A brief history of transgender issues
Prof Stephen Whittle, founder of Press for Change, runs through the key legislation, individuals and medical breakthroughs in the history of transgender issues
* Prof Stephen Whittle
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guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 2 June 2010 11.49 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/02/brief-history-transgender-issuesWhenever, wherever on this earth, we will find people who contravene gender boundaries. I'm not talking about the small ways of 'queering' gender, such as the lesbian separatists who wore dungarees in the 1970s. I mean the big ways: not just queering gender, but crossing gender. I mean the drive that makes people risk so much to represent a gender they feel is theirs, and yet is very different to the social, cultural and legal expectations of their birth sex. Whatever culture, country or epoch you choose to research, you will find a history of individuals who, if they lived now, we might now refer to as trans people.
We must be careful with our words. '->-bleeped-<-' originated in 1910 from the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who would later develop the Berlin Institute where the very first 'sex change' operations took place. 'Transsexual' was not coined until 1949, 'transgender' not until 1971, and 'trans' (a very British term) not until 1996. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of 'androgyne' was recorded in 1552, but it has only been in the last 10 years that people have claimed it for themselves to describe a state of being in-between, or having both genders. 'Polygender' is a late 1990s Californian invention used to describe a state of being multiple genders.
