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[–]MarkTwainiac 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I purposely did not bring up men trying to give the impression that they are women because I thought that this thread was/is specifically about female people who "identify as" "trans men" and have altered their bodies and appearance significantly to give the impression that they are male. Such as Buck Angel, Aaron Kimberly Scott Newgent, Ken Pirie, Aaron Terrell, Chase Strangio, Mars, Aaron George, Stephen Whittle, Freddie McConnell. It's not about the males who are pretending and claiming to be women today.

Nor did I understand this thread to be about all the girls and women who are claiming to be "non binary" today like that Quinn person who played women's soccer/football at the Tokyo Olympics. Also, from my POV, the new "non binary" girls and women with their short hairdos and blue, pink and purple hued dye jobs aren't likely to raise any eyebrows - or even warrant second glance - from most women in women's loos and other spaces coz they don't really come off as all that "GNC" - at least not by the standards of the 70s, 80s and 90s. Lots of women had Annie Lennox- and Grace Jones-style short cuts, buzz cuts and even shaved heads in the 80s and 90 - and in the 70s, "androgyny" was a look aspired to by both sexes, hence the common hairstyles from shoulder length locks to the shag. From the early 70s on, tens of millions of girls and women also wore "unisex" and "masculine" clothing such as Dr Martens, overalls, men's Army surplus, flannel shirts, men's jeans, jackets, shoes, T-shirts, button-downs, cardigans, man-tailored suits and tuxes, mechanics-style jumpsuits, cowboy boots, men's jean jackets, down vests, men's overcoats, parkas, sweatsuits, hats, gloves, briefcases, etc - and we weren't considered "GNC" for doing so. I wore a man-tailored (but made for women) tux with a white wool dinner jacket with satin piping, a red satin cummerbund and black satin trousers to a school prom in 1972 - not to express "gender nonconformity," but coz it was a cool look and the height of cutting-edge style and I got a great bargain on it at a women's discount designer store.

Also, for the record, in the 1970s, 80s and 90s there actually were quite a number of guys in the US (and Canada and the UK) trying to give the impression they were women. And they were trying to barge into women's spaces back then as well. The first time I had personal, face to face experience with such men was in 1974. They were constantly trying to get into women's spaces - such as women's conferences, sports, social gatherings, festivals and the women's gym I used to go to in NYC - in the 70s, 80s and 90s.

Male transvestism, cross-dressing and "trans-sexualism" are not new developments that only cropped up and became visible and an issue for women and women's spaces in the present century. The heyday of the world's "sex change clinics" for male patients such as Georges Burou's world-famous one in Casablanca was in the 1960s and 1970s; the "sex change" clinic for males who wished they were women in Trinidad Colorado was going like gangbusters through the 70s, 80s and 90s. Gore Vidal's novel about a "male to female transsexual" Myra Breckenridge was published in 1968; the movie version starring Raquel Welch as the "MtF" title character came out a few years later. James Jan Morris's memoir of his "transition," Conundrum, was a best-seller in the UK, North America and elsewhere in 1974. Janice Raymond's feminist landmark book The Transsexual Empire came out in 1979. Richard Raskin/Renee Richards, who "transitioned" in the early 1970s made headlines soon after for "becoming a woman" and then suing for the right to play women's professional tennis; Richards won his case in 1976. John Irving's The World According to Garp featuring a former NFL star who became a "male-to-female" transsexual named Roberta Muldoon was published in 1978 and was a worldwide publishing sensation that became a best-seller in multiple different languages.

But whilst male cross-dressers, transvestites and "transsexuals" were well-known and fairly common in the 70s, 80s and 90s, their female counterparts were not. The flood of women taking extreme measures like ingesting T, getting double mastectomies and growing beards to try to look like men is mostly a phenomenon of the 21st century. Though it actually first started in the 1990s, as was documented in Ariel Levy's 2004 book Female Chauvinist Pigs and has been related by a number of women who lived through those times and were greatly affected by the new trend of taking T that emerged amongst some lesbians in places like SF and NYC in the 1990s.

[–]Omina_SentenziosaSarcastic Ovalord 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It not being the purpose of the thread doesn' t mean that it should be ignored, especially when it' s likely the main reason why women who present as men are kicked out of women' s spaces and also, probably, why OP has asked the question to begin with trying to use it as a gotcha.

Also, yes, transvestitism isn' t a new concept, but there is a huge difference between a bunch of men doing it and being shamed/mocked for it, not to mention having the law not on their side if they decided to use women' s spaces, and lots of men doing it and being celebrated and legally protected for it in the form of being allowed to use women' s spaces.