2023 Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture Series: Jules Gill-Peterson

Stan Sclaroff: . . . Welcome everyone to the Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture, both in-person and online tonight. I’m Stan Sclaroff, dean of arts and sciences, and it is a true honor to introduce tonight’s lecture.

First I’ll speak a bit about Howard Zinn. Howard Zinn was a longtime professor in the department of political science from 1964 until 1988. He was a historian, author, professor, playwright, political activist, and a hero of the political left.

As dean, I go on the road, I meet with alumni around the country, and I speak to people who were students of Howard Zinn and the impact that he had on their thinking. They’re in all different professions — and the way that he taught, the way that he inspired them, lives on today in the work of so many alumni of Boston University. When you ask who was your favorite professor at Boston University, who was the person who impacted you the most in your thinking about the world, I would say that maybe one out of five people that I meet will say that Howard Zinn was among those faculty for them. And indeed his impact on society and thinking about how we portray history was momentous and lives on to this day and is brought out in the spirit of tonight’s speaker.

But first, a little bit more about Professor Zinn. Of course, he’s best known for his book, A People’s History of the United States, which countered the idea that history must be written by and for society’s winners. He had a lasting influence on his students, and his students were not just at Boston University — they were also the people that he met with in different contexts around the country. Throughout his life, Professor Zinn fought for peace and human rights, for equality for those whose stories had not been highlighted.

Now I’d like to speak a bit about tonight’s lecturer, Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson, associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins [University] and currently a William and Flora Hewlett Foundation fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She is a celebrated scholar of transgender history and through her research she has changed the myth that transgender children are a new phenomenon in the 21st century. The lecture will examine the political stakes of transition and gender as a matter of labor and property. In the spirit of Zinn, her scholarship takes an every day, every person perspective and brings to light transgender history and its relationship within political and economic circumstances.

I’d also like to thank Alex H. MacDonald and his late wife, Dr. Maureen A. Strafford, for establishing the endowment that helps fund the Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture. Next, I’d like to introduce Cati Connell, associate professor of sociology, who will introduce tonight’s speaker and then facilitate a discussion after the talk.

Professor Connell is the former director of BU’s Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program. Her primary research agenda centers on the contradictory consequences of increased LGBTQIA mainstreaming in the 21st century. In her recent book, A Few Good Gays: The Gendered Compromises Behind Military Inclusion, she considers the ambivalent effects of this mainstreaming in the context of recent changes to gender and sexuality policy within the U.S. Military. Her current research, a multimethod data collection initiative on lesbian lives, considers the antecedents and social conditions that have nurtured a nascent but rapidly proliferating movement toward redefining lesbian as not just a sexuality but also as a gender subjectivity with a distinct set of political, aesthetic, and cultural norms that exist outside of binary gender and assimilative sexual politics.

Finally, I’d like to note that there will be a reception immediately following the lecture at the Dahod Family Alumni Center at the Castle, just across the street behind the building, and I encourage all of you who are in-person with us tonight to please consider joining us at the reception. So, without further delay, please welcome Professor Connell to the stage.

Cati Connell: Hello. It is my distinct pleasure and honor to introduce Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and a leading scholar of transgender history, with a focus on the racial histories of sex, gender, and trans embodiment. I first encountered Jules’ work through her 2018 book, the award-winning Histories of the Transgender Child. In it, Dr. Gill-Peterson shows how the recent invention or discovery of the trans child in fact obscures a prior century of trans childhoods, one in which trans and intersex children were used to shore up scientific dominion over racialized sex and gender taxonomies.

In his biography, Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left, by Martin Duberman, Zinn is quoted as saying that through his work “it became clear to me that the really critical way in which people are deceived by history is not the lies that are told but the things that are omitted.” Histories of the Transgender Child corrects those omissions with respect to the lost history of trans children and how they were made legible and illegible through racialized notions of childhood sex and gender plasticity.

In addition to her prolific academic-facing work, Jules has made a number of crucial public facing contributions as a media expert in trans history and trans politics. Perhaps the most striking of these to date has been her work as a producer and commentator in the documentary Framing Agnes, a critical retelling of the case of the pseudonym Agnes, whose participation in a 1950s gender clinic has been used across the medical and social sciences for many decades as proof of the true nature of gender and sexuality and making sweeping pronouncements about them. Framing Agnes tells a much more ambivalent and polylithic story, not just of Agnes, but of mid-century trans lives more broadly. This retelling dramatically diverges from the ways Agnes was narrated by her clinic interlocutor, Harold Garfinkle, who used their conversations as the basis of his ethnomethodological theory of the production of gender, a theory that would go on to have field-shaping and indeed field-constraining consequences across a number of disciplines, perhaps most especially my own.

This, too, is in keeping with Zinn’s legacy, a telling of history, as Dean Sclaroff already mentioned, not from the perspective of the winners — which in this case would be the doctors and sociologists who made their careers through Agnes and her contemporaries — but rather from those whose complex gendered and sexual subjectivities were commodified and flattened by them. Across these and other intellectual projects, a hallmark of Gill-Peterson’s work is a keen eye and appreciation for stories of creative trans resistance and self-making.

“History cannot provide confirmation,” Howard Zinn once wrote, “that something better is inevitable, but it can uncover evidence that it is conceivable.” And it’s that commitment, that steadfast commitment to searching for more conceivable paths to liberatory ways of doing gender, that I see yet another crucial kinship between Gill-Peterson’s work and that of Zinn’s. Now, I’m sure we’re all eager to hear this evening’s lecture entitled “What Sort of Work is Transition? Class, Labor, and Trans History.” So, without further preamble, please join me in welcoming Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson to Boston University.

Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson: Oh my goodness, thank you so, so much Cati. That was very thoughtful, very moving. I just want to express my deep gratitude to everyone for making today possible [and] for welcoming me. And thank you all for taking time to share your evening with me. We’re already in December and the nights are long and the sun sets very early, but we don’t have any windows here so we don’t even know what time it is.

To say that I’m honored to offer this year’s Howard Zinn Lecture would really be an understatement in more than one way. Like many of you, I’m sure reading A People’s History of the United States was really kind of a major event in my political coming of age. Really long before I knew I was going to become a historian, I read the book. If you want to imagine it, as a pretty grumpy Canadian kid hungry to understand the outsized importance this country had made unavoidable in my adolescence, as a war on something as absurd and abstract as terror translated into killing millions of Afghanis and Iraqis, events that brought me into the streets for the first time. Canadians are fond of idealizing themselves when the American Empire faces extra international scrutiny, as if those bare differences of degree can be laundered into national pride — and that probably motivated me to some extent when I picked up A People’s History. But then reading it really helped transform my political education.

Later, I was taught in college that post-9/11 history wasn’t yet history in a disciplinary sense. But as we stare down all too familiar imperialist apologia for mass death, and particularly a lot of pressure to suppress pro-Palestine speech and protest, thinking with Howard Zinn obviously remains as urgent as ever. I was also honored by this invitation, sort of closer to my own work, because it’s not really a given that the kind of U.S. history I write, trans history, it’s not a given that it sits at the proverbial table of the people. I think what motivates me is actually a dynamic I probably first encountered in Zinn’s notion of A People’s History, a history as he put it, quote “different from what I learned in college and in graduate school, and what I saw in the history texts given to students all over the country.”

Well, I encountered no trans history in college. In graduate school it was entirely self-taught. In my contributions to some efforts to put trans people into school textbooks and endeavor facing formidable government repression in some places, my overwhelming sense is that in trans history everything remains to be written. Not because it chronicles a hidden or a repressed history, but because when you write history for which there are few or no reference points, you’re always asking fundamental questions about the practice of historical research and interpretation.

It almost goes without saying that the stakes of that task couldn’t possibly feel higher today. Anti-trans moral panic is a cornerstone of authoritarian projects turned openly and lustily against democracy in battling the liberal state. This year has seen over 500 anti-trans bills introduced in state legislatures. Eighty-five have been signed into law encircling education, public accommodations — like restrooms, sports, and healthcare — and they join laws and administrative fiats aggressively policing what words can be said in classrooms, what books can be lent in libraries, and what clothes can be worn in public. All of them, in other words, target what we call transition — the practices by which trans people materially change their genders and change their sexes. Laws banning and criminalizing gender affirming care for young people in particular have passed in 22 states so far. Most of these target youth, but a few states like Missouri have tried to ban adults from transitioning. And in Florida, they have partially succeeded, kicking the entire state’s adult trans population off their hormone prescriptions this summer.

I will without hesitation call these escalations unprecedented. The U.S. state has not found it advantageous until now to single out trans people by name under the law and to criminalize transition so garishly. Yet precisely nothing happening today is without a history, either. What I want to put to you tonight is a full throated critique of the way this political crisis has been presented and an alternative way to think about it.

The criminalization of transition, though it is rarely described so honestly by papers of record, has been styled from the center as a symptom of backlash. I’m sure you’ve encountered that term before. I think that thesis was latent all the way back in Time magazine’s now infamous 2014 cover story on the so-called transgender tipping point. That point of view takes what I would call a sort of Whiggish view of history; it reasons that U.S. social progress has enabled trans people to become culturally visible and able to transition in greater numbers, and that newfound visibility is said to have sparked a conservative reaction manifesting not just in state laws but in the so-called culture war — over a million petty grievances that shift with the spasms of the right-wing media ecosystem.

But I’ll be blunt with you: I don’t buy it. I don’t think we’re experiencing a backlash. If by backlash we consider for a moment the words’ actual meaning, which is a reaction to the over application of force, like for example if you over steer your car, the wheels might lash back at you through the steering apparatus. Backlash is really a mechanical word and actually its figurative meaning as a metaphor didn’t emerge until the 1930s. And if we want to be really nerdy, actually the Oxford English Dictionary’s representative examples of usage are almost all about white backlash against civil rights in the mid century. This is the moderate complaint, that granting too much freedom too quickly to Black Americans would arouse a counterproductive white backlash. That was a talking point designed to slow down the Black Freedom Movement at every turn. It was truly a kind of political victim blaming by liberal interests in the status quo suggesting that the real cause of white supremacist violence was not its perpetrators but the audacity of its targets. I think this alone ought to cast aspersions on using the term backlash. It’s not that it’s just inaccurate, I think it tends to get things backwards on purpose, reversing cause and effect. Because it wasn’t true of the Black Freedom Movement and I don’t think it’s true that trans people cause reprisal by being too visible or transitioning too much, as if those were neutral measures.

So, if not backlash, then what is occasioning the escalating criminalization of transition in this country? Why now? To answer that question, I submit to you first that we have to abandon anti-trans politics as an arena of morality, or an arena of technical debunking by science, or an arena of mere ideological distraction from the bread and butter economic crisis that supposedly motivates voters. In fact, if we give up the bourgeois fairy tale that transition is a voluntary exercise in identification, or the acquisition of new language to reflect an inner truth called gender identity, then we have to account for transition as a material practice, really genuinely changing gender and changing sex in the world, which I actually think is far less fantastical than the way psychiatric diagnosis imagines it. I promise you.

I think our question here really becomes: what are the historical conditions of possibility for transition in which criminalization now wants to force a single negative outcome? Taking my cue from Howard Zinn’s People’s approach, I’m going to put to you tonight that trans history since the New Deal shows that transition is not a matter of self-actualization; it is functionally a problem of labor and class. So, an analysis of political economy and work ought to be our guide, because I think the political stakes of transition actually involve the management of upward and downward mobility in an economy structured by the gendered division of labor. So you’ll see we’re going to encounter the history of medicine, psychiatry, and psychology here, but I think we’ll find them in terms pretty different from this Whiggish view of trans inclusion in the nation. And we’ll find that trans history, far from peripheral, actually concerns the most central, well-studied parts of U.S. history. It’s just that from a political economic perspective, trans doesn’t name some kind of unified people or flat group or minority. Trans is rather riven to its core by competing interests of class and race that often express themselves as gender.

I wanted to take the opportunity tonight to indulge in a narrative scale I almost would never employ, but one that Howard Zinn taught us has genuine political value. So, I’m going to do something that for a historian is kind of wild. I’m going to make my case to you over a hundred years. I’ve never done this before, but I think zooming way out to look at a whole century of transition will lead us to an answer for why authoritarian movements want to criminalize transition right now and why liberal defenses of the status quo are completely useless to stop them. That’s a lot to do in the next 30 minutes, and I can’t really promise to treat ten decades evenly, let alone thoroughly. But I can promise a fast-paced ride for a lecture, and I think some irreverent fun.

For instance, I’m arbitrarily going to divide this century into three parts and I’m going to give each of them a really ridiculous jokey subtitle that barely makes any sense. My hope is that this all gives us a lot to talk about. So, here we go. Come on a journey with me.

Part one — Comes Medicine To Answer: A New Question Called Your Body. I’m going to take us back to the New Deal, because it’s actually the moment that signals the contemporary marriage of statecraft to business interests, the formation of a liberal compact in which the function of government is to stabilize the boom and bust cycles of capitalism and reign in worker power by determining the formal boundaries for labor struggle against management. This arrangement of the welfare state was really only achieved during total wartime mobilization, and then the transition to a planned peacetime economy at the end of the 1940s. These are all events that profoundly changed the conditions of possibility for transition.

Since at least the early 19th century, transition had basically followed two gendered patterns that just reflected the broader constituents of U.S. social life. Transition to life as a man, as historian Emily Skidmore has shown, involved moving generally to a small town, wearing men’s clothing, marrying a woman, and contributing to small town life in conventionally reliable, mostly productive, terms. This was typically enough for trans men to withstand neighborly scrutiny of their appearance, and even the revelation of their trans status — which was something that would get reported in newspapers. The most successful trans man’s life was not just economically independent — that economic independence meant distancing oneself from other trans people to blend in. Transition, think about this, profoundly increased a man’s legal rights, social and economic mobility, and it commanded, therefore, a pretty genuine degree of sympathy.

But, by contrast, transition to life as a woman represented a real loss of legal rights and a total collapse of work opportunities. Thus, from the moment red light districts formed in cities flush with capital and working class men, trans women began to form community to survive and work in the service economy, particularly doing sex work. To manage transitions, downward mobility, becoming public women, as sex workers were often called, was really the only option in an era where they could neither marry nor work in the very few sectors open to women. Well, in the 20th century, the growth of industrial wage labor by FDR’s presidency and the family wage really raised the stakes of this decision to live as a woman. Giving up the jobs reserved for men in the economy made womanhood basically a farther plunge in standard of living than it had been before. So, as an adaptation to that problem, a new culture of part-time crossdressing emerged, one that didn’t interfere with work in the public sphere.

“By the 1930s, sororities and networks of penpals mediated a fledgling shared consciousness in New York City,” wrote Nancy in a letter to Transvestite magazine. A quote “little coterie of close friends of mine began gathering one night a week in her two-bedroom Manhattan apartment in the early 1930s.” Most of these transvestites made the trip into the city from the suburbs and Nancy had actually converted her second bedroom into a dressing room in which she and her sisters put on their clothes and makeup. Nancy reported that she also “employed a pretty light-skinned colored girl who was to be trusted to take care of the garments and wigs. We spent many delightful evenings chatting about the latest fashions, the theater, etc.” Well, in this part-time practice of private dressing, Nancy and her sisters relished in a shared experience of trans femininity explicitly designed not to ruin their lives. Very few trans women, except those who were already very poor pre-transition, dared to live full-time as women. Or full-time life as a woman was sort of a reward at retirement after a long career.

The class and race divisions within trans men in this period, by contrast, did not revolve around a distinction between part-time and full-time — they functioned, instead, just through one’s work. The solitary trans men who maintained farms, pursued loners’ lives on the settler economy of the so-called frontier states, or who worked in manual labor, had to contend with the increasing urbanization of the industrial population, which was pulling all the jobs into cities. So, by the 1930s, as Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis’ classic study, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, recounts, “There was, in fact, a proletarian trans masculinity concentrated in industrial centers like Buffalo, New York. And unlike its rural counterpart, these men faced a higher risk of exposure in the sheer density of urban life and in their homosocial workplaces. A butch femme bar culture also emerged in Buffalo at this time,” which is mostly what this book is about. But butch really became a kind of powerful social symbol. Although they crossdressed, which was usually illegal, butches did not really intend to pass as men. Instead, they represented a new and publicly advertised lesbian identity. This newly visible butch didn’t really endanger any of the trans men who would leave Buffalo for the country, but they did start to threaten to out trans men by association who worked at urban industrial plants where they labored stealth, without anyone knowing. Those trans men, despite also being working class, actually avoided the new lesbian bars springing up in Buffalo at this time. They were to be found instead at the same plant bar as the rest of their fellow workers.

The entry of many more white women into the workforce during the second world war, and then especially the sudden tolerance for women wearing pants, both heightened and softened these everyday risks to trans men. When they encountered doctors and psychiatrists, which they began to do, or even requested new hormones and surgeries, there were many fewer of them than there were trans women. But this sparked no mystery in doctors’ minds. The difference could be explained by the concrete distance in social and economic security between men and women at large in American society. In other words, there was nothing really inexplicable about trans men to doctors yet because wanting to live as a man was undeniably a rational desire in a country organized around white male power. So for that reason, fewer trans men really needed the assistance, let alone the certification of doctors to live in the world successfully as men.

The trans men who did struggle in this period were those who were already barred from the throne of white manhood. Pauli Murray, for instance, spent a great deal of the 1930s and the 1940s passing as a man, but actually failed, despite years of effort, to convince incredulous doctors to prescribe newly available testosterone. So, by 1952, it was Christine Jorgensen, the blonde bombshell and former GI, not Pauli Murray, who incarnated a new possibility, not for transition in a generic sense, but for the specific problem those part-time transvestites were trying to solve, that transitioning and becoming a woman was economically ruinous. Medical transition presented itself as a way for trans women to securely transition full-time by biologically and legally certifying their bodies as fit for marriage and women’s work. In other words, medicine appointed itself the task of solving what it saw as the social problem of trans womanhood, setting the stage for a very pivotal decade.

I will give a particularly cheeky name to U.S. political history nerds. Okay, part two, Great Society Transsexualism.

Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore made headlines in 1966 for opening the country’s first surgical gender clinic, but it was really San Francisco where the political economic purpose of medical transition first emerged, and most strongly. It was there, in the second half of the 1960s, that medical transition was fitted with the function of welfare reform under President Johnson’s Great Society programs, particularly the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, the centerpiece of Johnson’s War on Poverty. Now, we often remember San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood for the Compton’s Cafeteria riot, when drag queens, hustlers, and trans women battled the San Francisco Police Department [SFPD] three years before Stonewall. But that riot was only one half of a class relationship built in the Tenderloin. In San Francisco, the city designated specific areas as the target neighborhoods for the War on Poverty’s programs, and Central City — the neighborhood encompassing the Tenderloin — was designated just months before for the riot at Compton’s after an angry pressure campaign from gay organizations like the Mattachine Society and an alliance of left-wing protestant ministries had really begun to moralize the many runaway gay youth and trans sex workers who lived in this neighborhood.

So, what I call Great Society Transsexualism was kind of a series of endeavors funded by federal anti-poverty grants to build a pathway out of sex work and into the labor market for trans women. It was an exercise in welfare reform because the War on Poverty actually rejected direct economic redistribution to fight poverty in favor of coercing people to work their way out of poverty with the help of neighborhood social services. That sounds very familiar to us today, but it was kind of a new idea back then. A city health clinic called — this is true — the Center for Special Problems began to provide hormones to trans women contingent on psychiatric approval in 1968, and that year a support group for transsexuals at the center also formed. They called themselves C.O.G.; not very beautiful, but it’s short for Conversion Our Goal. And conversion, a little history lesson, back in the 1960s used to mean gender affirming surgery, not conversion therapy. Now, C.O.G. set itself the task of creating a political consciousness for transsexuals that could align with Johnson’s War on Poverty. Basically, they hoped that by reforming themselves into model citizens they would garner enough sympathy from experts and bureaucrats to grant them access to surgery. And, above all, joining that access to accessing the formal labor market for a kind of work that transition to life as a woman had barred them from.

C.O.G.’s main benefactor was actually a police officer, Elliot Blackstone, assigned to Central City’s War on Poverty office as a police community relations officer. Blackstone championed C.O.G.’s cause with the SFPD, whose application of California’s anti-crossdressing law prevented trans women from working. One member of C.O.G. named Judy, for example, was arrested 20 times in the summer of 1964 [and] she was never indicted. Every single time she went in front of a judge, he tossed out her arrest because she had no intent to deceive people through crossdressing. But because she didn’t earn enough to make bail, each stint in jail led to Judy being fired from her job. So she spent the summer chasing one low paid position after another, from cocktail waitress to theater cashier. C.O.G. presented all this police harassment in very liberal terms, asking only for reform, to protect respectable transsexuals like themselves, with medical diagnosis who did not deserve to be arrested, unlike all the other girls who were hustling out on the street.

Blackstone also used his office to get some transsexual women into the War on Poverty’s job retraining programs. He hired trans women like Sandy Thompson as his office aides, and he also arranged access to continuing education. So, a few trans women like Thompson attended John Adams Adult High School to obtain diplomas for work as typists. A 1968 War on Poverty office newsletter reported that “Terry Peoples is seeking secretarial training” and “Mandy Taylor would like clerk typist training.” So you can imagine that the jobs training in the War on Poverty was deeply organized by gender, and women’s positions intentionally paid much less than men’s. So, in an incredibly thrilling career as a typist, Thompson could expect to earn maybe $80 a week, which was a lot less than she could make selling sex. But Thompson had no choice: if she wanted surgery, she would have to prove not only that she could pass as a woman to a psychiatrist, but that she could support herself and stay out of trouble with the law. In other words, that she had been rehabilitated out of her deviance.

This welfare reform principle was then adopted across the bay in 1968 when a surgeon named Donald Laub at Stanford University decided to open a gender clinic. The Center for Special Problems began preparing patients for Stanford by putting them through psychiatric gatekeeping for hormones, and, with Elliot Blackstone’s help, pushing their economic rehabilitation. Then the Center adopted the gatekeeping that Laub advocated, like requiring what he called a real life test of living and working as a woman for a year or more first, to prove deservingness for surgery. Since the cost of surgery at a private hospital was several thousand [dollars] — usually more money than most poor people made in the Tenderloin in a whole year, finding jobs was really a genuine issue, though again, the War on Poverty’s preference for service work meant years of struggle to put away enough funds.

But these delays were all signs of success to their architects. By the early 1970s, Stanford — like Johns Hopkins — began to argue that gender affirming surgery was not the point of the gender clinic: Actually changing trans people’s behavior and employment status was the point. Working with psychiatrist Norman Fisk, Laub and his staff demanded that transsexuals enroll in extensive psychological and social programs during their real life test — which they described on purpose as a form of behavior modification therapy. So, what did they do? Well, they hired department store clerks to instruct trans women in feminine appearance, and this is true, they hired a coach to lead trans men in strict workout regimes. They used job counseling to pressure everyone into gender stereotyped lines of work and they stringently investigated patients’ heterosexuality and commitment to marriage after surgery. Failure to rehabilitate would mean further delay, what Fisk called “putting a patient on hold.”

So, by Laub’s own estimate, in 1972, 500 people had enrolled at Stanford and just 25 had been judged rehabilitated and approved for surgery. This was good news for them, because by that same token Fisk could count a 100% positive outcome rate in his first follow-up study because this clinic simply withheld surgery from over 90% of people indefinitely. Pretty macabre stuff. But this bargain between the welfare state and medicine was given its real teeth in 1979, when this system was codified as the very first standards of care issued by what is today called the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

Which brings us to part three: Transgender is Not for Profit and Transition is for Boys.

This alliance between the gender clinic and the welfare state established both the civic and the market value of transition by consolidating a class relationship. Good transsexuals were the ones who rehabilitated themselves into productive workers, and they were rewarded with surgery. Bad transsexuals, on the other hand, which was 90% of them, were those who didn’t pass, who were gay, who did sex work, and who couldn’t hold down a job. This class effect hardened into the profound disparities in who can transition that we would all recognize today.

Two major developments traverse this period beginning in the 1980s. First, trans men became an urbane, sociable, and highly visible cohort, for the first time medically transitioning in much greater numbers. Second, the explosion of nonprofits as the only check on the HIV/AIDS crisis locked poor trans women — particularly Black and Brown sex workers — into the narrowest path possible off the streets, institutionalizing the extreme violence they still endure.

Now, if you remember back in the 1990s, if you can remember back to the 90s, it was kind of a common talking point — although you might hear that point today, as well — that trans men suffered from a kind of unfair invisibility, that they were ignored not just by doctors, but that they were ignored in the trans community because it revolved all around trans women. But I think this history tells us that this was not so. In truth, trans men did not participate in urban community or even recreate the model of the private transvestite club because the upward mobility of transition to life as a man discouraged them from living near one another.

When trans men did begin to seek out doctors in large numbers in the 1980s, the gatekeepers of the gender clinics fell in love with them. Trans men in study after study were declared much more successful than trans women at rehabilitating themselves, especially in finding work. Shocking. There was also a bit of a pragmatic matter: a bit of a problem snuck into that glowing assessment, which was that most men did not want the bottom surgery that clinics offered. So their surgical needs were also much easier to meet through less invasive top surgery.

But why did trans men begin to medically transition in greater numbers in the 1980s and not earlier? And for that matter, why did they do that by moving to cities like San Francisco, where they could access health care, and join the trans social service and peer support landscape that they had so carefully avoided before? There’s two larger historical developments that shine some light on this. First, the meteoric rise in women working outside of the home dramatically changed the starting point for men’s transition. In 1960, just 38% of women worked outside the home; but by 1980, that number had finally broken into the majority and was still climbing. And the type of work available to women also changed, albeit not as much. In 1960, the top three professions employing women were all clerk and secretarial fields. But by 1980, teaching and nursing were climbing that list — not high wage jobs, but higher than what had been available 20 years earlier.

Now, the second related development was the growth of white middle class urban lesbian communities, which supplanted those working class butch femme bar cultures I referred to earlier. With a coupled household centric model in the 1970s and the 1980s, lesbian feminists pretty famously rejected butch femme as a kind of backwards imitation of heterosexuality. But I think we might reinterpret that critique as the expression of a new class interest very anxious about its virtue. Because unsurprisingly, it was these white middle class lesbian communities in which trans men were suddenly deemed a problem when they started transitioning in the 1980s and the 1990s. This engendered not just those famous border wars between trans men and butches, but actually an entire culture of agonizing over whether medical transition was a betrayal of friends and lovers.

Aren Aizura has written very movingly about the emergence of SOFFAs at the end of the 1990s. SOFFA stands for significant others, friends, families, and allies. This was actually a kind of pseudo identity category that lesbians and other non-trans people and trans men’s lives gave themselves to wallow in how hard it was on them when someone transitioned. Sorry, I’m not very sympathetic to that. But the conventional story of this moment is that trans men sparked some real crisis in the category lesbian, but I wonder if the intense aggression directed at them instead reflected pretty middle class anxiety that medical transition was revealing a little too much the economic gentrification of white urban lesbian communities. That is, fixating on trans men’s bodies sort of ventriloquizes the ambivalence about abandoning working class bar femme culture for a comparatively normy middle class version anchored in the affectionate couple who live together. The fear, in other words, of that couple could come to literally resemble heterosexuality if one partner transitioned, I think tells us a lot. The conflation here of gender with economic security is sort of the whole point, because the class position of these white lesbians was not actually that secure. Two income households became the norm in this period because American wages were stagnating, and two women households could not compete.

In fact, the movement from an industrial economy to a post industrial economy can be narrated in these kinds of gendered and racialized terms. Historian Gabriel Winant has shown that, for example, when men working in the steel industry were laid off and saw their standard of living plummet in the 1980s, their union health insurance became the back stop through care labor. The healthcare sector promised to sustain the entire economy of cities like Pittsburgh as low-wage nurses — a large percentage of whom were Black women entering the semi-skilled workforce for the first time — cared for these alien industrial workers. So, what I’m suggesting is that another thread in this history of deindustrialization concerns white trans men who were uniquely squeezed between two macroeconomic trends, the decimation of industrial jobs that they had relied on to make medical transition less important to them to succeed in prior decades and the entry of so many lesbians into the labor market as women, which afforded a degree of pretty precarious separatism and caused a lot of class anxiety.

In this context, I think trans men had a real economic incentive to medically transition, starting in the 1980s, basically to compete in a tough economy. And medically transitioning sparked aggression from the predominantly white middle class milieu in which they could afford it. Well, this cohort of trans men also played a pretty important role in the rise of the word transgender in the 1990s. This was a new term then, which announced a radical break from medical terminology. But consider also its umbrella function in light of the history I’ve been recounting. For the first time, in the 1990s, the mainstream trans word was supposed to include both men and women. Actually, it was supposed to radically include all sorts of people whose interests had never aligned and were often diametrically opposed. Not just transsexual women and men who medically transition, but transvestites, crossdressers, drag queens, drag kings, and — perhaps most revealingly — the girls who worked the streets.

The sex workers and trans women in the DIY street economy had been cast as a foil to Great Society transsexualism in the 1960s, and despite their collective efforts to build a better world together, their living conditions had really been stagnant. Up to the point when the HIV virus began to hit them extremely hard, the better known story of Black and Brown trans women leading a fight for the lives of their kin has been narrated through the ballroom community of Harlem that flourished in this era. But really the logic recurred throughout the country, at every scale. The Miss Gay Black Ohio Pageant circuit, for instance, which had operated across Midwestern bars since the late 1960s, pivoted their calendar of events to fundraising for their community members affected by AIDS in the early 1980s. In Cleveland, a wanderer performer named Big Mama devoted herself tirelessly to filling the near total void of healthcare and care labor services available to both Black gay men and Black trans women. In larger cities, the social service model became the calling card of a host of HIV/AIDS harm reduction and healthcare programs, many of which adopted the new terminology of transgender to do outreach to sex workers. As time wore on and those organizations kind of became de facto the only healthcare available, some white trans women and later Black and Latina women were hired as social service workers.

Following the War on Poverty’s principle of reclassifying the grinding experience of poverty, illness, and social death as work experience, Black trans women in particular started to be offered the narrowest of roots possible off the street by becoming social service workers and advocates. And only in exchange, I will point out, for working in constantly retraumatizing environments for much less money than they had been making before. More recently, LGBT liberalism has seized on these Black trans women as celebratory figures for narrating structural violence, and as a rallying cry for social progress, asking that they do the underpaid and grueling labor of certifying the goodness of pride events, the Trans Day of Remembrance, and being the public face of a movement that uses their names and images to achieve things for LGBT people that provide very few tangible benefits to people living in poverty or experiencing criminalization. For a really moving reflection on the ambivalence of those decades from the perspective of those women, I highly recommend Kristen Lovell’s outstanding documentary The Stroll.

All right, thank you for indulging that whirlwind tour of a hundred years. We did it, we did it. But as I suggested at the outset, I had a purpose in telling you such a gigantic story. So, to wrap up, let me take us through to a conclusion. Why now and what next?

I set out tonight to reinterpret transition through the lens of political economy. Rather than accepting the medicalized terms in which it’s been presented by its self-appointed gatekeepers, I argued that medicine has restricted transition’s value to producing men and women who can participate in the labor market and who cost the welfare state as little as possible. Doctors invented that value by obsessing over what they saw as the social problem of trans women’s inability to work outside of the sex industry. But by the 1980s, shifts in gendered wages incentivized trans men to transition medically, as well. The enduring antagonism between respectable upwardly mobile transition and the sex workers on the street — the Black and Brown girls on the stroll — was further institutionalized by social service agencies in the 1980s and 1990s, creating the profoundly unequal access to transition we see right up to this day.

So, one of the big takeaways from this history is that the criminalization of transition today does not impact all trans people equally. In fact, it might appear at first glance that it disproportionately affects middle class people, the ones with private insurance. I actually think it’s a little bit more complex than that, because the Affordable Care Act both greatly expanded state Medicaid programs and, although it’s taken a lot of litigation to get there, prohibits discrimination based on gender and insurance coverage. It has led over time to a significant increase in access to medical transition without having to get a job that has private insurance plans that cover transition. That’s a huge historical upheaval. In some states that really are the furthest ahead on this, like New York and California, although the gains are nowhere near close to meeting real needs, actually a number of low-income trans people have gotten access to hormones and surgery in the last ten years who otherwise would have had no access at all to formal clinics. So, I actually think this is the first clue to answering the question I laid out at the beginning of my remarks: why now, unsurprisingly, I think it’s because some low-income trans people have been able to transition.

Okay, a second clue is standing in front of you: it would be me. There are very few trans women of color like me with ten year professorships. But before me, I mean there were basically zero. My educational and work opportunities are a small data point in a big generational shift, indeed. The way the far right paints universities as pro trans wildly overstates how pro trans they really are. But, it is undeniable that a college degree structures the dominant current of American trans culture. Think of these things: the glossary of micro identities, the focus on inclusive language and pronouns, the definition of being trans as something private for the individual to narrate. All of those reflect worldviews, attitudes, and habits correlate to college educated people’s class. So actually I think the rising obligation of going into massive debt to get a college degree just to float in this labor market has pushed many more trans people into college, opening work opportunities beyond gender stereotyped industries. Also, thanks to decades of feminist agitation around that.

Interestingly, for the first time, white trans women are very well represented. Among them, many of whom are able to transition and actually stay in the industry they were already in or, in some cases, to transition and pursue the career they desired instead of transition dictating the type of work that they can pursue. And a few, though it remains shockingly few, Black and Brown trans women have joined them. Though the profound class and race hierarchies I outlined remain pretty firmly in place, the sheer entry of so many trans people into education and the workplace — as openly trans instead of as stealth products of the gender clinic — represents a reorganization of the conditions of possibility for transition built during this prior century. In fact, I think we’re starting to see the emergence of a pretty precarious low middle class of trans people for whom education and work choices are not dictated by their decision to transition the way it was in the past. That’s not a shift all trans people are enjoying. It’s actually a pretty small cohort. But, it is the cohort that I suspect the far right understands itself as targeting the audacity to transition and not cover it up in the classroom or in the workplace — even if that doesn’t actually change the class hierarchy in this country at all — it is nevertheless a powerful symbol for authoritarians looking to moralize the nation and the family.

It also makes it even more heartbreaking that just as so many more trans people are refusing the social contract of the gender clinic, the door is being slammed so hard in their faces. But the harshness and the cruelty of anti-trans authoritarianism also reminds us that the liberal state and its medical gatekeepers have been pretty useless protection this whole time. If you could even call them that. Exactly as with abortion. Exactly as with abortion, where the right to privacy and the slogan of safe, legal, and rare completely failed to stop it being made illegal. Criminalization of abortion sits on top of the fact that legality was never enough for poor people, it was never enough for Black women, it was never enough for trans men who needed abortions before the Dobbs decision.

So as we contemplate how to undo the damage of criminalizing transition, how to stop authoritarian strong men promising to rid the nation of trans people, and to dream of something bigger and better than the status quo of medical transition, I think we have to radically break with the history I’ve recounted tonight. We have to do what’s not really accomplished by creating a college educated middle class generation of transitioners. The problem all along has been that it’s much too hard and far too rare that people get to transition. And no one has gotten to transition freely on their own terms because the value of transition has been pegged all along to the social forms demanded by the labor market. So if you ask me, there actually really isn’t anything philosophically, culturally, or even biologically that remarkable about transition. It’s just one of many things human beings can do given the right environment.

But, in the political and economic environment in which trans people have been forced to figure out how to transition over the past 100 years, arriving in the crisis that engulfs us today, if you ask me, that remains nothing short of courageous and it remains nothing short of inspiring to demand an unconditional right to transition and to say that we want more people to transition. I only hope we can do justice to the latent freedom in collectively demanding a world in which transition were unconditionally possible. Anything less than that, I fear, will play right into the hands of those targeting trans people to facilitate the installation of permanent minority rule without majority consent.

Thank you so very much.

Cati Connell: Thank you so much. We have a little bit of time for some discussion and taking some questions. I will just be here to sort of moderate or throw out a question or two if needed. Are there microphones that are being passed? Should I be pointing people in the right direction? Okay, good. A microphone stand is coming out so you have some time to formulate your question. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your current work on DIY transition and how it responds to, and perhaps offer some reparative possibilities in terms of reading against the grain of trans medicalization as trans history.

Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson: It does occur to me some days that all I ever do, no matter what I think I’m writing about, is write about the history of trans medicalization. Like, you just can’t get away from it all. But for good reason, they stole transition from us. Well, except they didn’t really. I think that’s sort of one of the things that’s led me to the research I’m doing now, which formed the basis of this lecture. I finished my first book writing about Johns Hopkins primarily, but also UCLA, a couple other clinics, and I was like alright, these people really kind of built the landscape in which trans people have to live. But actually very few trans people ever went to those clinics. And you saw those numbers. At Stanford they wouldn’t turn you away but they didn’t give surgery to almost anyone. So what were most people doing this whole time? They were transitioning DIY, do it yourself. Particularly if they were poor, particularly if they were trans women, but not only and always. We could classify all those generations of trans men who really had no need to go to clinics to transition because they were perfectly capable of figuring out how to live in the world as men without that. I mean they were DIY transitioning absolutely, right. Actually, very much so because they are often figuring it out all by themselves.

Part of that is about the sort of tectonic shift in our head to go back to some of the moving. You know, different little snippets we’ve heard from Howard Zinn’s philosophy on history. What is it that hasn’t been conceivable to us already that can help us push our own conception of what is possible further? The story of medical transition is pretty sad news; it hasn’t turned out very well, I don’t think. And now it’s crashing and burning. But it’s actually not the whole story; it’s actually this much of a story. It exists in a class relationship to the rest of the people, but like the people, if we’re talking about trans people, are ones who transition DIY. And so, to me, what that does is instead of facing this Goliath that is medicine and feeling really small, it opens up a dynamic struggle. DIY has always been fighting with medical transition and doctors have always been fighting. I can promise you they’ve been very anxious this whole time about the fact that because they don’t give most people what they want, most people go somewhere else. They don’t like that. So, if we reinterpret that, reconceive of that as a terrain of struggle, well then we’re just the next chapter in that book of struggle. We’re not just facing a kind of Goliath that’s been growing on its own for the last hundred years.

Cati Connell: So, when you all have questions you can go ahead and line up at the microphones and we’ll go through.

Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson: Well, just to say this is my experiment in throwing a hundred years at you. So please don’t feel like you have to ask a 100-year-long question, obviously, that you have to ask a question about a hundred years. I’m happy to get granular with y’all, or think about what we’re going through right now in 2023, if you’d like, as well. I appreciate you being the first one. Thank you.

Audience Question: Hi. So I’m being brave, asking the first question. Thank you so much for this talk. I mean, I was all just impressed by how moving your way of speaking is. So thank you. I was thinking about what you were saying about how it’s clear that a radical change and a radical break from what we’ve been doing previously is needed. And I agree; I think in just about every sphere it’s becoming very clear that people have been asking for this broad spectrum of possibility and it’s been hemmed in by the too fast, too sudden rhetoric of, like “if we do it that way, bad things will happen,” I guess. But they’re happening now. So, what’s the story there? I guess I don’t know if I have a specific question, but I’m curious if you could elaborate a bit more on what a radical break can look like. Because I’ve also been thinking about that. Again, I think it’s needed, but I also think that it’s really important to not have it become a violent sort of power vacuum break, of just tearing everything down. So, what are your thoughts on that?

Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson: That’s a fabulous question, very thoughtful. I appreciate the complexity because I’m no accelerationist. I’m not a political theorist, anyway. I’m not a political scientist, either. I’m different from Howard in that way, not much of a prescriptivist. I am a historian. But one thing that your question sparked in me is — just to underline, too, that people have been making these demands for a long time. Trans liberation would be one version of it in the 1970s. But as long as people have tried to limit the freedom to transition, there have been people demanding a kind of unconditional freedom to transition. I think the term radical, not to be such a professor about it, it does mean getting to the root. So it doesn’t necessarily mean a violent upheaval.

One of the practical questions I like to think about — and DIY is always really helpful to kind of organize my thoughts here. DIY may be the most common popular version of that is self-administering hormones without a prescription. That’s really easy to do. Honestly, most people can do it. Very few people need professional help with their hormones. Also, most doctors aren’t capable of giving it, but anyways . . . Surgery is pretty hard to do; you can’t usually do it on yourself. I don’t recommend that. There are some stories of people doing surgery on each other — it’s pretty high stakes. Well, we need some kind of surgeons. It’s like, I don’t love the hospital clinic I go to, but I’m not trying to get it shut down tomorrow. So there’s that part of it; it is about thinking both concretely, this way may be the difference between asking for better private health care and asking for a better world in which it were possible to transition freely. And that leads me actually away from the narrowness of responding to anti-trans politics on their own terms.

When we look at what is the purpose of all this anti-trans legislation, I strongly believe it is about facilitating permanent minority rule. This is a very old playbook. It’s also a hundred years old. The rise of fascism in Europe involved a lot of scapegoating of queer and trans people, taking away the civil rights of minorities. Playing on moral panics about them as enemies to the nation is also often a practical political way to cement political power when you do not have majority consent from the voting population, when you only have a plurality. At this moment, the far right in this country does not enjoy majority support.

But, of course, one interesting example would be Ohio, [which] passed a really, really strong constitutional state protection for abortion. And when the GOP controlled legislature was floating the idea that maybe we’ll just ignore the will of the people, what did they call the legislature back to deliberate on? Anti-trans bills, a whole bunch of them. Not a coincidence. So anyways, there’s a purpose to anti-trans politics. It’s not really about trans people; transition is collateral damage. That, to me, means that the politics we need right now is just politics of solidarity. Trans people’s interests are aligned with people who want reproductive justice, people who care about climate justice and economic justice, and people who care about democracy. And that I actually think is probably the majority of this country. So, it’s more to me about a mass movement demanding something much bigger than any of the small demands groups can make on their own when they’re defined as kind of narrow interests, or minority, or just defined only in terms of legal civil rights. We could go back to the status quo, where transition is legal but most people can’t do it. That’s better than what we have right now, but that’s not a victory. I’m not interested in that, honestly. That’s not what gets me up in the morning.

I think it’s about practices of solidarity and thinking about what sort of public movement is robust enough to say, “Hey, trans people are part of democracy. We care about trans people because we care about democratic freedom, in the way we care about reproductive justice, the way we care about economic justice or having a planet in the future.” That’s where I land and part of that is just to say I think that’s where I stopped talking. That’s where I stopped talking as a historian. I don’t know the answer to how to set all of that up. It’s not really up to me; that’s a collective problem, it’s a democratic problem. We should work that out as a group, and that’ll be really hard. Honestly, the history of people trying to work that out hasn’t been so great. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try for it. I think it’s much better than what we’re walking into right now. Fabulous question. And hello, line up folks.

Audience Question: Hi, good evening. I also want to open by just saying this was such a lovely talk. I only found out it was happening a few hours ago and I’m so glad I found the time, too. Goodness, the depth of your research is astounding. But I had a question more about that era. You spoke about the 1960s and 1970s, the clinics that began to open and the birth of that psychiatric gatekeeping of medical transition, and in what ways you thought that that made, or reinforced rather, the kind of trans narrative of the trans person who’s always known that they wanted to transition, was always sure of their gender. And kind of as a pre-follow-up question, what do you need to do to get to the point you want to be at if that sort of narrative is easier to embody as a person of a higher socioeconomic status?

Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson: Wonderful question. The answer is definitely yes. That’s a short version of it. The idea of having an authentic interior self that you’ve cultivated since a young age, this kind of person you’ve always driven to become, that’s a very middle class way of thinking. To be really pedantic and historian, it’s like a bourgeois way of conceptualizing the self that arises in Europe first and [then] in America. It’s not widely shared; it’s like a privileged kind of relationship. It’s one where you’ve sort of been thinking about yourself and cultivating your relationship to yourself for a long time. It’s very much about your private self, who you are behind closed doors, who you are alone in your bedroom. It’s really interesting because the reason that you had to say “ever since I can remember, I was a little girl. I used to pray to God every night to be turned into some. . .”

Some people probably did experience that. Most trans people didn’t. Psychiatrists demanded that because they could not figure out a way to decide who was trans and who was not, and they did not want to listen to people saying, “Hello, I am trans, I’d like to transition.” That’s the one thing they could not accept. Psychiatrists, at this time especially, understand “mental disorders” as analogous to physiological diseases that have pathological causes in the body. Actually, their greatest hope was that one day they would discover a genetic or an endocrine or a neuroendocrine biomarker or disease that explained why trans people were different, say, from drag queens and transvestites and gay people. Because socially, those differences were pretty muddy. And of course they couldn’t figure out how to do that, so they just decided this would be a pretty good way: If you’re running a clinic, make people have really hard and fast distinctions to qualify.

So one of the ways we know that they were just making that up is after they implement that in these first gender clinics, say at Stanford, a few years later they have to invent a whole new diagnostic category. Gender dysphoria actually was invented because they were like, “Wait a minute, we opened this clinic and it was the most amazing thing that ever happened. Every single patient who came in fit the diagnostic category perfectly.” And at first, this is the way the doctors tell it. They’re like, “We were so proud of ourselves. We are such good doctors. All of our patients are perfect, perfect transsexuals.” And then like a minute later, a few years later, they’re like, “Oh they were lying, they just read medical journals and figured out what you’re supposed to say to get what you want, because we never let anyone transition.” So they had to create this whole new diagnostic category to try and deal with the fact that they had been making these bizarre demands on patients.

And patients, of course, you’re just going to tell people what you need to tell them to get what you need. It’s just such a great example of why psychiatrization transition is just nonsense. It’s a project of social control. In the mid century, there was intense social dislike of so-called deviants, and gay people and trans people were often treated as sex offenders under the law per se. Pretty bad stuff. We’ve shed a lot of that but really held on to the trans diagnosis, as if it’s totally cool. It’s a lot different than it used to be, but it really comes out of this period where doctors and clinicians kept getting humiliated when they realized their patients were smart enough to outwit them. I think there’s just a lot we can ponder in terms of how seriously we should even take medicalization, but also just how silly the narratives we’re told define being trans really are. They might only apply to a few people, but they tend to apply to more upper middle class folks. Wonderful question, thank you.

Audience Question: Hello. First of all, thank you for the talk. My brain is buzzing. I’m going to ask my question first, and I’m going to give you some disjointed thoughts to contextualize it. I’d love to hear more of your thoughts about parallels between labor movements and trans solidarity movements. Some of the thinking is around this conversation about the ambivalent nature of mainstreaming of trans identity is in some way similar to the ways in which like union recognition is super helpful. On the other hand, it has a lot of constraints on worker power. Also then thinking about the increasing wave of labor activity recently in some ways paralleling the increasing wave of trans activity. So these are the kind of disjointed thoughts I am buzzing with, and I’d love to have your thoughts on it.

Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson: I love that question. Thank you. There’s one person who I just couldn’t figure out where to put into this talk, because there’s too much history already crammed into it. Okay, you’ve set me up perfectly, [for an] incredible person named Denise D’Anne, who was a trans woman who transitioned in 1969. She worked in railroad administrative offices in California, a pretty good job sort of in the executive suite in the admin level. Not as an executive [though]. She was pretty good at her job. She decided to transition, has surgery, dadada, comes back to her boss and was like, “Hey,” and does the whole “I’m going to try and do this medically correct, like my doctor says. I had this thing and I went for this surgery and now I’m going to come back to work.” And the boss is like, “No, you’re not. You’re fired. And moreover, you’re blacklisted. You’re never working in this industry again.” A very common experience for trans women at the time.

So she moves to San Francisco — like a lot of people in 1969 — and she’s really frustrated to find that, because of this gender clinic model and the way transition is so tied to work, the only work she can get is secretarial work. She’s way over qualified for it. She’s making less money as a woman, experiencing just pure sex discrimination, and she’s pissed. So what does she do? She gets a job with the city government in San Francisco and starts union organizing, becomes a shop steward, gets really involved in the SEIU — and she does all of this more or less stealth. She doesn’t usually talk about being trans, but she gets really passionate about women’s discrimination and wages and gets really involved in the labor movement.

I love her. She’s a great person. She’s one of the very few out trans people in the labor movement from that time period. And I thought it was so interesting to sit with her story because it entwines a bunch of these things you just raised. She experienced firsthand that downward mobility, despite doing everything the gender clinic said. In fact, they wanted her to become a secretary, or better yet, get married and never work again. That wasn’t good enough for her and she became a women’s liberation activist. She never really became a trans activist, but she knew the jig was up and I think there’s just something so interesting about a missed connection, that there weren’t more trans people in the union movement. But then again, the labor movement wasn’t super friendly to trans folks.

I could say from my own experience of labor organizing in academia in the 2010s, getting the steel workers to understand how collective bargaining can help trans people’s material needs took a little bit of work. But we got there [and we] feel good about it. In the end, it was worthwhile work, but I think there’s something really interesting about that question of containment. That’s why I started with the New Deal. What is the New Deal partially trying to accomplish? Stopping wildcat strikes. They did not want people to just sit down on the shop floor and stop working. That was really devastating to the economy, and they thought well, we’re not going to be able to handle that in World War II. But it was really scary, whether there were wildcat strikes to business and to government. So having a formal union is a way to check that power, it just is this sort of eternal struggle between rank and file and the power that workers have.

I think the challenge for trans folks that’s different though, is workers are the numerical majority; trans people are a pretty small part of the population and I think that’s one of the interesting challenges. But then there are these obvious intersections: Trans people should be in the labor movement, the labor movement should care about trans people. In an era where democratic institutions and courts are pretty corrupt and rotten, collective bargaining can be a really effective way to make change, material change, to get people health insurance, get them surgery, get them hormones, get them benefits, get them family medical leave, things like that. There’s a lot there, but I just wanted to shout out Denise D’Anne because, in some ways, she was sort of making the case for that 50 years ago. Thank you.

Audience Question: Hello. My original question was going to be about trans people in unions but that got thoroughly answered. That was fantastic, the whole talk has been fantastic. So, my other question: For the younger generation, today in the 2000s, there’s been a kind of DIY queer education that doesn’t come through. Most bi kids in high school don’t get to read Judith Butler, and it’s inaccessible to a lot of people. We get things from the internet, we get things from word of mouth. You mentioned before that there were some historical trans and queer childhoods and I wonder if you could talk to what kinds of education or mass media made that even possible in the imaginations of these children and their families? Whereas today, it seems almost like one of the main far-right talking points, that it’s so easy for people to realize this is a possibility now. What was that like in the older media landscape?

Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson: What a great question. I mean, I love that question because I feel like the thesis of visibility which is tied to that backlash thesis is so consumed, LGBT, like everything in the U.S., we’re always talking about visibility — visibility, is it good, is it bad, did it cause this, did it do that. It’s very much tied to this sense of, well there’s a lot more representation today, curricular changes, like just the internet exists. It’s one of the reasons why book bans, I don’t think, have the literal function of trying to take books away from kids because kids could go on the internet. They’re trying to do something else: they’re applying pressure, they’re damaging public institutions like schools and libraries, they’re sending messages to career and trans youth that they are in danger in their home community, and so on.

But one of the amazing things that is just like an eternal riddle to me is, I think we’ve sort of been taught that it’s inexorably better to live in a world where there’s lots of trans words circulating because they’ll get in the heads of people who need to hear them and they’ll turn on a light bulb, and it helps people realize who they are. I don’t know that that’s necessarily true. I think it’s kind of true, but I always think of myself when I was writing my book, I was like wait a minute, who are these kids in 1962 who are like, “Hello, I am a transexual.” I’m like what? I was born in the 1990s. I saw trans people on TV. It was not good content. It was like Sally Jessy Raphael, and what’s the one where they’re always fighting with each other? Jerry Springer, yeah! Like, not cool stuff. Like, I saw the word transgender, transexual, I saw trans people on TV. I went to college and read books about trans people. All those trans words that got in my head did not do a thing for me until suddenly, one day, I was like wait a minute, I can’t explain that. Then, by the same virtue, people in the past who had access to zero trans words would figure out by themselves in the most ingenious ways possible, that they were trans. How did they do that? I don’t know. It’s again a very cool thing people are capable of.

So all of that is to say, I think the past helps us appreciate how ingenious people can really be, and why actually I think, to me, it’s like the democratic question is about like free access to information — not good representation versus bad representation, but wanting things to be in the world so people can engage with them creatively, without knowing in advance what that will mean. So I think it’s pretty cool to turn on the TV and see trans people today. It’s also really weird. But also, kids just figured it out decades ago. Sometimes it was really hard for them, sometimes it wasn’t. I’m not sure we’ll ever achieve a point where there’s so much availability that it won’t be hard for some people because being trans is not something you’re told is fundamentally a normal, exciting, even cool, thing you can do in the world. It’s something you still have to kind of pull out of yourself, in spite of yourself, even if you find out there are words for that in the world. And I think that that, to me, remains a much bigger barrier than anything else. I hope that kind of answers your question.

Cati Connell: I think Raj was first and then we can move to this mic. Are we about ready? One or two questions left.

Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson: Okay, I will answer much more quickly.

Audience Question: I will try to ask this as concisely as possible. Your talk was wonderful. You had so much fun with it and it made it so fun to listen to.I am actually in Professor Connell’s sexuality and social life class and I was going to ask you a question about what your thoughts were on how I feel like there are a lot more trans adults in the present today who kind of embody the mentality that you were saying the gender clinics promoted, of you’ve got to work to earn it and you have to be the right fit to deserve this kind of health care. I’m specifically thinking of, I don’t know if you’re familiar with public figures like Kalvin Garrah or Blaire White, who are white trans people specifically, who would market this idea of this is how you’re a proper trans person, this is what a trans person looks like, and also the invisibility aspect you brought up. Because one of the papers that I read in Professor Connell’s class was about the change in the sexual habits of trans men. So it was like documenting trans men’s perception of what does it mean to be a man as they go through the transition process and how much that changes. When I was growing up, I had access to the internet. I could see trans people online. One of them was a figure like Kalvin Garrah who was like, “This is what a trans man is like. Trans men always transition. Trans men always do this. Non-binary people are just lying to themselves.” And he actually coined the term trans trender, so he was one of those kinds of guys. It was interesting to me though that I was not familiar with the fact that this literature I read in Professor Connell’s class now existed way before Kalvin Garrah did, and it felt like it wasn’t that there were also lies spread, but it was the omission of literature that already existed out there saying, “Hey, there are trans men who don’t want bottom surgery and they’re still men.” I wanted to know your thoughts on how some of the queer adults of today within the trans community kind of promote this idea of this is what it means to be trans because this is what I did to be trans, and how they’re also omitting a lot of the literature that’s existed before them?

Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson: Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, I’m not always sure how many of those people there really are. I mean, I think we live in a political media environment that rewards this sort of like, “I’m telling you like it is,” kind of weird right-wing trans people. It’s like really, I mean, I don’t know how many subscriptions you get and then one day like, “Honey, we’re all going to be locked up in the same cell, so see you there.” That kind of strange like revanchist reactionary, I have a hard time buying it. I just think it’s like very few people and it’s sort of a shtick. However, I think the class story of transition can tell us a lot. If you experienced transition as an unfair impediment on the privileges or the entitlements that you expected over the course of your life and your career — your earning potential, your legal rights, and so on — then you’re probably more likely to gatekeep who should be able to transition.

We saw a similar thing in the gay rights movement, as well. Think about, for example, how much of early AIDS activism involved white gay men as one cohorted people who are just shocked that the U.S. government would let them die en masse. So, really a startling, disturbing thing to have to reckon with. I think maybe class actually just explains a lot of it. But also no one knows anything about trans history, especially trans people, but there’s a reason for that. It’s not just because trans history isn’t taught very often; it’s actually just because trans people just arise at random throughout the population. Trans people don’t literally reproduce themselves so our social reproduction is actually conditioned by that. It’s actually very hard. I feel very generous towards what people don’t know about the past. Well, we’re always relitigating the same fight every 20 years. But that kind of makes sense, because every generation has been forced to feel like they’re inventing their own existence out of nothing, instead of having lineages of direct cultural transmission of knowledge from generation to generation. So, I guess I don’t worry too much about the provocateurs. I think they’re doing their little grifty thing and I think most trans people don’t have that life, so I think most trans people experience a much more interesting but also much more precarious proletarian life, and that just sort of deserves our attention. I guess if that makes sense.

Cati Connell: I think we have time for just one more short question. But if we don’t get to your question, hopefully you’ll be able to stick around for the reception and speak to Jules.

Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson: Or just come up and ask me right after.

Audience Question: First off, thank you very much again for speaking with us today. I was just sort of wondering more about your process in research and writing. When doing this kind of intersectional genealogy, how do you make sure you don’t get lost in the sauce, you know? How do you make sure you stay focused on your initial core topic, which is the trans identity? Then, how you fit that into the larger intersexual picture?

Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson: Oh, wow. Wow, what a great question. I mean, the first thing is, you actually do got it, you have to get lost in the sauce. I mean, it’s kind of like I got lots to say about academia on every given day. It is so nice to get to just sit around and research for years on end, right? It’s hard to do it in this environment because things feel so urgent. But there is something that comes from that process of saying, “I have to invent a methodology as I am doing my research. As I’m writing I’m working out what it is I’m writing about.” I think that just sort of felt like the real impetus from Howard Zinn’s work that I’m really connecting with tonight in preparing for this event. But for me, it’s like being motivated by a question and basically following my hunches. Then it’s being obsessive; I just consume like everything I can possibly find, go to every single archive I can think of, read every single study I can think of. And not always being sure why.

There’s this kind of agnosticism. It’s almost become meditative for me. It’s like a ritual now, where I’m just like this thing I know how to do, which is become like a Hoover vacuum and consume like a thousand pages in one day. And the whole time I’m doing that, not thinking about what I’m reading. Then it’s like the next day when I wake up and I’m walking to my office, where my brain is like, “Did you see that pattern?” Oh wait, this thesis I came to, that the gender clinic is practicing welfare reform, that’s taken me like ten years to figure out, multiple books, manuscripts, and like it just like hit me three months ago and that’s how long it’s taken to get that far, just because it’s required figuring out how to follow all these connections and how to come back to these core sites that I’ve researched for years, but finding new angles and finding new archival sources and finding new oral history interviews. It’s just exhaustive, painstaking work. But I think it’s so fun. It’s like your little project that lives with you; you get to carry it around and you’re like, “Okay, here’s my little trans history.” And it’s getting bigger and ganglier and probably going through adolescence right now. And you know what? That’s great. One day I’m going to kiss it goodbye and send it off to college, and it can write itself.

No, but, I think it’s just like being willing to throw yourself into it without being entirely sure what you’re going to find out on the other end. That can be a kind of useless piece of advice, because what the heck are you supposed to do with that? But what I mean is, feel free to just follow your hunches and your desires in your own research, be curious, and always just keep in mind that kind of core takeaway that Zinn’s work really gifted us, which is that you’re, we’re, ultimately trying to produce something different, more interesting, and more meaningful than what we were taught originally. And to do that we have to give ourselves permission to exercise a kind of freedom in research and thinking that I think ultimately is so incredibly rewarding, and also means you’ll never run out of things to think about. And that’s something I’m really grateful for.

Cati Connell: Thank you so much. What a beautiful and apt way to end this conversation. I’ll pass the mic to Dean Sclaroff to wrap us up but thank you all too for your excellent questions and discussion.

Stan Sclaroff: So, first I just want to thank Professor Gill-Peterson and Professor Connell for the awesome lecture and questions afterwards. Thank you. And what a wonderful audience tonight. Thank you all for coming. I’d also like to reiterate our gratitude to CAS alumni Alex MacDonald, who’s here tonight. Thank you. He and his late wife Maureen can take pride in the vision, not only of the series that celebrates the values of Professor Zinn, but also the wealth of scholarship, debate, and enlightenment that we had tonight.

I invite the audience to attend the Silas Peirce Lecture, which is on February 26th. The title is “Fighting Misinformation on Social Media” and the speaker is Sergei Guriev, provost and professor of economics at the Sciences Po, Paris. It’s a very interesting lecture that we’ll hear if you’ve read any of his writings [or] talks about authoritarian regimes and the economic declines that result from them in modern history. It’s very interesting, from an economic perspective, so I invite you all to join us at the reception afterwards at the Dahod Family Alumni Center, which is at the castle right behind this building. So thanks again and have a good evening.