Transitions, with Susan Stryker

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Written By Blair Hodges

About the Guest

Susan Stryker is author of the book Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution. She is professor emerita of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona and founding coeditor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. She also won an Emmy for her documentary film, Screaming Queens.

Best Books

Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, by Susan Stryker.

Confessions of the Fox, by Jordi Rosenberg.

Transcript

SUSAN STRYKER: It felt like pretending. It felt like I was really invisible. It felt frustrating that when people related to me, they were relating to what I considered to be a false image of myself, you know, not like who I really was.

BLAIR HODGES: When she was born, Susan Stryker’s parents thought they were welcoming a baby boy into the world. She knew they were wrong by the time she was five, but it took decades to let them know who she really was. Being trans raised a lot of questions for Susan—practical questions of course, but also theological, philosophical, and historical questions. Thanks to decades of research, she’s one of the foremost specialists on transgender history in the United States.

In this episode of Fireside with Blair Hodges, Susan Styker joins us to talk about her personal experiences and how they intersect with the story she tells in her pathbreaking book, Transgender History.    

Growing up trans – 1:05

BLAIR HODGES: Susan Stryker, thanks for joining me today at Fireside. It's a real treat to have you here.

SUSAN STRYKER: Hey, Blair. It’s actually a great pleasure to be here.

BLAIR HODGES: We're talking about your book Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution. This is one of the most important works of transgender history that's been written—especially about the United States. And in my opinion, the book itself could include itself as part of that history.

You're an important part of transgender history, yourself, in doing this kind of research. So I wondered if it bothers you at all that people want to dig into your own personal background and experiences right away when they start talking with you about your research.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: No, that's totally fine. My life is an open book, shall we say? [laughter] And you know, I think people can just learn a lot and relate to people differently when you have a personal story to hang it on. So I've always been very open, talking about what my journey has been.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Let's hear about it. Tell us about your experiences as a trans woman. And just tell us a little bit about yourself?

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Well, I will say that I am one of those people who, as far back as my memory goes into very early childhood, it's just like I thought of myself as a young person who was going to grow up to be like mommy, you know? That was just how I felt as a kid. And as a very young child—you know, say around five years old—that's when I had the rude awakening of realizing I lived in a culture that assigned people to boy/girl categories based on genitals, and that genital difference was a biological thing. And so that was my little wakeup call of like, “uh-oh!” You know? “I feel like this about myself, what does this mean that I got this body, not that body?” So it's always been a question for me, and—

 

BLAIR HODGES: Can I ask how a five-year-old can even begin to wrap their head around that? Because as a cisgender person, I never experienced that as a kid. So I just, it's hard to see what that’d be like.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Well, you know, it wasn’t like I had a technical sense of the way gender works. I just had a set of feelings, you know? It's just like, I just felt myself to be the way that I was.

There's a story that I've told a number of times about—so again, I wasn’t reading medical textbooks as a five-year-old, but I did listen to the radio. [laughter] And there was a very popular song when I was that age, “The Girl From Ipanema,” just a little popular song, but I just remember that song and projecting myself into it. I was the tall and tan and young and lovely one whose, you know, hips swayed so gently like a samba, you know, I can't remember exactly the words. And that was the “me” that I was going to grow up to be. I remember feeling that very, very clearly, that I knew what I identified with. Little kids don't have a sense of the way biology works, or the way social categorization of bodies works. I didn't know anything about that.

But I knew how I felt. I knew what I thought—I'm like that not like this. You know, bodily difference doesn't mean so much when you're a kid. You don't know what it means that you've got this body, not that body. But that recognition around five-ish years old for me, where I was like, “Oh! People's bodies are different from one another.” And it's like, “People who have those bodies are girls and people that have those bodies are boys, and I have this body. I don't feel like I'm a boy, what's up with that?” That was as much as I knew as a five-year-old. But I knew that as a five-year-old. And it just really drives home to me—you know, this was a long time ago, I'm in my sixties now; that was back in the 1960s. But it just drives home for me now, all of the cultural hoopla and the culture wars about trans kids and, “How can kids know that,” and, “This is just a fad,” and you know—

 

BLAIR HODGES: “They’re being pressured into it, it’s like a cool thing.”

 

SUSAN STRYKER: That people are being pressured into it. And, you know, I can just say—straight up testifying—I knew that about myself as a kid. So, I believe it when kids that age or younger persistently express a cross-gender identification. However you want to explain it—How does it happen? Why does it happen? It's like, that's fodder for conversation. People can talk, we can have a reasonable conversation about it. But the fact that it happens is just incontrovertible. It happens.

 

BLAIR HODGES: So for you, how did it start to spill out into everyday life? And did you get pushback as a kid? What were your experiences with that?

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Well, you know, I really hit it. It was like, “Uh, oh! What’s going on with this? Should I say something about this?” But you get lots have informal messages from the world that gender-crossing behavior is frowned upon or is ridiculed or stigmatized.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Tons of reinforcement. Clothes. Colors.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: I mean, just watching television, just like, guy in a dress! Yuk, yuk, yuk, yuk!

 

BLAIR HODGES: Bugs Bunny kind of stuff, yeah?

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Right. Or knowing that you would get disciplined, like, “Honey, don't wear that, wear this,” or, “Don't act that way, act this way.” And so there's that constant, low-level norming of gender behaviors that you experience. And so, should you say something to Mommy and Daddy? What if you feel like, “But wait, why are you wanting to be more boy-like? I don't really feel that way.” And that's a hard conversation to have as a five- or six- or seven-year-old with your parents.

 

Growing up in the RLDS tradition – 6:58

 

BLAIR HODGES: Especially, maybe, back then. I didn't know this about you—I found this out when I reached out to you—that you grew up in the RLDS tradition with an RLDS mother. Now, I'm a Latter-day Saint, so a Mormon background. And RLDS is a different church that broke off; these are sister churches, we could even call them. So did that play a part? Did your family have religious values that conflicted with this?

 

SUSAN STRYKER: They did, and that was also part of it. I was supposed to be groomed for the priesthood. And I would have certain roles. And my transness planted questions about religion for me. It’s kinda like, well either I am misunderstanding myself somehow, or the received information that I'm getting from my mom's faith tradition is wrong somehow.

Or at an even deeper level, it's like, “You know, if this is all true, I’ve got something to say to God, because this isn't anything I chose about myself. This is just how I am.”

My transness is something that definitely planted questions for me about, you know, call it cosmology, or the ultimate nature of reality and truth.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Speaking of truth, I don't know how the RLDS arrival at truth—I don't know exactly how it works culturally. Within my upbringing, it was that we're supposed to pray, seek answers to prayers, listen to authorities—there were scriptures and prophets—but also get confirmation of that. And so there was the sense that we are kind of an authority, that we are supposed to rely on how we feel about things. And so it seems like—

 

SUSAN STRYKER: That “still small voice,” right?

 

BLAIR HODGES: Right! So it seems like a conflict for you is to have a religious tradition that’s saying, “Trust yourself. Listen to how you feel,” but also saying, “Except you're not supposed to feel like that. And that part doesn't count. Fight that.”

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Right. And, you know, What I can say about the religious side of my upbringing is that, because of my feelings of being trans, and my questions like: Oh, what does this mean? How do I deal with this? Will the feelings go away? Can I study this and learn an answer of some kind through my studies that will resolve this question in my mind? Should I transition? What's the story? What would that mean?

You know, I never felt it was bad or wrong. I just always felt like this is just how I am. This is fine. It's gotta be okay. And if it's not, okay, it's like, “I got something to say to that guy upstairs!”

 

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Okay.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: This is something that was handed to me, you know? And so it raised all kinds of questions in my mind about what the right thing to do is, and how to move forward. I think being trans planted the seeds of my intellectualism. It made me want to research and ask historical kinds of questions. And even as a kid, when I was starting to learn—I would say around age ten—that hormones and surgery were a possibility, it planted the historical question in my mind of, like: Huh! I feel this way about myself. I would certainly like to take hormones and reshape my body shape. But before that was possible, before they discovered hormones or had anesthesia, did people who felt the way that I do—it's like, what did they do? How did they deal with it?

So there was that historical question in my head of, could somebody like me have existed in the past? Or, if somebody had the feelings I had at a time before current trans medicine was available, what would they do? To me that's a really interesting historical question.

But on the religious questions, I would say it steered me towards having a more intellectual rather than more fundamentalist kind of outlook. It wasn't like, “Well, it says this in the Bible. So that must be true!” It sort of led me in the direction of being like, “Well, there's many different ways that scripture could be interpreted.” And I've studied religion—I actually wrote my dissertation on early Mormon history, and I know a reasonable amount about, not only that, but the broader history of religion. I knew there were many different intellectual traditions in Christianity, Islam, Judaism; about what's the relationship of the people—who are people of the book—to the books that they are people in relationship to, different hermeneutic and heuristic traditions, different relationships to scripture, different intellectual questions about how does any particular set of religious beliefs relate to philosophical or cosmological questions?

So I just had this sense, as an adolescent growing up in the faith tradition my family was a part of, that I was part of its intellectual wing somehow, you know? And maybe people I’d hear at church preaching about something, and maybe I was a snotty, little smartass kid, thinking “I know better than they do,” [laughter] and just like, “I'm gonna get a college education, and I'm going to learn all of this.”

And then by the time I got into my later teens and early twenties, I really realized there wasn't much of what I would think of as a progressive intellectual tradition that was available to me through the RLDS tradition.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Although, I will say, too, that even though I’d had religious questions and doubts since I was in my early adolescence, even though I no longer practice, and don't consider myself a member of the LDS communities of faith, even though I felt like I was not able to find a home in that tradition, I respect the way they have continued to evolve as a church as an institution. You know, that they started admitting women to the priesthood, or, “We should approach the Book of Mormon as something that you don't have to think of as being literally true.”

 

BLAIR HODGES: And affirm queer relationships and stuff now, too. The Community of Christ has—whereas the Salt Lake-based LDS Church hasn't taken any of those moves.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah, you know—

 

BLAIR HODGES: Did that affect you at all, too? Because like that the Community of Christ was more progressive in sort of moving in those directions—

 

SUSAN STRYKER: More progressive than the LDS Church, yeah.

 

BLAIR HODGES: But you were already kind of disconnecting at that point, or—

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah, I was. This was back in the sixties and seventies, you know. I have not had any active involvement with the church probably since around like 1979 or 80, so. But I have family members who are still actively involved. I have both an aunt and an uncle—both departed, as of the present—who were both members of the priesthood. My family history is very much connected with the RLDS tradition. But I said, I'm not actively a part of it and haven't been for decades.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Do you think being trans was a big contributor to that? Or is it your general intellectual bent and other things?

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah, you know, I do think my being trans contributes to me not being part of that community. Like I remember when, as an adolescent, I was—I don't want to say getting pressured, but there were people in the priesthood who were saying, like, “We've received a priesthood call for you. And you should be ordained as” whatever and I'm going, like, “Yeah, I don't think so.” Because ah—

 

BLAIR HODGES: And they didn't ordain women yet, right, at that point?

 

SUSAN STRYKER: They didn’t, right. So it's kind of like, “You know, I just think this is not the right thing for me.”

And, you know, there was a lot of questions—“You have such leadership potential,” and whatever. It's like, “Yeah, but there's the thing that I'm not telling you, which is that you're thinking I'm a guy, and I'm not. And so, yeah, that was basically it.

 

Transition as an ongoing journey – 15:21

 

BLAIR HODGES: What did transitioning look like for you, then?

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Well, I didn't transition until I was 29 or 30. But I knew about myself early on. By the time I was in my teens, I really felt like I needed to come out to people that I was romantically or sexually attracted to. And I've always been oriented towards women. I'm a trans lesbian. And it's like, the women who were interested in me, they were interested in me because they thought I was a guy. Maybe the things they liked about me were like, “Oh, there's something different about you. You're not like the other guys.”

It's like, “Yeah, if I could only tell you more.”

 

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Yes.

SUSAN STRYKER: But I do feel like there was something that a number of people I dated found attractive about me, I mean not at a physical level, but just sort of at an emotional relationship level. But you know, it would always get to that point of going like, “Uhhhh, this feels false to me.” Or they would do something that I perceived as homophobic or transphobic, and I’d be like “Oh, they're not, sort of, down for this, all right,” you know, and things would drift away.

But by the time I was in my late teens, I just thought, “You know what I need to do? I need to find bisexual women to be involved with. People who, like, are totally okay about eroticizing a same-sex relationship, but are not put off by male anatomy.

 

BLAIR HODGES:  Well and they also haven't been part of the binary—you know, maybe there's not the same kind of hang-ups, because they're not typically heterosexual.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Exactly. And that I thought, let me find people like that and come out early in the relationship and see how it goes.

 

BLAIR HODGES: But did you know that you would transition though, at that point?

 

SUSAN STRYKER: I would say that I knew how I felt about myself, but I wasn't sure exactly what I would do. And finding, in my late teens, somebody to be with, that I was open with, who accepted me, and it was part of how we related to each other in an intimate relationship? That felt great! It's kind of like, “Wait. You see me as a person. We understand each other. We're relating to each other, and maybe I don’t need to do anything physical,” you know? We had a child together. So that was also a consideration for me.

 

BLAIR HODGES: So more than just figuring out this category and taking these exact steps, it sounds like the relationships you could build were really what you were seeking after, however you did body changes or hormones or whatever else. You needed a safe place.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Right. And I feel like, by my late teens, early twenties, I'd certainly found something that was more satisfying than what I had known as a teenager or a young adolescent. But it also became clear to me very quickly—I don’t know that I’d say “very quickly.” It eventually became clear to me that it was not enough. That it meant the world to me that I had a partner who recognized me. But then I had a son who didn't know this about me. And I had friends and colleagues. And I just thought, this isn't just “who am I to myself? Who am I to my intimate partner?” It's like, “who am I to anybody who's significant about me? How, how am I in the world? How do I relate to the world?” And I just felt like I could not continue down that path, living as a man.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Did it just feel like pretending all the time?

 

SUSAN STRYKER: It felt like pretending. It felt like I was really invisible. It felt frustrating that when people related to me, they were relating to what I considered to be a false image of myself, you know, not like who I really was. And so it just felt very isolating. I felt very alone.

You know, sometimes I would think about, like, this is like some science fiction movie where I'm a little consciousness operating some Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robot™ out there. It's like, there's this body that looks the way it looks in the world that I'm inside here manipulating, and making it go, and speaking through its mouth. But what people are seeing is not actually me, you know? And that I just sort of wanted to be to be present. To be—you know, to manifest myself.

 

BLAIR HODGES: So that's what you did. Then you made choices to do it.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah. I was held in place for a number of years by that relationship I was in. And I have great compassion for my ex-partner. What I what I realized was that I was her closet. That she was somebody who had queer feelings, who was oriented towards women, but actually came from a very homophobic family. And that she found in me something that felt emotionally right, but passed as straight in the world.

And every time I would go, “I just don't think I can do this anymore,” she would freak out, because it would be like outing her. And I just tried for a number of years, because there was so much at stake. I mean, not just the relationship, but our child, who, you know, I will say to your audience is just fine! Is thirty-eight years old now, is a happy, healthy well-adjusted adult human being who came from a queer/trans family. Kids are alright!

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yes!

 

SUSAN STRYKER: No damage there that I know of, other than the routine—

 

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Yeah, I was gonna say. We all damage, in some ways, our kids—

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah, it’s like, “Honey, I’ll pay for therapy, whatever you need,” you know? But we get along great. And he's got a good relationship with both of his parents.

But yeah, I eventually just got to the point of saying, “I gotta put this burden down, I've gotta be who I am in the world, and let the chips fall where they may.” And it's been wonderful, honestly.

I mean, it was hard, it’s been hard. I mean, there's employment discrimination, there's stigma, I lost relationships over people’s ignorance or prejudice or freakout.

But by and large, everybody who really mattered to me is still with me. Family feels strong. And I have an amazing network of friends and colleagues. I've had long-term relationships with people. The partner I'm with now I've been with for more than twenty-five years.

 

BLAIR HODGES: What did that later coming out process look like? Because now I'll see people, maybe, talk about it on social media, or send an email around to their family. What was your coming out process like at that moment in time?

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Ah, gosh. It's multifaceted, because I felt like I needed to manage the flow of information about my transition with work and career. I was at the tail end of graduate school. I was finishing up my dissertation the year that I was deciding to transition. And I just thought—I didn't really trust that my dissertation director would do the right thing or be cool about it at all. So I actually—

I mean, I was already socially and hormonally transitioning in my life, but wasn't letting my university or my advisors know about it yet. So sort of living a double life for about a year in there. And then after I finished the dissertation, had the title page signed, degree was awarded, it was done, it was in the can—the very next day, I went in and filed a petition to change the name on the title page of my dissertation. Which was, you know, your dissertations don't have gender markers on them, they just have your name, but it's just like, as soon as I actually had the degree in hand, I filed the name change.

But then, in my social world, it's that it was kind of bifurcated. There were there were people that I knew in the San Francisco queer community who I was out to as trans from the late eighties forward, I definitely had a queer and trans community. But I also had this whole world of family and academia that didn't know this about me.

So my coming out process was really one of sort of integrating the two. Of coming out to people I wasn't out to yet. And, by and large, people were maybe shocked or curious or surprised. But for the most part, people in my community stuck with me.

And then with my family, I remember telling my son, who was eight at the time, and I said, “Look, I wanna to tell you something about why your mom and I have broken up and aren’t living together. And it's just that I—I don't think there's anything wrong with being a boy, you know, you're a boy and that's a totally fine way to be, but I've never really felt like one, and it makes me feel really unhappy. And so I decided that I'm going to change and be a woman. And he's, you know—as a precocious little eight-year-old, he says, “Humans can do that?! I knew it was possible in some fish!” you know?

 

BLAIR HODGES: In fish! [laughs]

 

SUSAN STRYKER: And I said, “Well humans and fish do it in different ways. But you're right, some fish change sex over the course of their lives. And that just kind of like happens for various reasons. But you know, I'll have to do this on purpose.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: And he was listening. And then he said, “So I'm gonna have two moms! Cool!” And I thought, alright, he's okay. He's okay about this. And he has been.

Coming out to the rest of my family? When I told my mother, it's like, I was waiting to publicly transition and change my name and gender markers, and sort of how I dressed and all that, until I came out to my mom. And I told her, I said, “Look, I want to come home for a visit. I'd like for us to spend a day together. I've got some big news I want to tell you.”

She said, “What?! Aare you alright?”

I said, “I'm fine, I'm fine. It's just big news that I want to tell you.” So I went for a family visit.

She said, “I actually have to go into work this morning, but let's talk at lunch.”

And I told her, I just said, “Okay, well, I'm just gonna lay it out. I have always felt that I'm transsexual and I'm going to change gender pretty much as soon as I get back to San Francisco [laughs], and how are you doing with that?”

And she says, “Well, umm. I thought you were going to tell me that you were gay and HIV positive. So I guess this is good news.”

And I said, “I told you—I would consider being HIV positive bad news,” I mean—

 

BLAIR HODGES: Sure, like it’s a real health issue, yeah.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: But I said, “I would consider that bad news. But I had just said it's big news. It's like, yeah, it's a big change. And I just told her a little bit more about stuff going on in my life. And I said, “How are you doing with this mom?”

And she says, “I'm in complete denial. You can tell me anything right now.” [laughter] And I told her a little bit more. And then, you know, she said, “Well, I actually have to go back to work and finish something up before the end of the day. But why don't you just go to my closet, find anything you like that fits you? Why don't you just take it and then we can go shopping to replace all of that, or buy some things that you want?”

I was like, “Okay. Gotta go!”

 

BLAIR HODGES:  Oh, wow.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: And so that was mom, you know? I don't think she ever quite got it. I don't think she totally understood it. But she was a fierce Mama Bear of a mother who loves her kids and totally has their back in all ways, shapes, forms, and fashions. And yeah, she never abandoned me. And she was always very supportive.

And before she died—this was in 1992 and 1993 that I was coming out to her—and she was with us on this earth until 2020. But in her later years, she told me many times that she was proud of me, and of what I had done with my wife, and she was totally accepting of my life.

And as it turns out, [laughs] one of my brother's kids came out as trans in high school. He's transitioned now, too. So it's like, it's a family affair!

 

Why not curiosity? – 28:54

 

BLAIR HODGES: Wow, yeah. I have to say, as a parent, I've thought about the possibility of this with my own children. And the two things that come to mind—and I confess that, for me, it doesn't feel great to say this out loud, but I would really love to hear your feedback on this—is, if my child had a conversation like that with me—and I think it would probably happen relatively early on, this is more common these days—the two things I would think about are, number one, I did have sort of hopes and dreams about—or not even maybe hopes and dreams, but just expectations, cultural expectations, about what this child is, and gender and sex are part of all that, and that would be hard to let go of, in some ways, as a parent, number one. And then number two, really just a concern and a fear that this child will face difficulties and prejudice.

So I would want to personally—I'm in a place where I've known enough trans people and really learned about it enough to be accepting of this—not like it needs my acceptance in the sense of like, making it right or anything, but just like, I could be okay with it. But that would still be hard, thinking “Oh, oof, you've got some, maybe some things you're gonna have to face and that makes me sad.”

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah, well, I think you just hit both nails right on the head. I think those are the two big parental concerns: that you want your kids to thrive in life because you love them, and you want them to have enriching rewarding lives, at the emotional level. You want them to find people to love and be loved by. You want them to feel like they're gonna have some success in what they do, or some happiness, some contentment in their life.

And when you see those things out there in the world that could be stumbling blocks for that, it's like, yeah, your parent’s heart is like, “Oh no, I hope they're okay, and what can I do to smooth the path?” I totally get that.

And I can say, I have had a very fulfilling life as a trans person. I feel like even though it complicated things, even though I've definitely experienced prejudice and discrimination, I have been able to work with that, and to have a life that feels very livable to me, you know? A life worth living. And I think the stigma and prejudice and discrimination that came with being out as trans—particularly early in the transition, before I kind of got more fully reestablished in my life—it's real, you know? It definitely slows you down.

But it also teaches you things, if you survive it. And I totally value the experience I gained. I mean, I think it sharpened my political sensibilities, I think it created more empathy in me, I think it required me to learn different skills to live my life than I would have needed to learn otherwise. And I have zero regrets about the transition. It is just what needed to happen. It's what I needed to do to stay alive as me. And I'm just so thankful for the people in my community who came along on the journey with me.

There's a survey that takes place, generally once every five years—the National Transgender Health Survey—that shows that the single greatest predictor of how well trans people are going to do post-transition is whether or not they've been abandoned by their families of origin . That is the most important safety net for helping people make the social transition and not fall through the cracks and wind up someplace they don't want to wind up.

So, again, if I'm preaching today, it's like telling the parents of trans kids or telling the family members of adult transitioners: Do not abandon your loved ones! Maybe it’s not what you were expecting of their life, but it is a life worth living.

And at some level, I think it's no different than any other major change, like your kid tells you “Oh, I’m getting divorced,” and you really liked their ex. Or they said, “I've decided that I'm going to become a Buddhist monk and go live in a monastery,” and you go, “But wait!” you know, it's like, “When am I gonna see you?” [laughter] So, any kind of major life change like that is hard. So I just appreciate your honesty in saying, like, “Ah, I had gendered expectations for what my child would be, and I need to reset my expectations.”

And that's your work to do, right? It can be very pleasurable. It's like, “Oh, here's this person I know so well, my child!”

 

BLAIR HODGES: I like how you say in your book’s introductory materials, it's interesting that a lot of times the reaction people tend to have, especially cisgender people, when they find out someone's trans is either revulsion or disgust or confusion or distaste or condemnation. And you say, “Why not curiosity?”

 

SUSAN STRYKER: I think the deeper answer to that is, when people who've never really thought about transness—either in somebody they care about, or in themselves—is that it's kicking the ground out from under their feet. It's like, “But wait, I don't know how to relate to this person!” The idea of gender being almost like a container that holds your personhood, and when you crack that container, or say, “Actually, I need a different container here for my sense of self that's shaped in a different gender—” to encounter that, I think it can make the person who encounters the trans person afraid. It's kind of like, very disorienting, and it can result in reactive, defensive, aggressive kinds of attitude or actions toward the trans person.

I mean, it's why I think so many men who discover that somebody they're like attracted to, or maybe dating or just picked up, is a trans woman, or it’s like, “revealed,” that there can be a very homophobic reaction. It's like, “Aaah! What does this mean for me? What does it make me?” You know, it's like, “Aaah, I must kill you!”

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, violence does result—

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Violence does result out of that panic in the person who encounters the trans person because of what they think it means about themselves. So it's still a problem.

But I will say, I've seen a lot of change in the thirty-plus years since my own transition. Which I also want to say is not a one-time thing. It's not like a one-and-done, hit it and quit it, you just changed

 

BLAIR HODGES: Just flipped a switch.

 

SUSAN STRYKER:  Transition is an ongoing process. I mean, we are all, everyone, humans, we are not the same person tomorrow that we were yesterday. We are all changing.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I've learned a lot from a friend, Kelli Potter—just seeing her relation to sports and stuff as she's transitioned, and that hormone therapy has changed her relationship to her body in ways that she couldn't have anticipated because she couldn't have experienced it yet. And so there's just a lot of factors that—as you said, this is an ongoing process. I mean, she came out as trans a while ago, and is still sort of learning about what this new body does and all the implications of it.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Exactly. And, you know, bodies don't stand still for any of us.

 

BLAIR HODGES: That’s right.

SUSAN STRYKER: And as I age—I was transitioning in my late twenties, early thirties, and now I'm in my early sixties. And you know, there's a lot I noticed about ways bodies change, that actually have something to do with metabolism and hormones and fat distribution and muscle tone, it's just like, there's all kinds of things that change about your body as you age. And I keep comparing those age-related changes to the gender transition-related changes. There's actually a lot of similarities there.

 

Being a storyteller – 37:40

 

BLAIR HODGES: Interesting. Before we move on to the next section—we're gonna get into some definitions of transgender, we're gonna get into some of the history—but I wanted to ask one more personal question here. In the beginning of the book, you describe yourself with these different roles you occupy: a historian, an activist, a cultural theorist, a media maker, and an academic, who you say, has “tried to chronicle the various dimensions of transgender experience.” And I wonder if any of those roles in particular are more comfortable for you, and if any of those are less comfortable for you. Because when you're a trans person writing about trans issues, it almost seems like you kind of have to do some activism as you're doing that. So are any of these roles really more at home for you?

 

SUSAN STRYKER: You know, I think ultimately, my deepest calling is as a storyteller. And so if I think about everything that I'm doing as storytelling, it's just different modalities, venues, audiences for telling stories about the world.

So I do feel very comfortable in that role, but it changes over time, right? It's like, I got a PhD because I wanted to be a history professor, telling stories about the past. My transness really complicated that. I've never actually worked in history departments. It took me fifteen years between the PhD and professorhood, where I was working in the community. I ran the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, for a while I was a filmmaker—still am a filmmaker,

 

BLAIR HODGES: An award-winning filmmaker!

 

SUSAN STRYKER: An award-winning filmmaker! And you know, I actually really love that kind of public facing work. But I did eventually have a chance to enter the professoriate. I kind of joke about it, back in the nineties and early aughts, to say like, “I'm never gonna get a job as a professor until people that I knew as undergrads are now tenured faculty members who want to hire me as a senior scholar in a field that I have pioneered—

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Right!

 

SUSAN STRYKER:  —and it's exactly the way it played out!

 

BLAIR HODGES: Wow.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: So I taught on and off as an adjunct while making my living in other ways.

 

BLAIR HODGES: You'd have to do with adjuncting, yeah. [laughs]

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah. It's not a stainable mode of life. But I kind of kept my hand in. I published I, you know, I edited things. I still did scholarship, but I made my living in the nonprofit sector and as an independent filmmaker.

 

Defining transgender – 40:22

 

BLAIR HODGES: Right on.

That’s Susan Stryker, author of the book, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, which we're talking about today. She's also professor emerita of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Arizona, and a founding coeditor of TSQ, Transgender Studies Quarterly.

Alright, I know we're a ways into this now [laughs], but let's define “transgender.” You say that the word itself has only come into widespread use kind of in the past few decades, and that it's still under construction. So how do you use transgender in this book?

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Right, Blair. The first documented instance of using a “trans” plus “gender” neologism, a made up word in the English language, is from 1965. So we had a medical doctor writing in this handbook of mental health about what he was calling “transsexualism,” but then says, “but actually, it would be more accurate to call it transgenderism.” So that was the first known use of the term.

 

BLAIR HODGES: And why did he make that distinction?

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Well, maybe a quick thing to say about where the word “gender” came from. It wasn't until the late 1950s and early 1960s that social scientists and neuroscientists and endocrinologist came up with this new conceptual system of thinking about sex, gender, and identity. The idea is like, sex is biological. Gender identity is like, what you think of yourself as—man or woman. And gender role is like, how are you perceived socially? What social roles do you perform?

And so that idea of sex, gender, gender identity, gender role, was like a new conceptual framework, new set of vocabularies, in the late fifties and early sixties. Until that time, gender wasn't a word people used to talk about bodies, it was a word people use to talk about grammar and language, you know? Like nouns—masculine, feminine, neuter. And that linguistic gender is just—what are the rules by which we arbitrarily assign certain words to certain categories of words. Like so, masculine, feminine, neuter, we have three genders in English, but other languages have no genders, or many genders. But it's just basically gender as the arbitrary set of rules for how you treat all members of the same class of things in a similar way.

And these scientists were like, “Well, that's actually a good metaphor for talking about what we do with humans.” It's like, how do we categorize bodies into categories? How do we place bodies into categories? That could be called “gendering,” it's like you put an object and a gender of similarly treated things. So yeah, this book in 1965 was the first one to apply that new nomenclatural system, or conceptual vocabulary to trans issues.

But how I think about transgender? It's like, you could think of it as an identity label. “There are some people who are called transgenders. It is a name for them.” But I think of it in a different way. I think of transgender as not being limited to a certain kind of people that gets a new name in the mid 1960s. I think of transgender as the practice of moving away from a socially assigned sex/gender position, and that's really broad. It's like, it's moving away from something culture told you that you were, that you didn't pick for yourself, and you are moving away from that towards something else, towards some other gender, to move towards no gender, to move back and forth across the gender divide. I think we can imagine transgender as this really expansive word for talking about all the different ways people “trans” genders, you know? It's like, rather than an identity label, it's a name for practices of moving away from a non-consensually assigned gendered starting place in life, however one does it.

 

BLAIR HODGES: That was really helpful to me, to see it as a process kind of term that doesn't have a set final destination, or a set plastic identity or sort of like static identity, but rather a process that acknowledges these roles are kind of socially constructed, and that some people don't fit into those constructions. And therefore, they seek that home, and it requires a journey. It requires exploration.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah, and I think all of that. And I think of transgender as a big tent. You know, people in trans communities can really get their knickers in a twist about like, “No, don't call me by that name, call me by this name.” And “transgender” is really different than “non-binary.” And transgender is different than “transsexual” and la la la—

 

BLAIR HODGES: —“Genderqueer” and other things, yeah.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Right. And for me, it's like, I usually actually don't use the word “transgender,” I'll just say like, trans, just like as a shorthand. And it's like, anything that kind of troubles and unsettles and refigures gender—whatever you think that is, however you're doing it—let's just call it “Trans.” Big tent. So that's the way I look at it.

 

BLAIR HODGES: I love that your book basically also says, “Hey, all of this is going to change. And you've really got to be plugged into the ongoing conversations, because these terms will change. Some will offend some people, others will offend other people.”

And so, instead of throwing up our hands, or being frustrated with that, I see your book as an invitation to just remain engaged and maybe not freak out so much. If you say the wrong thing, take correction, or learn, and just continue to grow.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah, I’m glad you're taking that away from the book, because that is definitely my hope. And it goes two ways. I want to say to curious, well intentioned, respectful cis people who are interested in trans for whatever reason, it's like, as long as you're coming to this with a sense of respect for the other person, and genuine, open-minded curiosity—it's not good pedagogy to scold people about things they don't know, right?

And so it's just like, I really want to model that sense of like—if it's a legit question, and you just want to know, I'm not gonna say, “You said that wrong!” That just doesn't help.

 

BLAIR HODGES: I get that too, though. Like it would be pretty irritating.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Well, you can feel that way. And I think it's always fine to say, you know, actually, I don't want to talk about that right now. Or it's kind of like, “Yeah, you know what? Go ask somebody else.” Or “You know what? You don't have to ask me that question. There's this thing called the internet. And there are search terms, so why don't you Google something? Why don't you read a—And it's just like, you can do that. You can do it in a nice way.

But, genuinely, for me, if somebody is asking me a question from a place of a real desire to know, and they're open to hearing something, it's like, I feel like that's the teacher in me, that wants to say, “Sure. Let me answer that question for you. Here's my take on it.”

The flip side of the coin is like, I do feel, sometimes in trans communities, that I can be a person saying like, “Y'all just settle down a little bit, just chill out.” And just like, “let's not lose our minds over—

 

BLAIR HODGES: Well, that's gonna irritate some people by the way, too, right? You probably irritate some people that are like, “Hey, no! We gotta really be vocal about this,” you know.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Well, it's like, be vocal about what? I mean, I really feel like we are in it in terms of cultural struggle right now. It's like it is such a reactionary period. So it's like to quote Ben Franklin from back in the eighteenth century, “If we don't all hang together, we're all gonna hang separately here.”

 

BLAIR HODGES: Stick together.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Who's got your back? Who's on your side? It's like, you know what? I really couldn't care less if somebody said, transgendered instead of transgender. Or if somebody uses a word in the wrong way, or like kind of sort of doesn't really totally get what you're doing. Basically, it's like, are we on the same side of this thing? Are we all part of the herd of cats that is vaguely going in the same direction towards some kind of alternative to the reactionary onslaught we are experiencing right now?

And if the answer is yes, it’s like, you know what? Let's have a discussion over a cup of tea later tonight about nomenclature, but I am not going to read you the riot act about it.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Do you have the same kind of attitude to accidental or deliberate misgendering? Where someone might say, “Hello, sir,” or, you know—

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Deliberate misgendering I have no patience with, and I will totally get up on somebody's grill about that. But if it's just accidental, it's kind of like, give the person the benefit of the doubt. Politely, generously ask them to do something different, sort of explore that moment with them. But you know, but particularly if it's a family member, like you were saying earlier, it's like, we have gendered scripts in our heads for the people that we love. And we think about them in a particular way. And it can just take time—

 

Pronouns – 50:43

 

BLAIR HODGES: Even linguistically, the hardest thing for me is just how gendered—And if you stop and think about it, I'm seeing people complain about, “Oh, they’re grooming kids by introducing them to the fact of different gender identities,” and I'm like, “What are you talking about? We’ve all groomed kids in the sense of instilling belief in them about male and female or boy and girl from the very beginning. And it's pervasive! Like we can't hardly refer to a person without it being about what we think their genitals are. And if you think about it, that's actually really weird.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: It is. Yeah. But I'm glad you brought up the part about linguistics, because I do feel like we become very habituated. And I think even our brains get wired in particular ways through repetition, that we internalize certain grammatical rules that are, you know, neurological processes. And that it's like—learning somebody's gender pronoun, and then asking them to change it. It's like, it's kind of like learning a different language that you haven't been habituated to speak.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, just from a pragmatist’s standpoint, I'm like, can't we just “they” everybody? But you know, then again, I'm speaking from a place of privilege when I say something like that, but I just—

 

SUSAN STRYKER: It's interesting to me that since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, there's many different efforts to introduce new pronouns into English. I mean, not even related to trans questions, but a lot of it has to do with the fact that English does not have what's called an epicene pronoun in the third person.

You can't talk about a person—you can say “I,” and that's not gendered, you can say “you,” and that's not gendered. So speaking of yourself, speaking directly to another person—but speaking of a person, referring to them without addressing them, you've got he, she, and it.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Right. And now “they,” right? But since that's pluralized, what people would say is, it's not a singular—

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Well see, that's the interesting thing for me, is that you point to the they/them question, and the use of “they” as a singular, and I really think that's the way to go.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. I lean on it a lot.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: It's a word that we already use. We actually already use the word “they” in colloquial speech. You can look back in the historical record and there's the use of the word “they” for third person singular, I mean, and like Shakespeare and Chaucer, it's like back to like the 1400s, 1300s.

The thing that I've taken to doing in my classes, instead of doing the pronoun-go-round, like, “Okay, everybody say what your pronouns are”—which I think can put trans and non-binary and gender questioning people on the spot, and that it becomes kind of a hollow lip service kind of exercise—what I tell my students first day is, is like, “Look, I'm just going to call everybody, ‘they,’ it's like, that's where we're going to start. And we're going to treat it like the formal and familiar distinction.” You know, it's just like, if I don't know you well enough to know what your pronoun preferences and uses are, I'm just going to call you “they,” that's where everybody's going to start out. And if you would like me to call you something else, then invite me. Invite me in to gender you in a more personal way.

And it's kind of a fun little exercise to just practice that sense of like, “Why am I assuming that I know what that person's gender identity is?” It's like, “I see what their body looks like, but what's the relationship between what their body looks like and how they think of themselves?” And so, you know, I'm not gonna get up in their business and say, “Hi, please tell me your pronouns!” I’m just gonna do that vague, formal “they/them” for everyone, and let people come to me.

 

Terms of the times – 54:48

 

BLAIR HODGES: In the book you discuss early American history, back in the earliest days of colonial settlement. For example, you say there have always been people who have contradicted social expectations about what was considered typical for women or for men, and you find people in the records that don't quite fit these things. And I learned a lot of new things here.

For example—I don't know why I hadn't realized this—but even the word “transvestite,” which is one of the earliest terms, I think, that that we see in the historical record, literally meant “someone who's wearing different vestments,” like a vest—I don't know why I didn't even realize that that's what that was referring to. [laughs]

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Vestments. Yeah, trans-vest-ism. But I think one of the most conceptually or theoretically interesting things about trying to do trans history is that when you look at the historical record, you can absolutely, unquestionably see a wide range of gender styles and concepts of people who I would say trans gender, but there's a very different conceptual vocabulary. How do you talk about transness before you have trans terminology? That's a kind of interesting meta-historical question.

And so there are definitely terms people used back in the day that have a trans angle to them, but that are totally not in use today. I mean, like “Molly,” which was a word in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for people we might call either effeminate homosexual men, or trans women, depending on how we want to name them. But basically somebody with a male biology, who—“molly” kind of meant like soft or womanlike, from the Latin word, I’m gonna mispronounce it, mulieribus, a girl or woman, like in Spanish, mujer. The word molly, the slang word molly, was related to that.

And you know, people don't really use that word anymore. But it was a word that was very specific to a time and place that, arguably, is a kind of trans-ish identity. Or like the word “tribade,” which comes from a Greek word that means to rub. And that a tribade was somebody who was, as we would say now, assigned female at birth, who was oriented towards women.

Another word, describing people like that back in the day was “confricutress,” I love that one.  

 

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] I’ve not heard any of these.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: I know, right, because vocabulary changes. Conceptual frameworks change, too.  

 

BLAIR HODGES: Were they negative words, too? Were these sort of morally problematic?

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Most of these were morally problematic words—words that were imposed from the outside upon people perceived to be deviant. But they were also words that people could take up for themselves, and particularly, mollys, people self-identified as mollys.

Yeah, so like I said, the language changes over time. Terms come in and out of favor. Conceptual frameworks change, as well as particular words. But you can look in the historical record and see people who do things that look an awful lot like trans, what we call trans today. I have a friend and colleague, the historian, Jen Mannion, who has a book out in the last year called Female Husbands. And Jen just writes about, like, “you know, this term ‘female husbands’ starts showing up in the middle of the eighteenth century, and it seems to fall out of favor in the early twentieth century. So I just sort of want to do this history of like, who are people who call themselves “female husbands”? What was up with that? And what Jen winds up saying is, “I don't want to say these are transgender people. But I do want to say that they are people who trans’d gender.

 

BLAIR HODGES: And I think the distinction there is—n disability studies, this was similar, where when people try to diagnose past historical figures and say, “Oh, was Mozart autistic,” or something like this, that category itself didn't exist in his context, and the way he was treated and thought of, and the way he behaved, was culturally conditioned such that what we think of today as autism, in some ways, didn't actually exist back then. We want to kind of think everything that exists today can just have this exact parallel in the past. But that's really not exactly how it works. Because the cultures have differences.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah. You know, there's a philosopher, cultural theory person, Ian Hacking, he actually does a history and philosophy of science. But he writes about what he calls “looping effects.” And he's got this great article called “Making Up People.” And the argument is like, alright, let's talk about tuberculosis. We could certainly do a social history of tuberculosis, about how its treated, and how people understood it, and what the scientific understanding was at the time, or what public health measures were taken, and how ideas about tuberculosis turn into policy or inform epidemics, you know, yada, yada, yada. But whatever the human activities are there, there is still this thing called the tuberculosis bacterium, regardless of what we're doing, right? And our way of thinking about it doesn't necessarily change that organism.

But then when we're talking about human social categorization, there's a different order of problem that gets introduced, which is that ways you think about things inform ways that people think about themselves, and you kinda get this looping effect where nobody would have used the word transgender before 1965. But kind of like, once that word is out there, you know, how are people taking that up and using it as a form of self-interpretation? They're like, “Ah, this thing about me, that I know, there is a word that kind of sort of fits for me,” and you start relating yourself to it. And so that over time, there's this looping relationship that happens between how people think of themselves and existing ways of thinking about people. It's like a total feedback loop.

And so yeah, the historical question in there, like you raise the question about autism, I think that's exactly the right point to make, that there was something about Mozart that kind of sort of maps on to what we think about autism today, but didn't really—that was not part of the milieu at his time. It wasn’t how he thought of himself. And so you asked that question, is it a useful framework for thinking about Mozart through the category “autism”? Or do you just want to say, “I've learned from disability studies that there are these interesting kinds of conceptual and historical questions that we can get into. How do we talk about Mozart in a way that recognizes a potential neurodivergence without anachronistically projecting contemporary terminology into the past where it would be inappropriate to think about it that way.

 

The fame of Christine Jorgensen – 62:35

 

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, as people approach this book, I want them to know, it really does lay out this history sort of chronologically. We’re introduced to a lot of developments in medical science and in psychology, and we meet pivotal figures who made discoveries, or people who, again, kind of—were they trans back then? You know, people that were trans in the sense of being on a journey away from societal norms and things.

And so, I wanted to zoom in just on a few of these. One of them was Christine Jorgensen. This is a person who became, you say, the most famous transgender person in the world back in the 1950s, with news of her so-called “sex change,” right, this idea that she had a surgery to change this. Maybe spend a minute introducing people to Christine Jorgensen and your thoughts about her.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah, she's really the person who popularized the concept of transsexuality. And I use the word “transsexual” to mean a medicalized, you know, hormones and surgery transition from man to woman or vice versa. Some people think that's a pejorative term now. That it came out of the medical establishment, and it's always pejorative and never self-applied. But you know, I will just say, I know a lot of trans people who still use that word about themselves. And often it gets used to make a distinction between people who are interested in some kind of medicalized transition versus people who are not.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Because it pertains to sex, pertaining to like biology? Like genital shape?

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah. some people just sort of continue to use it as a way of marking a certain kind of distinction within the broader umbrella of transgender. And, you know, I use the word about myself. So, you know, it's like, I mean, I personally don't find it pejorative. But sometimes people can say things about themselves that, you know, other people should maybe refrain from using.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Right, well I would also say, like, sometimes it's nobody's business what someone's morphology, or what their actual genital shape is, right? And it seems like some people get really interested in that and want to know—

 

SUSAN STRYKER: “Have you had the operation?” It's like, “I don't know, right? You tell me about your junk first.”

 

BLAIR HODGES: Right

 

SUSAN STRYKER: It’s like, “Can I see that?” It's like, “Tell me, how have you felt about your genitals since you were a child? I really want to know.” It's like—

 

BLAIR HODGES: “Can you hear yourself right now?”

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Right. So but Christine Jorgensen is the person who called public attention to the possibilities of using hormones and surgery to change your morphology, like your body shape. And to link that to this idea of social transition of genders. Jorgensen was somebody who was born in, like, 1926, I believe, to Danish American parents in the Bronx, and always felt effeminate somehow. I think they had questions about whether they were gay or trans or what have you. And remember that they were a young person in the thirties and forties.

 

BLAIR HODGES: And I think it was when they would say, like, “You're probably gay.” Like, if you're associating too much with women because you like boys, that means you're gay—like this is some of the thinking that they would go through.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah, but you know, Jorgensen, self-educated herself on what was possible, and she sought out surgical and hormonal treatment in Europe, because it wasn't really available in the US in the early 1950s. And then when she transitioned, then she spent like a year and a half, two years living in Copenhagen, and going through her social transition there.

When she had surgery, it was leaked to the press and became this global media story and if any of your listeners remember all of the hoopla a few years ago around Caitlyn Jenner coming out, I mean, just completely mediatized—cover of Vanity Fair, you know, ABC News, you know, 2020 with Diane Sawyer doing a special episode on this, and you know, Caitlyn Jenner was just like, all over the place for a hot minute there. And that was Christine Jorgensen in the fifties. She heard news of her so-called “sex change.” It made headlines around the world. I mean, the first story was in, I think it was the New York Post. But the headline says “Ex-GI becomes blonde beauty.” And it just, it went viral.

 

BLAIR HODGES: She looks like a classic beauty of that era, the lipstick and the hair—

 

SUSAN STRYKER: I mean, she looked it. When she's when she's in her twenties, she looks like a young Marilyn Monroe, and she definitely has the sort of charisma and vivacity.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Do any trans women look at that, and kind of—is that a problem to say, “Wow, do we really have to code that much into these gender roles”?

 

SUSAN STRYKER: I think trans people code into their gender roles just like everybody else. I mean, like me personally, I feel like I'm like pretty androgynous. Femme of center, I am not a girly girl by any stretch of the imagination. But it's just like, some people are, right? You know, just like some cis women are more androgynous. And it’s just like, that was who Jorgensen was, I mean, she could rock that little blonde starlet look. And she did, you know?

 

BLAIR HODGES: Was part of it that she needed to? Like you bring up the fact that she felt pressure to perform “goodness,” for example, she felt representative, she actually felt like, “Okay, I need to do good for other people. Like I can be representative.”

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah, I mean, she definitely had that sense of wanting to enact what I would call a “trans respectability, you know? That she definitely played against the, “Hi, I am a sleazy drag entertainer doing burlesque,” and “I'm a street walking drag queen.”

And I will just say, no shade to people who do that work, you know, just like—sisters. But Jorgensen was trying to perform a kind of middle-class, white, gender normative so-called respectability, and trying to distance herself from any kind of subcultural expression of gender variance, for sure.

But I don't think she anticipated the level of fame she would achieve when her story was leaked to the press. She was actually trained as a photographer, she wanted to be a documentary filmmaker, she had worked in Hollywood as a set photographer, she was working at RKO Studios in the newsreels division as a film cutter, you know, the last job she had before she went off to Copenhagen. And she was not expecting to become a celebrity at all.

But once the story went viral, she really was not able to do anything else, you know? It was kind of like, “Well, I'm outed as trans. I'm exoticized, I'm sexualized. I'm not finding any other work. I guess I better develop a nightclub routine, and, you know, get out there and hoof it, and support my aging parents, and keep a roof over my head—" So she did.

And I would say she rose to the occasion, you know? That she became a successful performer and entertainer from like, 1953, 1954 up through about 1963, 1964, for about a decade. She was making like $5,000 a week out on the nightclub circuit. And that's a nice chunk of change even now. It was a lot of money back in the fifties and early sixties.

But it was through Jorgensen that the concept, you know, it's like, “Here's what science can do for you.” And there was there was an awful lot of, I would call it the “technological sublime,” you know, of like, there was all of this post World War II enthusiasm about science. It was like, “We can split the atom and we can put rockets on outer space—

 

BLAIR HODGES: “Going to the moon!” Yeah.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: —and we're on the way to the moon! And it’s like, “And look we can turn a man into a woman or a woman into a man!”

 

BLAIR HODGES: Marshmallows were invented, like a food revolution of like all this sort of—

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Radar. Plastics, you know? All of this. So Jorgensen was, I think of her like an avatar. She was the avatar of this post-20th century moment of technological enthusiasm, and the idea that humanity itself could be transformed through scientific innovation. And so, you know, Jorgensen was the poster girl for all of that.

 

BLAIR HODGES: And it was eye opening to see that sometimes surgery has been seen as a radical progressive move—like, “Wow, they're changing their bodies.” But also, it could be a conservative solution to homophobia, where it was like, “Oh, actually, we're going to change bodies to align with this person so that they're not gay,” or something like that.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah, well I think it was definitely part of the fascination with Jorgensen, because like she before transition, I think was widely perceived as an effeminate gay man, you know? The way she got mediatized you know—“Ex-G.I. Becomes Blonde Beauty!” There's this idea of like, Jorgensen was some like, virile gung-ho combat veteran in World War II.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Right. G.I. Joe.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: In truth, I mean, she got drafted at the end of the war, and she was assigned mostly to Fort Dix, New Jersey.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, but that’s not a great story, though. That's not a front-page headline, we've really gotta play up the—

 

SUSAN STRYKER: “Ninety-eight Pound Weakling Military Clerk Decides To—” you know, blah, blah, blah. [laughter] So, yeah, the copy wasn't headline worthy, but this sense of Jorgensen being the manly G.I. Joe type who gets turned into Marilyn Monroe, I mean, that's sort of the cultural fantasy at work there. I think a lot of it has to do with, as you were just saying, cultural fears of homophobia. There was heightened attention in the post-World War II years to, particularly male homosexuality, it had become much more visible during the war years, for a variety of reasons we could go into if you want—

 

BLAIR HODGES: The book certainly does, people can check it out!

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Right! And it was like, “Homosexuality! What to do about this?” It's like, science! Engineering!

 

BLAIR HODGES: That was the time, yeah.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah, “We can make that boy who likes boys, a girl.” You know, it's like, phew! Problem solved!

 

Activism, alliances, and the LGBTQA+ community – 73:42

 

BLAIR HODGES: And this is why it's important—as you lay out at the outset of the book—that sex, gender, and sexuality are three different things. Gender identity perhaps being more cultural, sex being perhaps more biological, and sexuality being what people are attracted to, are turned on by. And those are all different variables. And over time, psychologists and just everyday people have come to terms with that more and more.

To skip ahead here a little bit your book looks at social conditions. And it's not just about individual people who transition, or individual experiences. I was not expecting to see some of the infighting, or some of the struggles that went on within what we now call the LGBTQ+ community. That's just the thing we have today. But it wasn't always that way. And there were some alliances, but there were also some divisions.

I'm thinking, for example of Stonewall as a famous instance, this protest that happened there against police, and trans people were a big part of that. But now it's associated in the popular imagination more with gay people, with gay men in particular, right? So maybe spend a minute talking about the activism side of things, and how there were different alliances that took shape over time.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: The thing that I would say is that, if we look back historically into the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the most common way of thinking about sexuality and gender variance, I think, among both variant people themselves, as well as medical and legal forensic authorities, was to think about—not like homosexuality and heterosexuality, that that kind of wasn't the framework yet, but to think about inverts and normal people, you know? And the idea of the “psychosexual invert” who was attracted to a so-called “normal” person have their same biological sex. That was that was the predominant way of thinking about things, so that it kind of conflates the idea of sexual orientation and gender identity, the way that we've come to make that distinction post-World War II.

But the idea of a female person who was in love with a female person—well, one of them is going to be a normal woman and the other one's going to be an “invert,” and that they might just be a little bit inverted in terms of like, liking a woman is something that men do, and so that's a little bit of a gender inversion there, but maybe they're even more inverted, in that they, like, wear pants instead of dresses or like to cut their hair short.

But then that could be somebody who's really super inverted, you know, like, actually thinks they're a member of the other sex, or like trying to pass as a member of that gender, or wanting to change their bodies, so that that the “invert normal” model puts trans and gay kinda on the same side of the question. It's like, they're conflated. They're both expressions of the same thing.

And it's really not until you develop this new sex/gender identity model post-World War II, that I think gay and trans people really start thinking of themselves as fundamentally different kinds of people. And that once you have that, I think that we would now call like, cisgender, gay and lesbian identities, they were really unaware of what we would now call their “cisgender privilege” and would try to distance themselves from those more sick, more pathological, “freakier trans people who are not like us. And that's not what we were we are doing.”

And that, I would argue, that the progress that was made on gay and lesbian rights in the post-World War II period, particularly in the sixties and seventies, was predicated on ways that gay and lesbian people shared with straight people their cisgender privilege, and they kind of threw trans people under the bus.

And you can really see it and the social history of LGBT social activism in the sixties and seventies. You mentioned Stonewall, it's like, “Oh, it’s gay men rioting.” It's like, well, yeah, gay men did riot. But the instigation of that event was the harassment of gender variant people of color on the streets outside the bar.

And so, I mean, Stonewall is so mythologized as a as a point of origin, there’s a very complex record of what happened there. But I think it's not an exaggeration to say that the spark for resisting police violence, resisting any kind of clamp down on trans and gay spaces, it usually revolves around the way trans feminine people engaged in sex work on the street are targeted by the police. It's like, that is the most common instigation of anti-queer violence. It is the point of origin of all of the resistance movements that have taken place over the last half century and more.

 

Feminism, TERFS, and transgender issues – 79:16

BLAIR HODGES: Another division your book draws out is between feminism and transgender issues. And I was struck with how much the seventies parallels what's happening today, where we have feminism, really flourishing. But then you have feminists who say, “Well, not trans people—especially not trans women.” And you know, we're seeing that same thing today with people like J.K. Rowling, and this TERF identity, “trans exclusionary radical feminists,” who say, “Nope, the only women that count are defined in this particular way.” And it really parallels more with what was happening in the seventies than I would have realized.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah. Well I would say it not just parallels it, but that the ideas that have really taken off since about 2014, 2015, it's not that they parallel the seventies. It's like, it comes out of the seventies. It's some of the exact same people, you know? And that there's a fascinating history there to look at how certain kinds of transphobic discourses emerge in certain very specific pockets of lesbian feminist separatism in the late sixties and early seventies, and how those ideas migrate out of those very marginalized cultural spaces and more into the mainstream, how it moves into international human rights discourses, particularly around sex trafficking, and then the way it starts to get folded in with rightwing, ethno-nationalist populist movements, other kinds of reactionary populist politics, with Fundamentalist Catholicism and Evangelicalism.

I mean, I would call that “Transphobia Studies,” you know? Like there is a tremendous story to be told there about how that all went down. But these ideas that are experiencing such a resurgence right now emerged fifty years ago. It's like, it's not a parallel. It's a continuation.

  

BLAIR HODGES: As you're writing this part of the book, we're kind of getting later into the book into the nineties and stuff. You talk about how the American Psychiatric Association changed over time, thanks to lobbying and input from specialists, but also trans people and others. Gender Identity Disorder was finally removed from the DSM in 2013. Which actually seems really, recent for that.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Really recent, yeah.

 

BLAIR HODGES: But as you're writing the history of this, did it line up with your own memories of what was going on back then? Or was it like, “Oh, wow, there was a lot more here than what I realized at the time.”

 

SUSAN STRYKER: I'll answer that. But I also just want to circle back to the feminism question for a moment and just say, I consider myself a feminist. You know, I teach in Gender Studies programs—or at least I did until I retired. I feel like feminism is something that is in alignment with anti-racist practices and support of Indigenous sovereignty movements, and it's in alignment with struggles for economic justice, as well as bodily autonomy. It's just like, for me it is a wholly positive word.

But I also recognize there are many kinds of feminisms and that it's not monolithic. There are some feminisms that I think are actually quite pernicious, and I don't mind calling them out. But I also just really want to highlight—I don't want conflate the idea of transphobia with feminism, because most feminists in my experience are not transphobic.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, even back then, there was that that transgender woman who was the folk singer who was at the event—

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah, Beth Elliot.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And they had the vote to see, “Should we kick her out?” And then most people said no, but then the people in charge were like, “No, we're still gonna do it.”

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Right.

 

BLAIR HODGES: So, you can show, even back then, most of the feminists at that time were supportive, but the people that had the levers of power were like, “Nope, you're out of here.”

 

SUSAN STRYKER: There was just a really mobilized base, you know, to use our current terms. That even though most feminists were trans inclusive, I would say, only some of them were like, “Yes! We must do this!” Others are kind of, “Ehh, haven’t really thought about this a whole lot. But you know, no big deal to me.” And then there was this minority that was just like, “No! These people are evil, Nazi-constructed FEMbots, who are trying to destroy our movement from within!”

 

BLAIR HODGES: “And they’re actually the patriarchy!” It's Stolen Valor, too, this idea of like, “Hey, you can't be a woman because we've paid our dues. You haven't.”

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Right. Exactly. And so, that was always the minority, but they were a very persistent minority.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Do you get the sense that's how it still is today, then, within feminism in general?

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah, I do. There's definitely a fire, but there's a lot more smoke than fire. That's what I would say. But your other question about, remind me—

 

History in real time – 84:09

 

BLAIR HODGES: Your experience in the nineties. Yeah, it was basically, like, if you were writing this history, and you were like, “Oh, wow! I did not know that was going on!”

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Right. Well, so I would say, if it's something that happened in the eighties and after— which is a long time now—it's things that I was aware of at the time. Because by that time, I was an adult, and in the eighties I was really wrestling with like, transitioning, how to transition, blah, blah, blah, but I was definitely part of conversations with people outside my head and, you know, was part of communities, part of social networks, certainly paying attention to what was going on in the news.

But by the nineties, when I transitioned, I was living it 24/7, 365. And I kind of joke about it in a half-funny kind of way of saying like, there's only one job that the world lets most trans women have, and that is to figure out how to get other people to pay them for being a trans woman, you know? [laughter] And you can figure out lots of ways to get paid for being a trans woman. And I've gotten paid in lots of ways for being a trans woman.

But it's like, I thought, well, like this is it, I get reduced to this one thing. It's like, I'm not a person who comes from this part of the country. I'm not a person who has this social or religious background. It's like, I'm not a person who has a family. I'm not a person who has interests or expertise or whatever. I'm a transsexual woman. It’s like, that is that is the door that I have to go through at every interaction with the world. So, you know, “dance with who brung you to the ball,” you know? It's like, that's the horse I need to write in on. And so how many different things can I make trans to do?

 

Updating the history after a decade – 86:08

BLAIR HODGES: I want people to know as we're talking about this, too, we've focused a lot on trans women issues and things. The book itself is much broader, it talks a lot more about race, about trans men. It's very intersectional. So people that are listening to this interview, if they haven't got that impression yet or are wondering what's up with that, that's kind my own thing as an interviewer, I could have done better at that. But I do want people to know the book itself definitely is more expensive on that.

And the book itself has also been updated. It was originally published in 2008. It needed big updates. After ten years, you released a second edition. And I just want to conclude really quick with a word about the state of affairs right now. How are you feeling right now about the lay of land? You've mentioned a few things—We're seeing legislatures doing things, et cetera. So just maybe a word of advice for people that are concerned about these issues today.  Yeah, sure.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah, sure. Happy to do that. All right, well, I'll just say, I tried to have very broad spectrum, attention to trans issues from the nineties forward. So I feel like things I write about in the book from the nineties, the aughts, the teens, are things that I've been directly involved in as an activist, artist, filmmaker, scholar, you know, what have you.

I definitely felt like the first edition of the book, it was basically reflecting on what had happened in the twentieth century, that it positioned the nineties as a sort of watershed moment where you had these new ideas about transness coming out. It needed to be updated to account for what happened after 9/11. Because that was kind of about the time the first book came out, and the sort of end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Because there was a tremendous amount of progress—at least for fairly privileged trans people—in the Obama years, from 2008 to 2016.

And, you know, the second edition of the book came out right when Trump was elected. And that was—I mean if you wanna talk about a watershed, like that was a watershed event. And I think that was the thing that slaps people upside the head with the idea that history is not a “progress” narrative, you know? And that, I think I might have to do a third edition of the book now to account for what's happened since 2016. Because it's just not pretty. And it's totally important. And who would have thought that trans issues would be one of the frontline issues in the contemporary culture wars, but here we are.

 

BLAIR HODGES: And with all of that, too, I'll just conclude by saying your book isn't just about the struggles, the fights, the legal implications, et cetera. But you also spend time on the joy and the art and the cultural efflorescence. So, there's joy in this book as well. It's a wonderful story. It gets a lot—There's a lot on the table here for people to chew on. So I appreciate you writing it.

We need to take a quick break, but that’s Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, and we'll be right back with a best book recommendation.

[BREAK]

 

Best Books – 91:24

BLAIR HODGES: We're back with Susan Stryker, author of the book Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution. Alright, Susan, it's your turn now. It's best books time, what did you bring to recommend to us?

SUSAN STRYKER: I brought one of my favorite novels of recent years, and since we're talking about trans stuff, it’s a book with a trans theme in it. And that book is Confessions of the Fox, by Jordi Rosenberg. It's a novel that revolves around—I'm not going to be able to do it justice, but it revolves around a trans guy who's an English professor at a small college in New England who thinks he has discovered a lost eighteenth century manuscript about this guy named Jack Shepard, who was a historical figure, who was the historical basis for the Mac the Knife character in The Threepenny Opera. And that, apparently, Jack Shepard was a trans-masculine person. You know, that's the “made up” part. So Confessions of the Fox purports to be this rediscovered manuscript that is being annotated by this scholar, a trans guy.

And the footnotes are hilarious. It's just like, the conversation that goes on between the narrator and the character? It's like, Jack Shepard has got this girlfriend, Bess, and the professor who's annotating is like, “Oh my god, it's just so like my relationship with my girlfriend. Let me tell you about this thing—” [laughter] And so you start to see the two stories between them. The scholar and the historical character paralleling each other.

And I will just say it is one of the most inventive, funny, sexy, smart books I have read in recent years. I have taught seminars on this book. Students love it. It has so many little rabbit holes to go down. If you like transgender history, this is a book that makes the most of like, telling weird stories about trans history that you never thought of, and yet weaving it into a speculative historical novel. Five stars. Highest possible recommendation.

BLAIR HODGES: I haven't heard of this. It looks—I mean, it's been critically hailed. It's won Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews—Yeah, this looks like a really fun book.

SUSAN STRYKER: Yeah, it's super fun.

BLAIR HODGES: Well cool. Hey, I wish we had way more time, because we barely, barely scratched the surface today, Susan. This has been a really enjoyable conversation with you. I really appreciate you meeting here at Fireside, just talking about yourself and your research.

SUSAN STRYKER: Sure! Happy to do it. And you know, have me back anytime.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, let's do it! We need part two and part three, [laughter] so—

SUSAN STRYKER: Well, just hit me up.

BLAIR HODGES: Alright, thanks a lot.

 

SUSAN STRYKER: Alright.

 

Outro – 57:30

BLAIR HODGES: Fireside with Blair Hodges is sponsored by the Howard W. Hunter Foundation—supporters of the Mormon Studies program at Claremont Graduate University in California. It’s also supported by the Dialogue Foundation. A proud part of the Dialogue Podcast Network.

Alright, another episode is in the books, the fire has dimmed, but the discussion continues. Join me on Twitter and Instagram, I’m at @podfireside. And I’m on Facebook as well. You can leave a comment at firesidepod.org. You can also email me questions, comments, or suggestions to blair@firesidepod.org. And please don’t forget to rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts if you haven’t already.

Fireside is recorded, produced, and edited by me, Blair Hodges, in Salt Lake City. Special thanks to my production assistants, Kate Davis and Camille Messick, and also thanks to Christie Frandsen, Matthew Bowman, and Kristen Ullrich Hodges.

Our theme music is “Great Light” by Deep Sea Diver, check out that excellent band at thisisdeepseadiver.com.

Fireside with Blair Hodges is the place to fan the flames of your curiosity about life, faith, culture, and more. See you next time.

[End]

NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.

 
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