Transgender Studies

History

Transgender studies began to coalesce as an academic field in the early 1990s, primarily in the United States and the United Kingdom. During that time, a set of diverse conditions came together that were collectively conducive to the emergence of transgender studies. Like other socially engaged academic fields, such as women's studies, ethnic studies, and queer studies, transgender studies was fueled by sociopolitical activism, primarily taking place outside of the academy. During the early 1990s, transgender and transsexual social movements were growing rapidly and becoming increasingly visible. Groups inspired by ACT UP, such as Transgender Nation in the United States, were formed and staged direct-action politics. More traditional social movement organizations, such as Press for Change in the United Kingdom, increased in number as well. Although movements and organizations such as these predated the rise of transgender studies, their scope and visibility increased considerably in the 1990s.

In addition to overt political activity, representations of transgender people were more visible in popular culture, including movies and television. Drag performances that had been part of sexual minority subcultures for many years suddenly became mainstream. TV talk shows provided a window into a sensationalized version of the lives of gender benders.

In the 1990s, ways of being gender-variant seemed to proliferate. People identified with an increasing range of gender-nonconforming identities, including many that had been around for a long time (drag queens, transsexuals, cross-dressers) and others that were new or newly visible (drag kings, boidykes, trannyfags, gender queers). In addition, the dominant meaning associated with the term transgender changed. Originally coined in the 1970s by full-time heterosexual cross-dresser Virginia Prince, transgen-derist had originally meant someone who took on the social role of the “opposite” gender without any surgical or other bodily intervention to “change sex.” However, in the 1990s transgender became an umbrella term that was meant to include all of the manifold ways in which people step outside of normative gender. The popularization of this new meaning is generally attributed to transgender activist Leslie Feinberg's 1992 pamphlet, “Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come.” It is this broad meaning of transgender that is most associated with the academic project of transgender studies.

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