Transgender History (book)

This first chapter is an overview of the topic of gender identity and outlines Stryker's definition of common terms and concepts used throughout the work. This chapter also deals with the current arguments and discussions about transgender people. Multiple reviewers noted that Stryker's definition of transgender, as stated in the book as "people who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth, people who cross over (trans-) the boundaries constructed by their culture to define and contain their gender" forms a historical discussion that allows for a "history sensitive to a wide range of identities and experiences".[2]

The second chapter discusses how the idea of transgender was pathologized from the 1850s through the 1950s by the medical community and how any type of gender nonconformity was treated as an illness. At the same time, the chapter discusses how the earliest forms of the transgender movement began and groups and organizations began to form.[3] During this period, the ideas of sexuality and gender, homosexuality and transgender specifically, were not as clearly defined and often were assumed to be synonymous or at least closely related. Efforts to clearly differentiate gender into its own subject were seen through the actions of people like Magnus Hirschfeld and groups like the self described androgynes that made up the Cercle Hermaphroditos. These social and medical discussions helped to advance the visibility of transgender identity and to bring it into the public sphere. In later decades, groups and publications made by Virginia Prince would also raise the idea of cross-dressing and its relation to other gender subjects.[4]

The third chapter chronicles grassroots organizing of transgender people, and how clashes with police and other regulators led to civil rights protests and riots in the United States, from the 1950s through the early 1970s. Among these events were the Stonewall riots, a demand for equal service at Dewey's Coffee Shop in Philadelphia, a small scale riot at Cooper's Donuts, and the Compton's Cafeteria riot in San Francisco. The riot at Compton's Cafeteria is the earliest documented large-scale riot by transgender people in the United States.[3]

The fourth chapter analyzes the backlash against the transgender movement, especially within the feminist and LGB movements through the 1970s and 1980s. This backlash came along with the push by transgender groups to have transgender identity listed under the medical diagnostic literature as a curable disorder called Gender Identity Disorder. The coalescence of the transgender community behind this resulted in the formation of several organizations comprising solely of trans women, which began to achieve larger mainstream visibility during the period. At the same time, the chapter discusses the effects of the spread of AIDS among the transgender community, especially among persons of color.[3]

The fifth and final chapter examines the increasing visibility of transgender people from the 1990s through the present, improvements in medical technologies and health resources for transgender people, and acknowledgement of the complexities and subjectivity of gender.[3]