Gender

Nonconformists
in 2nd Wave
Feminism
How 2nd Wave and Radical Feminism theorized
transgender rights from the 1960s onwards

Early Trans Pioneers.

Though the trans community has
very recently gotten quite a bit of
attention in the media, American
exposure to trans individuals
stretches back to the early-1950s,
when Christine Jorgensen publically
returned to the US from Denmark as
a post-transition trans woman

Second
Wave
Feminism

Transphobia in 2nd Wave Feminism.

When the male accepts his passivity, defines himself as a woman and becomes a
transvestite he loses his desire to screw and gets his dick chopped off. He then
achieves a continuous diffuse sexual feeling from `being a woman. Screwing is, for
a man, a defense against his desire to be female,
Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto
Some lesbians seem to see FTMs as traitors to a womens movement who cross
over and become the enemy Lesbians tend to erase FTMs by claiming
transsexual males as lesbians who lack access to a liberating lesbian discourse,
Judith Halberstam, Transgender Butch
What men really envy is womens biological ability to procreate. Transsexuals
illustrate one way in which men do this, by acquiring the artifacts of female
biology. Even though they cannot give birth, they acquire the organs that are
representative of female power,
Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire

1974 Pride March

At the 1974 Pride March in New York City, trans activist Sylvia
Rivera stormed the stage. Second Wave lesbian feminists refused to
refer to Rivera as she, and passed out flyers during the entire event
outlining their opposition to female impersonators.
White, middle-class gays and lesbians heavily dominated the event,
and Rivera, one of the leaders of the 1969 Stonewall Riots, was booed
loudly by the crowd as soon as she took the stage.
I had to battle my way up on stage, and literally get beaten up
and punched around by people I thought were my comrades, to
get to that microphone. I got to the microphone and I said my
piece
For the Second Wave Feminists and gay men in this movement,
regardless of whether or not they ideologically disagreed with the
veracity of the trans identity, they eventually saw such issues as a
political liability and detached themselves from the trans community.

Judith Butler: The First

Transgender Tipping Point
Judith Butler represented a marked shift away from
Second Wave Feminism with the publication of her
seminal text, Performative Acts and Gender
Constitution
Articulating that gender was a performative social
construction, Butler refuted Second Wave Feminist
arguments that trans identities were performative
impersonations by arguing that all people were
simply performing impersonations of societal
expectations of gender roles.
This theorization of gender was truly radicalizing, and
it disrupted over twenty years of trans-exclusionary
dominant discourse.