genocide of hundreds of millions of people including turning on people and groups who helped them achieve power.
Locke went on to start individualism in government and Bacon went on to start science.
For Locke, the individual was sovereign, meaning that each of us should be free to develop our own understandings and capacities using perception and reason. Many of his views are articulated in our Declaration of Independence. The use of force or the threat of force should be prohibited and government should be limited. And if each person was sovereign, their points of view should be treated with respect including religious views. This the rationale for freedom of religion in our Constitution. Democracy is a form of government which allows each individual to vote how their society should be run. In order to compare notes and make societal decisions, the right of freedom of speech is necessary. Likewise, people should be judged on their capabilities, ethics and behavior, rather than such irrelevant features as skin color, sex, ethnicity or gender. It has taken decades to implement these beliefs, but we have eliminated slavery, secured the vote and political process for women and given rights tailored to transgender people. Of course, there is more to do. Turning a Premodernistic world with its considerable inertia into a Modernistic world takes some time.
To protect the individual and minorities, we guarantee political and economic rights in law. Political rights include freedom and democracy. Economic rights are vested in capitalism which facilitates progress and happiness in terms of standards of living and enables democracy, science and wealth accumulation. Political rights and economic rights go hand-in-hand. Transgender people need to be able to participate in elections. Transgender people could not do what they do if capitalism productivity did not leave them free time to go to support groups, participate in Pride celebrations or have time to achieve their goals. Since most transitioning transgender people pay for their own treatments including surgeries one way or another, they are clearly able to accumulate enough wealth for transition. Although Western democracy and capitalism are not perfect they are the best systems available. Historically, some societies, notably Russia, Germany and Cambodia have tried Postmodern collectivism and it has failed.
Transgender people need particular rights protections because they are somewhat different from other people in terms of their genetic gender predisposition being incongruent with their birth sex. Because many rights and laws were not formulated with transgender people in mind, we will be playing catch up for years to come. But we are making progress. The Premoderns will obstruct us and the Postmoderns will take credit for progress to grab power. Once they achieve power, rights will be the first casualty and suppression of transgender people will shortly follow, judging from history. We already see the right of freedom of speech being suppressed on some campuses.
The third member of the Enlightenment trio was Frances Bacon who championed scientific methods involving collection of evidence about nature with rational interpretation. Unlike the Premodernists, he believed that nature was not susceptible to influence by invoking supernatural powers and said “Nature, in order to be commanded, must be obeyed”. He published books on the scientific method and inspired development of scientific societies.
Science contributing to the British Industrial Revolution became the discipline of engineering and applied to human beings became the science of medicine.
Engineering was instrumental in the Industrial Revolution which started the raising of standards of living but making manufactured goods more available. It also finally broke the Premodernist practices of serfdom by providing jobs in return for wages by free agreement of the employer and employee. Engineering increased productivity which made work easier and stimulated capitalism. It also contributed to medicine, providing new instrumentation.
Modern medicine started just before the turn of the last century based on evidence-based science wherever possible. Before this period, people who crossdressed in public might be considered eccentric but the idea of being transgender came into being as sexology and endocrinology developed.
As modern medicine developed here were Magnus Hirschfeld, a sexologist, and Harry Benjamin ,an endocrinologist. These two were friends who walked the streets of Berlin to advocate for sexual minorities and transgender people with police. Benjamin got stranded in the U.S. by WWI and Hirshfeld toured the U.S. after leaving Germany when the Nazis came to power. Many of the pictures of Nazi book burning that you have probably seen, were from Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Knowledge. The Nazis had their own brand of Postmodern collectivism that suppressed free speech through book burning.
The term transgender had not yet come into being and the term Hirschfeld coined was transvestite. Initially Hirschfeld believed that sexual arousal was the primary motivation for transgender behavior as he likened it to homosexuality. (Hirschfeld was gay.) This is how the term transvestite got the connotation of sexual arousal. But as Hirschfeld studied transgender people, he found that sexuality was not the primary motivation and that being transgender was a natural phenomenon unworthy of pathologization. Unfortunately, subsequent generations of psychiatrists ignored this finding including Freud, Erikson and Blanchard, contributing to the pathologization of being transgender. After Hirschfeld left Germany, his friend Harry arranged engagements for him in the U.S.
Benjamin became an advocate for transgender people, especially those who wanted to transition to change sex using hormones and surgery which were both pioneered in the late 1940s. Although his medical consulting office was in New York City, he spent summers in San Francisco advocating for transgender people to find them treatment sources.
In the 1960s, advocacy for transgender people was centered on San Francisco and other cities. Four advocacy groups developed there. The these groups, described below, were separate but have been interweaving off and on.
The first group we will call Street Transgender who were mainly poor people of color, organized to get resources for medical and other services. They used demonstrations and force to achieve their aims because they did not have the means for legal or political action. Although we think of Stonewall in 1969 as the beginning of transgender advocacy, Stonewall was not the first, having been preceded by several outbreaks in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. These preceded Stonewall starting in 1962. This group managed to get government help both Federal and local.
The second group we will call the Transsexuals was also based in San Francisco. People in this group were concerned with transition. Harry Benjamin was one of the leaders in conjunction with UCSF. Benjamin worked to find endocrinologists who could provide hormone therapy and surgeons who would perform transgender genital plastic surgery (TGPS). The legal basis for TGPS was tenuous and/or banned in several states, so Benjamin found surgeons who would perform the operations in secret. University gender clinics were started to develop transition techniques but shut down after Johns Hopkins clinic closed, based on religious grounds. The resulting free market produced improved techniques and developed the affirmative approach to treating transgender people in which transgender people were allowed to explore their genders. A professional group was formed as the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association which is now the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).
The third group we will call the Support Group advocates. The most prominent leader here was Virginia Prince who was one of the founders a support group for married transgender people, The Society for the Second Self. But other support groups developed all across the U.S. whose membership was more diverse and was not restricted to married males. Many transgender people temporarily pass through these support groups to learn about themselves but later do not continue to need them. Some obtain support online rather than in person. This group represents the vast majority of transgender people.
The last group we will call the Trans Men advocates. While the other groups concentrated on trans women (those assigned male at birth), this group advocated for trans men. The principals in San Francisco were Louis Sullivan and Lin Fraser, a mental health counselor.
So, we are now in the position of having four loosely organized advocacy groups which hardly represent “ a unified transgender movement.” This refutes the claim of anti-transgender people that there is an organized transgender movement. But lack of solidarity puts us in a disadvantage when dealing with Premodernists and Applied Postmodernists.
So that is how we got here. Where we go from here stands on a knife edge. We can continue the Modernist rational pursuit of happiness towards achieving tolerance and acceptance. According to Modernism, the unique traits of transgender people are irrelevant. We can now fall back into theocracy or plunge ourselves into collectivism. Either of which destroy our individuality. It is a choice as transgender people that we must make.
Category: Transgender History
