Our Own Words: Fem & Trans, Past & Future

For a powerful articulation of the political project “queer” was cultivated within, and an equally powerful critique of how queer political practice has often fallen short, see Cathy Cohen’s classic “Bulldaggers, Punks, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,” GLQ 3, no. 4 (1997) →.

I use the spelling “fem” as the general term and for the dyke world, following Joan Nestle’s account of bar dyke usage, where the frenchified spelling was considered pretentious. I use “femme” when I’m talking about the ballroom world, which consistently prefers it.

The classics on fem/butch: The Persistent Desire: A Femme/Butch Reader, ed. Joan Nestle (anthology); Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis (oral history—excerpt at →); Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg (fiction—available at →), A Restricted Country by Joan Nestle (fiction and biomythography).

This is explicit throughout the writing on dyke life that exploded after the fem/butch revival began, much of which had to repeatedly explain why butch and fem were not simply versions of straight gender roles. I’ll quote one example of a rhetorical contrast between fem and normative femininity: a Women’s Monthly blurb from the Alyson Publications ad in the back of my 1996 edition of Pat Califia’s Doc and Fluff. It reads: “Images of so-called ‘lipstick lesbians’ have become the darlings of the popular media of late. The Femme Mystique brings together a broad range of work in which ‘real’ lesbians who self-identify as femmes speak for themselves about what it means to be a femme today.”

I follow the tradition of black radicals (and their comrades) who do not capitalize the names of racial/ethnic/national categories, as a small refusal to give these categories undue power and attribute “objective reality” to them.

Some sources by participants: Michael Roberson’s work with the Ballroom Freedom School (→) and elsewhere (for example: →); Marlon M. Bailey’s “Gender/Racial Realness: Theorizing the Gender System in Ballroom Culture,” Feminist Studies 37, no. 2 (2011), “Engendering Space: Ballroom Culture and the Spatial Practice of Possibility in Detroit,” Gender, Place & Culture 21, no. 4 (2014), and more; and Jonathan David Jackson’s “The Social World of Voguing,” Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement 12, no. 2 (2002).

For Heels on Wheels, see their 2015 anthology, Glitter and Grit; for Femme Sharks, see →. Key to both, and to the fem/butch revival generally, are fat feminist and disability justice organizing—both in explicit opposition to normative (and highly racialized) notions of femininity.

The ideas about the importance of relation throughout this piece are tied to indigenous thinking about (right) relation, kin-making, and survivance, which can be found in work by (among many others) Qwo-Li Driskill, Audra Simpson, Kim Tallbear, and Métis In Space.

I use this somewhat clunky phrase because we don’t have simple, materially grounded language yet to refer to the range of overlapping social positions, lived experiences, and relations to structural power among the people who are the central subjects of this piece. The most common terms all depend (directly or indirectly) on centering the gender a person is assigned at birth by doctors or parents in collaboration with the state (“AMAB,” “originally male-assigned,” and their synonyms), on collapsing all of us into a binary and normative gender category (whether womanhood—“trans women”—or femininity—“trans femmes” as the phrase is generally used), or on both these moves (“MTF,” “women of trans experience,” etc.). My phrasing above reflects the concrete and materially meaningful distinction among trans and nonbinary people, as I see it: our direction of motion in relation to the pole of binary gender that holds structural and institutional power. It is parallel to “transmisogyny affected,” but focuses on the structural relationship rather than the enforcement mechanism. Practically, from here on, I’ll mostly use “trans women” as an umbrella term, in the expansive sense that has emerged over the last ten years, which includes both binary-oriented and nonbinary folks in motion away from manhood, with our wide array of relationships to the category of “woman.”

The two manifestos, and an essay on Radicalqueens by cofounder Cei Bell, are republished in Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation, edited by Tommi Avicola Mecca (the other cofounder of Radicalqueens). The manifestos are online at →.

The Transvestite and Transsexual Liberation statement was reprinted in Susan Stryker’s Transgender History, and is included in the same online anthology as the Radicalqueens manifestos.

Transsexual Menace was a trans counterpart to Queer Nation: a mid-1990s network of several dozen groups across the US that came together as needed for zaps and other (mainly media-oriented) actions targeting anti-trans organizations and events, and at times for other education and agitation work. Its T-shirts and stickers in the Rocky Horror Picture Show title font were a major part of politicized trans visibility for many years.

All four issues of gendertrash can be found online (along with other material related to the magazine) at →.

It’s important to note that thinking about trans folks who aren’t straight is central to any thinking about trans people, not a margins-of-the-margins question. The best demographic information we have on trans people in the US (from the 2015 US Transgender Survey and the 2008–09 National Transgender Discrimination Survey) shows that an overwhelming majority of us are not heterosexual: in the nonexclusive categories used in the USTS, 81 percent of trans women and 98 percent of nonbinary folks. A near-majority of trans women (including folks who are also nonbinary/genderqueer/agender/etc.) consider themselves queer, bisexual, or pansexual; another quarter use gay, lesbian, or same-gender-loving. The surveys’ methodology may be shaky—they asked about identity terms, not sexual or romantic partners’ genders—but the conclusion is not at all uncertain. Perhaps marking a certain discomfort with its own results, the report does not break down the 11 percent of its respondents who identified themselves as lesbians into its overall categories of trans women, trans men, and nonbinary folks (though the survey data would allow that to be done); its methodology definitively prevents us from distinguishing between trans dykes and trans lesbians.

All the text from “My Words …” is quoted from the version of the text published in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle’s The Transgender Studies Reader.

This embrace of monstrosity has been a continuing theme in trans fem and trans feminist aesthetics. A key example from midway between Stryker’s piece and the present is “the seam of skin and scales” by little light / Elena Rose Vera, available at → and printed in The Emergence of Trans: Cultures, Politics and Everyday Lives, ed. Ruth Pearce, Igi Moon, Kat Gupta, and Deborah Lynn Steinberg (Routledge, 2019).

This performance description is based on the brochure essay written by Paul Preciado for the 2020 exhibit “Lorenza Böttner: Requiem for the Norm” at the University of Toronto Art Museum, which is available at →.

I won’t try to dig into the interweavings of trans and disability politics beyond Böttner’s work, except to point out that what I’ve been describing all through this piece is the trans approach that’s parallel to the disability-justice framework, which has been developed (largely by queer and trans disablized folks) to directly address the shortcomings of the “social model” of disability that has guided advocacy and policy efforts for many years. See, for instance, Eli Clare’s writing (including Exile and Pride and Brilliant Imperfection), the work of Sins Invalid (→), and AJ Withers’s Disability Politics and Theory.

Quoted in a Tumblr post by Morgan Page that includes a link to watch the film, at →.

Quoted in curatorial notes for Tobaron Waxman’s “TOPOGRAPHIXX: Trans in the Landscape.”

Also from Tobaron Waxman’s curatorial note. The complicated relationship between Firestone’s writing and trans lives and trans feminist analysis is explored a bit here: →.

This commitment is visible more broadly in the Canadian trans world of the 1990s, with Vivian Namaste holding similar space as an organizer, researcher, and writer. See her Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People; Sex Change, Social Change: Reflections on Identity, Institutions, and Imperialism; and C’était du spectacle! L’histoire des artistes transsexuelles à Montréal, 1955–1985.

All these quotations are from a 1999 radio interview with Mirha-Soleil Ross by Nancy Nangeroni, on the GenderTalk program, which is available (with a transcript) at →.

For excellent contemporaneous critiques and analyses of this essentialism, see the “French Speaking Lesbian Consciousness” section in Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Julia Penelope’s For Lesbians Only: A Separatist Anthology.

All of these folks have written on the purges, and the latter three on the “sex wars” that followed them within lesbian feminist spaces. I especially recommend Beth Elliott’s memoir, Mirrors, which depicts trans women’s lives in the pre-purge lesbian feminist movement (though I’ve heard it may be best to read her forward to the latest edition after the rest of the book).

The forms of nominal androgyny that embodied this “authentic” womanhood may seem far less transgressive of conventional femininity now than they were at the time—but even then, jewish, black, and latina dykes pointed out how the prescribed norms of behavior and speech reproduced the conflict-avoidant, passive-aggressive style of normative WASP femininity (a tradition that has continued in the NGO sector, where those norms are now marketed and enforced, on trans women in particular, as “Non-Violent Communication”).

Parts of the leather scene remained comparatively welcoming, though with a great deal of variation.

One example: the Lesbian Herstory Archives, which Joan Nestle cofounded in the mid-1970s, has never excluded trans women, though how welcoming it has been in practice has varied through time.

Clippings containing an ad for the ball, and the letter attacking it—neither one dated or marked with a source—appear on a page with an ad for a 1927 ball presented by the same promoter, Jimmy Harris, in volume 10 of Carl Van Vechten’s as-yet-unpublished scrapbooks of queer and trans material (held at Yale’s Beineke Library).

As it has been by NGOs and elected officials invoking Layleen’s name as they advocate for jail expansion rather than an actual plan to close the Rikers Island jail that killed her. Similarly if more subtly, the provisions of reform efforts like the HALT Solitary legislation passed in 2021 (which does make some meaningful changes to New York State’s carceral system) would not in fact have prevented the torture through isolation that led to Layleen’s death. All this stands in contrast to grassroots groups led by and made up of trans folks of color, who have been heavily engaged in abolitionist work (many of them with direct ties to the ballroom world). Some NYC examples are the F2L Network (→) and GLITS (→).

For a detailed analysis of this tendency, focused on New York City and State, see Survived & Punished NY’s report, “Preserving Punishment Power” →.

See Edgardo Menvielle and Catherine Tuerk, “A Support Group for Parents of Gender Non-Conforming Boys,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 41, no. 8 (2002).

For more on trans-affirmative clinics, see Patricia Leigh Brown, “Supporting Boys or Girls When the Line Isn’t Clear,” New York Times, December 2, 2006 →; D. B. Hill et al., “An Affirmative Intervention for Families With Gender Variant Children: Parental Ratings of Child Mental Health and Gender,” Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy 36, no. 1 (2010); and Edgardo Menvielle, Catherine Tuerk, and Ellen Perrin, “To the Beat of a Different Drummer: The Gender-Variant Child,” Contemporary Pediatrics 22, no. 2 (2005).

See Sahar Sadjadi’s “Deep In the Brain: Identity and Authenticity in Pediatric Gender Transition,” one of very few publications based on extended on-site observation of clinic practices (both in interactions with children and families and—most importantly—among doctors in private), rather than relying on interviews and other forms of self-representation and publicity. It is available at →.

Simona Giordano, “Lives in a Chiaroscuro: Should We Suspend the Puberty of Children with Gender Identity Disorder?,” Journal of Medical Ethics 34, no. 8 (2008).

A physician-turned-researcher tells me that until Kenneth Zucker’s notorious “reparative therapy” clinic was finally closed down, he supplied so many patients to clinics specializing in puberty blockers that he was considered one of their biggest referrers and practical supporters. None of these clinics reported Zucker’s pattern of sexual assault on his patients.

Coauthorship is the best sign of doctors’ and scientists’ own understanding of their affiliations and alliances; it marks an even closer relationship than citation (which Sara Ahmed has pointed to as key to any analysis of intellectual proximity and influence). In trans healthcare, lasting patterns of coauthorship clearly establish that doctors portrayed as representing opposing positions in fact see themselves as part of a shared project. Two of the highest-profile doctors whose work trans liberal authors like Julia Serano contrast (at times by name), Peggy Cohen-Kettenis (an acclaimed “pro-trans” puberty-blocker pioneer and stalwart of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health) and Kenneth Zucker (a notoriously “anti-trans” “reparative therapy” advocate) provide a perfect example. Cohen-Kettenis and Zucker have published together in many different contexts over decades, from authoritative textbook chapters like “Gender Identity Disorder in Children and Adolescents” (Handbook of Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders, 2012) to explorations of alleged correlations between trans identity and finger-length ratios (Wallien et al, “2D:4D Finger-Length Ratios in Children and Adults with Gender Identity Disorder,” Hormones and Behavior 60, no. 3, 2008) and sibling sex ratio (Blanchard et al, “Birth Order and Sibling Sex Ratio in Two Samples of Dutch Gender-Dysphoric Homosexual Males,” Archives of Sexual Behavior, no. 25, 1996). The other authors on these and their other papers include both Cohen-Kettnis’s colleagues from the “pro-trans” clinics and some of the doctors most notorious for their anti-trans positions, Ray Blanchard and J. Michael Bailey among them.

For a brief examination of this history, in the context of the ongoing attacks on support for gender-dissenting kids and the temptation “to take the opposite position of one’s enemy,” see Sahar Sadjadi’s “The Vulnerable Child Protection Act and Transgender Children’s Health,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 7, no. 3 (2020).

This section’s title comes from “Sid’s Aria,” the turning point of Nomy Lamm’s 2000 rock opera, The Transfused.

These include the fiction anthology Nameless Woman (edited by Berrout, Elly Peña, and Venus Selenite in 2016); the double-dozen issues of the Trans Women Writers Booklet Series that Berrout edited and designed (available at →); and the publications of the ongoing River Furnace writers collective. Alongside these projects, Berrout has released her own poetry, prose, and essays and her translations of Venezuelan poet Esdras Parra and Argentinian organizer Lohana Berkins.

See →.

“Precolumbian Mix,” Mask Magazine.