Editor’s Notes: Trans Awareness Week
Hello everyone! I am here with my first ever Editor’s Notes, because I have just hit publish on the last piece in my first ever package. It’s both fitting and not fitting that my first foray into leading a package was Trans Awareness Week — not fitting because I struggle with these sorts of gay themed holidays, fitting because I love a challenge.
Transgender Day of Remembrance was created in 1999 by Gwendolyn Ann Smith to honor the memory of Rita Hester, who was killed the year before. Trans Awareness Week was created in the mid-2000s to lead up to this day. Of course, a lot has changed in the past two decades. The last few years have shown an increase in violence against trans people, so, unfortunately, Trans Day of Remembrance is still relevant. But Awareness? Isn’t the increase in Awareness (and its sister Visibility) part of what has led to the increase in violence? There is an immense over-saturation of discussions by cis people about trans people — including by politicians using our lives for fear-mongering — and personally I’m just not sure awareness is the thing we need to be encouraging.
The question for me became: During the week where cis people are centering us even more, what can a publication do that tries to center trans people all-year-round?
I started thinking about when the week was first created and what gaps in awareness still exist. I started thinking about the 2000s and recent trans history. Sure, cis people are talking a lot about us in the most boring ways, but one conservative talking point is that we’re new. On the liberal side, there is an acknowledgment of our history, but sometimes in a way that lifts a handful of figures (Marsha P Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Stormé DeLarverie) to a sort of icon status that’s dehumanizing in its own way. That’s how I landed on the in-between. What does recent trans history look like from after Stonewall (1970) to pre-Tipping Point (2013)?
I worked with both team writers and external freelancers, and I feel really proud of the package itself. Stef did a deep-dive on the complicated legacy of Reed Erickson, For Them Social Media and Comms Lead Motti compared trans actors in cis roles of the past and present, Daven McQueen wrote about the history of the word genderqueer, and Eva Reign looked at trans characters in video games during the 80’s and 90’s. I also did a very meta look at Autostraddle’s own pre-Tipping Point coverage. That’s such a range of work! With so much fascinating history!
I’d never worked with outside freelancers before, so the biggest challenges for me were just logistical. Like, oh right, I need to get this new author to write a bio! Simple stuff like that. Thankfully, the writers were all patient with me. It is really interesting being on the other side after half a decade of working for Autostraddle as a writer. There are a lot of little things that go into publishing a piece and, especially, a package beyond just the writing and editing.
One thing, for sure, is next time I’ll start planning further in advance. I would’ve loved to have a more consistent visual aesthetic for the package but due to limited time I just kind of went with… desaturated. I mean, it made sense to me. If black and white or sepia communicate distant history, lightly desaturated images felt fitting for recent history. Then again, vibrant colors are maybe more attractive when it comes to getting people to read articles so while it made sense intellectually, I’m not sure it was the best move. Something to consider for next time!
There was also one other piece that just didn’t get finished in time, because it started to expand into something bigger. This is where planning earlier would’ve helped, but I also don’t mind the piece publishing later. As I told the writer, the great thing about working for Autostraddle is our trans writers aren’t limited to one special week. Any one of these pieces could’ve published at any time of the year.
I hope you enjoyed reading these pieces and learned something about trans history. (I know I did!) And thank you so much for being A+ members. Going back through the Autostraddle archive really emphasized how rare it is in the modern media landscape to have that kind of publication history. I love Autostraddle’s history and I love our present even more. Here’s to getting even more trans in the future!
This piece is part of our 2023 Trans Awareness Week coverage. Our Senior Editor, Drew Burnett Gregory, felt like cis people were plenty aware of trans people in 2023 thank you very much, so this week trans writers will be taking us back into recent history — specially post-Stonewall (1970) to pre-Tipping Point (2013).
From Birdetta to Flea: 12 Trans Video Game Characters From the 80’s and 90’s
Feature image of trans video game characters from Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VIII, Leisure Suit Larry 6, Final Fight, Super Mario Bros 2, and Final Fantasy V
For as long as I can remember, escaping into imaginary worlds full of adventure, magic, and fantastical beasts in novels and comic books has been one of my all-time favorite pastimes. But as much as I love to read, I really love to game. My first video game console was a broken PlayStation 1 passed down to me by my older brother. The only games I had were Spyro and Ready 2 Rumble Boxing. Spyro is still one of my favorite games today — that purple dragon has a special place in my heart — but Ready 2 Rumble let me live out another fantasy. While I have never had any interest in boxing or any other athletics, in this game I could play as a female character, and no one could stop me. At school, I got made fun of for being too feminine, but in video games, I could just be the girl I’ve always known myself to be. Shoutout to Sony for being my first ally.
Every trans person finds some way to express themselves before they find an accepting environment. For many of us, video games were that outlet. Today we live in a world where video game publishers create canonically trans characters, but what about before the Transgender Tipping Point? What about before I was even born?
I did a deep dive on all the retro video game characters that fans believe to be trans. I searched through Reddit, Tumblr, YouTube, and everything in between. I expected to only find a few characters, but I underestimated the nerdiness of our community. We’ve laid claim to a ton of people throughout the 80s and the 90s, and I love that for us. I also found quite a few trans characters were created for humorous purposes. I don’t love that. Whether we’re claiming a beloved, aspirational character or simply being mocked, the following characters are proof we’ve always been in the vast world of gaming.
Birdetta AKA Birdo – Super Mario Bros 2 (July 1987)
The first canonically transgender video game character is Birdetta who is also known as Birdo. Debuting as “Catherine” in the Japan-only PC game Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic from Nintendo, Birdetta was described in the game manual as “a man who thinks of himself as a female.” When the game was re-released in September 1988 in North America under the name Super Mario Bros 2, the game manual stated “He thinks he is a girl and spits eggs from his mouth. He would rather be called ‘Birdetta.” This insensitive language is very representative of the 80s, a time where many people were aware of trans women but invalidated our existence. Today Birdetta is seen as a trans icon in many gamer spaces, and she is still a major part of Mario’s pantheon of characters.
Tessy LaFemme – Caper in the Castro (May 1989)
In May 1989, C.M. Ralph created the first known video game with queer and trans themes. This point-and-click, murder mystery game follows Tracker McDyke, a lesbian private detective, as she searches San Francisco’s historically queer Castro district for her kidnapped friend, a trans woman named Tessy LaFemme. Ralph released Caper in the Castro as charityware and spread it through early bulletin board messaging systems. The game came with a short message asking people to donate to an AIDS charity of their choice. For years, the game was thought to be lost, but in 2017, an emulated version of the game became playable through Internet Archive.
Poison – Final Fight (November 1989)
Anyone who has gone to a video game arcade knows about Street Fighter. Created by Takashi Nishiyama, Hiroshi Matsumoto and Japanese video game company Capcom, this is one of the highest-grossing franchises in the world. In November 1989, Final Fight, a spin-off game, was released. Beat ‘em up games usually consist of buff men brawling with other men, but Final Fight was a game changer for gender representation with Poison, a non playable character (NPC), that players go up against. Poison was introduced as a member of Mad Gear, an enemy gang, in Final Fight, and her gender has been a long-time debated topic.
As game developers prepared to release Final Fight in the United States, there were concerns about how beating up a woman would be perceived. Poison and her palette-swapped gangmate Roxy were deemed “newhalf” which is derogatory Japanese slang for trans women. This change in character origin is obviously transphobic, for it implies that hitting a transgender woman is the same as hitting a cisgender man. When the game made it to Super Nintendo, a playtester in the States complained about the protagonist hitting women which led to the removal of Poison and Roxy. Capcom has since tried to retcon the origin story for these two by describing them as trans women who have undergone gender-confirmation surgery, crossdressers, and cis women. Street Fighter producer Yoshinori Ono stated, “Let’s set the record straight: in North America, Poison is officially a post-op transsexual. But in Japan, she simply tucks her business away to look female.”
Like a lot of trans women, people can’t seem to make up their mind on whether or not they see her as a legitimate woman and have a lot to say about her body. The controversy surrounding this fictional character isn’t all that dissimilar from any trans woman in the spotlight.
Yasmin – Circuit’s Edge (1989)
Developed by Westwood Associates and released by Infocom in 1990, Circuit’s Edge is a point-and-click adventure game based on the novel When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger. In this game, players follow Marîd Audran, a private detective, as he goes on a cyberpunk, dystopian journey through the Budayeen, a lively quarter of a fictional Middle Eastern city. During the game’s first quest, players meet Yasmin who is described as Audran’s “long-time ex-girlfriend, although she hadn’t been born female.” Audran uses her as a source of information. While Yasmin has no further appearances, other characters are specified as trans throughout the game.
Frozen Half – Akumajō Special: Boku Dracula-kun (1990)
Released by Konami, Akumajō Special: Boku Dracula-kun created for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) which is known in Japan as the Famicom. It follows self-proclaimed Demon King, Kid Dracula, as he wakes up from a long term sleep and learns that he’s been challenged by a demon named Galamoth. Kid Dracula journeys through Castlevania to go after Galamoth and fight Galamoth’s army. During the ice stage of the game, Galamoth’s servant, Frozen Half, attacks Kid Dracula. In the game manual, she is described as okama, Japanese slang that can refer to trans women, gay men, and/or crossdressers depending on the context. When Frozen Half later appears in 1991’s Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, she’s described as “newhalf” and has had a redesign where she appears more traditionally feminine.
Various Characters – Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender (1992)
Before Y: The Last Man there was MicroProse’s Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender. In this point-and-click adventure game, players follow the titular protagonist Rex as he searches for a missing vase on Terra Androgena, a strange planet that seems to be solely inhabited by cis women. To continue procreation, the women on the planet created a machine, the Cosmic Gender Bender, to change their sex for short periods of time. One could argue that this game is full of trans people since the inhabitants swap genders at random. According to blogger Martin Smith of TransmitHim!, the game’s biggest challenge is putting up with “out-dated, casual chauvinism and transphobia.” Sounds like a regular Tuesday to me.
Faris Scherwiz – Final Fantasy V (1992)
The Final Fantasy franchise is beloved by many trans and queer people. I’m a huge fan myself, so when I learned there was a gender nonconforming character from the early 90s, I flipped out. In 1992, Japanese video game publisher Square (succeeded by Square Enix) released Final Fantasy V for Nintendo’s Super Famicom which is known internationally as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Born Princess Sarisa Scherwil Tycoon, Faris was lost at sea and raised by pirates to be a boy. Faris goes back and forth between masculine and feminine pronouns and wears masculine clothing. Many fans have claimed Faris as a trans or nonbinary character while others see Faris as a masculine woman. Either way, she is the first known playable gender nonconforming character in a video game.
Shablee – Leisure Suit Larry 6 (1993)
The Leisure Suit Larry franchise consists of 10 releases and three remasters where users play as titular character Larry Laffer, a middle-aged cis white man with no game. In these adult-themed sex comedy games, Larry attempts to seduce young women with few success stories. Leisure Suit Larry 6, like the five releases before, is a PC point-and-click game, but in this edition, players meet Shablee – the first Black trans character in a video game. She is a “dark-skinned makeup artist” Larry meets at a resort. After the two hang out, they begin to hook up and Larry learns Shablee is trans. When he pulls out a condom, Shablee takes it and puts it on her own penis instead. Larry has a violently transphobic reaction to her reveal which prompts the game to misgender her by referring to her with masculine pronouns. After her reveal, the narrator of the game quips, “No wonder Shablee knows what a man likes” in the classically transphobic “gotcha!” action that ruled the 80s and 90s.
This was the most disheartening discovery I found during my research. The first Black trans character in a video game was created to be ridiculed and then discarded by society. Larry throws up after seeing Shablee’s erect penis and is seen washing his mouth out the following morning because he kissed her. The scene is reminiscent of Stan (Evan Peters) in season one of Pose who washed his mouth out after kissing Angel (Indya Moore). Shablee represents so many of the girls who never made it beyond the 90s because a man they came across couldn’t handle their attraction toward them. Shablee represents our fallen sisters of yesteryear like Rita Hester, Venus Xtravaganza and Dorian Corey. In many ways, Shablee represents me and the girls of today. We are all just trying to live our best lives, but the bigots of the world rather see trans women as punchlines in their own stories as opposed to fully realized human beings with something to offer. There is no mention of Shablee after her date with Larry, but I like to imagine she found a man actually worth her time.
Boethiah – The Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994)
The first game in the Elder Scrolls series, The Elder Scrolls: Arena was released in March 1994 for Microsoft. This open-world RPG fantasy game takes players on an adventure through Tamriel, a large continent full of various cultures, magical creatures and supernatural forces. Arena was one of the first games with a realistic day/night cycle with shops closing at sunset and streets clearing at night when monsters roam until morning. Throughout the series of monster-fighting quests, players meet Boethiah, a Daedric Prince, who shifts between female, male and genderless personas. Boethiah is another character with a debated gender history. I think it’s pretty fair to call Boethiah nonbinary.
Flea – Chrono Trigger (1995)
Developed and published by Square, Chrono Trigger was released for Super Nintendo and is the first game of the Chrono series. As of March 2003, Chrono Trigger was Square Enix’s best-selling game with nearly 2.7 million units shipped. This RPG allows players to time travel to different eras from prehistoric to the Middle Ages and a post-apocalyptic future. Throughout their quests, characters battle enemies, make friends, gain allies and obtain magic. One of the boss characters is Flea whose gender has been interpreted differently by many players. In the game, characters refer to Flea as a woman, but Flea says, “Male… female… what’s the difference? Power is beautiful, and I’ve got the power!”
Sheik – The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998)
Zelda has a fierce queer and trans fanbase. Many fans of the franchise have argued that the main character Link is trans. Others have made an argument for Princess Zelda herself because of her alter ego. In 1998’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Princess Zelda goes into hiding as a boy named Sheik to get away from Ganondorf, a tyrant, and to guide Link during his quest. Some argue that Sheik is trans because Zelda used magic to change herself, but other people believe it was just a change of clothing. Either way, it’s giving gender nonconformity, and we love that. Welcome to the Alphabet Brigade!
Adel – Final Fantasy VIII (1999)
Many characters in the Final Fantasy franchise have been speculated to be trans or gender nonconforming because of their appearance. Adel is a special case. In 1999’s Final Fantasy VIII, players come face-to-face with a powerful sorceress who has caused a lot of confusion for people in the fandom. While the game indicates that only women can be sorceresses and Adel searches for a girl to be her successor, her pronoun usage shifts depending on the language used. In the original Japanese dialogue, no gender is indicated. In English, feminine pronouns are used. In French, both masculine and feminine pronouns are used. In the Italian version of the game, she is given the feminine name spelling “Adele.” I began looking through game forums, and I quickly exited each one because the transphobia was too much to handle. Whether or not Adel is canonically trans is irrelevant, she’s a fan favorite for being a certified badass.
HONORABLE MENTION: Samus Aran – Metroid (1986)
I debated including Metroid’s Samus Aran on this list. Out of all of my findings, Samus Aran has caused the most heated gender debates I’ve seen over a fictional character. In 1986, Nintendo released Metroid, the first mainstream video game featuring a playable female character, as stated by Guinness World Records in 2013. In 2015, The Mary Sue published “Metroid’s Samus Aran is a Transgender Woman. Deal With It.” which sparked a lot of controversy. The article currently has around 2300 comments. In 1994, the game developers were asked by the writers of the official strategy guide of Super Metroid if Samus had any secrets. Hirofumi Matsuoka worked on the original design for Samus and claimed she “wasn’t a woman” but actually “newhalf.” Since then there has been discussion on whether or not to take this offensive commentary seriously. For many fans, this is enough which would make Samus Aran “canonically a 6 foot 3 transgender woman,” as Twitter user JinkiesJerrica stated. The people stating that she isn’t trans are going off physical characteristics which feels pretty transphobic.
Trans people exist in every form of media, and we always have. In video games, like in film and television, a great deal of our past representation was created with malice. But despite these poor intentions, we reclaim our narratives with pride.
Hopefully Nintendo will give Samus a coming out party one day soon. Either way, I think I’ve found my next cosplay idea.
This piece is part of our 2023 Trans Awareness Week coverage. Our Senior Editor, Drew Burnett Gregory, felt like cis people were plenty aware of trans people in 2023 thank you very much, so this week trans writers will be taking us back into recent history — specially post-Stonewall (1970) to pre-Tipping Point (2013).
Beyond Gender Identity: A History of Trans Actors in Cis Roles
Feature image of trans actors in cis roles: Michaela Jae Rodriguez in Loot, Sandra Caldwell in The Cheetah Girls, Morgan Davies in Evil Dead Rise, Holly Woodlawn in Women in Revolt, and Patti Harrison in Together Together
It’s Transgender Awareness Week, which means for seven days and seven days only, trans folks like myself will be visible to the world. We’ll be featured as models in fashion campaigns (given a ton of visibility with zero protection), people will read our books (read a 3 page excerpt PDF), corporations will honor and celebrate us (temporarily add a trans flag to their LinkedIn banner), and our loved ones will uplift us to demonstrate their allyship (let us know when we’re misgendered in their presence).
It’s a special time to be trans and I’m certainly not one to complain about getting a little extra attention, but sometimes it’s nice to take a break from constantly being aware of my own trauma or the trauma of my trans siblings. You see, when I say I want trans representation in TV and film, I’m not always talking about stories that focus on a character being disowned by their family or being denied healthcare or experiencing a hate crime. No, I’m talking about stories where the trans character’s transness isn’t the focus — where they’re allowed to be the worst behaved one or simply hot and getting laid or just really fucking good at their job.
For this reason, I went on a deep dive to investigate the history of these kinds of roles for trans actors, how they’ve evolved in modern media, and where we’re still missing opportunities for complex trans characters.
Andy Warhol and Paul Morrisey’s 1971 film Women in Revolt is an excellent satire of the Women’s Liberation Movement and a “fuck you” to Valerie Solanas, a sex essentialist who also happened to be the person who SHOT WARHOL IN THE STOMACH. The reality behind the making of this movie makes watching transfeminine actresses Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, and Jackie Curtis deliver absurd lines coated in privileged white feminism all the more delicious. Rather than playing characters rooted in the trauma of being trans, the three play over-the-top characters rooted in the trauma of being cis white women during second wave feminism. It highlights the absurdity of the time in all the right places. I mean come on, trans actresses playing over the top cis characters? What a concept.
Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling in Women in Revolt (1971)
Another 20th century film with surprisingly gender fluid casting is Law of Desire (1987), which tells the story of a filmmaker, his boyfriend, and his lover. Gay! But also… Trans! He has a trans sister, played by cis actress Carmen Maura, who has a cis ex-girlfriend played by trans actress Bibi Fernández. Dykes! Man, this movie just keeps getting better. Not only does Fernández play a cis woman, but she also gets to be the selfish, slutty type. She abandoned her own daughter to take up a new lover in Italy because she’s really, really hot… more of this please.
During this time period, there were also trans performers who made careers by being stealth. And as someone who is incredibly invested in seeing a trans James Bond in my lifetime, I’d be remiss to not discuss Caroline Cossey, the first trans model to pose for Playboy. Cossey played the role of “Girl at Pool” in For Your Eyes Only (1981), making her arguably the first trans Bond Girl. Cossey was egregiously outed following the film’s release and, like many other trans performers, was thrust into a life of advocacy thereafter. She took a truly horrid experience and turned it into something beautiful: tangible, positive change for trans folks to come. I think it’s rad that she’ll be known in history as a Bond Girl and fierce advocate for trans and human rights.
The most notable example of an actor working while stealth is Sandra Caldwell, a trans actress who, until 2017, spent her 35 year-long career playing cis roles. Considering what happened to Cossey and other out trans people, who could blame Caldwell for not wanting the attention of a largely transphobic public eye? Given the limits of Hollywood’s imagination, Caldwell would not have been cast in the roles she played had the industry known she was trans. It actually wasn’t until Caldwell played a trans character for the first time in the stage production of Charm that she came out publicly.
Sandra Caldwell in The Cheetah Girls (2003)
Caldwell belongs to the Baby Boomer generation, whose out trans population is only .1%. She says herself that trans folks now have much more freedom and don’t have to hide as much. Perhaps this is true in part because of the growing number of young, out trans folks, now reported to be 2.3% of Gen Z. I’m not sure what came first, the chicken or the egg (no pun intended). Did the rise in self-reporting create more complex roles for trans folks in media or did the increase in media representation for trans folks help more people come out? I have to imagine both are and will continue to be true. That’s kind of like… the whole argument for representation, right?
To that point, it was much easier for me to find modern examples of trans actors in complex roles than it was to find the ones mentioned above. Many trans actors in the 20th century and through the 2010s did not just play roles on-screen — they also played a role in social justice and advocacy spaces that made the introduction of a new generation possible. This new generation of trans actors are more and more getting to act in complex roles — cis, trans, and unspecified — and I am eating them up every chance I get.
Patti Harrison, for one, has a number of roles in her filmography that are complex outside of her transness. For example, in Together Together (2021), Harrison plays a gestational surrogate named Anna, which is about as overtly cis a role a trans woman could play.
But my favorite Harrison role — and one of my all-time favorite television roles period — is Ruthie on Shrill (2019 – 2021), the NSFW coworker of my dreams. I live for the harmless drama she brought to every episode and the way in which her transness was explicit, yet not the most interesting thing about her. Sure, Ruthie is trans, but did you know she’s also a veteran?! There’s one scene in particular that stuck with me after multiple rewatches which is in the episode “Salon” when Amadi (Ian Owens) thinks he’s having this tender ally moment with Ruthie, just for her to reveal that she lives with her boss and his partner not because her birth family disowned her, but because her chosen family is rich and she doesn’t have to pay rent. This was a moment Harrison constructed herself with the hopes to give Ruthie a story free of trauma porn and pity, yet rich in humor and depravity.
Patti Harrison in Shrill (2019-21)
Michaela Jaé Rodriguez made history when she became the first trans woman to be nominated for a lead acting Emmy for Pose in 2021. Her performance, and the show itself, are wildly important to trans storytelling in media, especially because it centers the Black trans femme perspective. Contrastly, in Loot (2022–), Rodriguez plays the role of Sofia: a hardworking, confident, take-no-bullshit, nonprofit Executive Director who’s reluctantly tasked with making sure her rich, incapable boss (Maya Rudolph) doesn’t fuck everything up. It was sweet to watch Sofia grow throughout the first season without her transness being mentioned once, and instead focus on her efforts to let her guard down a bit and have a little more fun than she typically allows. I’m glad the strikes are over and production on Season 2 can resume so we can see more!
I can only hope that Zoe Terakes performance as Hayley in Talk to Me (2023) will inspire filmmakers to create more on-screen trans bullies who have beef with the female lead. Okay… I’m begging. Hayley’s 90’s lover boy haircut and cunty attitude make them the perfect troublemaker to instigate the plot of one of my favorite movies of the year. When the character is first introduced, it’s through gossip about a party they’re throwing, making Hayley out to be the popular girl in school with an exclusive invite list. Boy were we wrong. Upon entering the party, we’re greeted by a menace in a short-sleeve-over-long-sleeve look that we transmascs know all too well. To say I was delighted would be an understatement.
Another favorite of mine is the absolute treat that is Nicole Maines as Lisa in Yellowjackets (2023). I know what you’re thinking, “Motti, Yellowjackets is literally a show all about trauma, how are you gonna tell me Lisa doesn’t have trauma?” Listen here, punk, Lisa does have trauma. In fact, she has mommy issues! But the issue is her mom is controlling, not that she’s transphobic. In fact, her trans identity doesn’t even get brought up! I’m hungry for more Yellowjackets for many reasons, most of them being gay, and Lisa is definitely one of them!
It’s never explicitly said that Danny in Evil Dead Rise (2023) is trans, but between the bleach blonde mullet, singular earring, chain, and LITERAL DJ SET IN HIS BEDROOM… Morgan Davies gave a performance that screams transmasc 20-something year-old in Bushwick. This was my first introduction to Davies, but I’m told with excitement that he’s in the new live action One Piece as a character named — get this — Koby, so I’ll definitely be checking that out.
Morgan Davies and Lily Sullivan in Evil Dead Rise (2023)
Complex roles for trans folks are much more abundant now than they were five, ten, and sixty years ago. And while I’m psyched to see that many of these parts allow actors to dig into something other than their transness and trans trauma, there remains a secret, more complex third option: explicitly trans characters who are just as complex as the ones whose transness is barely — or never — mentioned.
Look at me, trying to find a middle ground. Who am I, Dax Sheperd? All I’m saying is that we’ve seen the characters whose transness make up their entire personality, and as a result, their entire value (Che Diaz in And Just Like That, Max in The L Word, Sophia Burset in Orange is the New Black). We’re also now seeing characters played by trans actors whose transness is not so much a part of their characterization, if at all (Viktor in Umbrella Academy, Ellie in The Last of Us, Dr. Barbie in Barbie).
What about a character who’s loud about their transness but their entire thing is that they suck and fuck or that they’re annoying as hell or they’re a futuristic alien hunter? Could you imagine if McLovin from Superbad (2007) was a trans woman played by a trans actress?
You thought girl Superbad (Booksmart) was good? Wait until you see trans Superbad.
This piece about trans actors in cis roles is part of our 2023 Trans Awareness Week coverage. Our Senior Editor, Drew Burnett Gregory, felt like cis people were plenty aware of trans people in 2023 thank you very much, so this week trans writers will be taking us back into recent history — specially post-Stonewall (1970) to pre-Tipping Point (2013).
The Complicated History of Reed Erickson, A Different Kind of Trans Resistance
Feature image of Reed Erickson courtesy of the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.
Reed Erickson (center) with girlfriend Daisy Harriman (left) and Michele, 1963.
When we look at resistance history, we have a tendency to focus on the most public-facing activities. We envision demonstrations numbering in the hundreds or thousands taking over entire buildings, blocking highways and train stations, and preventing boats from leaving their ports. We think of organizers vandalizing the homes or corporate offices of people and corporations responsible for some of the most terrible atrocities we’ve ever witnessed. Or we remember moments where organizers took over radio and television stations or the stages where politicians were speaking.
I see why we do that — they’re flashy, they’re impressive, they make us feel less lonely, and their coverage in the media has the power to get other people thinking about the issues at hand. But this leaves out a lot of other resistance strategies and a lot of people who work to improve our society.
I’m always thinking about resistance that happens behind the scenes, the things people do to create material change without putting themselves or their work in the spotlight. When I’m digging through archives and researching online, I’m on the look-out for people who challenged the norms of our society and created pathways for other people to do the same — even in ways we wouldn’t normally classify as resistance.
I don’t know if Reed Erickson would think of himself as being among an assemblage of people who did this kind of work. After all, his legacy is quite complicated and he was an extremely private person who evaded most attempts at public attention for his contributions. But when I think about people who had the power (and money) to do something and then did, I think of Erickson and all he accomplished.
Reed Erickson grew up in a middle class suburb in north Philadelphia where his engineer father owned a lucrative lead smelting business. When Erickson graduated from college in 1940, his father moved the business to Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Erickson followed to attend Louisiana State University’s school of mechanical engineering. While going to school and working in the family business in Baton Rouge, Erickson met a female partner (her name has been withheld from all archival documentation at the family’s request) who he was with prior to his medical transition in the early 1960s. From there, he and his partner moved back to Philadelphia.
Erickson didn’t start working towards trans liberation until he was middle-aged, but his early adult life was peppered with involvement with progressive politics and left-leaning political inclinations. In 1948, he and his partner campaigned for Henry Wallce of the Progressive Party, they hosted Paul Robeson — yes, Paul Robeson — at their home in Philadelphia, and Erickson was even fired from his engineering job for refusing to fire his secretary on the grounds that she was a suspected member of the Communist Party. Erickson’s father died in 1962 and left the family business to Erickson, which he managed to expand and run successfully for a number of years.
I can’t be certain that his father’s death is what gave him the freedom to seek medical transition but it certainly seems that way from the sequence of events. In 1963, Erickson sought the help of Dr. Harry Benjamin who had a track record of treating people with hormonal replacement therapy for what would later become known as gender dysphoria. According to sociologist Aaron H. Devor, Erickson had his name legally changed in Louisiana in 1963 (Devor says it was a legal first for the state to change a name due to a “sex change”) and then underwent gender affirming surgeries in 1965. Although he originally sought treatment from Benjamin for himself, it was their relationship that precipitated a different dream for Erickson.
I want to be clear: this is a very abbreviated account. The truth is, Reed Erickson lived an incredibly rich life that was also marked by drug problems, divorces, protracted legal battles, and a very public falling out with ONE, Inc., the legendary gay rights organization that Erickson helped fund for much of its early existence. In addition to that, some of Erickson’s early work was done in conjunction with not just Benjamin, but also Dr. John Money, whose work many people (especially trans people) regard as terribly misguided at best and violent and dangerous at worst.
I don’t think the less flattering parts of Erickson’s life should be ignored just because he was able to accomplish so much in a time period when there was so little care and support for trans people. In the 1960s, the field of gender identity research was extremely limited, particularly in the U.S. There weren’t a lot of doctors, like Benjamin and Money, who were willing to take the risk of addressing “transsexualism.” In fact, it was this absence of available treatment and ongoing research in the field of gender identity that pushed Erickson to use his money — and the power bequeathed to him as a result of having said money — to do something about it.
Once Erickson’s treatment was “complete,” he didn’t just turn around and continue living his life. He used his newfound sense of whatever he was feeling — I imagine something close to freedom — to make sure other trans people could feel the same way. In 1964, Erickson founded the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF), a philanthropic organization that was established to fund projects, institutions, and research to help trans people get the gender affirming care and treatment they needed. Through the EEF, Erickson funded the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA) — now called the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) — and helped subsidize the opening of the Johns Hopkins University Gender Identity Clinic.
The EEF also funded years of the annual International Symposium on Gender Identity, an event that helped gather together doctors from all over the world to discuss their medical research and advancements in the treatments of “transsexual” patients. Through their work at the symposium, the HBIGDA became the first medical organization in the U.S. to develop standards of care for transgender people: the Standards of Care for Gender Identity Disorders. The Standards of Care became a living document that has been amended year after year as new research and new clinical practices in the treatment of trans people evolve.
Beyond the contributions to the medical care that trans people received then and now, the EEF also provided mental health support and aid to trans people seeking help in understanding themselves. The EEF published and distributed newsletters and publications to trans people who needed information on gender affirming care and support in discovering the possibility of trans life. They also kept an in-person office with a phone line, both of which were open to anyone who needed support and wanted to call-in or stop by to get it.
Of course, Reed Erickson was in a unique position to do this work that most trans people are not. Through the inheritance of his father’s business, his growth of that business, and his sale of it, Erickson was able to amass a small fortune that is wholly inaccessible to most of us. And any good organizer knows that philanthropy technically doesn’t change the material conditions of the people it’s intended to help. In most cases, I think that’s absolutely true.
However, when I examine Erickson’s contributions, it feels much more complicated than that. Erickson wasn’t technically an organizer and the EEF wasn’t necessarily started as a political organization working towards the liberation of trans people. In fact, the mission of the EEF was “to provide assistance and support in areas where human potential was limited by adverse physical, mental or social conditions, or where the scope of research was too new, controversial or imaginative to receive traditionally oriented support.” From this vantage point, it seems like Erickson’s work with Benjamin (and Money and many others at the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic) wasn’t just about providing critical care to trans people but also to push the boundaries of what people understood as “normal.”
This reality is most closely reflected in who was able to take advantage of the foundation’s support and Benjamin’s and the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic’s treatment. Although it’s estimated that Benjamin treated more than 1,500 trans patients over the course of his career, the majority of the people who could both afford to make the trip to Benjamin’s clinic and take advantage of treatment options were middle to upper class white trans people who exhibited Benjamin’s very narrow and specific set of symptoms for “gender identity disorder.” The EEF’s funding didn’t help alleviate this lack of access for other trans people, and Erickson stayed incredibly rich until his death in 1992.
But even with those limitations Reed Erickson’s contributions were significant to the material conditions of trans people’s lives. It’s important to recognize the fact that gender affirming care almost always guarantees happier and more fulfilling lives for trans people. While it’s true that any real liberation movement would address and attempt to solve the problems I’ve noted, it’s also true that the creation and existence of the institutions he funded made it possible for many other people to receive treatment. The advancements in these treatments and care for trans people that came out of the institutions he personally bankrolled have been improved upon as the years have gone by, and that wouldn’t have been possible if they never existed in the first place. And even though trans healthcare is still not as accessible as it absolutely should be, Erickson’s funding of this essential research helped the field grow and move forward toward a more substantial level of accessibility. It took a lot of courage and a lot of tact — and, sure, the privilege granted to him through his class position — to not only live publicly as a trans man in the 1960s and 1970s, but to provide medical institutions with the funding necessary to give others the same opportunity.
When we think of resistance, we don’t often think of it this way. But even as a person who thinks immense wealth is a crime against humanity, I can’t deny that Reed Erickson used his class position and the power that came with it to actually affect vital and lasting change.
This doesn’t absolve Erickson’s wealth hoarding, but I do wonder if it can serve as an example for what’s possible in our current moment of legalized anti-trans violence. Challenging the legal discrimination and exclusion of trans people in public and in the courts is, no doubt, an essential part of the fight for our lives and our ability to live them. But I wonder if sometimes we forget the fact that many of us have to live our lives — and figure out how to afford therapy, gender affirming care, etc. — regardless of what happens with the law. There are many organizations working to provide critical mental health support to trans people around the country who desperately need it, yet the anti-trans violence keeps coming. And the more extreme the violence gets, the more I find myself wishing we had a network of care and relief that could not only provide mental health support to trans people experiencing the effects of these laws but could also help us make the material changes needed to improve the conditions of our lives overall. A lot of people might roll their eyes at the idea of the redistribution of wealth and a lot of people probably feel overwhelmed at the thought of movement building, but if one guy could change the trajectory of trans history simply by throwing a bunch of money at the lack of trans healthcare in this country, I think we could pull together — especially those of us from privileged and powerful class positions — to work towards the same.
At a time when gender affirming care wasn’t just unusual but was also illegal in some places, Erickson and the EEF were able to pull the resources together to create a pathway to both help create the very first standards of trans healthcare and help provide that treatment to many people who needed it. Right now, we’re standing at the crux of a historic moment where many people are faced with the same decision as Erickson. Do you make the choice to resist and figure out how to create the conditions necessary to get people the care they need? Or do you use your privilege and power to shield yourself from the more damning effects of the anti-trans violence we’re all experiencing?
I’m not saying we need another Reed Erickson, but I do think we can use the lessons we’ve learned from him and the Erickson Educational Foundation to conceive of a more liberatory path forward, a path even he couldn’t imagine.
This piece is part of our 2023 Trans Awareness Week coverage. Our Senior Editor, Drew Burnett Gregory, felt like cis people were plenty aware of trans people in 2023 thank you very much, so this week trans writers will be taking us back into recent history — specially post-Stonewall (1970) to pre-Tipping Point (2013).
In Genderqueer, a Word To Call Home
At St. James Catholic Preschool, where I had my first years of education, Power Rangers was the recess game of choice. I rarely participated, having no knowledge of the show and little patience for the squabbles over plot and character that took more time than the game itself. The roles were limited anyway: with only six Rangers and a couple of villains, a group of kids was always left spectating.
I agreed to play only once. It was at the request of my best friend Nolan, whose patience for two-person make-believe only went so far. He reserved our spots with sometimes-bully Benton, and when recess came, we gathered at the jungle gym with the other Rangers-to-be. Immediately, one of the girls, Stephanie, informed me that there was a problem: only the Yellow Ranger and the Pink Ranger were girls, and they were already taken. Thinking nothing of it, I told her I would happily play the Green Ranger, since that was my favorite color, anyway.
This, I quickly learned, was not an acceptable response.
I have no memory of whether the game started, or if I ended up being a character at all. All I know is Stephanie laughed in my face and told me that wasn’t allowed. Then, later that day, during arts and crafts time, she pulled out an easel and told us all to gather around. I didn’t think much of it at first; Stephanie had always liked attention, and I figured this was another one of her performances. I watched her take out a pink marker and a green marker, coloring in a messy circle on the whiteboard with each one.
“Pink is for girls,” she told us, pointing to the pink circle. “Green,” she pointed now to the green circle, “is for boys.”
This was classic Stephanie, making up arbitrary rules and trying to convince everyone to follow. I stayed at the back of the circle, only half paying attention. Then I heard my name.
“Daven,” Stephanie said, pointing at me now with an accusatory finger, “likes green.”
I don’t know what I said to Stephanie, or how any of my other classmates reacted, but I remember being furious. It wasn’t so much the insinuation that I wasn’t a girl. It was the limits she was placing on me because that’s what she thought I was supposed to be. That’s what I thought I was supposed to be at the time too. I didn’t know there was any other option.
Joke’s on Stephanie, in the end: the following year, she was one of the only girls in my kindergarten class not to get an invitation to my birthday party. (My mom said I didn’t have to invite anyone I didn’t like, and I didn’t pull any punches.) And almost two decades after her attempt to humiliate me for not being enough of a girl, I realized she was right. I wasn’t even one to begin with.
I first encountered the word “genderqueer” during my mid-2020 lockdown-fueled gender reconsideration era. I’d come to accept a few truths about myself:
- I wasn’t a girl.
- I wasn’t a boy.
- I didn’t like the colors of the non-binary flag.
So it started as a superficial thing, more about my aesthetic disagreement with the pairing of purple and yellow than any real beef with the term itself. But as I tried “non-binary” on for size, I kept running into its limits. It felt incomplete — a clinical term, a technical definition, describing what isn’t instead of what is. I had recently seen some Instagram infographic about using “non-men” as a way to describe, well, people who are not men, and the creator expressed their dissatisfaction with the term. What was the value of a word that centered the very thing it was trying to exclude?
I felt similar sentiments toward “non-binary,” and for a while refrained from using it. I didn’t quite vibe with “trans,” either, because I was presenting very feminine and still thought I needed more marked changes in appearance to claim transness. (I would learn later that being trans isn’t about physical appearance or binary notions of “passing” and these days I happily use the word to describe myself.) When I came across “genderqueer” while scrolling through a list of LGBTQ+ identities, it was the first time I really felt seen.
In the grand scheme of queer terminology, “genderqueer” is a pretty recent addition. It surfaced in the mid-to-late 90s, perhaps first used in print by Riki Anne Wilchins in the spring 1995 issue of In Your Face, the newsletter of trans rights organization Transexual Menace. “[The political fight against gender oppression] is not just one more civil rights struggle for one more narrowly defined minority,” Wilchins writes. “It’s about all of us who are genderqueer.” She goes on to list a number of gender identities and expressions that fall under the genderqueer umbrella.
The early uses of “genderqueer” in the late 90s often referred to individuals whose presentation challenged the conventional expectations of their assigned gender, regardless of their actual gender identity. While that remains true, in the early 2000s the term began to function as a gender identifier of its own. 2001 saw the founding of United Genders of the Universe, “the only all-ages genderqueer support group, open to everyone who views gender as having more than two options.” In 2004, evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden referred to “genderqueer” as defining the third-gender space that exists in many non-Western cultures. By the time I was drawn to the satisfying pastel green and purple stripes of the genderqueer flag in 2020, I was joining a long lineage of people who eschewed the gender binary.
Some things I love about “genderqueer”:
- It’s a wiggly word. I don’t know how to expand on this except to say that I see it in my head in wavy purple block letters, Word Art style. Much like my gender, it’s weird, spunky, and hard to read.
- It has “queer” in it, a word I love, but, as a lesbian who will defend identifying specifically as a lesbian to the death, I don’t often get to use in describing my sexuality.
- It holds so many possibilities. As an umbrella term, it provides a home for the many specific gender terms from outside the binary, from agender to genderfluid and everything in between. And on its own, it conveys a sense of expansiveness that I’ve felt about my gender since before I had the words to identify it; a joyful space of experimentation and potential.
In early October, author Davey Davis tweeted: “resurgence of genderqueer is so interesting.” The responses are eager and earnest, a chorus of “We’re back!” and “We’ve been here!” It was this tweet that planted the first seeds of this essay, reminding me of my roots and the word I fell in love with when I was still trying to give my gender identity a name.
Despite my initial identification with “genderqueer,” I’ve more or less left the word behind in the past few years. “Non-binary” is just more common; it’s recognizable to people outside of the queer community, and at this point it’s listed on some forms at work and the doctor’s office. I started using it more because it was a step toward acknowledging my gender in a way most cis people in my circles could understand. It was palatable to them.
“Palatable” is a strange word to use here, because, of course, trans identities of all stripes are presently under severe political and personal attack across the U.S. What I mean is that “non-binary” is palatable to a specific, but nonetheless broad, crowd of liberals whose allyship begins and ends with the memorization of politically correct language — and, since I live in Boston, those are people I often find myself around. For them, “non-binary”is well-circulated; it’s used with enough regularity in the New York Times and on Netflix originals to give it credence. I rarely hear genderqueer used by anyone who doesn’t identify as genderqueer themselves.
This is not to say that these liberal circles are uncomfortable with the word “genderqueer.” (I don’t have data to back that up.) But I do suspect there’s a reason why it was “non-binary” that became the third-gender term of choice. It acknowledges the capacity of one’s gender to be something besides woman or man… and that’s about it. “Non-binary” makes no attempts to describe what exists in the space beyond, only slots those of us who claim it into another defined category. I would bet this problem of language is in part responsible for the narrow understanding of how a non-binary or genderqueer person can look and behave.
When your gender is defined by what it isn’t, it’s harder to make space for what it is.
I have no idea where Stephanie is today. She moved away the summer before first grade, and we weren’t exactly primed to keep in touch. Nolan and Benton went on to different elementary schools, and I’ve long forgotten their last names. I think about them all sometimes, and I wonder who they’ve become.
But the person I think about most from that class is one I haven’t mentioned yet. His name was Cole, and he was quiet and blond and not someone I particularly considered a friend. I don’t think he ever got a role in Power Rangers. But as we were leaving class after Stephanie’s little show, he stopped me and whispered, “It’s okay. I really like the color pink.”
It meant a lot to four-year-old me to know I wasn’t alone. I wonder what Cole is up to these days, twenty-something years removed from that preschool playground. I wonder if he’s queer.
I don’t hate the word “non-binary.” I have nothing against people who feel represented by it; I use it to describe myself and likely will continue to do so. But it barely scratches the surface of who I am and the identities I am proud to hold.
My gender is a grand and beautiful thing. It has too much presence to be defined by an absence. It exists beyond explanation, more expansive than anything a scrambling of letters could capture. But as long as I’m operating within the constraints of language, as long as I exist in a society that demands categorization, “genderqueer” is the word that holds me best.
This piece is part of our 2023 Trans Awareness Week coverage. Our Senior Editor, Drew Burnett Gregory, felt like cis people were plenty aware of trans people in 2023 thank you very much, so this week trans writers will be taking us back into recent history — specially post-Stonewall (1970) to pre-Tipping Point (2013).
Autostraddle Before the Tipping Point: A Trip Through the Archive
This piece is part of our 2023 Trans Awareness Week coverage. Our Senior Editor, Drew Burnett Gregory, felt like cis people were plenty aware of trans people in 2023 thank you very much, so this week trans writers will be taking us back into recent history — specially post-Stonewall (1970) to pre-Tipping Point (2013).
When I came out as trans in 2017, I knew Autostraddle as a publication where trans people were welcome. Pieces from trans writers had popped up on my Twitter feed and, once I knew to look, there was an entire archive that helped me better understand myself.
This year for Trans Awareness Week, I wanted us to focus on recent trans history. The parameters I set were post-Stonewall (1970) to pre-Tipping Point (2013). As far as I’m concerned, cis people are too aware of trans people in 2023, but that awareness is often accompanied by the ignorant idea that trans people are new. That’s why this recent historical time period felt so essential to me. Not only have trans people been around in distant history — we’ve been around throughout the lives of anyone still living today. That distinction may feel redundant, but I think it’s important to remember.
Once we started thinking about this era, our team realized that Autostraddle itself is part of that history. Founded in 2009, there was half a decade of trans coverage — and lack of trans coverage — before Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time.
I’m fascinated by the way individuals and publications can grow. Rather than look to the past to retroactively prove someone or somewhere is bad, I think it’s worthwhile to observe how people and places get better. When I came out in 2017, this site had positive connotations to me. But that environment didn’t happen by accident. It was the result of trans people changing this place for the better and cis people welcoming that change.
There’s a clear journey from Riese as an ally criticizing the treatment of Max on The L Word to trans-related news stories to a photoshoot of a band with one transmasc member to trans writers getting space to answer 101 questions to, finally, trans writers getting to write complex, personal, and unique pieces like their cis counterparts.
All of that is worth revisiting through an archival lens, but I’ve gathered together about two dozen pieces that are especially representative of Autostraddle’s pre-tipping point journey. There are some real gems here, especially in the pieces from trans writers. Enjoy!
Disclaimer: If you’re someone who does not want to read terms used for trans people from 2009 to 2013 then this piece isn’t for you! There’s nothing I personally deem offensive included here, but even the way trans people talked out about themselves during these years was different.
Chaz Bono Talks About His Gender On AM TV And We Like It. by Riese (November 2009)
“Now, let’s get to the linguistic violations! The Associated Press sets a bad example with ‘Chaz Bono says beginning the sex-change process to turn him from a woman to a man is ‘the best decision I’ve ever made’ in Chaz Bono: Sex change is his ‘best decision’, a headline that’s repeated by about 200 other newspapers.
We’ve encountered this issue on Autostraddle before and I was surprised that so many people didn’t know ‘sex change’ is passe.”
Trans Photographer Amos Mac: The Autostraddle Interview by Laneia (February 2010)
“Amos: It was a blast working with Margaret (Cho). She is hilarious, warm, wonderful! Rocco and I had met her in October when we were asked to be part of the music video she was directing for the band GIRLYMAN. Margaret wanted the video to consist of queers, trans people, femmes and butches, as the song, ‘Young James Dean,’ is about butch identity, so her vision was to get as many different types of queers as possible in the video. Rocco and I really bonded with her while shooting it. We just really clicked as friends. Now we call her our ‘TranMa’ (a play on the term Grandma) and she calls us her TranSons. She loves OP and as she is an incredibly outspoken person, she was easy to interview and of course fun to photograph.”
Being Trans Is So Hot Right Now, At Least for Celebrities and Models, Kinda by Rachel (December 2010)
“There’s nothing wrong with recognizing the achievements and accomplishments of trans people. Lea T’s career really is inspiring, and attention should be drawn to the careers of women like Connie Fleming and Candy Darling, the trans fashion pioneer of the 1970s. But to write a full-length article gushing over the trans community’s having ‘made it’ because of a few modeling contracts without even acknowledging that from January to June of ‘the year of the transsexual,’ there were reported 93 murders of trans people, and that that’s only a fraction of how many probably really took place, feels like it’s willfully misunderstanding the climate.”
xxboy Meets World by Sebastian (January 2011)
Note: This piece is the start of trans writers getting the space to write their own pieces. Sebastian wrote several more articles over the next year. I love that even in this 101 piece Sebastian is allowed to be as voicey as the other writers on the site.
“When Laneia and Riese first contacted me about writing for Autostraddle, I had a whole bunch of mixed emotions. The fanboy in me who’d read every Real L Word recap pretty religiously had an “OMG THEY LIKE ME?!” moment. The queer in me was honored and excited about the opportunity to write for a site that is so prominent in the world of non-hetero culture. The man in me felt a little out of place and possibly ignored.
The opportunist wondered if this would help me get jobs and/or girlfriends.”
Trans Etiquette 101: No Offense, But That’s Offensive by Sebastian (February 2011)
“7. Do not ask what the person’s birth name was. There is absolutely no reason for you to need to know this and it is likely something this person wants distance from. It is a particularly offensive question when phrased, “What is your REAL name.” After all, Sebastian is my real name and has been since I started asking people to use it.”
Where the Bois Are: Bklyn Boihood is the Future by M.J. (March 2011)
Note: This is a piece about the Bklyn Boihood collective who would go on to write a handful of pieces for Autostraddle.
“Ryann returns with the story of how it all started — the modest, yet inspired beginnings of a very Big Thing: ‘Back in 2009, we were just hanging out at Genesis’ place. We’d been talking about how we don’t really see ourselves represented in a lot of ways. We didn’t see ourselves at the parties we were going to, we didn’t see ourselves in the organizing world, in any sort of medium.’”
What Do You Mean You’re Not Monogamous by Bklyn Boihood (Akwaeke Z Emezi) (March 2011)
Note: Yes, THAT Akwaeke Emezi. I had no idea they’d written for Autostraddle and discovering their pieces was one of the coolest things about this trip through the archive. I also love that this is a piece about non-monogamy, not specifically about transness.
“I never thought of how I handled relationships in terms of monogamy or nonmonogamy, those specific labels. It didn’t occur to me that there was a term for my preferences, and when it did, I freaked out because I thought, “How can someone want to be with me if I can’t give them what makes them happy?” Everyone I’d been involved with deeply wanted monogamy, and they seemed to be part of an overwhelming majority. I didn’t want to not be able to give that to them, but eventually I reached a point where I had to put my foot down, throw my hands up and say it: I don’t want to be monogamous. Never have. Ever. Ever.”
I’m Just Your Typical Urban Hipset Femme Twentysomething Trans Lesbian by Annika (April 2011)
Note: Trans girl lesbians have arrived! Annika wrote a bunch for the site over the next two years. Annika, if you’re reading this, let me buy you dinner whenever we’re in the same city.
“In many ways, I am your typical urban hipster femme twentysomething lesbian: I work for a greentech startup that has nothing to do with my liberal arts degree. I worry about our generation’s internet addiction (mine included). I spend a lot of money on vinyl and concert tickets. I moved to San Francisco last summer, but I’ll never start saying “hella.” I voted for Prop 19. I’m secretly mad that my love of British slang makes me cliché.
Oh, and I’m a transgender former-University-of-Southern-California-Frat-Boy.”
Chaz Bono Doesn’t Speak For Me: Reluctance About the “Reluctant Transgender Role Model” by Oliver Baez Bendorf (May 2011)
“I in no way want to invalidate Chaz’ suffering, or the suffering of any trans person for that matter, but I take issue with the insinuation that our lives are unendurable. There is suffering, yes, but why must that always be the throughline? There’s such a lack of nuance here—it’s not always that neat equation of once I was suffering, but now life is perfect.”
Annika and Sebastian Answer Your Trans* Questions (Part Deux) by Annika (July 2011)
“Q: What happens if/when someone chooses to not fully transition? I mean, that happens sometimes, right? Like if someone can’t afford surgeries or get them for health reasons?
SEBASTIAN: We don’t really use the terminology of ‘full’ transition, because a full transition means different things to different people. Sometimes people don’t have all the surgeries or procedures or medical interventions because of financial reasons, but often times it is because not every trans person needs or wants every type of medical intervention.”
Trans* Characters Are Increasingly Portrayed By, Surprise, Actual Trans* People by Annika (July 2011)
“My only concern is that trans* actors will be restricted to portraying only trans* characters- this would be a shame, because it would both ignore a lot of talent and reduce us to merely our trans* experiences. I can only speak for myself. Being trans is an important part of who I am, it certainly doesn’t define me as a person. So Zooey Deschanel, if you’re looking for a co-starlet for your next film, I’m your gal.”
OPEN THREAD: Trans Day of Remembrance by Annika (November 2011)
Note: Autostraddle articles used to have robust comments sections, so 34 in this thread is not a lot. But it still touched me to see trans people in 2011 gathering at Autostraddle to reflect on Trans Day of Remembrance.
“Today is a reminder that we all must take responsibility for combating transphobia. It’s about making our voices heard and taking a stand against bigotry and hatred. It’s about creating a future in which the next generation of trans* kids can feel safe and proud of who they are.
Until then, we must honor our dead. Please feel free to share your stories and feelings in the comments section below.”
Gender Blender: An Intimate Film About Life Outside the Gender Binary by Vanessa (January 2012)
Note: There were discussions of non-binary identities, especially from Bklyn Boihood, but this still feels like a shift toward normalizing that experience.
“So how do we fight that situation, how do we break the binary, how do we make the world a safe space for other people to express their true genders once we’ve finally got a handle on our own and the confidence to live openly and truthfully? Well if you’re Lauren Lubin, you decide to make a movie about your experience transitioning from female to gender neutral, and you aim to educate the world so that eventually things will change.”
19 Terribly Interesting Tips On Raising a Trans Kid (From a Trans Kid) by Morgan M (April 2012)
“Don’t equate “Mommy I want to wear girls clothes” with “Mommy is the stork going to make a second trip to drop off my vagina?” Just because your child has these feelings doesn’t mean they are trans, genderqueer or simply fabulous. However, they do need the space to figure themselves out, and if you deny them that I guarantee you the feelings will only intensify over time. If you deny them this chance to express themselves in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone, it will only lead to complexes, trust issues and even more identity issues. SPOILER ALERT: everything you do as a parent makes these.”
Sarah McBride: The Autostraddle Interview by Carmen Rios (May 2012)
“I found out her favorite Spice Girl is Ginger (formerly Baby, but who didn’t outgrow Baby?). But I didn’t even have to ask her for Top 5 Words About Coming Out because as soon as we dug in to what it was like for her, she spurted them out.
‘Surreal. But surreal in a good way. Comforting. Liberating and more than anything – empowering,’ she said, leaning back after thinking hard about each one.”
In a Bind Helps Get Trans* Youth Out of One by Maeve (September 2012)
Note: The first comment on this piece is: “Eh… what’s with all the trans stuff lately?” It made me laugh seeing that, because it’s the kind of comments my pieces have received since writing for Autostraddle. A sign that Autostraddle has had “trans stuff” for a long time and that some cis people always think we’re new.
“‘The program is all based on donations. It’s in the spirit of helping out your own,’ says Kit. Binders are frequently donated by transguys who have had top surgery, changed size, or found a size or style that works better for them. In a Bind also accepts donations of new binders, as well as monetary donations used to offset shipping costs.”
Michelle Kosilek’s Surgery Raises Questions About Trans* Prisoners’ Rights by Rose (September 2012)
“The fact that there’s so much misunderstanding about trans* rights even in more progressive circles does a lot to explain why even normally pro-LGBT politicians, like MA Gov. Deval Patrick and Elizabeth Warren have come out against Kosilek on this issue. Although Warren’s statement — ‘I have to say, I don’t think it’s a good use of taxpayer dollars’ – isn’t quite as strongly-worded as that of her opponent in the Senate race, Scott Brown, who called it an ‘outrageous abuse of taxpayer dollars’ and referred to a possible overturn of Judge Wolf’s ruling as ‘common sense prevailing.’ There seems to be particularly dismay at Warren’s stance, though, since she’s someone who has made a career out of standing up for the downtrodden, and would be expected to be on the progressive side of things when it comes to both trans* rights and prisoners’ rights.”
Call for Submissions: Trans*Scribe by Riese (February 2013)
Note: This is when everything changed. This call for trans women writers brought so much talent to Autostraddle — including future editor Mey Rude — and really shifted the kinds of pieces trans people could write on the site. It’s kind of wild to think this happened because Annika decided to take an indefinite internet break. Seriously, Annika, thank you for everything.
It’s really worth reading the wide range of pieces that were born from this series.
“So here’s what we’re looking for: writing from queer-identified trans* women — personal essays, features, lists, interviews, advice, anything!”
Getting With Girls Like Us: A Radical Guide to Dating Trans* Women for Cis Women by Savannah (March 2013)
Note: I do want to highlight this one piece from the series. Writing about sex as a trans woman on the internet is challenging and as someone who has done it a lot here, I appreciate this piece for paving the way.
“I happen to have had a couple of awesome relationships with cis women who were already in long-term, (explicitly) non-monogamous relationships. That said, I can’t help but notice there seems to be a pattern in which I am invited to be someone’s ‘thing on the side.’ While I can’t know for a fact if this is because I’m trans, I have heard other trans women relate similar things. In principle, I have no problem entering into such relationships with someone I trust and with whom I feel genuinely close. I’m just saying I know I’m not the only trans woman who feels a bit frustrated when this kind of thing seems to be on constant replay.”
Trauma Queen: An Autostraddle Book Review and Interview by Mey (June 2013)
Note: I just want to note this moment when trans people started being interviewed almost exclusively by trans writers!
“Janet Mock just wrote a blog post highlighting the problem that trans* women of color’s stories so often get pushed out of the way and purposefully silenced. Your memoir is one of the books she mentions that’s changing that. How did it feel to be mentioned in that blog post?”
Real-Life Sofia Bursets: Transgender Women Face a Nightmare in Men’s Prisons by Mey (July 2013)
“The problem isn’t trans women being placed in men’s prisons, or trans prisoners being denied medical treatment, the problem is the entire system. There are no good cops or good prisons, all of them work towards the goal of white supremacy and terrorizing, torturing, locking up, and murdering Black people. Police and prisons must be abolished now.”
Mira Bellweather and “Fucking Trans Women” Zine: The Autostraddle Interview by Kennedy (August 2013)
“So much of what I read about sex and what I have seen out in the world stresses one point over and over to the point where it’s completely useless: communication. Yes, communication is important. Yes, we need to learn how to talk about our bodies. But one of the most common issues I hear about from other trans women is over-thinking everything, and being too preoccupied with our bodies to really enjoy sex.
I have a sort of mantra that I repeat to myself: if you’re in your head, you’re not in your body.”
Laverne Cox, Superstar: The Autostraddle “Orange Is the New Black” Interview by Mey (August 2013)
“I just wanted to tell the story as truthfully as possible. I believe what artist do is take pain and turn it into art. Some of those moments which are similar to moments I’ve had in real life I got to make art out of and I’m so grateful for that.”
And I’m so grateful to all of the trans people who spoke to and wrote for Autostraddle in its early years. I hope this space only gets even more trans with every passing year. <3
On The 6: Confronting the Mortality of Girls Like Me
Feature Image via Shutterstock.
It’s Trans Awareness Week, the week leading up to Trans Day of Remembrance on November 20th. When we say that Autostraddle is website primarily for queer women, we want to be 100% clear that that includes queer trans women and that it’s important to honor trans women year-round, not just in obituaries. So all week long we’re going to be spotlighting articles by and about trans women, with a special focus on trans women of color. We hope you’ll love reading everything as much as we’ve loved writing and editing it.
Today is Trans Day of Remembrance, the day we look back and remember the trans people who’s lives have been taken in the past year. This was an especially bloody year for the trans community, resulting in a record number of murders against trans people in the US, all of whom were trans women, and nearly all of whom were Black and/or Latina. The names of the trans women who have been murdered this year in the US include Papi Edwards, Lamia Beard, Ty Underwood, Yazmin Vash Payne, Taja Gabrielle DeJesus, Penny Proud, Kristina Gomez Reinwald, B. Golec, Keyshia Blige, Mya Hall, London Chanel, Mercedes Williamson, Jasmine Collins, Ashton O’Hara, India Clarke, K.C. Haggard, Shade Schuler, Amber Monroe, Kandis Capri, Elisha Walker, Tamara Dominguez, Keisha Jenkins and Zella Ziona. For a more complete list of trans people killed around the world in the past year, please visit the Trans Day of Awareness website.
Assembling myself for the daily interrogation of my femininity is a careful procedure. As a woman in New York City I must be desirable enough to navigate public spaces of transportation comfortably, but subdued enough to be left alone. As a trans woman, getting catcalled is the relief of my gender being read correctly muddled with the fear of my name appearing on social media in honor of my life the next day. When I’m riding the uptown 6 train on my way to work in the very privileged and beige Upper East Side, violence isn’t supposed to exist. Trauma wasn’t meant to happen at 9 a.m. on that August morning. Not when I was running on time, and somehow missed the long line for the day’s first cup of coffee. Nothing could have warned me that the meticulous construction of my person would be unraveled while my peers watched from their own cocoons of solitude.
Before that day in August, I associated the 6 train with Jennifer Lopez’s first album, On the 6, referencing her daily commute from the Bronx to Manhattan. It was the only album of my older sister’s that I was not allowed to touch, which only cemented its importance in the tapestry of femininity that I was assembling. With lyrics like If you want to live your life, live it all the way and don’t you waste it we followed J.Lo’s lead into our earliest concepts of agency and re-claiming space. The dance beats and affirming lyrics could mean whatever we needed them to mean as we co-existed in our own varying degrees of girlhood. I imagined a purposeful Jennifer riding into Manhattan, drowning out the voices of catcallers with the promising vibration of the city that would eventually launch her into the small blue stereo that my sister kept beside her bed. When I arrived in New York City, I was able to call upon the memory that resonated across all the distinct representations of girlhood in my family. On that unassuming morning in August, my attacker intruded on this fortifying recollection. Every train ride has turned into a return to the scene of the crime, with my time being spent calculating the minutes between each stop until I reach my destination. Sexual assault has stained the details of my life while revealing itself in my daily actions. The decision to wear a skirt has become a confrontation with my mortality, and the mortality of girls like me has become a trending topic.
While commuting during the 9 o’clock hour, one must maintain the appearance that they are on a solitary mission, looking anywhere but the eyes of the people pressed up against them. On that morning I was successful in mirroring the performance of my peers until I felt an unwelcome intrusion on my backside. I was ready to chalk it up to someone’s gym bag, but gym bags don’t lift up your dress and grab your arm. All of the feminine voice training disappeared, and I could only plea for help through desperate glances around the train compartment. As he exposed my flesh to the cold air conditioning of the train, I knew he was moments away from discovering the part of my body that had caused an incorrect assignment when I entered this world. I felt myself becoming a social media fixture, my Instagram selfies being shown across news stations.
As the headlines misgendering me appeared in my mind’s eye, the train stopped and I was able to pull myself free and stall the death that had felt inevitable ever since my first injection of estrogen. By this time my voice had returned, and my cries were unapologetic. The morning continued all around me, and New Yorkers granted me privacy while on their own linear paths. I had become one of the distractions that cause everyone to turn up the volume on their headphones.
During those desperate moments of looking for empathy in any form, I called myself to task for all the times I turned up my own headphones to avoid the sounds of another person’s pleas for aid. The daily requests for kindness become part of the scenery after five years in this city. It wasn’t until I was asking for help that I realized the resentment New Yorkers experience towards the people brave enough to request a helping hand. Strength, in New York, is measured by the ability to master pain in solitude, and vulnerability is the biggest threat towards this notion. Our self imposed isolation keeps us from salvation. We resent the courageous for asking for tenderness from their peers, something largely unlearned in the name of maintaining an air of control. As we see the lives of trans women being extinguished, especially black trans women, this also becomes apart of the landscape of our virtual lives. We honor these women as long as they are not a threat to the online presence we carefully curate. Let us say the names of the lives taken from us while being proud of the trans women that have survived up until this point. Let’s allow the trans women amongst us to enrich our lives, and enable their journeys to exist alongside our own.
Extending a hand to the trans women we know, and especially to the trans women we do not know, can feel like it has nothing to do with our development or our experience. Trans women are all around us, and they have always lived among us. It’s in all our best interest to make sure these women are cared for, loved and heard. When the people we coexist with are taken care of, it heightens the quality of our own lives. When the most marginalized group in our culture is given shelter, it’s a triumph for every corner of our society. It brings us closer to the idea of community that only seems to exist in essays and think pieces. It loosens the grip of the constraints placed upon all of us by gender. It takes us from running around in circles of discourse to making sure tangible basic needs are being met. Trans women deserve to contribute to the world and no longer carry its weight, often standing at the intersections of race, class and expression, which only makes the weight heavier.
Most women, cis or trans, have been the recipients of genital-based oppression. Most women, cis or trans, have been told they are not feminine enough or not beautiful enough to deserve love. Our issues are the issues of anyone who wishes to abolish being told who you are before you have introduced yourself. The deaths of trans women this year, especially black trans women, tell us that visibility has not challenged the specific brand of misogyny that is killing us. It has only reassembled itself around the most vulnerable in our community. Women like me haven’t been able to heal from the stark reality that our bodies are unwillingly political statements, as we fear our death being the next number added to the growing list. This doesn’t end here, as we must get used to the possibility of that one of our sisters will be taken from us. A casual stroll through our Instagram feed turns into images of women like us who have been taken and debates over our humanity.
Including trans women doesn’t have to be a disruption to anyone’s lives. Adjustments of people’s language and shifts in people’s thinking can be small reminders that our lives are no longer an afterthought. Pausing for a moment before we use words like ‘penis’ to be synonymous with men, or ‘vagina’ to be synonymous with women. Dissecting the public interest with genitalia. Stopping the simplification of people down to their body parts. All of these are simple things you can do. As a woman with a penis, I’ve always felt shame during intimacy with new partners. Small alterations to the way we speak could save women like me from the feeling that words like ‘shame’ and ‘trans’ are interchangeable. This is a collective shift that begins with cis people, but could end up saving all of our lives. A shift that asks all people to question gender, and trusts they will seek out their own answers, not just requesting trans women to confront identity when we all could benefit from asking necessary questions. Releasing trans women from the responsibility of having all the answers about gender and identity. Ultimately leading us to conclusions that will allow our children to not be confined by the genders that were assigned to them, and to give them the space to have relationships with their own bodies.
Invoking the girl I was before that very public assault took place is impossible. I’ve resigned to the fact that she is now a part of the tapestry of my own womanhood that I will develop for the rest of my life. In order to ride the same train every day, I have had to bring the woman I aspire to become to the surface, and her presence can be felt in waves. I stand near other women on the train, hoping for a comrade in the diurnal scrutiny of our bodies. My comfort is in the mother, wife, and sister I envision myself to be, alongside all of the other trans women that are still using their lives as an example of the highest form of morality. The women who manage to face the world every day, despite their life expectancy being 35 years old. Now, being On The 6 means more than just my favorite childhood album, but I can still rely on the old familial practice of re-purposing her lyrics to mean whatever I need them to mean. The lyrics You gotta do it your way, you gotta prove it, you gotta mean what you say is a mantra to remind myself of the work left to be done, the hope of being alive to see the fruits of our labor, and instilling trust in young trans girls that their older trans sisters are working tirelessly to make their lives fuller and safer.
17 Incredible Autostraddle Personal Essays By Trans Women
It’s Trans Awareness Week, the week leading up to Trans Day of Remembrance on November 20th. When we say that Autostraddle is website primarily for queer women, we want to be 100% clear that that includes queer trans women and that it’s important to honor trans women year-round, not just in obituaries. So all week long we’re going to be spotlighting articles by and about trans women, with a special focus on trans women of color. We hope you’ll love reading everything as much as we’ve loved writing and editing it.
From 2009 through 2011, Autostraddle’s coverage of trans issues could best be characterized as a series of blunders, failures and missteps. Raised on movies like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and coming into our lesbian identities in bars and at queer parties occupied by queer cis women and trans men, Laneia and I never decided to intentionally exclude trans women from Autostraddle… we’d just not thought about trans women at all, not even for one second. When we published our first essay by a new trans male writer and readers asked where the trans women were at, I remember thinking “but trans women don’t date women, they date men, right?” Um, wrong! (In fact, the best numbers we have on the topic indicate that two-thirds of trans women identify as lesbian, bisexual, or queer.) Oh my friends, that was just the tip of the “shit I was wrong about” and “things I am so sorry about” iceberg.
So we set out to educate ourselves and be better. If someone in a leadership position like mine could be that ignorant, who knows how little everybody else knew. I read a lot of books and spent a lot of time on Tumblr, which is where I found Annika Penelope, our first trans woman staff writer.
When Annika decided to take a break from the internet, we used money from our 2012 fundraising campaign to publish a series of essays by trans women called Trans*scribe. We hoped at the very least we’d publish a bunch of interesting work and at the very most, add a bunch of new trans writers to our rolodex for future contributions. Around that time I read a really interesting post at The Lingerie Addict by the incredible Cora Harrington, who was being attacked online with transphobic slurs although she was not, in fact, transgender. I thought it’d be cool to re-publish her piece with a response from an actual trans woman of color, and asked Mey Rude, whose Tumblr I’d been lurking on for a few weeks, if she’d like to do it. At this point I didn’t make the connection that Mey was also the author of a Trans*scribe essay we were planning to publish, but when I did, it all came together. (The Call/Response piece with Cora and Mey turned out SO GOOD.)
At this point I cannot even imagine an Autostraddle without Mey in it. She’s become a dear friend and an incredible Autostraddle Team Member. In addition to writing about comics, witchery, television, cold-weather fashion and dinosaur facts, she’s taken on the role of Trans Editor and solicited work from so many of the best transgender writers working today, with a particular emphasis on trans women of color.
She’s told ghost stories with Janet Mock, interviewed Laverne Cox (twice!), consulted with the authors of Lumberjanes and Bitch Planet, interviewed Miss Major, schooled the world on how not to interview trans women, appeared on HLN, had her article mentioned by name on The Melissa Harris-Perry Show and been featured on Facebook Stories — and brought authors like Gabrielle Bellot, Raquel Willis and Drew Harris to Autostraddle.
I shelved the original piece I’d written for this week because Mey has curated such an exceptional series of articles and essays centering trans women’s voices that the last thing I wanted to do was re-center a cis voice. I JUST WANT TO TALK ABOUT MEY, YOU GUYS! But I’d also like to highlight some of the best stuff that’s been published by trans women over the years. Since 2012, we’ve published writing by 48 different trans women writers. Autostraddle is committed to trans inclusion, to elevating trans voices, and to setting a new standard for queer women’s communities to be explicitly inclusive of trans women, no matter how many TERFs harass us on Twitter. We know that we mess up sometimes, and that not everybody in the trans community is a fan of everything we do, and that we’re not perfect allies by any means. (Nor does anybody need or want a cookie.) But this we believe: trans women are women, black trans lives matter, trans women of color need our support, and that queer communities who don’t include trans women are doing it wrong.
This year has been full of many steps forward and many steps back for the trans community at large, but I do think Mey has had a hand in a lot of the steps forward that have happened. I’m proud to have her in our family, and grateful for every trans woman who’s published with Autostraddle.
Here’s what’s gone up for Trans Awareness Week so far:
- 15 Best Trans Woman Movies According to Trans Women, by Mey Rude, constructed with input from amazing humans including Jen Richards, Annie Mok, Zackary Drucker, Princess Harmony Rodriguez and Trace Lysette.
- True Life: I’m Genderqueer and I Watched MTV’s “True Life: I’m Genderqueer”, by Anna Bongiovanni
- The Complete History of Transgender Characters in American Comic Books, by Mey Rude
- Making the Dive and Loving Myself Dangerously, by Gabrielle Bellot
- 10 Trans Women Pioneers They Definitely Didn’t Tell You About In History Class, by Mey Rude
- Kicking Off Trans Awareness Week, the Trans Stories of the Past Year, Recapped, by Mey Rude
1. I’m Just Your Typical Urban Hipster Femme Twentysomething Trans Lesbian, by Annika Penelope
The post that started it all!
I doubled down on my efforts in college. I made a vow to try to become the man that everyone expected me to be. It certainly seemed easier than the alternatives. I joined a frat and started lifting weights. But the more I butched up, the more miserable I felt inside. I was never comfortable in social situations. I couldn’t fully relax around others for fear of letting the girl below the façade show through.
2. A Muslim RuPaul At the Dawn Of Islam, by Maryam
It’s really hard to describe Tuwais without getting a little wide eyed. He comes off as a mixture of David Bowie and RuPaul.** He was a freed slave of Arwa, mother of Uthman, the Third Caliph. (It’s said he was born the day the Prophet (P) upon him died. Which was the origin of the phrase “unluckier than Tuwais.” Legends.) Sometime in his career, he took a nickname, something only female singers did, changing his name to Tuwais, or ‘little peacock.’
3. How to Write About Trans Women, by Gabrielle Bellot
After we all read Gabrielle’s essay on Guernica, Mey reached out to see if she’d write for us. When she said yes we all died because she is so good and we were so excited.
The photo on your cover or hanging above your article comes next. Go for broke here. Images of hairy legs in high heels or emerging from tutus are classics you can’t go wrong with, like Strauss’ Blue Danube waltz or light summery pastas with basil and garlic. The goal is to suggest that trans women must look like comical parodies of womanhood, like clueless men.
4. If Joan Of Arc Can Do It, Why Can’t I?, by Mey Rude
One of the first times Mey’s whole heart was just right there on the screen. Also I love Joan of Arc and I love Mey.
Ever since I went to a Halloween party at my friend’s church youth group in 6th grade, I’ve been almost inseparable from my Christian identity. But on November 4th, 2012, my heart was all the way down in my toes as I got ready to go to church for the first time as a transgender lesbian.
5. I Said Yes To The (Gay Wedding) Dress, by Mari Brighe
Despite all the planning, and all the talking, and all the money we had spent, it was THAT moment that suddenly made the wedding feel very real. This was the dress I was going to get married in, that I would be wearing when I affirmed my desire to spend the rest of my life with my amazing partner. But, it also touched something deeper, more complex, more fundamental to my transition and my womanhood.
6. Graduation to Womanhood, by Raquel Willis
Some people come out of the experience with a degree, others with incredible stories, and others simply with a better understanding of their body’s tolerance for alcohol. But some, like me, left with a newfound understanding and sense of purpose; I matriculated as a timid, confused boy and departed as a woman standing in her truth.
“I think Mey is going to be my best friend for life.” – Heather Hogan, pictured here with Mey Rude
7. Do Not Consume Psilocybin Mushrooms While Trans, by Meredith
Meredith’s cis wife, Genevra, has also written some really amazing stuff for Autostraddle.
It feels real when I wake up, but I still have a male body. It must be another dream. I shakily walk over to a bookshelf and pick a book at random — Orlando, funnily enough. The pages remain the same no matter how many times I look away and back again, almost like I’m awake. I must be dreaming though, if only because it would be too unfair for this to be my real body again.
8. “And I Do Mean All My Life”: A Trans Coming Out Letter, by Sarah Szabo
Over the last four years, my incredible parents have basically done the equivalent of bringing me the moon and stars down from the sky, through all the things they’ve done for me. They are amazing people, and I know I’m fortunate, but even they had troubles grasping what it truly meant for them and me, the first time I told them, “I’m a girl.” I knew they probably would. Also, I knew I’d have trouble saying the words.
9. I’m A Trans Woman And I’m Not Interested in Being One of the Good Ones, by Vivian
Here’s the thing: People fucking despise trans women. Often the nicest thing they can thing of to say to trans woman is “gosh, you are so little like a trans woman!” Being trans is something to avoid, to exclude, to escape, at worst to nobly bare up under. But I’m done with it.
10. I Knew I Was A Girl at 8: Transitioning and Teenage Activism, by Eli Erlick
I remember explaining to Harmony, my best friend in third grade, that I was a girl:
“Harmony! We can have sleepovers now!”
“But you’re a boy!” she immediately retorted.
“Well, I’m a girl now.”
Harmony rolled her eyes and walked away, confused.
Annika with her cabin at A-Camp 1.0
11. Imagining a Better World For Trans Women Survivors of Domestic Violence, by Morgan Collado
The reach of intimate partner violence in my life still amazes me. Emotional violence in relationships leaves scars that are deep and knotted. It has taken years and lots of love, both self-love and love from others, in order to ease out the tension that ties up my body. But being a survivor has shown me how resilient I can be because I am still alive. I can take the shit that the world has thrown at me and turn it into a garden.
12. I’m Both an L and a T and I Don’t Want to Choose a Side, by Mey Rude
As a trans woman, I’m much more afraid of, and much more angry at, about a dozen demographics before cis lesbians, and as a lesbian I’m much more afraid of, and much more angry at, another dozen demographics before trans women. Actually, I’m pretty over this pitting women against women thing, especially when we have so much in common. I feel much more kinship with cis lesbians than I do with gay men or most trans men, or to be honest, with many white trans women. Oftentimes I feel a bigger divide between white trans women and trans women of color than I do between trans women and cis lesbians.
13. This Is Because I’m a Woman, by Morgan McCormick
It didn’t take long before I wasn’t leaving my home much anymore. Friends I’d opened up to about it often just say, “Welcome to womanhood” or sometimes, “Wow, really? I wish guys would pay that much attention to me.” I can see what they’re saying, because some guys are just trying to tell me I look nice and they’re not going to follow me home or hurt me. (One just bicycled around me a couple times and said, “Little girl, you are the most beautiful,” and pedaled away.)
14. Rebel Yell: This Voice Isn’t Gendered, It’s Punk, by Audrey Zee
Instability is a funny thing, being queer and trans: it can be a space of possibility, of new starts, and making norms look as dumb as they are in comparison. And good punk is nothing but instability, everything just about to fall apart. Instability is scary, though, when it’s my own gender identity being broken down, live, in front of other people.
Tim O’Brian, Laverne Cox & Mey Rude
15. Badass Blacksmiths: Women’s Work and Transgender Identity, by Willow Zietman
My passion for the craft became less of a blessing when I came out as transgender. People would look surprised and say, “But…you can’t be a girl. You’re a blacksmith!” My adherence to my passion as a gendered activity ended up negating the reality of my inner feelings. I may be trans, but people didn’t believe me because of my craft.
16. On The Silencing of Trans Women of Color: A Response to Trans Glamour vs. Trans Activism, by L’lerrét Jazelle Ailith
As a white woman, you may not understand this, but the simple act of getting up and being in the public eye and proclaiming your transness unapologetically is an act of revolution for every trans person of color, and in that right, they are doing the work.
17. Click on a Keyboard: Dungeons, Dragons, and Trans-Feminism, by Katherine Cross
Single player games provided me with visions of female power. Women with swords, spells, lightsabers, martial skills, elegance, high education, class, guts, skill, and who – above all – showed no shame in who they were. If these fictional characters could do it, so could I. But since I was still being forced to live as a boy, where could I possibly begin?
15 Best Trans Woman Movies According to Trans Women
It’s Trans Awareness Week, the week leading up to Trans Day of Remembrance on November 20th. When we say that Autostraddle is website primarily for queer women, we want to be 100% clear that that includes queer trans women and that it’s important to honor trans women year-round, not just in obituaries. So all week long we’re going to be spotlighting articles by and about trans women, with a special focus on trans women of color. We hope you’ll love reading everything as much as we’ve loved writing and editing it.
It seems like filmmakers are practically jumping at the chance to make movies about trans people right now. This year alone we’ve seen Tangerine, About Ray, Stonewall, Grandma and The Danish Girl, all featuring trans characters. However, this increase in trans characters hasn’t exactly resulted in an increase in positive representation. Most of the movies I mentioned featured cis actors playing the trans roles, and most aren’t really what you would call happy stories for the trans characters. This is how trans representation in movies has been for as long as I can remember.
Laverne Cox tattooing Lily Tomlin in a scene from Grandma.
So, when I say that this is the list of the 15 Best Trans Woman Movies, I should make it clear that most of the movies on this list aren’t necessarily that great in the area of trans representation, and I don’t think that any of them are perfect. They are, however, better than most, and they did mean a lot to many of the trans women who watched them. So, while most of these movies might not be great examples of trans representation on the silver screen, they are the 15 best movies featuring trans women according to trans women.
The trans women who I polled were women who have written for Autostraddle and other sites, including me, Devan Diaz, Lexi Adsit, Gabby Bellot, Raquel Willis, Savannah, Drew, Nicole and Sadie Edwards; writer and editor Jamie Berrout; author Ryka Aoki; trans activist Cherno Biko; Her Story co-creator and co-star Jen Richards; Transparent producer and one of the creators of “This is Me,” Zackary Drucker; writer and illustrator Annie Mok, Drunktown’s Finest and Her Story director Sydney Freeland, Black Girl Dangerous writer Princess Harmony Rodriguez, TSER Director and co-founder Eli Erlick and Transparent actress Trace Lysette.
Many of the trans women I talked to couldn’t name more than two or three movies they thought were good, some could only name one, a few couldn’t even name one. One of the women I asked, Devan Diaz said that she finds it hard to watch films with trans characters because they ring so false for her. It doesn’t feel like she’s seeing herself reflected in the movie.
Most films I’ve seen that have included trans characters/actors have been for the cis gaze. It’s always the same story of the person going from point a to point b, but we never see the life beyond transition. We never see cis characters and actors ask critical questions about gender the way that seems required of trans people in film. I think if we want to be more inclusive we all need to confront identity and who we are, and that means interrogating misogyny and transmisogyny in film.
Another woman, Jamie Berrout, said that it’s hard for her to watch these movies because it’s too difficult for her to not empathize with the trans women on screen, who are usually being mistreated, either by the other characters, the narrative itself or the filmmakers.
Whenever I see trans women characters there’s an immediate connection where I try to identify with them and match up my experiences to what they’re going through in their fictional lives. When a trans woman character is treated badly by her part in the film or by the plot or by being portrayed by a cis person then that means I’ll be suffering along with her. And I’m not using that “when” lightly — watching a movie that features trans women is almost always a painful, invalidating, anxiety-causing experience. The question isn’t, “Will this movie hurt me?” it’s, “Which of these possible ways of hurting me will this movie employ?” and “Is there something about this movie that makes it worth being insulted and humiliated for a couple of hours?”
Still, there are some movies that some trans women do like, and do relate to. These movies aren’t assured to work for all trans women, but if you’re looking for a movie that at least some trans women think represent them well, these are your best bets.
The films Wild Zero, Beautiful Boxer, Trash, The Legend of the Swordsman (Swordsman II) and Laurence Anyways also received votes but didn’t make the list.
15. The Matrix
Not only is The Matrix one of the most revolutionary action and science fiction films of the past 30 years, but it’s also probably the most famous movie written and directed by a trans woman, and as Ryka Aoki told me, “We should not focus only on the beautiful ones in front of the camera, but also the brilliant trans women behind the camera, as well.” Although she wasn’t out at the time, Lana Wachowski co-wrote and co-directed this film about a group of hackers/freedom fighters who start a revolution against the robots who are enslaving earth. As Annie Mok pointed out, the film was also full of trans symbolism.
Among the first words in The Matrix are “CALL TRANS OPT,” flashed in green on Neo’s MS-DOS-style screen. This movie was written by a 90’s trans woman anime nerd (with white girl dreads, unfortunately…) — as my friend Maggie Eighteen pointed out, the Wachowski siblings took heavily from the 1995 Ghost in the Shell movie. Several essays explore transness in the film. When I watched it on VHS with my housemates recently, I would have taken a drink every time something obviously trans happened, but I’m sober so at each instance I just yelled out “TRANS!” and held up my fist.
14. Drunktown’s Finest
Carmen Moore as Felixia.
Another movie written and directed by a trans woman, this time a trans woman of color named Sydney Freeland, Drunktown’s Finest also co-stars a trans woman of color playing a trans woman of color. This film is about three interconnected young Navajo people, including a sex worker and aspiring model Felixia played by newcomer Carmen Moore. Freeland and Moore bring an authenticity to a trans woman’s story that’s rare in film, and even more rare for a Native American trans woman.
13. A Girl Like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story
The only “Based on a True Story” on our list, A Girl Like Me tells the story of Gwen Araujo, a young trans Latina, who was beaten and murdered by a group of men who attacked her after they found out she was trans when she was just 17 years old. The film, which originally aired on Lifetime, stars J.D. Pardo as Gwen and won the 2007 GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Movie for Television. Drew said that she latched onto the film because “it was one of the first movies I ever watched that was inclusive of someone with not only trans experience but also who was a person of color.” For Sadie, the film marked a turning point in how she viewed trans experiences.
I was probably in the 9th grade, it was a time when I had finally been able to give a name and a face to what was going on with me and seeing films like this were a big influence on that. I spent more than one night I’m sure, sitting and weeping to this movie. It was my one of my first exposures to the brutality and denial that so many trans women, most significantly trans women of color, face in just being themselves. It’s haunting and kind of beautiful, for Lifetime standards, but like most tragic real life trans narratives it’s sometimes pretty hard to watch.
12. The Crying Game
The Crying Game is probably one of the more famous movies with a trans character, but not really for a good reason. This movie’s about an IRA fighter, Fergus, (played by Stephen Rea) who kidnaps a Black British soldier, Jody, (played by Forest Whitaker) and, after bonding with the captive and hearing stories about his girlfriend Dil (played by Jaye Davidson), later meets and falls for her. This movie is, for the most part, a pretty touching love story between Fergus and Dil, even after he finds out she’s trans. The famous scene, however, is when Fergus first sees that Dil is trans, the same time the audience does, causing the viewer to gasp and Fergus to vomit.”The Crying Game was one of those movies I avoided for a very long time. Not really because of the film itself, but the mythos surrounding it. Its been referenced time and again in pop culture because of just how ‘shocking’ the reveal is,” Sadie said, “Once I got around to seeing the film itself, though, I saw a lot of the tenderness and the complexities of the plot. Where others saw the disgust, I saw the love story, the part that said that a trans woman could find love, even with all her parts.”
11. Todo sobre mi madre
Directed and written by the legendary Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, Todo sobre mi madre, also known as All About My Mother, features a trans sex worker named Agrado played by a trans woman, Antonia San Juan, who’s the main character’s old friend. It’s also one of the most-awarded movies featuring a trans woman, taking home the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, as well as dozens of other international awards. For Savannah, “the relatable, charismatic trans woman character Agrado and her relationships with the other women in the film balanced well with transfeminine Lola, who was essentially the film’s ever-absent (but still humanized) antagonist.”
10. Better than Chocolate
This was ranked #91 on our list of the 100 Best Lesbian Movies of All Time, and one of the lesbians in it is Judy, a trans woman played by Peter Outerbridge. It’s not necessarily that this movie is quality that makes it beloved, though, as Annie Mok told me.
Better Than Chocolate is a bad movie, but it’s gleefully bad and weirdly addictive — Autostraddle cartoonist Archie Bongiovanni once busted open a broken laptop with a hammer to get at their DVD copy. I recommend it without irony partly because of the legit sweet subplot starring a trans lady character, the nightclub singer Judy. Judy is a gay nightclub singer, and at one point the protagonists of the movie beat up a girl who harasses her in a bathroom. This movie has multiple montages and ends, as Archie pointed out, with a literal explosion. It’s cute, but only watch it with a friend or two so you can laugh about how, overall, it makes no sense.
9. The Queen
The Queen is a documentary chronicling the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pageant of 1967, which was a drag queen pageant hosted by Flawless Sabrina, and won by Rachel Harlow, who would go on to transition after the contest, and featuring, among others, Andy Warhol as a judge. Zackary Drucker says that The Queen isn’t only a good movie, it’s an important historical artifact.
It’s so important that we know where we’re coming from. The Queen is a rare look at pre-Stonewall queer communities, and reveals a time before gender identity distinctions were cemented — all cross-dressing was a felony whether you were a gay man in drag, a trans woman, somewhere in between, black or white, young or old. Watching this group come together over one of Flawless Sabrina’s pageants (“The Nationals”) in 1967 and talk about the draft in Vietnam, family, and living underground, is a tremendous inspiration for today’s trans movement.
The Queen features legends like Crystal LaBeija and has a really interesting behind the scenes look into trans history.
8. Pay it No Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson
This documentary, which you can watch on Youtube is mainly made up of interviews with the legendary trans activist and Stonewall instigator Marsha P. Johnson, herself. Cherno Biko says it’s “life changing,” and “the most comprehensive archive we have of Marsha. I love that it’s free and on YouTube and more accessible to the girls. Too often we only focus on Sylvia and only think of Marsha as an afterthought. By centering Marsha, this film cemented her place in history as one of the mothers of this movement.” She added that her favorite part “is when they talked about her being called Saint Marsha and how vendors in the flower district cared for her because they considered her holy. This film inspired me to invest and act in Happy Birthday Marsha.” Lexi Adist added that this “documentation of Marsha P. Johnson, in which very little has been written or documented about, is extraordinary! Her struggles and life are a story worth witnessing. I’m just sad it hasn’t received as much fanfare or visibility as other films. Marsha is an icon and grandmother to our modern community and she deserves to be recognized for her labor.”
7. Women in Revolt
A film by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey, this is the rare example of an older film actually starring trans women. Jackie Curtis, Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn. Drucker says that Women in Revolt “is a hoot. Also improvised (like Woodlawn’s earlier film with Morrissey, Trash), [Woodlawn, Curtis and Darling] interpret the fledgling 2nd wave women’s liberation movement with campy flair, organizing their comrades under the moniker ‘P.I.G.’ or ‘Politically Involved Girls,’ becoming lesbians, embezzling money from socialites, among other antics.” She adds that “I love that in both films the transgender actresses were playing cis characters — so ahead of its time.”
6. Wild Side
Wild Side, a 2004 French/Belgian/British film about a trans sex worker named Stéphanie, stars Stéphanie Michelini and won several awards when it came out. Nicole says that what she loves most about the film is that “it manages to be about a trans woman’s life, without sensationalizing it. It touches on so many struggles, feelings, and themes that I relate to, and have lived, without making them Stéphanie’s entire life. Being trans isn’t all of who I am, it’s only part of who I am, and this film portrays that better than many other trans related shows/movies that I have seen.” Also, she adds, “about 7 seconds of this film feature Evangelion, so that’s also a win.” Drucker agrees, saying that “Wild Side is sexy, unpredictable, and features a menáge-a-trois relationship in which a trans woman is the object of desire — weak knees thinking about this one.”
5. Princesa
The first film in our top five is this 2001 Italian film about, again, a trans sex worker. In this film, Ingrid de Souza, a Brazilian trans woman, plays Fernanda, a 19-year-old Brazilian trans woman who travels to Milan in order to work as a sex worker and get enough money for her surgery. Like Women in Revolt, this is a rare film to actually star a trans woman. According to Trace Lysette, “the key word for me is authenticity, Princesa is a look into the life of a trans girl who journeys away from home, like so many of us do, and takes matters into her own hands to finance her gender transition while struggling to find a sense of community, family, and love all while dealing with the pressures of a world that leaves little space for us to thrive. It’s the rawest, truest narrative around the trans female experience I’ve seen.” Savannah adds that “one thing I think it does successfully is that it manages to neither condemn nor exotify her life on the streets.”
4. Ma Vie En Rose
Zackary Drucker says she “was 14 years-old when Ma Vie en Rose came to my local independent movie theater in Syracuse, NY. It was the first time I saw my adolescence, my experience of being young and trans, reflected on the big screen. I have a picture of myself in front of the movie poster that was taken the night that I saw it.” Many others felt similarly about this Belgian film about a a young trans girl played by Georges Du Fresne who is trying to live as the girl she is while her school, family and communty try to stop her. Ma Vie en Rose won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.
3. Tangerine
Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez in TANGERINE, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
This poll stops being a contest when we get to the top three movies as voted by trans women. These three films were so far ahead of the others that if they got half as many points, they would still be the top three.
While the trauma of this film is understandably too much for some trans women, others found it to be one of the most emotionally authentic portrayals of trans women on screen. I loved this film and said “This movie is, above all else, sweltering and electric. Most of the movie’s slow-burning heat comes from Mya Taylor’s amazingly deep and deliberate — and often uproariously comedic — performance as Alexandra, one of the film’s two transgender main characters. The film’s crackling and bubbling energy comes from Alexandra’s best friend and partner-in-crime Sin-Dee, played with energetic hilarity by fellow newcomer Kitana Kiki Rodriguez.” These two women go on a journey across Hollywood trying to find the woman who Sin-Dee’s boyfriend cheated on her with and getting to Alexandra’s musical performance at a local restaurant. For Lexi Adsit, it was “exciting to see sex-working trans women of color characters get screen time. There are so many girls who have not had their stories told and Tangerine not only does a good job of telling it, but does so in a way that emotionally connects a mainstream audience to the characters’ struggles without losing it’s authenticity.”
2. Gun Hill Road
When Gun Hill Road came out, many in the trans community started buzzing about the film. Not only was it a movie about a trans woman of color, but she was actually played by a trans woman of color! That twoc, Harmony Santana, took full advantage of the role she was given, delivering a powerhouse performance and earning an Independent Spirit Award nomination, making her the first openly transgender actress to be nominated for an acting award in the US. Biko says that Santana “was the first young trans girl I saw in a feature film. I shared many experiences of her character in the film and her family dynamic mirrored my own.” Raquel Willis also loves Gun Hill Road, adding that she thinks “it was an eye-opener, intersectionality-wise, to focus on a Latina trans woman and, of course, the interesting dynamics she had in her relationship.” Drew adds that “the movie tackles a lot of topics surrounding the trans community that cisgender heteronormative people might consider taboo; transphobia, transmisogyny, sex work, ‘pumping” (black market surgery)’ and more.”
1. Paris is Burning
Number one is this legendary documentary that focuses on New York’s Ballroom scene and the people, including many trans women of color, who built a community there. Lysette says that with this film and The Queen, she “can’t help but be overwhelmed with appreciation for the women who stood before me. Rachel Harlow, Octavia St. Laurent, Crystal Labeija, Venus Xtravaganza, the list goes on. I see the strength in them and it gives me the strength to exist unapologetically, to make things better for the next generation of girls.” Biko points out that despite the fact that the film is over two decades old and the fact that it’s director Jennie Livingston profited off the backs of the QTPOC featured in the film (only $55,000 was distributed among 13 of the people featured), “it remains one of our greatest treasures. It’s a roadmap for the children and made me want to escape Ohio for NYC. PEPPER (LaBeija). OCTAVIA. DORIAN (Corey). I could go on.” Drew adds that Paris is Burning “is just simply EVERYTHING! Dorian Corey’s sassy commentary adds a legendary effect to the already groundbreaking documentary.”
Adsit also pointed out Livingston’s continued profiting off of the film and exploitation of the queer Black and Brown people within, but also praised the film.
I want to recognize the empowerment that, as a transgender woman of color, I experience watching Paris is Burning. This film not only seduced me as a viewer, but empowered me and gave me powerful women to look up to. Dorian Corey, for instance, throughout the movie drops some of the most amazing life knowledge that you wouldn’t be able to get from your own grandmother. Venus Xtravaganza, is unapologetic in her pursuit of a beautiful life. Octavia St. Laurent, is a powerful young black woman who has the skills and ability to chase her dreams regardless of her gender history. These are stories that are epics, in their own right.
Few films showcase the brilliance of trans women of color the way that Paris is Burning does. So many trans women have found themselves in the legends in this film, finally realizing that they’re not alone and that they have a history too.
The Complete History of Transgender Characters in American Comic Books
by rory midhani
It’s Trans Awareness Week, the week leading up to Trans Day of Remembrance on November 20th. When we say that Autostraddle is website primarily for queer women, we want to be 100% clear that that includes queer trans women and that it’s important to honor trans women year-round, not just in obituaries. So all week long we’re going to be spotlighting articles by and about trans women, with a special focus on trans women of color. We hope you’ll love reading everything as much as we’ve loved writing and editing it.
I’ve been reading comics ever since I was in elementary school, when I would go to the public library and run upstairs to the comic section and check out whatever graphic novels they had, even if I had read them a dozen times before. But it wasn’t until I was a teenager that I saw my first trans character in a comic book. Like many people, my first experience with a trans comic character was in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. I remember when I was in high school opening up Volume 2, titled The Doll’s House, and reading issue #14, Collectors. This issue focuses on a serial killer’s convention and predictably features some extremely disturbing content. The thing that stuck in my mind, though, is one panel where we see a killer standing over a dead trans woman with narration that says “There’s something about preoperative transsexuals that makes The Connoisseur uncomfortable. Something brittle and bright in the back of their eyes. He loves them. But he always feels they’re laughing at him. He’s only ever found eight that he’s been able to talk to.” This was my first time seeing someone like me in a comic book. It made me terrified for my future.
From Sandman #14.
One of the big selling points of comic books is that they give us heroes to look up to and want to be like. They show us possibilities. They show us dreams and wishes. Not being able to see yourself in those dreams, wishes and possibilities can really have an effect on you, especially if you’re a younger reader. When readers are told that none of the heroes look like them, it can seem like it’s impossible to be a hero. That’s why representation is important. It allows us to see a brighter future for ourselves and to set out for that future. For trans readers, that representation has been almost nonexistent until recent years.
The Era of Not-Quite-Trans Characters (1940-?)
Unfortunately, transgender people are a group that was so marginalized in comics that the only characters trans people could see ourselves in were shapeshifters, aliens and victims of magic spells or science fiction body swaps. While trans characters were scant for most of the history of comic books, these kinds of characters were actually pretty popular, going as far back as DC Comics’ Golden Age. So while these characters are not quite trans, they still served an important function in giving trans readers some semblance of representation in their comics.
The Ultra-Humanite in Action Comics #20 with art by Joe Shuster.
One of the earliest examples of a not-quite-trans recurring character took place in Action Comics #20 from 1940. The Superman villain, Ultra-Humanite (a super genius similar to Lex Luther), has seemingly been killed. However, we learn that he had kidnapped a famous actress, Dolores Winters, and placed “his mighty brain in her young vital body.” As soon as Action Comics #22 this version of the Ultra-Humanite was gone and later instead of putting his mind in the body of a woman, the character would transfer his consciousness into the body of an albino ape. However, during the events of Infinite Crisis, a universe-wide crossover event in the late 2000’s, and in the 2006-2007 Lightning Saga crossover event, the Ultra-Humanite’s time as Dolores (now spelled Deloris) Winters is revisited.
Sir Tristan in Camelot 3000 with art by Brian Bolland.
The next notable examples appear in the 1980s when DC Comics published Mike W. Barr and Brian Bolland’s sci-fi/fantasy series Camelot 3000. In this story King Arthur and his knights of The Round Table are reincarnated in the year 3000 in order to fight off Morgan le Fay and an alien invasion. One of the knights, Sir Tristan, is reincarnated as a woman. Tristan spends much of the comic trying to figure out a way to be turned back into a man, but in the end accepts this new body and role, even ending up with Isolde, Tristan’s lover throughout time. Stories like this showed the lack of awareness of real life trans people that comics had. Sir Tristan could have been portrayed as a trans man, and in the 80s there were ways for trans men to transition, so one would think that a thousand years in the future, those techniques would be much better. Marvel, for their part, in Alpha Flight #45 from 1987, had their own mind-transfer story. The Canadian superhero Sasquatch, who was basically a man who could turn into a giant white beast, was “killed” and his soul was transferred into the body of another Canadian superhero, a woman named Snowbird. So for a time Sasquatch had a “female” body when in human form and the male, Sasquatch form.
This trend really reached its peak in the 1990s. We saw characters like Malibu Comics’ Mantra, who had her own solo title, an immortal male superhero soul who was reincarnated into the body of a woman; Top Cow’s Joshua Cane, a character from the series Rising Stars who was possibly trans and had as one of their powers the ability to turn into a super-powered woman and DC’s Comet, who appeared in Supergirl comics and, in 1997, was revealed to be a shapeshifter who alternated between being the bisexual human woman Andrea Martinez and the male centaur Comet all reflected this trend of comics playing around with gender, but not actually having trans characters.
From Legion of Super-Heroes #31.
One of the characters who comes closest to actually being trans is Shvaughn Erin, a member of the interplanetary Science Police in the DC comic Legion of Super-Heroes. Erin was actually introduced as a female character in 1978, but in 1992, in Legion of Super-Heroes #31, it was revealed that Shvaughn was actually Sean, and that he was born male, but had been taking a futuristic drug called Profem in order to transition into a female form apparently because he was in love with the male superhero Element Lad, who he presumed was straight, but actually turned out to be attracted to Sean just as much as Shvaughn. Again, the lack of knowledge about trans characters shows here, as the Legion writers not only had to use a science fiction drug, Profem, that would cause its user to revert back to their original form once they stopped taking it, but they also seemed to think that trans women are just gay men who want to date straight men.
This “era” actually stretches all the way to recent comics of the 2000s. In 2000, Marvel had two characters who fit into this category. In their Ultimate Universe, the character of Spider-Woman, Jessica Drew, is actually a female clone of Peter Parker who retains some of his memories and has some struggles with her gender as a result, and in their X-Men comics, Courier, a shapeshifting friend of Gambit, became trapped in a female form by the evil Mr. Sinister. Over at DC in the year 2006, the character Erik Storn was given superpowers which manifested in him becoming a female superhero named Amazing Woman. In 2008, the longtime Thor villain, Loki, had taken over a female body (that of Lady Sif) and was portrayed as a woman until Thor #602 in 2009. Loki could possibly go on this list again, as when a younger version of the character got his own title, Loki: Agent of Asgard, in 2013, Al Ewing, the series’ writer said that “Loki is bi and I’ll be touching on that. He’ll shift between genders occasionally as well.” So, Loki could possibly count as transgender, as much as a shapeshifting trickster god can be.
Masquerade in Blood Syndicate #1 with art by Trevor Von Eeden.
A couple of these characters actually might be better suited in other categories, but I’m going to mention them here first. In 1993, Milestone Comics introduced the character Masquerade, a shapeshifter who was a male superhero, but was assigned female at birth. Finally, this conversation wouldn’t be complete without a mention of Xavin, a shapeshifting Skrull from Marvel’s comic about the teenage children of supervillains, Runaways. While Xavin initially shows up as an ostensibly male character, they change to a female form saying “for us changing our gender is no different than changing our hair color” in issue #8 of the series. While this attitude toward gender and ability to shapeshift make Xavin not really representative of the human transgender experience, the character did explore changing gender in a way that was pretty revolutionary for a comic book character.
Next: Actual trans women characters!
Making the Dive and Loving Myself Dangerously
It’s Trans Awareness Week, the week leading up to Trans Day of Remembrance on November 20th. When we say that Autostraddle is website primarily for queer women, we want to be 100% clear that that includes queer trans women and that it’s important to honor trans women year-round, not just in obituaries. So all week long we’ll be spotlighting articles by and about trans women, with a special focus on trans women of color. We hope you’ll love reading everything as much as we’ve loved writing and editing it.
Learning to love yourself is a lot like learning to breathe.
I have been learning, again, how to live, to love, to breathe.
When you begin to transition, sometimes the world seems like a new place, terra incognita, the patches labelled ‘here there be dragons’ on an old map. I know this was the case for me. In some ways, it still is. I’ve been fully out for almost a year, and I’ve both learnt new confidence and failed to unlearn some of my old fears from my earliest days of presenting as a woman. I still, sometimes, hear my heart beating in my head when I step out the door in a dress, wondering if today is the day that wearing that dress will cause a man to call out to me in front his friends, then, realising I’m not the cis woman he wants me to be, turn his call into curses and kicks or worse. I still hesitate, sometimes, before picking up the phone, even when I know I must make or take a call, worried that the voice I have worked on for so long will vanish and that I’ll be reduced to a ‘sir’ by a stranger. I still use the restroom quicker than I should on some days, avoiding eye contact with the women in it, hoping I don’t give off such an overwhelming aura of nervous energy that I’ll cause the very thing I want to avoid: everyone turning to me.
Getting over these fears, and choosing to live with fear rather than live in fear, is an act of self-love. Learning to control your heartbeat so you don’t hyperventilate, learning to breathe normally in a crowd: these are lessons of love. These are ways of embracing ourselves.
I’m still learning.
The first day I taught a class of undergraduates presenting as female made me think, later on, of learning to scuba-dive in the Caribbean Sea. The two were many islands apart, me teaching in my new home in Florida after having learnt to dive in the Commonwealth of Dominica, the verdant island I grew up in between Martinique and Guadeloupe, but they felt quite close, all the same. Both set my heart going like the erratic wingbeats of a bat.
I’ve loved the ocean for as long as I can remember. As a child, I spent hours looking up information about the denizens of the deep sea, the realm that fascinated me the most. I was particularly intrigued by the enigmatic giant squid, and I remember with embarrassment the day I sent an email to one of the world’s most eminent squid scientists, Dr. Steve O’Shea, proposing what I thought was an obvious solution for capturing the then-as-yet-unseen behemoth on film. Why not, I wrote, just attach a camera to the back of a sperm whale, since they eat the giant squids? O’Shea, a gentleman, wrote back soon after, politely telling me that my idea was rather unlikely to succeed.
I loved the sea so much that it came to terrify me as I learnt more about the creatures that lived in it. I knew well it was unlikely I would encounter any of the creatures I’d read about just by going snorkeling on a family trip to the beach, but my imagination always ran wild. I was unable to wade more than a few steps most of the time, my mind filled with images of rushing tentacles, barracudas, and the barbed tails of stingrays. Beyond that, I was never a strong swimmer. My mother’s tales of old friends being dragged out to their deaths by currents in certain fatal patches of water — which she would repeat whenever we drove past the beach or estuary where someone had lost their life — would echo through my head. I would panic as I took a few steps into the water, the sand swirling around my feet in clouds, and begin to hear my heart hammer. I at once knew too much and nothing at all. If we were at Champagne Beach, where the beach was more rocks than sand, the ground lizards and the occasional iguana might leer at me as I retreated from the water, as if considering whether or not to run from such a comical specimen.
But, like embracing the woman I am, I couldn’t stay back from the allure of the waves. The pull of my trans-ness and queerness, of course, would always be stronger, the strongest impulses I have ever known. The sea, like them, was a place that represented a kind of forbidden love. I needed to overcome my fears or I would feel that I was holding myself back from living authentically.
So, contrary to all the walls my fears had erected between the sea and me, I decided to learn how to scuba dive.
Learning to breathe with your scuba gear is a kind of act of faith. It seems contrary to all expectations if you’ve never done it before, especially if you’ve experienced the sudden lack of air from poking your head too far beneath the surface while snorkeling. Yet somehow it works. You just breathe, as normally as you can. And the world is your air: your breaths become loud and constant. As you learn to descend, though, the sea reminds you it is there. You feel its weight, your having come from the surface, when you descend a few feet and there is a pain in your head. You learn to pinch your nose and blow out to equalise so that you can slowly descend further into this blue world.
Illustration by Yao Xiao
And then there is the terror, which you must face, of simulating having your dive mask knocked off, where you must suddenly either close your eyes or come face to face again with where you are and either way put it back on. You learn to control your breathing so you don’t kick back up too fast to the surface when your gear stops giving you air, as once happened to me about 50 feet below the surface — for returning too fast can be your death sentence. And then, of course, you must learn how to control your fear when the old nightmares appear: when you encounter the creatures where you are diving. I learnt not to fear the enormous stingrays, the blue morays with their mouths hanging open that swayed in the current, the rare spotted eagle ray that once found its way into the area I first learnt to dive in. I even learnt, on my first and only night dive, to gradually not fear being surrounded by the darkness, only our flashlights, the pale moonglow, and the bursts of phosphorescence softening the black.
So much of this reminds me of walking outside presenting as a woman for the first time. Of having men call out to me, of having security guards in museums proposition me when no one else was around and my heart suddenly wanting to burst from my chest for the very person who I thought would protect me might become my enemy if I say the wrong word, and if I speak in a voice that does not ‘pass,’ what will happen next? I remember the many, many nights I stayed in instead of going out, even for something as routine for groceries, for I was terrified of being clocked as a trans woman, of being laughed at, stared at, followed.
I remember when all of my optimism about shifting my voice into the kind of voice I had always wanted came to an end, when I was humiliated over the phone. I’d had to call Tallahassee Memorial Hospital to pay a bill I couldn’t pay online for some reason, a bill that was under my new legal name and gender. I tried to raise my voice the way I’d tried before, thinking it sounded all right in my head. ‘How can I help you, sir,’ I heard seconds into the call. It became worse. My account number wasn’t coming up, so the man I was speaking with transferred me. The woman who answered brought up my information, but wouldn’t believe I was Gabrielle Bellot. I couldn’t be her because of my voice, she reasoned.
To prove I wasn’t a criminal, she asked me to verify my gender. I’m accustomed to verifying my first car, my best friend in secondary school, and my mother’s maiden name, but I had never been asked to verify my gender. I imagined, suddenly, that she had asked me to strip over the phone. I told her my history with transition over the phone. She sounded relieved.
‘Thank you, sir,’ she said.
My eyes began to sting, and the world felt heavy. My gender said ‘F’ on my file, but her pronouns wouldn’t shift. I didn’t even imagine, at the time, that the woman was transphobic; I imagined that my voice was simply so non-F, somehow, that her own instinct couldn’t align it with the ‘F,’ couldn’t fit the contours of the right word. I didn’t love myself enough to even correct the woman.
It was a humiliation that echoed what would happen soon after on a trip to New York, where a receptionist at the Neue Galerie, a museum I had longed to visit for years, gendered me female on sight, then shifted without a blink to ‘sir’ as I blurted out that I couldn’t find my student ID for a discount. It was such a quick, cold switch that I left the museum after fighting with myself for half an hour, because I had come to hate myself so thoroughly. I had come to not see the paintings in the top floor properly through my stupid tears. I felt imprisoned by my fear of my old voice. Clearly, I was not ready to descend into the world, not to these depths.
Now things have begun to change. I enter the world with more confidence. I know the privilege to pass that I have; all the same, I’m prepared for the looks and questions I do get. I have worked on my voice for months because I wanted to, not because there is anything wrong with keeping your old voice, but because I didn’t want that voice, didn’t feel safe with it, didn’t feel right with it, didn’t feel happy with it, felt embarrassed teaching with it, hid because of it. I learnt to change the timbre of my voice through breathing differently — quite literally — and hundreds of recordings and hours of research. It may not be perfect, but it’s hard to express how happy I feel when I can pick up the phone, call a stranger, and — most of the time — expect to hear ‘ma’am.’
It was a labour of love to reach this far — and the labour, I realised, signified the love. To be lazy in such things was to be love-denying, to see myself standing at my own door and to shut it instead of letting myself in.
I remember descending over the largest stingray I’ve ever seen on. It was resting on the silty bottom near the wreck of a small liner we were exploring. The stingray looked like a muddy magic carpet with eyes. I remembered my terror of stepping on one before I learnt to dive. I was still, floating, the sound of my breaths a reliable muffled rhythm, the bubbles floating up to the surface like currents of little jellyfish.
I remember smiling like a fool. I had learnt how to love a world I once feared.
Now, I must do it again. I must learn to be brave wearing a new wetsuit, getting a new diver’s card with the right name and gender on it. Diving for the first time since coming out scares me. I wonder at the dangers of diving in a group of strangers, where someone learns you are trans and decides they do not like it. I think of how I still avoid going to the beach because I have never worn a woman’s swimsuit in front of anyone but my reflection. In my worst moments, my past dives begin to seem like dreams.
But I’ll do it.
“Create dangerously,” the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat advised in Create Dangerously: the Immigrant Artist at Work, “for people who read dangerously,” for people who, she says, soon after, “may risk his or her life to read” your words. To that I would add: love dangerously, so you don’t regret the breaths you could’ve enjoyed.
I cannot return safely to the place I learnt to dive as a queer trans woman, but I love the lessons it taught me, which I only understood better later, when I began to become myself.
Kicking Off Trans Awareness Week, the Trans Stories of the Past Year, Recapped
It’s Trans Awareness Week, the week leading up to Trans Day of Remembrance on November 20th. When we say that Autostraddle is website primarily for queer women, we want to be 100% clear that that includes queer trans women and that it’s important to honor trans women year-round, not just in obituaries. So all week long we’re going to be spotlighting articles by and about trans women, with a special focus on trans women of color. We hope you’ll love reading everything as much as we’ve loved writing and editing it.
It’s November 14, and the first day of Trans Awareness Week. Awareness, at its most basic level, is just knowing what is happening in the world of trans people, or in our case, mostly specifically trans women. So to start the week off, I’m going to take a look back at some of the trans news, coverage and stories that we’ve featured in the past year.
Not every trans story from the past year is going to be featured here, there are tons of trans women and I’m just one person. The point of this list is just to provide a cursory glance at the lives of trans people and the trans coverage we’ve had here on Autostraddle in the past year, so please forgive me if I miss a few things.
November
30th – Amazon Prime’s Emmy winning show about a transgender woman, Transparent, hired Our Lady J as its first trans staff writer.
December
5th – Just two short weeks after Trans Day of Rememberance 2014, another Black trans woman was murdered. Her name was Deshawnda Sanchez.
12th – With issue #37, Batgirl undid the good faith they had built with trans fans. The comic had featured Alysia Yeoh, one of the first trans characters in mainstream comics, but in this issue they relied on tired transmisogynistic stereotypes with their villain and even had Batgirl herself shout out “you’re a man” when she pulled off the villain’s wig. The creative team was quick to apologize, though, reached out to trans women to figure out how they could do better, and even changed the issue for the trade paperback. Way to step up.
19th – New York State decided to start including trans healthcare in their state Medicaid coverage.
22nd – A group of trans women of color were featured on the cover of Candy Magazine, and reminded us that living as a TWOC is a radical act. Some of the trans women featured include Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, Geena Rocero, Isis King, Juliana Huxtable and Gisele and Carmen Xtravaganza.
30th – 17 year old trans girl Leelah Alcorn committed suicide, sparking a national conversation about how dangerous so-called reparative therapy is for trans youth.
January
6th – Trans Lifeline, a suicide for and staffed by trans people, is here to help you out.
7th – If you want to read about a badass trans blacksmith, you can read Willow Zietman talk about her life.
Willow Zietman
8th – B. Binaohan ruminated on listening to living trans women and #JusticeForLeelahAlcorn.
9th – Papi Edwards, a Black trans woman, was murdered in Louisville, Kentucky.
13th – We wrote about Witchy, a webcomic about Asian witches who get magic from their hair. And it co-stars a teenage trans witch of color.
13th – Incarcerated trans woman LeslieAnn Manning sued New York State after being raped in prison.
14th – Madeleine Flores talked about her new comic Help Us! Great Warrior, which features a TWOC as a co-star.
Lamia Beard and Ty Underwood.
17th – Lamia Beard became the second Black trans woman murdered in just eight days when she was killed in Norfolk, Virginia.
26th – For the third time in less than three weeks, a Black trans woman was murdered. This time it’s Ty Underwood in Tyler, Texas.
29th – We interviewed Londyn Smith de Richelieu about appearing on Love Thy Sister.
31st – Yazmin Vash Payne, from Los Angeles, became the fourth trans woman of color murdered in the US in January.
February
1st – Just one day after Yazmin Vash Payne was murdered, another TWOC, Taja Gabrielle DeJesus, was murdered in San Francisco.
3rd – I asked if Image comics, with at least four trans women characters, is doing trans women’s representation better than anyone else.
Penny Proud via The Advocate
10th – Penny Proud was murdered in New Orleans, becoming at least the 6th trans woman murdered this year.
12th – Bryn Mawr widened its admission guidelines to allow trans women.
16th – Kristina Gomez Reinwald was murdered in Miami. At this point, a trans woman of color is being murdered about once a week in the US.
17th – Sera from Angela: Asgard’s Assassin and later, 1602: Witchhunter Angela and Angela: Queen of Hel is the closest thing we have to a trans superhero at this point.
21st – HUD told homeless shelters to stop discriminating against trans people.
22nd – Sumaya Dalmar, a Somali-Canadian trans woman, was murdered in Toronto.
March
via Planetransgender
1st – Charges against Monica Jones, a Black trans woman, were finally dropped after she was initially convicted of “manifesting prostitution,” a crime many trans advocates referred to as “walking while trans.”
7th – Keyshia Blige, a Black trans woman, was murdered in Aurora, Illinois.
8th – Wellesley College opened its doors to trans women.
10th – Mari watched the movie Boy Meets Girl, about a bisexual trans women played by a trans woman actor, and liked it a lot.
13th – Trans teenager Jazz Jennings starred in a commercial and got her own reality show on TLC.
Jazz and her family via aceshowbiz.com
![aceshowbiz.com](http://www.aceshowbiz.com/images/wennpic/jazz-jennings-24th-annual-glaad-media-awards-04.jpg"){kind=link}
17th – As a transgender lesbian, I take up two letters in LGBT and I don’t want to have to choose a side.
18th – Raquel Willis talked about the “tragic” humanity of Black trans women.
23rd – In Boise, Idaho, DW Trantham, a transgender girl, stood up to angry and transmisogynistic parents who withdrew their daughter from school because DW was allowed to use the girl’s bathroom.
30th – Mya Hall, a Black trans woman with a history of mental illness, was shot by NSA security when she drives into a security checkpoint.
31st – Here are 18 songs by trans artists and bands with trans musicians in them.
April
2nd – The 2015 Trans 100 was announced and I talked to the women on the list about how we can all support trans women.
Laverne Cox in her appearance on The Mindy Project via Variety
7th – As capitalizing on the stories of trans women started becoming a media trend, a bunch of TV shows about and starring trans women were announced.
8th – Discovery Life aired a trans docuseries called New Girls on the Block about a group of trans women living in Kansas City.
25th – In an interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC, Caitlyn Jenner came out as a trans woman, making her the most famous trans person in the US. Caitlyn Jenner’s coming out is probably the biggest trans news story of the year alongside the terrifying and tragic record number of reported murders of trans women, almost all of whom have been trans women of color.
May
via Huffington Post
4th – Janet Mock was absolutely amazing on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday.
4th – Smith College, a women’s college, will start accepting trans women.
15th – In a very unsurprising article, Audrey writes about how trans women prisoners suffer most from failures to stop prison rape.
18th – ABC Family’s show Becoming Us isn’t exactly the transgender reality show we hoped it would be.
18th – After a whole month(!) without any reported murders of trans women in the US, London Chanel was murdered in Philadelphia.
Mercedes Williamson
30th – Mercedes Williamson, from Rocky Creek, Alabama, became the second trans woman murdered this month and at least the 10th this year.
June
1st – While we were up at A-Camp, Caitlyn Jenner made her debut on the cover of Vanity Fair.
1st – A crack team of A-Camp staffers put together this list of 16 ways to make queer women’s spaces more friendly to trans women.
8th – Barnard College, a women’s college in New York City, announced that it will start accepting trans women!
Brouhaha trainer Luna Merbruja left and project director Lexi Adsit right in downtown Oakland.
8th – Luna Merbruja and Lexi Adsit talked to us about their TWOC storytelling revolution, Brouhaha.
12th – Caitlyn Jenner is a Pretty Big Deal on the internet, here’s what we said about how we’re going to cover her.
21st – Mari talked about how she rebuilt her relationship with her father after coming out for Autostraddle Plus.
22 – The Autostraddle staff watched the Netflix series Sense8, co-starring Jamie Clayton, a trans woman, and co-created by Lana Wachowski, another trans woman. We had very mixed feelings on it.
23rd – Jasmine Collins, a Black trans woman, is murdered in Kansas City, Missouri.
29th – US Immigration officials released a memo saying that they plan on improving their placement and treatment of trans immigrants in their detention centers, but the fight for justice for these immigrants isn’t over.
30th – The Girl Scouts of Western Washington turned down a $100,000 donation because it was given on the condition that they exclude trans girls.
July
6th – Maddie showed you how to talk to your parents about being better trans allies if you’re cis.
Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez in TANGERINE, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
13th – I watched Tangerine, a film starring two trans women of color, and liked it a lot.
14th – Ashton O’Hara was murdered in Detroit. His (reports say he identifies as a trans woman and used he/him pronouns) murder is the beginning of the second huge wave of murders of TWOC in America this year.
15th – Caitlyn Jenner is awarded the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the 2015 ESPY awards.
16th- Porcelain, a character in Gail Simone’s Secret Six, is shown to be genderfluid.
21st – One week after Ashton O’Hara is murdered, India Clarke was murdered in Tampa, Florida. Just over halfway through the year, more trans women had been murdered than we know were murdered in 2014.
India Clarke via facebook
23rd – K.C. Haggard was murdered in Fresno.
29th – Shade Schuler was murdered in Dallas, making her the third trans woman murdered in nine days.
August
6th – Lexi Adsit writes a terrific list of 24 actions needed to help trans women of color survive in a time when more are being murdered than ever before.
8th – Amber Monroe was the second Black trans woman murdered in Detroit in less than a month.
10th – Miss Major absolutely shuts down that horrible Stonewall movie’s version of one of the first major events of America’s LGBTQ history.
11th – Kicking off a week where three trans women of color are found murdered, Kandis Capri was killed in Phoenix.
13th – The body of Elisha Walker was discovered in Smithfield, North Carolina. She went missing late last year.
15th – Tamara Dominguez was the second trans woman of color murdered in Kansas City, Missouri this year. Four trans women of color have been found murdered in the first half of August.
19th – The director of About Ray, a new movie starring Elle Fanning as a young transgender boy, seems to not quite understand what a trans boy is.
20th – The White House hired its first openly trans staffer, Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, who will serve as Outreach and Recruitment Director in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel.
From Lumberjanes #17.
26th – Issue #17 of Lumberjanes came out, where Jo, one of the main characters, talks about being a transgender girl. This is one of the best comic issues of the year and makes Jo the first transgender girl of color to star in a popular all-ages comic.
26th – Morgan Collado wrote about her experience watching Tangerine and how it seems like the only time trans women of color get to have our stories told is when we’re experiencing trauma.
September
4th – The White House announced that it would start requiring insurers to cover transgender healthcare.
8th – I interviewed Jen Richards, Angelica Ross and Laura Zak about their upcoming webseries Her Story, about two trans women (played by Richards and Ross) who enter into new relationships, one with a man, one with a woman. It looks really amazing!
Jen Richards in Her Story.
22nd – Gabby Bellot wrote this terrific essay about how to write about trans women.
24th – Maddie wrote about the mistreatment of queer and trans immigrants in “GBT pods.”
24th – Beth interviewed Blacksmith Willow Zietman about her awesome metalwork business.
29th – I interviewed Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, two producers from Transparent, about their terrific docuseries This is Me.
30th – Law and Order aired its attempt at a Very Special Trans Episode. I, and other trans people, were not very pleased.
October
6th – Keisha Jenkins, a Black trans woman, was murdered in Philadelphia. She was at least the 20th trans woman murdered this year and the 2nd murdered in Philadelphia.
Keisha Jenkins
8th – Presidential Candidate Hilary Clinton met with activists including Cherno Biko and discussed the murders of trans women of color, which she called a “national crisis.”
8th – California became the first US state to officially ban the use of “trans panic” defenses in court.
11th – Diane Rodriguez, a trans activist from Ecuador, announced that her boyfriend, Fernando Machado, is pregnant with her child. Congratulations!
13th – Argentinean trans activist Diana Sacayán was found murdered in her apartment in Buenos Aires. She worked with LGBT rights groups like Movimento Antidiscriminatorio de Liberación and the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association.
13th – CJ Bruce wrote about how Ch4’s docuseries “Girls to Men” mistreated, mislead and misused them.
15th – Samantha Azzarano, a former Walmart sales associate in New Jersey, sued her manager and the company for harassment. After she came out as trans, Sheena Wyckoff, the manager, started calling her trans slurs, yelling at her and writing her up without reason.
15th – Kroger, the nation’s largest supermarket chain, announced that it will provide full health benefits to trans employees starting in January 2016.
Zella Ziona
15th – Zella Ziona, a Black trans woman, was murdered in Gaithersburg, Maryland. She’s at least the 21st trans woman to be murdered in the US this year. According to police reports, she was murdered because she “began acting flamboyantly” and “greatly embarrassed” one of her friends in front of his peers.
19th – I tried to make a list of the 10 Best Cities for Trans Women and found out that no such list exists.
21st – Lee Daniels is creating a new show for Fox called Star that’s about a hip-hop girl group with four female leads. One of those leads will be an Afro-Latina trans woman, and the casting call is specifically looking for trans actors. This will be the first time a trans woman of color will be a lead character on a prime-time network show.
22nd – New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that he would extend the New York State Human Rights Law to protect trans people.
24th – Bestselling YA author James Dawson came out as a trans woman.
Reina Gossett and Grace Dunham fight over who looks more like Caitlyn
24th – Reina Gossett talked with Grace Dunham about transphobia, activism, empathy and violence.
27th – Drew wrote about her experiences trying to find self-love and embracing her natural hair as a Black trans woman.
28th – Legendary trans activist Sylvia Rivera became the first trans person to have a portrait in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
30th – How to Get Away With Murder had maybe the best Very Special Trans Episode ever.
November
1st – Anry Fuentes, a trans girl in California, made her school’s varsity cheerleading squad after being kicked out of her home by her mom.
1st – MTV’s show Faking It announced that they were looking for trans actors for the upcoming 3rd season.
2nd – The Office of Civil Rights releases a report saying that a school in Illinois violated a trans girl’s Title IX rights when it refused her access to girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms.
3rd – Voters in Houston showed their transmisogynistic side when they voted down the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, which would have protected not only LGBTQ people, but also other protected classes like race and sex. HERO failed to pass largely because of commercials targeting trans women, claiming that the law would allow men to enter women’s bathrooms where they could assault bathroom users. Men going into women’s bathrooms and assaulting people would, of course, still be illegal, and trans women aren’t men, nor are there widespread (or really any) reports of trans women assaulting people in bathrooms, but this vote showed that transmisogyny is indeed a successful political strategy.
4th – Tangerine and Drunktown’s Finest, two movies starring trans women of color (Drunktown’s Finest was also written and directed by one) are available to watch online!
Janet and Aaron.
5th – Janet Mock marries Aaron Tredwell in what was probably one of the most beautiful weddings ever.
9th – The Out 100 honored trans women including Caitlyn Jenner, Candis Cayne, Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez of Tangerine, Hari Nef, Juliana Huxtable, Bamby Salcedo, Breanna Sinclairé, Jennicet Gutiérrez, Andreja Pejic and Jen Richards.
14th – The Bring Your Own Body exhibit ends in New York City. In this exhibit, trans artists showed their work alongside a selection of archival documents exploring the history of trans people’s lived experiences.