History, Pride In Our Past

The history of the trans movement is lost in the past, our hero are hard to find because a lot of times they were looked down at and were considered to be suffering from a “degenerate disease” or a perversion which makes it difficult to find and interpret our past

Transgender Revolutionaries Profiled in New Documentary Series
Huffington Post Queer Voices
By Sara Warner
March 1, 2016

There is a growing transgender movement in America today, fueled in part by celebrity icons such as Laverne Cox, Caitlin Jenner, and Janet Mock, but trans and gender non-conforming people have always existed. Some have lived and loved quietly to avoid detection and discrimination while others have been political activists who openly and defiantly challenged unjust laws.

Transparent producer Rhys Ernst has teamed up with Focus Features, the distribution company behind The Danish Girl, a film about Lili Elbe, one of the first people to undergo sex reassignment surgery, to create We've Been Around. This series of documentary shorts, each about five minutes long, profiles six transgender pioneers. Importantly, the project draws on a wealth of talent in the trans community and features a number of artists, advocates, and academics, including trailblazing historian Susan Stryker, community leader Monica Roberts (a.k.a., the TransGriot blogger), and actress Alexandra Billings. We've Been Around premiered today across three different Time, Inc. websites (People.com, EW.com, and Essence.com) and simultaneously on Advocate.com.

One of the pioneers is Lucy Hicks Anderson, she because a figure in our history because of her arrest for perjury on her marriage license.

The trials of Lucy Hicks Anderson, a woman of color who became a successful entrepreneur during Prohibition, are the subject of the second video. Born Tobias Lawson in 1886 in Waddy, Kentucky, she insisted on being called Lucy and wearing dresses to school. After being outed as a transgender woman, Lucy and her second husband were sentenced to prison for fraud for falsifying her gender. "I defy any doctor in the world to prove that I am not a woman," Anderson told reporters. "I have lived, dressed, acted just what I am, a woman."

They also cover well known trans people like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, and also Lou Sullivan.

The final segment recounts the life of Lou Sullivan, an author, AIDS activist, and founding member of the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society. Sullivan was one of the first transgender men to publicly identify as a gay. While this declaration delayed his surgery, it helped health care professionals understand that gender identity and sexual orientation are discrete categories.

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Also Julia Serano has come out with a second addition of her book “Whipping Girl” and is reported in BuzzFeed,

The Lasting Transgender Legacy Of Julia Serano’s “Whipping Girl”
As a book that has become standard reading for trans women goes into a second edition, the author — along with trans women the book has touched — reflect on its incredible impact.
By Meredith Talusan
March 6, 2016
In the new preface to the second edition of Whipping Girl, Julia Serano writes poignantly about how little positive transgender representation existed when she wrote the book in 2007. “I remember explicitly thinking to myself that I was trying to write a book that I wish that I had had as a teenager or young adult,” Serano writes, “one that would help me make sense of both my inexplicable feelings that I should be female rather than male, as well as the conflicting messages that were constantly telling me ‘boys are better than girls’ and ‘women are only good for one thing.’” In the almost decade since the book was first published, Whipping Girl has become exactly that kind of book, recommended and passed around from trans woman to trans woman, as we all try to make sense of our lives.

Whipping Girl is a book about transgender politics and philosophy that comes out of Serano’s own experiences as a trans dyke in the first decade of the new millennium. It’s so effective in large part because its precise analysis is rooted in Serano’s urgent desire to communicate her ideas accessibly and transparently, so that both transgender and cisgender people can use them to change a gender system that oppresses transgender women. And because the book is clearly written, it is now often taught in college courses as an introduction to transgender issues. It’s the kind of success Serano did not anticipate, as BuzzFeed News spoke to her over the phone from her home in Oakland, California.
[…]
Whipping Girl is most famous for introducing the term transmisogyny into the language, which Serano uses to discuss the intersection of transphobia and misogyny that permeates the lives of trans women. She writes: “When a trans person is ridiculed or dismissed not merely for failing to live up to gender norms, but for their expression of femaleness or femininity, they become the victim of a specific form of discrimination: trans-misogyny.”
[…]
Another important concept in Whipping Girl that departs from both traditional models of gender and queer academic theories that try to dismantle them is the idea that gender isn’t simply a performance, but is the product of complex interactions between one’s subconscious sex and the social influences to which a person is exposed. Serano calls this the intrinsic inclinations model, as she asks readers not to deny that gender has a biological component, drawing from her academic background as a biologist.

I look forward to seeing what has changed or been added to this edition.