good-girl-elly:

elliegrine:

queeranarchism:

diamoricgrantaire:

queeranarchism:

wecanalldobetter:

queeranarchism:

Trans history: whatever happened to the other T?

I don’t know how universally relevant this is (I guess no part of queer history ever is) but I wonder how many trans people know the history of T&T groups.

Like, in the 90′s and 00′s in the Netherlands almost every trans related groups was a T&T ‘Transsexual and Transvestites’ group and that seemed to also be a quite common thing in other north-west European countries for as far as I can see. Maybe beyond Europe too? I’m not sure.

People who called themselves transsexual and transvestites at the time felt that they had many experiences in common that made organising together valuable and many agreed that there was a large grey area of overlapping identities. With very little information available, a lot of trans women identified as transvestites first, before identifying at trans women (in that period often using the term Male-to-Female transsexual and transwoman without the space between the words).

Then, in about 2007-2012, things changed. Transgender became more popular than transsexual and crossdresser largely replaced transvestite. In those early days, the term transgender was often understood to include crossdressers. The transgender umbrella is from that time:

Back then, the word transgender was seen by many as the umbrella term that would unite all the struggles against gender roles. But that grouping together was far from uncontroversial and a lot of heated debates took place over how broad or narrow the transgender umbrella term should be. Some feared too wide an umbrella would take attention away from transsexuals, others feared it would be confusing, some groups that had previously only had transwomen and transvestites did not appreciate the new presence of transmen and transmasculine people in their transgender community, some felt that it was very important to distinguish binary-identified transsexuals from all sorts of weird non-binary identities.

Those who took part in the debates probably remember the specific standpoints in more detail. For me, I just remember how in 2008-2012 all the T&T groups started changing their names to ‘transgender groups’ and then slowly but surely focussing more on only those transgender people that wanted some kind of transition, physical or social. Eventually, transvestites (or crossdressers, as the common term was by then) disappeared entirely from the transgender groups and a lot of transgender people forgot about the earlier wider meaning of transgender as an umbrella term.

Within that same period, there started to be a LOT of new and fairly positive media attention for transgender issues, specifically transition related atttention. The media was no participant at all in the ‘what does transgender mean’ question but the questions they did ask were ‘are you on hormones yet?’ and ‘did you have the surgery’? Since that was a lot better than ‘so are you mentally ill because you want to be a woman?’ a lot of people who fitted the hormones + surgery narrative eagerly accepted this ‘positive visibility’ and did not question the narrow focus. This further cemented the view that transgender meant transition.

And the transgender activists? Well, let’s just say many of them, knee deep in a struggle for better health care and human rights, leaped at the opportunity to seize the momentum and finally make some changes and many didn’t really give much thought to the slow disappearance of transvestites from the newly named ‘transgender’ community.

So where are we now, in 2018?

The transgender community seems to have largely forgotten about their T&T history. The terms transvestite and crossdresser both seem to be in decline, as are the communities that meet around those identities. Younger people who don’t fit the gender binary but also do not desire social or physical transition, are now more likely to identify themselves as some kind of genderqueer and nonbinary or just ‘not into labels’ or just to wear whatever they want and rock it. Some of them find their way back under the transgender umbrella after all. Which I guess is some kind of a happy ending.

But then theres the question of recognizing our legacy. I don’t think a lot of these young people realise that, had they been born 20 years earlier, many of them would probably have found a home in the transvestite community. I don’t think a lot of young transgender people recognize older transvestites as their elders, who paved the way for them. I often get the impression that they view the dwindling groups of 50+, 60+, 70+ transvestites with an element of disdain, as people who held on to a regressive binary identity, instead of as like – their badass grandfather-mothers who build parts of trans history.

i mean, i get a real “nonbinary genders aren’t real”/ “nonbinary just means GNC” vibe from this that is unnecessary but I do think it’s unfortunate how there is no real community for GNC people who usually just get lumped in ‘trans’ and even then, only occasionally 

I am genderqueer and that was definitely not what I meant. My statement that some (and only some) people that now identify as nonbinary would previously have found a home in transvestite communities comes from meeting many many transvestites over the years who felt far more trans than merely GNC and who saw crossdressing as an expression of their genderidentity. Some embraced a non-binary identity once that term became more common, some stuck with the terms that had been their home for decades.

This is of course not true for ALL transvestites. That is true of some (and only some) transvestites, but yeah, there is a definite historic and modern overlap in those terms. If you read this and STILL get that vibe, you might need to rethink ‘transvestites aren’t real’ and ‘transvestite only ever means GNC’ ‘cause it’s just more complex than that.

I see a lot of this tendency in young trans communitues of labelling GNC identities not real and not inherent and then distancing themselves from them, refusing to acknowledge that some GNC identity terms include a significant number of nonbinary people. It’s part of the disdain and prejudice that fueled the seperation of T&T communities.

This whole post is so important. The T&T community was definitely a thing in Sweden as well and I didn’t know about it until just a couple years ago.

I think we need to draw fewer hard lines in the modern trans community. We like to draw very nive tidy lines between binary trans people and nonbinary people, between transgender people and gender nonconforming people, between transness and crossdressing, but these lines are not always neat tidy lines and accepting and acknowledging that is important.

A few years ago a speaker came to my school who identified as a transvestite and I was originally pissed at him because I was under the very millenial/gen Z impression that transvestite was a slur thrown at trans people (true) that cisgender crossdresses were appropriating (not true). But that speaker made me do more research and I found that for most of Swedish trams history there was no separation between transsexual/transgender and transvestite/gender nonconforming the separation ran mainly along presentation and agab lines. This speaker had been a trans rights fighter for 30 years before I was even born and I was dismissing him because he used the language of his time to describe himself and I had grown up in a time that had forgotten the origins of my own community.

Communities change and thats okay. Im not saying that we should go back. But we should acknowledge that some of these neat and hard lines we have drawn around the trans community that separates transgender people from gender nonconforming, transvestite, drag kings/queens and crossdressers are not actually neat lines and that they might actually exclude some of our trans elders from the T&T days for whom the new definitions of transness might not apply despite the fact that they are the ones who built this community.

The modern equivalent of the more inclusive T&T community would probably be the label ‘Gender variant’ since that term includes both transgender, nonbinary, gender nonconforming and crossdressing people. But learning about the T&T community and understanding that some of these groups under tge gender variant umbrella who in modern times would probably not be considered trans (like crossdressers, transvestites, gender nonconforming people and even some nonbinary people) were originally part of the trans/T&T community has been very eye opening.

YES! Thank you so much for every word of this.

This post has been pretty eye opening for me

How did the timing of it falling out of favour line up with mainstream drag getting taken over by cis gay misogynists like Ru Paul?  Did people distance themselves from the identity as it got associated with that sort of thing?  Or perhaps where they sidelined before that happens because they weren’t considered respectable enough for the ‘sucking up to the straights’ movement?

From my experience changing representations of drag had absolutely no impact on it at all because no one in the T&T scene saw drag queens and transvestites as in any way related. Those were experienced as completely different categories. The similarities between drag and crossdressing still mostly seems to exists in the eyes of uninformed outsider. They are usually not perceived as similar things at all by the people who take part in them.

I think that in many cases the switch from T&T to ‘transgender’ as a group description was based on a genuine intend to build a broader more inclusive movement but the spirit of inclusiveness didn’t last and as the meaning of ’transgender’ began to change to something more narrow, transvestites began to feel like outsiders in transgender groups.

In some cases this was deliberately pushed by transgender people who felt that their experience was more real and more important, but I think in many more cases people simply didn’t notice the slow impact of media on their communities and didn’t really question why there were no new young transvestites showing up in their communities.

Transitioning people often spend only a few years in a transgender group before reaching a point where being trans plays a limited role in their lives. This means the long term memory of a group is very fragile.