I Turned In My Homework

I just sent in my homework. Hun? I thought you graduated.

It is homework for a guest lecture I am giving at UConn in a couple of weeks, I had to send my Bio, a synopsis of my lecture and some reference material for the students to read.

My lecture is for a class called “Out to Lunch.” It is at the Rainbow Center and they have a series of lectures on current LGBT issues over lunch. My talk is

“Transgender Activist History: From World War II to the Present”
The lecture will look at transgender activist from World War II until the present. It will cover the history of the movement and notable transgender activists such as Sylvia Rivera, Dallas Denny, Virginia Prince and Christine Jorgensen. In addition, the lecture will look at the Stonewall Uprising from a trans-perspective and will cover legislative victories, defeats and betrayals, both locally and nationally.

And the reference list was,

Fienberg, L. (1998). 'I'm glad I was in the Stonewall riot'. Worker’s World. Retrieved August 1, 2009. From http://www.workers.org/ww/1998/sylvia0702.php

King, D., Ekins, R., (2000), Pioneers of Transgendering: The Life and Work of Virginia Prince, GENDYS 2k, The Sixth International Gender Dysphoria Conference, Manchester England. http://www.gender.org.uk/conf/2000/king20.htm

Sontag, D. (2015, August 29). Once a Pariah, Now a Judge: The Early Transgender Journey of Phyllis Frye. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/us/transgender-judge-phyllis-fryes-early-transformative-journey.html

I have at the end of the PowerPoint three pages of references; I had to cut it back to three references for the students to read.

I actually gave this presentation for the first time back in 2009 at another OTL lecture. The idea for this talk came about because of two events. The first was at the True Colors conference that year, I went to a workshop about LGBT history but it was really just LG history and afterward I talked to the woman giving the workshop about the lack of the “T” and she said that she was that familiar with our history… um why did you call it LGBT History? And she also had a PhD after her name.

The other thing was at a Pride, since it was 2009 and the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising they had all these posters of people who took part in the uprising and they had no trans people (Hmm… does that sound familiar?). When I questioned them about it what do you think they said?

When I was asked to give the lecture back in 2009 on a trans topic the first thing that I thought of was to do one on our history.

So anyway, for the last couple of weeks I have been working to bring it up to date and it was nice that the New York Times had that article the other day about Phyllis Frye, it kind of filled in some gaps that I had about her and I also added the Cooper Donuts uprising in 1959.