Been thinking about this a lot lately, so bear with me while I bemoan, then celebrate, the trans community.
It's been commented on by people far wiser, smarter, and better at speaking than me, but, we lost our radical trans history.
Or, more accurately, we had our radical trans history stolen from us.
Starting (in my research) in the mid 1950s (in the US, please forgive my utter lack of knowledge on queer history outside the imperial core. I'm still learning), with the rise of groups like the Mattachine Society, and on into the 1970s and the rise of lesbian feminism, we started bleeding our radical history. The street queens and transsexual hustlers and the stealth girls and boys that passed so well, no one questioned it. The Black and Brown dolls and trans Leather Daddies that hit and bit and beat the cops outside of Stonewall. They were pushed aside. I mean, look at how much more famous Christine Jorgenson was than Sylvia or Marsha. The streetwalkers, the dolls who got beat and worse, the boys that were forced to reveal their crotch to a gang of drunk assholes.
Those were the transsexuals.
Transsexuals fought. They got bloodied, bruised, broken for liberation. Like Sylvia said, "I have lost my job, my apartment, my life for gay liberation."
But, assimilationist cis gays took that from us.
They didn't want liberation. They wanted conformity. Tolerance. "Acceptance," as much as that word can mean anything in a fundamentally homophobic society. They wanted the law to treat them the same as cis people, as heterosexual people, when the law was the very source of the problem. The problem isn't that gay and trans people are treated differently; its that the laws are fundamentally corrupt and oppressive.
So, we lost it. The AIDS crisis made street queens and leather pups public enemy number one in the eyes of cis society, and so they were targeted for extermination. The 90's brought the birth of the marriage equality movement, and the 00's pushed it into the mainstream.
And transsexuals, bulldykes, leather Daddies, and street queens-the radical history of the queer liberation movement-were the casualties.
To convince the cishets to give them a modicum of liberty, instead of taking it for themselves, the cis, white, middle class gays gave us up. They sold us out, told cishets, "we're not like them, see? We're normal, god-fearing, Capitalism-loving Americans, see?"
Marriage equality came (though, not in any way that garuntees longevity), housing and employment discrimination laws started popping up, cis gay couples could adopt and buy homes and cars and lives, just like cishet society told them they should.
And the radical history was buried, remembered only by the few who survived, and the people who loved them.
Queer people, especially queer trans people, are reconnecting, rediscovering, re-remembering.
We are nurturing that radical history, that fire for liberation, that hatred of assimilation that saved us all those years ago.
And that-that hope for rebirth and rekindling-is why I call myself trannsexual. To embody that past, and the dolls and bois and Daddies and queens before me, and the hope of a liberatory future for all queer people.