Transgender History: Toward the Future (1996-2007)
Filed by: Guest Blogger
March 18, 2008 9:30 AM
http://www.bilerico.com/2008/03/transgender_history_toward_the_future_19.php[EDITOR'S NOTE:] Frequent guest blogger Mercedes Allen has written a six part history of transgender people for the Project that is running weekly on Tuesdays. A listing of the other sections is at the bottom of the post.
It is interesting that it really wasn't until after Stonewall, when the GLB and T communities started to define themselves, that marked divisions occurred among them. From the earliest ages, gender variance and same-sex love were seen as connected and congruous, even if one aspect manifested entirely without the other. Before the oppression of the Middle Ages, both were also seen as equally innate and equally respectable. The rifts that began in the early 1970s (albeit with some earlier genesis in The Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis), deepening with third-wave feminism and other movements, would start to come closer together again as Western culture approached the new millennium, and as the various communities learned that they could distinguish themselves, and still learn to understand and respect each other. The trans community would remain outside the longest, not seeing any protective civil rights legislation pass until 1993. But as inclusion would spread, so would protections.
