The Rise of the 'Transgender Community'
http://www.bilerico.com/2011/07/the_rise_of_the_transgender_community.php (http://www.bilerico.com/2011/07/the_rise_of_the_transgender_community.php)
7/23/11
Cristan Williams
How did it come to be that transsexual people became a constituent member of a diverse community that at one time referred to itself as the "gender community" and is now known as the "transgender community"?
In my last post on the subject, I noted that there seemed to be at least five distinct arguments about the term 'transgender' taking place at the same time. In that post, I reviewed the cultural context of the word's usage in the 1970s and 1980s, with an eye towards understanding how it is used today - which I termed the "Cultural Context debate". In this post, I will address the "Historical Context debate": what can we learn from history about the "transgender community"?