When & where did the "transgender" movement begin? Seeking specifics.

submitted by our_team_is_winning from self.GenderCritical

All my teen years were spent in the 80s, the era of every color of hair; nail polish, makeup, and crazy clothes on male and female both; all sorts of subcultures: goths, mods, New Romantics, metalheads, all sorts. Dungeons and Dragons was a big thing, so RPG were there; and there were gay teens and androgynous teens, but never once did I hear anyone say "I was born in the wrong body" or "I'm really the opposite sex."

That just did not exist. Yeah, you'd hear about a RARE "sex change" operation in some other country or HSTS, but there were no Riley J. Dennis, Charlotte Clymer, Brianna Wu, etc. types. None. (Of course there was no internet nor smartphone to fuel one's narcissism.)

I keep hearing the TRA claim that "you oppose our existence," but TRA literally did not exist until recently. There were no parents support groups for "my child is actually the opposite sex." There were parents groups worried about backwards masking of "Satanic" messages in their kids' music (!)

This craze is less than 20 years old, isn't it? Did "Queer Theory" move into the universities under the guise of gay rights but then explode with the craziness?

Was it one particular semester at Columbia in the Sociology department that started this or what?

Trying to understand how the world I knew suddenly became Trans World. Any specific info is much appreciated.

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[–]censorshipment 8 insightful - 6 fun8 insightful - 5 fun9 insightful - 6 fun -  (6 children)

Sheila Jeffreys answers this. https://youtu.be/XYxR86x8Ev4

[–]our_team_is_winning[S] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

Men's Rights Movement in the 90s, fueled by porn. Got it. How are so many women on board with this????

I do wish there was a name other than "men's rights" because that sounds like custody battles in divorce cases. It's specifically Men's Sexual Fetish Demands isn't it. And I've got women telling me "it's who they are! Don't be a bigot. It's who they are!"

[–]censorshipment 6 insightful - 6 fun6 insightful - 5 fun7 insightful - 6 fun -  (1 child)

I think the MRA movement started before the TRA movement. White men were seething about three movements happening back-to-back-to-back: civil rights ('60s), women's rights ('70s) and gay rights ('80s into '90s).

[–]MarkTwainiac 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I think it's unfair to make such sweeping statements about "white men seething" over those movements as though this were true of all white men. For all the white men who were seething over these movements as you say, there were plenty of white men who actively supported the civil rights, women's rights and gay rights movements.

A look at what actually happened in the past will show that the legislatures and courts that ended up passing, changing or striking down laws and policies to be less discriminatory to racial minorities, women and gay and lesbians were predominantly, indeed almost entirely, made up of men - and mostly white men at that.

Moreover, some white men were actively involved in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. IIRC, a few were brutally murdered as a result.

The gay rights movements of the 70s, 80s and 90s was predominantly a movement of led and populated by white men.

[–]MarkTwainiac 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I think "male libertinism" is an accurate term for this movement.

Libertinism comes from the noun libertine, which means

a person, especially a man, who behaves without moral principles or a sense of responsibility, especially in sexual matters

[–]Kai_Decadence 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I think the reason why so many women don't question it is because they're afraid to. A lot of women are socialized to put others before themselves. They are the nurturers and they are expected to put the feelings of others, especially men, over themselves and so when they hear these delusional men blubbering over their "oppression", that part of their socialization kicks in and makes them go into "Defend the poor victim" mode. But as we've seen, there is a limit to this and that's how many peak trans when they finally notice how their kindness is being taken advantage of.

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

There's an article from the New York Times in which trans activists are interviewed and talk openly about how they targeted the gay rights movement for infiltration and takeover. This was because gays (and by "gay" I mean gays and lesbians) had built the infrastructure and donors already. The T very deliberately Trojan Horsed the gays.

I don't think it was the beginning, but the meeting of human rights and LGBT activists in Yogyakarta, Indonesia in 2006 that led to the Yogyakarta Principles was a definite milestone.

This is worth reading if you're wondering how gender ideology achieved a global stranglehold:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogyakarta_Principles

[–]our_team_is_winning[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yeah, I've seen that. And so strange that they would meet in Indonesia!

It reads like some extremists got together, made a list of demands, and somehow got various others to adopt parts of it. These people only represented themselves. "An international meeting of human rights groups" -- self-appointed. It's like if the SPLC, ACLU, HRW, etc. got together and wrote a manifesto. These are private groups that don't legally represent anyone.

It reminds me of the way some Islamic States try to force blasphemy laws through the UN. They want to make criticism of Islam an international crime. No. Bad enough their own people aren't allowed to reject Islam.

The United Nations doesn't rule the world. We don't have One World Government.

This seems directly at odds with puberty blockers, unless they say children can give consent:

Principle 32 recognizes a right to bodily and mental integrity, autonomy and self-determination, including a freedom from torture and ill-treatment. It calls for no-one to be subjected to invasive or irreversible medical procedures to modify sex characteristics without their consent unless necessary to prevent urgent and serious harm.

[–]MarkTwainiac 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Trans - particularly amongst males - has become a full-blown craze in the current century, for the reasons you cite. But it's not the case that it suddenly arose in the past 20 years. It's mushroomed and become widespread and dominant in recent years, but the seeds were being sown over the course of many decades.

I don't doubt you when you say that in the 1980s,

never once did I hear anyone say "I was born in the wrong body" or "I'm really the opposite sex."

But that doesn't mean no one was saying these things back then. Some men were making such claims for many, many decades.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a former US military man who went by the name Christine Jorgensen became a huge celebrity in the Western world for having undergone what was then called a "sex change." When Jorgensen died in 1989, the NY Times said

Miss Jorgensen said she had a normal, happy childhood but on growing up became frustrated by feelings that she was a woman trapped in a man's body.

https://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/04/obituaries/christine-jorgensen-62-is-dead-was-first-to-have-a-sex-change.html

Yeah, [in the 1980s] you'd hear about a RARE "sex change" operation in some other country or HSTS, but there were no Riley J. Dennis, Charlotte Clymer, Brianna Wu, etc. types. None.

In the 1960s & 70s in the Western world, the idea of males having "sex change" operations got a lot of coverage in the mainstream press. Whilst Christine Jorgensen appears to have been HSTS, the two biggest TIM celebrities of the 1970s - James Jan Morris and Richard Raskin Renee Richards - were both conventionally "manly men" who'd excelled in macho pursuits and careers who "transitioned" in mid-life after being married to women and fathering children. Like AGPs today, they called themselves lesbians after their surgeries and only had sexual/romantic relationships with women (Morris actually stayed with his wife after the two divorced).

To give you an idea how manly these two men were: Morris initially made a name for himself by writing of his travels alone in places off the beaten track in the Muslim world, and by being one of the men who climbed Mt Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary. Raskin/Richards attended male-only HS and university where he excelled in men's sports, including American football. Then he did a stint in the (male) military, where he continued to excel in male sports by being one of the US Navy's top-ranked men's tennis players. Raskin/Richards also went to an American medical school at a time when there was a cap on the number of women allowed to study medicine and get MDs in the US.

Conundrum, the memoir by Morris about his "sex change," was a huge English-language bestseller after it was published in 1974. In his memoir, Morris showed enormous male entitlement, sexism and misogyny. Yet Morris was widely celebrated for "changing sex."

In 1976, Richards sued in NY courts to be able to compete in US women's professional tennis - and won. Suing for that "right" seems very much a "TRA" move steeped in male supremacy, sexism and high-octane misogyny to me.

Gore Vidal's novel about a man who became a TIM due to medical "forced feminization" Myra Breckenridge, came out in 1968. In the movie version, this TIM was played by Raquel Welch - fueling men's fantasies that if they were to become women, they'd all of course look exactly like one of the hottest Hollywood female sex symbols of all time.

John Irving's The World According to Garp, a worldwide publishing sensation in 1978, featured as a main character Roberta Muldoon, a TIM who'd formerly been a famous NFL player. In the movie, to the casting director's credit, Muldoon was not played by a gorgeous woman like Raquel Welch, but much more realistically by John Lithgow.

In the 1960s and 70s, tons of gay male transvestites and heterosexual cross-dressers (in the mode of Grayson Perry and Eddie Izzard) were around. Which is why The Kinks's song Lola became such a hit when it was released in 1970.

In the 1950s and 1960s, transvestites and cross-dressing men hadn't yet seized enough power to become the/a dominant narrative in popular culture and political circles like today. In fact, they were scorned and derided. But they definitely were there. Everyone knew this, which is why no one blinked an eye over Norman Bates in the 1960 movie Psycho. And it's one of the reasons audiences in the 1950s found the film Some Like It Hot so funny and the character of Corporal Klinger in the TV show MASH so funny.

These and the large number of other popular TV shows, skits and of the 1950s-80s that featured "female impersonators" took behaviors everyone knew that some males did in private settings for sexual arousal and made them public - and in so doing, caused such behaviors to be publicly ridiculed as well as looked at with sympathy at the same time.

In the 1960s and 70s, a change began to occur. Starting first in hipster and avant garde circles and then spreading to the wider culture, men who engaged in transvestitism, "transsexualism" and cross-dressing began to be considered ultra cool and cutting-edge: Candy Darling, Lou Reed, David Bowie, the NY Dolls, glam rock.

Moreover, throughout the 1960s and 70s, the political movement behind male transvestitism, cross-dressing and "transsexualism" - all of which IMO are part of, and ultimate expressions of, the larger project of male libertinism - was indeed prominent, powerful and gathering steam with each passing year.

BTW, the father of my school mate's was an AGP who "became a woman" and started calling himself a lesbian in his late 40s in 1974. This wasn't happening all the time and being widely celebrated the way it is today, but it was going on.

For more history, I highly suggest reading Janice Raymond's The Transsexual Empire which was published in 1979. It's free on her website.

But several things that are happening today are indeed new and have cropped up only in the past 20 years or so as you say. These include: a) the concerted effort on the part of adults - parents, educators, the mainstream media - to indoctrinate children into gender ideology and strict sex stereotyping starting in infancy; b) the profusion of "childhood gender clinics" and "gender therapists;" c) the practice of sending children whom adults view as liking "the wrong" toys/clothes/manner of play for their sex to gender clinics to get them put on punishing, extreme medical pathways to change their bodies to better suit the strict sex stereotypes that adults have taught them to embrace; d) the trend of seeing all the attention-seeking, sexist and homophobic parents intent on transing their kids as "progressive" and "loving" rather than as regressive sexists committing child abuse in plain sight; e) the current fad for "changing sex" amongst female children, adolescents and young adults that's caused and is causing so many girls and young women to revel in - and preach to others - the toxic misogyny they have unfortunately been steeped in growing up and have internalized as self-hatred (and hatred for female people and being female) as a result.

Regarding how the craze for going "trans" started becoming popular amongst young lesbians in the US in the 1990s, I highly recommend Ariel Levy's 2005 book, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture.

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

I have the same memories as you. I remember being shocked that there were protests when Silence of the Lambs (1991) came out, over the portrayal of trans issues, but honestly few paid attention. In every day life, we just knew feminine men, butch women, lots of us didn't conform and no one felt a need for to explore and name this. Even in the early days of the web, it was just absent. I notice a lot of the most harmful ideas hijacked from academia ended up severely focused at tumblr and spread through fandom communities. They seem to have infiltrated and hijacked gen z; without that they'd still be without teeth. Heck, offline they're still without teeth unless you're at a specifically feminist or L space from what I've seen.

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

I'm about the same age as the OP, and I can confirm that in the 1980s, while I might have been distantly aware that a small number of people like Wendy Carlos went to Europe to get "sex change" operations, it seemed so rare as to have nothing to do with gay rights, which I got involved in around 1988. I helped found my university's first Gay & Lesbian organization, and a year later, it became Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual. I don't think it crossed any of our minds to include transgender because it simply didn't exist in our experiences. I didn't meet a transgender person until I was 26 and living in California, and I only met two other transgender people during that entire decade.

As to the history, there were various ideas that floated around among the early sexologists, like the idea of "inversion," where lesbians were seen as men in women's bodies, but, if you think about it, all that it steeped in trying to preserve heterosexuality and sex role stereotypes.

One name I haven't seen mentioned here is the controversial figure of John Money, who was in many ways the modern inventor of gender identity. You can look up his whole disturbing career.

Queer Theory didn't move into universities. It was invented in universities and collided with an already-growing movement of looking at the histories of actual lesbian and gay male communities along an ethnic studies model. Lesbian & Gay Studies was gradually displaced during the 1990s by Queer Theory, along with the rise of Gender Theory championed by its high priestess, Judith Butler. Butler's work was then translated and disseminated to a popular audience by people like Riki Wilchins, who was also involved in the Camp Trans protests against MichFest. Leslie Feinberg also helped popularize these ideas.

A number of figures involved in Queer Theory eventually became trans like Pat/Patrick Califia.

[–]WildApples 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Someone posted this link in LGBDroptheT: http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Esfos0060/LGBT_figures.shtml

It has a lot of charts that highlight the rapid increased in focus on transgender issues in UK charities over the years. I imagine the same trend could be shown in places like Canada and the U.S.