Transgender Warriors (Leslie Feinberg)

Transgender Warriors
Author	Leslie Feinberg
Publisher	Beacon Press
First published	1996 25 Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Type	Book
ISBN	9780807079416
Source	https://ptilou42.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/leslie_feinberg_transgender_warriors__making_hisz-lib.org_.pdf

Preface

"Are you a guy or a girl?"

I've heard the question all my life. The answer is not so simple, since there are no pronouns in the English language as complex as I am, and I do not want to simplify myself in order to neatly fit one or the other. There are millions more like me in the United States alone.

We have a history filled with militant hero/ines. Yet therein lies the rub! How can I tell you about their battles when the words woman and man, feminine and masculine, are almost the only words that exist in the English language to describe all the vicissitudes of bodies and styles of expression?

Living struggles accelerate changes in language. I heard language evolve during the 1960s, when I came out into the drag bars of western New York and southern Ontario. At that time, the only words used to describe us cut and seared—yelled at us from the window of a screeching car, filled with potential bashers. There were no words that we'd go out of our way to use that made us feel good about ourselves.

When we all first heard the word "gay," some of my friends vehemently opposed the word on the grounds that it made us sound happy. "No one will ever use 'gay'," my friends assured me, each offering an alternative word, none of which took root. I learned that language can't be ordered individually, as if from a Sears catalog. It is forged collectively, in the fiery heat of struggle.

Right now, much of the sensitive language that was won by the liberation movements in the United States during the sixties and seventies is bearing the brunt of a right-wing backlash against being "politically correct." Where I come from, being "politically correct" means using language that respects other peoples' oppressions and wounds. This chosen language needs to be defended.

The words I use in this book may become outdated in a very short time, because the transgender movement is still young and defining itself. But while the slogans lettered on the banners may change quickly, the struggle will rage on. Since I am writing this book as a contribution to the demand for transgender liberation, the language I'm using in this book is not aimed at definingbut at defending the diverse communities that are coalescing.

I don't have a personal stake in whether the trans liberation movement results in a new third pronoun, or gender-neutral pronouns, like the ones, such as ze (she/he) and hit (her/his), being experimented with in cyberspace. It is not the words in and of themselves that are important to me—it's our lives. The struggle of trans people over the centuries is not his-story or her-story. It is ourstory.

I've been called a he-she, butch, bulldagger, cross-dresser, passing woman, female-to-male transvestite, and drag king. The word I prefer to use to describe myself is transgender.

Today the word transgender has at least two colloquial meanings. It has been used as an umbrella term to include everyone who challenges the boundaries of sex and gender. It is also used to draw a distinction between those who reassign the sex they were labeled at birth, and those of us whose gender expression is considered inappropriate for our sex. Presently, many organizations—from Transgender Nation in San Francisco to Monmouth Ocean Transgender on the Jersey shore—use this term inclusively.

I asked many self-identified transgender activists who are named or pictured in this book who they believed were included under the umbrella term. Those polled named: transsexuals, transgenders, transvestites, transgenderists, bigenders, drag queens, drag kings, cross-dressers, masculine women, feminine men, intersexuals (people referred to in the past as "hermaphrodites"), androgynes, cross-genders, shape-shifters, passing women, passing men, gender-benders, gender-blenders, bearded women, and women bodybuilders who have crossed the line of what is considered socially acceptable for a female body.

But the word transgender is increasingly being used in a more specific way as well. The term transgenderist was first introduced into the English language by trans warrior Virginia Prince. Virginia told me, "I coined the noun transgenderist in 1987 or '88. There had to be some name for people like myself who trans the gender barrier—meaning somebody who lives full time in the gender opposite to their anatomy. I have not transed the sex barrier."

As the overall transgender movement has developed, more people are exploring this distinction between a person's sex—female, intersexual, male—and their gender expression—feminine, androgynous, masculine, and other variations. Many national and local gender magazines and community groups are starting to use TS/TG: transsexual and transgender.

Under Western law, doctors glance at the genitals of an infant and pronounce the baby female or male, and that's that. Transsexual men and women traverse the boundary of the sex they were assigned at birth.

And in dominant Western cultures, the gender expression of babies is assumed at birth: pink for girls, blue for boys; girls are expected to grow up feminine, boys masculine. Transgender people traverse, bridge, or blur the boundary of the gender expression they were assigned at birth.

However, not all transsexuals choose surgery or hormones; some transgender people do. I am transgender and I have shaped myself surgically and hormonally twice in my life, and I reserve the right to do it again.

But while our movement has introduced some new terminology, all the words used to refer to our communities still suffer from limitations. For example, terms like cross-dress, cross-gender, male-to-female, and female-to-male reinforce the idea that there are only two distinct ways to be—you're either one or the other—and that's just not true. Bigender means people have both a feminine side and a masculine side. In the past, most bigendered individuals were lumped together under the category of cross-dressers. However, some people live their whole lives crossdressed; others are referred to as part-time cross-dressers. Perhaps if gender oppression didn't exist, some of those part-timers would enjoy the freedom to cross-dress all the time. But bigendered people want to be able to express both facets of who they are.

Although I defend any person's right to use transvestite as a self-definition, I use the term sparingly in this book. Although some trans publications and organizations still use "transvestite" or the abbreviation "TV" in their titles, many people who are labeled transvestites have rejected the term because it invokes concepts of psychological pathology, sexual fetishism, and obsession, when there's really nothing at all unhealthy about this form of self-expression. And the medical and psychiatric industries have always defined transvestites as males, but there are many female cross-dressers as well.

The words cross-dresser, transvestite, and drag convey the sense that these intricate expressions of self revolve solely around clothing. This creates the impression that if you're so oppressed because of what you're wearing, you can just change your outfit! But anyone who saw La Cage aux Folks remembers that the drag queen never seemed more feminine than when she was crammed into a three-piece "man's" suit and taught to butter bread like a "real man." Because it is our entire spirit—the essence of who we are—that doesn't conform to narrow gender stereotypes, many people who in the past have been referred to as cross-dressers, transvestites, drag queens, and drag kings today define themselves as transgender.

All together, our many communities challenge all sex and gender borders and restrictions. The glue that cements these diverse communities together is the defense of the right of each individual to define themselves.

As I write this book, the word trans is being used increasingly by the gender community as a term uniting the entire coalition. If the term had already enjoyed popular recognition, I would have titled this book Trans Warriors. But since the word transgender is still most recognizable to people all over the world, I use it in its most inclusive sense: to refer to all courageous trans warriors of every sex and gender those who led battles and rebellions throughout history and those who today muster the courage to battle for their identities and for their very lives.

Transgender Warriors is not an exhaustive trans history, or even the history of the rise and development of the modern trans movement. Instead, it is a fresh look at sex and gender in history and the interrelationships of class, nationality, race, and sexuality. Have all societies recognized only two sexes? Have people who traversed the boundaries of sex and gender always been so demonized? Why is sex-reassignment or cross-dressing a matter of law?

But how could I find the answers to these questions when it means wending my way through diverse societies in which the concepts of sex and gender shift like sand dunes over the ages? And as a white, transgender researcher, how can I avoid foisting my own interpretations on the cultures of oppressed peoples' nationalities?

I tackled this problem in several ways. First, I focused a great deal of attention on Western Europe, not out of unexamined Eurocentrism, but because I hold the powers that ruled there for centuries responsible for campaigns of hatred and bigotry that are today woven into the fabric of Western cultures and have been imposed upon colonized peoples all over the world. Setting the blame for these attitudes squarely on the shoulders of the European ruling classes is part of my contribution to the anti-imperialist movements.

I've also included photos from cultures all over the world, and I've sought out people from those countries and nationalities to help me create short, factual captions. I tried very hard not to interpret or compare these different cultural expressions. These photographs are not meant to imply that the individuals pictured identify themselves as transgender in the modern, Western sense of the word. Instead, I've presented their images as a challenge to the currently accepted Western dominant view that woman and man are all that exist, and that there is only one waytobeawomanoraman.

I don't take a view that an individual's gender expression is exclusively a product of either biology or culture. If gender is solely biologically determined, why do rural women, for example, tend to be more "masculine" than urban women? On the other hand, if gender expression is simply something we are taught, why has such a huge trans segment of the population not learned it? If two sexes are an immutable biological fact, why have so many societies recognized more than two? Yet while biology is not destiny, there are some biological markers on the human anatomical spectrum. So is sex a social construct, or is the rigid categorization of sexes the cultural component? Clearly there must be a complex interaction between individuals and their societies.

My interest in this subject is not merely theoretical. You probably already know that those of us who cross the cultural boundaries of sex and gender are paying a terrible price. We face discrimination and physical violence. We are denied the right to live and work with dignity and respect. It takes so much courage to live our lives that sometimes just leaving our homes in the morning and facing the world as who we really are is in itself an act of resistance. But perhaps you didn't know that we have a history of fighting against such injustice, and that today we are forging a movement for liberation. Since I couldn't include photos of all the hard-working leading activists who make up our movement, I have included a collection of photos that begins to illustrate the depth and breadth of sex and gender identities, balanced by race, nationality, and region. No one book could include all the sundry identities of trans individuals and organizations, which range from the Short Mountain Fairies from Tennessee to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in San Francisco.

It is time for us to write as experts on our own histories. For too long our light has been refracted through other people's prisms. My goal in this book is to fashion history, politics, and theory into a steely weapon with which to defend a very oppressed segment of the population.

I grew up thinking that the hatred I faced because of my gender expression was simply a by-product of human nature, and that it must be my fault that I was a target for such outrage. I don't want any young person to ever believe that's true again, and so I wrote this book to lay bare the roots and tendrils of sex and gender oppression.

Today, a great deal of "gender theory" is abstracted from human experience. But if theory is not the crystallized resin of experience, it ceases to be a guide to action. I offer history, politics, and theory that live and breathe because they are rooted in the experience of real people who fought flesh-and-blood battles for freedom. And my work is not solely devoted to chronicling the past, but is a component of my organizing to help shape the future.

This is the heart of my life's work. When I clenched my fists and shouted back at slurs aimed to strip me of my humanity, this was the certainty behind my anger. When I sputtered in pain at well-meaning individuals who told me, "I just don't get what you are?"—this is what I meant. Today, Transgender Warriors is my answer. This is the core of my pride.

Acknowledgements

I've been forced to pack up and move quickly many times in the last twenty years—spurred by my inability to pay the rent or, all too often, by a serious threat to my life that couldn't be faced down. Yet no matter how much I was forced to leave behind, I always schlepped my cartons of transgender research with me. Thanks to my true friends who got up in the middle of the night, wiped the sleep from their eyes, and helped me move. You rescued my life, and my work.

Over the decades, my writings on trans oppression, resistance, and history have appeared as articles in Workers World newspaper, and Liberation and Marxism magazine. I have spoken about these topics at countless political meetings, street rallies, and activist conferences. So I thank the members of Workers World Party—of every nationality, sex, age, ability, gender, and sexuality—for liberating space for me, helping me develop, and defending a podium from which I could speak about trans liberation as a vital component of the struggle for economic and social justice.

Some special thanks. To Gregory Dunkel for waking me some twenty years ago to the need to archive the images I'd found, and then helping me every step of the way. To Sara Flounders, for proving to be such a good friend and ally to the trans communities—and to me. My gratitude and love for Dorothy Ballan is right here in my heart. I'm especially grateful for the unflagging support from my transsexual, transgender, drag, and intersexual comrades—especially Kristianna Tho'mas.

In 1992 I wrote the pamphlet Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come, which became the basis for my slide show. I traveled the country showing slides in places as diverse as an auditorium at Brown University and a back room of a pizzeria/bar in Little Rock, Arkansas. Thousands of you asked questions during or after the program, which contributed to this finished work. Maybe you sent me a clipping, photo, or book reference. You've all offered me support. I am grateful for this kindness and solidarity.

My gratitude to each of the trans warriors included in this book. But many other transsexual, transgender, drag, intersexual, and bigender warriors gave me a heap of help and support, including: Holly Boswell, Cheryl Chase, Loren Cameron, Dallas Denny and the valuable resources of the National Transgender Library and Archive, Lissa Fried, Dana Friedman, Davina Anne Gabriel, James Green, David Harris, Mike Hernandez, Craig Hickman, Morgan Holmes, Nancy Nangeroni, Linda and Cynthia Phillips, Bet Power, Sky Renfro, Martine and Bina Rothblatt, Ruben, Gail Sondegaard, Susan Stryker, Virginia Prince, Lynn Walker, Riki Wilchins, and Jessy Xavier.

Chrystos, you really served as editor of Chapter 3; I loved working with you! Thanks to other friends and allies who also gently helped me to express my solidarity with people of other nationalities in the most sensitive possible way: Yamila Azize-Vargas, my beloved Nic Billey, Ben the Dancer, Spotted Eagle, Elias Farajaje-Jones, Curtis Harris, Larry Holmes, Leota Lone Dog, Aurora Levins Morales, Pauline Park, Geeta Patel, Doyle Robertson, Barbara Smith, Sabrina Sojourner, and Wesley Thomas.

Then there was the research. Leslie Kahn, you are my goddess of transgender library research. Miriam Hammer, I will always remember you coming to my home at the eleventh hour after I'd lost my manuscript and research to a computer virus. Thanks to Allan Berube, Melanie Breen, Paddy Colligan, Randy P. Conner, Bill Dragoin, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Jonathan Ned Katz, and Julie Wheelwright.

My warmest thanks to Morgan Gwenwald and Mariette Pathy Allen—who worked on this project as photographic consultants and advisors. Amv Steiner. thanks! And I owe a debt of gratitude to the many brilliant documentary and art photographers, amateur shutterbugs, graphic artists, and a wildly popular cartoonist—who all contributed to this book. Special thanks to Marcus Alonso, Alison Bechdel, Loren Cameron, Stephanie Dumaine, Greg Dunkel, Robert Giard, Steve Gillis, Andrew Holbrooke, Jennie Livingston, Viviane Moos, John Nafpliotis, Lyn Neely, V. Jon Nivens, Cathy Opie, M. P. Schildmeyer, Bette Spero, Pierre Verger, and Gary Wilson. And my regards to the darkroom folks, particularly Ligia Boters and Brian Young at Phototechnica, and the guys at Hong Color.

As I saw how much archivists, librarians, and researchers all over the world cared about preserving our collective past and making it accessible, my respect for their work soared. Special thanks to archivist Janet Miller, and your Uncommon Vision, and the staffs of the Schomburg Collection, Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institute (especially Vertis), Library of Congress, State Hermitage Museum of Russia, Mansell Collection, British Library, National Library of Wales, Royal Anthropological Institute, British Museum, Louvre, American Library Association, Bettmann Archive, New York Public Library, Musee de Beaux Arts de Rouen, Staatliche Museen, Clarke Historical Library, Verger Institute, National museum Stockholm, Cleveland Museum of Art, Guildhall Library, and Art Resource.

For support that came in many forms, my gratitude to: John Catalinotto. Kate Clinton, Hillel Cohen, Annette Dragon, Bob Diaz, Ferron, Nanette Gartrell, Diane McPherson, Dee Mosbacher, Joy Schaefer, Adrienne Rich. Beth Zemsky, and Carlos Zuriiga.

To my agent, Charlotte Sheedy—it's an honor to work with a pioneer who marked the trail for so many of us. To Deb Chasman, my editor at Beacon—you've demonstrated that editing genius is sharp style, and a whole lot of sensitivity. My gratitude to Ken Wong for grammatically scrubbing this book. And I thank the whole staff at Beacon for their contributions—not the least of which was enthusiastic support.

Thanks to those whose astute reading of my drafts greatly developed this book—especially Elly Bulkin and Deirdre Sinnott. For teaching me how to be a journalist, over two decades, I credit you, Deirdre Griswold—longtime editor, longtime friend.

Now I go a bit deeper. Thanks to my sons—Ben and Ransom—for loving and supporting your Drag Dad. I love you each dearly. To my sister Catherine, and my "chosen family"—Star, Shelley, Robin, Brent and my mom Wyontmusqui—how else can I thank you for your love except to love you right back.

To my wife, my inspiration, and my dearest friend, poet-warrior Minnie Bruce Pratt—I couldn't have gotten through this without you. I've stoop-picked beans and stretch-picked apples, but this book was the hardest work I've ever done.

Your brilliance, insight, and generous love got me through each day. How could I possibly thank you in the way you deserve? Tell you what—As we grow old happily—one day at a time—I'll try to find the ways.

The sum total of everyone's contributions to this book is a collective act of solidarity with trans liberation. Since the movement to bring a better world into birth developed me and my world view, I give this book—and every cent of the advance royalties, an author's wages—back to the struggle to end all oppression.

Part 1

The Journey Begins

When I was born in 1949, the doctor confidently declared, "It's a girl." That might have been the last time anyone was so sure. I grew up a very masculine girl. It's a simple statement to write, but it was a terrifying reality to live.

I was raised in the 1950s—an era marked by rigidly enforced social conformity and fear of difference. Our family lived in the Bell Aircraft factory housing projects. The roads were not paved; the coal truck, ice man's van, and knife-sharpener's cart crunched along narrow strips of gravel.

I tried to mesh two parallel worlds as a child—the one I saw with my own eyes and the one I was taught. For example, I witnessed powerful adult women in our working-class projects handling every challenge of life, while coping with too many kids and not enough money. Although I hated seeing them so beaten down by poverty, I loved their laughter and their strength. But, on television I saw women depicted as foolish and not very bright. Every cultural message taught me that women were only capable of being wives, mothers, housekeepers—seen, not heard. So, was it true that women were the "weak" sex?

In school I leafed through my geography textbooks and saw people of many different hues from countries far, far from my home. Before we moved to Buffalo, my family had lived in a desert town in Arizona. There, people who were darker skinned and shared different customs from mine were a sizeable segment of the population. Yet in the small world of the projects, most of the kids in my grade school, and my teachers, were white. The entire city was segregated right down the middle—east and west. In school I listened as some teachers paid lip service to "tolerance" but I frequently heard adults mouth racist slurs, driven by hate.

I saw a lot of love. Love of parents, flag, country, and deity were mandatory. But I also observed other loves—between girls and boys, and boys and boys, and girls and girls. There was the love of kids and dogs in my neighborhood, soldier buddies in foxholes in movies, students and teachers at school. Passionate, platonic, sensual, dutiful, devoted, reluctant, loyal, shy, reverent. Yet I was taught there was only one official meaning of the word love the kind between men and women that leads to marriage. No adult ever mentioned men loving men or women loving women in my presence. I never heard it discussed anywhere. There was no word at that time in my English language to express the sheer joy of loving someone of the same sex.

The author at about the age of nine.

And I learned very early on that boys were expected to wear "men's" clothes, and girls were not. When a man put on women's garb, it was considered a crude joke. By the time my family got a television, I cringed as my folks guffawed when "Uncle Miltie" Berle donned a dress. It hit too close to home. I longed to wear the boys' clothing I saw in the Sears catalog.

My own gender expression felt quite natural. I liked my hair short and I felt most relaxed in sneakers, jeans and a t-shirt. However, when I was most at home with how I looked, adults did a double-take or stopped short when they saw me. The question "Is that a boy or a girl?" hounded me throughout my childhood. The answer didn't matter much. The very fact that strangers had to ask the question already marked me as a gender outlaw.

My choice of clothing was not the only alarm bell that rang my difference. If my more feminine younger sister had worn "boy's" clothes, she might have seemed stylish and cute. Dressing all little girls and all little boys in "sex-appropriate" clothing actually called attention to our gender differences. Those of us who didn't fit stuck out like sore thumbs.

Christine Jorgensen in her home in 1984, sitting below a portrait of herself

Being different in the 1950s was no small matter. McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunts were in full frenzy. Like most children, I caught snippets of adult conversations. So I was terrified that communists were hiding under my bed and might grab my ankles at night. I heard that people who were labeled "reds" would discover their names and addresses listed in local newspapers, be fired from their jobs, and be forced to pack up their families and move away. What was their crime? I couldn't make out the adults' whispers. But the lesson seeped down: keep your mouth shut; don't rock the boat. I overheard angry, hammering accusations on radio and television against grownups who had to answer to a committee of men. I heard the words: commie, pinko, Jew. I was Jewish.

Inside the police van are some of the ninety-nine arrested for wearing women's clothing at a 1939 raid on a New York City "Masque Ball"

We were the only Jews in the projects. Our family harbored memories of the horrors that relatives and friends had faced in Czarist Russia before the 1917 revolution and in Eastern Europe during World War II. My family lived in fear of fascism, and the McCarthy era stank like Nazism. Every time a stranger stopped us on the street and asked my parents, "Is that a boy or a girl?" they shuddered. No wonder. My parents worried that I was a lightning rod that would attract a dangerous storm. Feeling helpless to fight the powers that be, they blamed the family's problems on me and my difference. I learned that my survival was my own responsibility. From kindergarten to high school, I walked through a hail of catcalls and taunts in school corridors. I pushed my way past clusters of teenagers on street corners who refused to let me pass. I endured the stares and glares of adults. It was so hard to be a masculine girl in the 1950s that I thought I would certainly be killed before I could grow to adulthood. Every gender image—from my Dick and Jane textbooks in school to the sitcoms on television—convinced me that I must be a Martian.

In all the years of my childhood, I had only heard of one person who seemed similarly "different." I don't remember any adult telling me her name. I was too young to read the newspaper headlines. Adults clipped their vulgar jokes short when I, or any other child, entered the room. I wasn't allowed to stay up late enough to watch the television comedy hosts who tried to ridicule her out of humanity.

LEFT: This person is about to face a 1951 Chicago grand jury, charged with failure to report to the draft board for induction. RIGHT These two people are being led into Manhattan felony court in 1952. Their crime? They went to the movies together. The manager spotted them and called the police.

But I did know her name: Christine Jorgensen.

I was three years old when the news broke that Christine Jorgensen had traveled from the United States to Sweden for a sex change from male to female. A passport agent reportedly sold the story to the media. All hell broke loose. In the years that followed, just the mention of her name provoked vicious laughter. The cruelty must have filtered down to me, because I understood that the jokes rotated around whether Christine Jorgensen was a woman or a man. Everyone was supposed to easily fit into one category or another, and stay there. But I didn't fit, so Christine Jorgensen and I had a special bond. By the time I was eight or nine years old, I had asked a baby-sitter, "Is Christine Jorgensen a man or a woman?"

"She isn't anything," my baby-sitter giggled. "She's a freak." Then, I thought, I must be a freak too, because nobody seemed sure whether I was a boy or a girl. What was going to happen to me? Would I survive? Would Christine survive?

As it turned out, Christine Jorgensen didn't just endure, she triumphed. I knew she must be living with great internal turmoil, but she walked through the abuse with her head held high. Just as her dignity and courage set a proud example for the thousands of transsexual men and women who followed her path, she inspired me—and who knows how many other transgendered children.

Little did I know then that millions of children and adults across the United States and around the world also felt like the only person who was different. I had no other adult role model who crossed the boundaries of sex or gender. Christine Jorgensen's struggle beamed a message to me that I wasn't alone. She proved that even a period of right-wing reaction could not coerce each individual into conformity.

Police raid on a Manhattan Ball in 1962

I survived growing up transgendered during the iron-fisted repression of the 1950s. But I came of age and consciousness during the revolutionary potential of the 1960s—from the Civil Rights movement to the Black Panther Party, from the Young Lords to the American Indian movement, from the anti-Vietnam War struggles to women's liberation. The lesbian and gay movement had not yet emerged. But as a teenager, I found the gay bars in Niagara Falls, Buffalo, and Toronto. Inside those smoke-filled taverns I discovered a community of drag queens, butches, and femmes. This was a world in which I fit; I was no longer alone.

It meant the world to me to find other people who faced many of the same problems I did. Continual violence stalked me on the streets, leaving me weary, so of course I wanted to be with friends and loved ones in the bars. But the clubs were not a safe sanctuary. I soon discovered that the police and other enemies preyed on us there. Until we organized to fight back, we were just a bigger group of people to bash.

But we did organize. We battled for the right to be hired, walk down the street, be served in a restaurant, buy a carton of milk at a store, play softball or bowl. Defending our rights to live and love and work won us respect and affection from our straight co-workers and friends. Our battles helped fuel the later explosion of the lesbian and gay liberation movement.

I remember the Thaw Out Picnic held each spring during the sixties by the lesbian and gay community in Erie, Pennsylvania. Hundreds and hundreds of women and men would fill a huge park to enjoy food, dancing, softball, and making out in the woods. During the first picnic I attended, a group of men screeched up in a car near the edge of the woods. Suddenly the din of festivity hushed as we saw the gang, armed with baseball bats and tire irons, marching down the hill toward us.

"C'mon," one of the silver-haired butches shouted, beckoning us to follow. She picked up her softball bat and headed right for those men. We all grabbed bats and beer bottles and followed her, moving slowly up the hill toward the men. First they jeered us. Then they glanced fearfully at each other, leaped back into their car and peeled rubber. One of them was still trying to get his legs inside and shut the car door as they roared off. We all stood quietly for a moment, feeling our collective power. Then the old butch who led our army waved her hand and the celebration resumed.

My greatest terror was always when the police raided the bars, because they had the law on their side. They were the law. It wasn't just the tie I was wearing or the suit coat that made me vulnerable to arrest. I broke the law every time I dressed in fly front pants, or wore jockey shorts or t-shirts. The law dictated that I had to wear at least three pieces of "women's" clothing. My drag queen sisters had to wear three pieces of "men's" clothing. For all I know, that law may still be on the books in Buffalo today.

Of course, the laws were not simply about clothing. We were masculine women and feminine men. Our gender expression made us targets. These laws were used to harass us. Frequently we were not even formally charged after our arrests. All too often, the sentences were executed in the back seat of a police cruiser or on the cold cement floor of a precinct cell.

But the old butches told me there was one night of the year that the cops never arrested us—Halloween. At the time, I wondered why I was exempt from penalties for cross-dressing on that one night. And I grappled with other questions. Why was I subject to legal harassment and arrest at all? Why was I being punished for the way I walked or dressed, or who I loved? Who wrote the laws used to harass us, and why? Who gave the green light to the cops to enforce them? Who decided what was normal in the first place?

These were life-and-death questions for me. Finding the answers sooner would have changed my life dramatically. But the journey to find those answers is my life. And I would not trade the insights and joys of my lifetime for anyone else's.

This was how my journey began. It was 1969 and I was twenty years old. As I sat in a gay bar in Buffalo, a friend told me that drag queens had fought back against a police bar raid in New York City. The fight had erupted into a four-night-long uprising in Greenwich Village—the Stonewall Rebellion! I pounded the bar with my fist and cursed my fate. For once we had rebelled and made history and I had missed it!

I stared at my beer bottle and wondered: Have we always existed? Have we always been so hated? Have we always fought back?

Many lives of females who lived as men are reduced to headlines such as these. While we'll never know which of these individuals would today describe themselves as transsexual, transgender, drag king, butch, or some other contemporary identity, it is clear they could not live openly and proudly. Had I not spent twenty years in the movement for change and lived in a historical period in which a trans movement arose, my life could have also been diminished into a salacious headline.

My Path to Consciousness

It had never occurred to me to search history for answers to my questions. I didn't do well in history classes in school. Actually, that's an understatement. I could never make sense out of history. I couldn't remember whether Greece or Rome came first. The Middle Ages were a monolithic boulder I couldn't chip. I always got confused about who were allies during which war.

I couldn't find myself in history. No one like me seemed to have ever existed.

But I had to know why I was so hated for being "different." What was the root cause of bigotry, and what was its driving force? Some people expect to find answers to questions like these in hallowed halls of learning. But I found what I was looking for on another path - by working in the factories and the political movement for justice.

Looking back, I can see that growing up blue-collar shaped my life and my consciousness in general, but it didn't automatically make me progressive. My parents instructed us not to be racist when we were kids because they thought it was wrong to teach children to hate. That was a good start, but it wasn't until I began working in the plants as a teenager that I really learned the function of institutionalized racism. I quickly understood the phrase "divide-and-conquer." Whenever a strike loomed, the foremen suddenly tried to cozy up to a few of the white workers, "advising" us not to trust the African-American, Latino, and Native workers. "Don't count on the women, either," they would whisper to the white men. "They've got their husband's paycheck, too. They won't stand with you." And the supervisors and their helpers hung out near the time clock as we all punched in, their voices rising on the epithets "bulldagger" and "faggot."

Sometimes other workers told me the foreman had informed them that all Jews were rich bankers and industrialists responsible for the suffering of the working class. But I'd remind my co-workers they labored alongside Jews like myself on the assembly line every day, and since when did the foreman care about our misery! It became clear to me that racism and anti-Semitism - like woman-hating and homophobia- were designed to keep us battling each other, instead of fighting together to win real change.

However, my understanding of class dynamics was limited to factory life. This was the 1960s. There were plenty of jobs. We had won livable wages. The system seemed to be working for me. It didn't occur to me that this economic prosperity was based on weapons production and government spending for the Pentagon's war against Vietnam. So I didn't make the connections as I sat, stalled in traffic on my motorcycle, as anti-war protestors marched down Main Street chanting "Big firms get rich, GI's die!"

My view of the world was limited to my factory, the gay bars, my friends, and my lover. Outside of my own small sphere, society was roiling. This struggle also raged in Buffalo. University students occupied the local campus. Tear gas wafted across Buffalo streets. The African-American community rebelled in righteous fury. I could even hear the impact of the women's movement in our conversations at work. Change was rocking the world outside my window. But it took one more event to radically change my consciousness - unemployment.

When factories were humming with production during the war years - and many young men were being shipped to Vietnam - everyone was considered employable. But as the boom economy receded during the early 1970s, we stood in block-long lines just to get a job application. If I forgot for a moment just how "different" I was, the recession reminded me. I was considered far too masculine a woman to get a job in a store, or a restaurant, or an office.

I couldn't survive without working. So one day I put on a femme friend's wig and earrings and tried to apply for a job as a salesperson at a downtown retail store. On the bus ride to the interview, people stood rather than sit next to me. They whispered and pointed and stared. "Is that a man?" one woman asked her friend, loud enough for us all to hear.

The experience taught me an important lesson. The more I tried to wear clothing or styles considered appropriate for women, the more people believed I was a man trying to pass as a woman. I began to understand that I couldn't conceal my gender expression.

So I tried another experiment. I called one of the older butches who I knew passed as a man on a construction gang. She lent me a pair of paste-on theatrical sideburns. After gluing them on, I drove to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. As I walked around, nobody seemed to stare. That was an unusual experience and a relief. I allowed my voice to drop to a comfortably low register and chatted with one of the guards about the job situation. He told me there was an opening for a guard and suggested I apply. An hour later, the supervisor who interviewed me told me I seemed like a "good man" and hired me on the spot. I was suddenly acceptable as a human being. The same gender expression that made me hated as a woman, made me seem like a good man.

My life changed dramatically the moment I began working as a man. I was free of the day-in, day-out harassment that had pursued me. But I also lived in constant terror as a gender outlaw. What punishments would I face when I was discovered? The fear moved me to make a complex decision: I decided to begin taking male hormones, prescribed to me by a local sex-reassignment program. Through this program I also located a surgeon who would do a breast reduction. Shaping my body was something I had long wanted to do and I've never had any regrets. But I started taking hormones in order to pass. A year after beginning hormone shots, I sprouted a full, colorful beard that provided me with a greater sense of safety - on the job and off. With these changes, I explored yet another facet of my trans identity.

The years I worked at the art gallery impacted my consciousness. I spent eight hours a day surrounded by centuries of artwork. Listening to the tour guides, I began to understand how developments in technology - like the camera - influenced art. I got a luxury education.

But I soon learned that the art gallery wasn't designed merely for the enlightenment of working-class people like myself. I discovered there was another class in Buffalo I'd never seen before, and the gallery was one of the elegant places where they entertained. They arrived in limousines. They wore tuxedos in mid-afternoon. They clinked champagne glasses served to them by waiters they didn't notice.

One morning as I punched in, the atmosphere at the gallery felt electrically charged. My supervisor ordered me to straighten my tie and polish my black shoes until they gleamed - Nelson Rockefeller would be paying a visit. I was assigned to be the guard at the entrance of the gallery when he arrived.

I paced around the front entrance, smoking one cigarette after another. "Is he here, yet?" the head guard asked again and again. I saw the glint off a line of sleek black limos as they turned into the parking circle in front of the gallery. Squinting to see through the dark glass, I noticed dozens of protesters waving placards that read "Attica's blood on Rockefeller's hands! " When the lead limo driver got out and opened the rear car door, I recognized Rockefeller from his pictures in the newspapers. He sneered at the demonstrators and flipped them the finger.

My boss shouted at me, "Open the door for him! Open the door!" As I reached forward and held the door open, Rockefeller stepped inside. "Thanks, boy," he muttered without looking at me.

That moment was an epiphany.

No matter how much passing as a man had changed my daily life, I understood then that the rock foundation of my class had not changed. Until that moment, I had directed all my rage against the foremen and the middle-class people - like small business owners - who were arrogant and rude to me. I had thought they held the reins of power. But suddenly I had an opportunity to watch Rockefeller and his wealthy associates stride down the hall, oblivious to a handful of middle-class art gallery volunteers hurrying to keep up with them. I snapped a new mental picture of middle-class people as literally caught in the middle - between Rockefeller and me.

I realized that the men in tuxedos who strolled through the gallery halls like they owned the world really did! Here was Rockefeller hobnobbing with the Knoxes and Schoellkopfs and other men who privately owned the very factories I had worked in and the banks where I cashed my checks. They represented just a few families, yet they claimed as their own industry, finance, and communications - all the massive tools that sustain human life.

I thought about the huge factories of Buffalo: Anaconda Copper, Chevrolet, Bethlehem Steel. People like me built them from the ground up. Our muscles set those tools of production into motion. So why did these families who didn't work there own it all? And why, after lifetimes of labor, did working-class people like myself own little else than the ability to toil for a paycheck?

I thought about the placards that demonstrators angrily waved at Rockefeller when he arrived. I knew the Attica prisoners were workers, too. Yet they were paid only pennies a day for their labor. When these prisoners - predominantly men of color - rose up and demanded to be treated as human beings, not beasts, Rockefeller ordered troopers to open fire and mow them down. I found several books on labor history at the library about miners who organized and demanded economic justice. They were cut down by bullets with another Rockefeller's name on them.

Now I felt connected to this vortex of struggle.

Soon after the Rockefeller incident, I quit my job at the art gallery and found work as a third-shift dishwasher at a local diner. As I hauled heavy pans filled with dishes and silverware into the kitchen, I listened to the radio blaring from a shelf over the sink. The big news, night after night, was the bloody military coup in Chile. Newscasters reported tens of thousands of Chileans were being tortured or had fled in exile. The junta generals smashed the workers' organizations and boasted they would hang a Jew from every lamp post.

One morning after my shift, I told one of the short-order cooks who had been a merchant sailor how upset I was by a news report that the CIA was behind the coup in Chile. He explained to me that when the Chileans had elected a socialist as president, big U.S. companies like ITT and Anaconda Copper started plotting the coup with the CIA. He told me you can't just vote for socialism, you have to fight to win it.

I was angry and sickened at so much genocide by the U.S. military - from the massacre at Wounded Knee to the war against Vietnam. I wanted to travel to Latin America to join the resistance movement. But when I applied for merchant seaman papers and asked a clerk what was required to join, he said a physical exam. My idealistic dream hit a dead end.

Weeks later I asked one of the day-shift waitresses out on a date for Friday night. She said no, she attended meetings every Friday evening. Nobody I knew went to meetings about anything. "What are you?" I joked, "a communist?" All conversation stopped in the restaurant. She flushed. A co-worker dragged me into the kitchen. "What did you do that for?" she scolded me. "You could get us fired." She said they were both members of the Workers World Party. I was working with two communist waitresses! I apologized profusely. I hadn't meant to hurt anyone. To me, "communist" had always been a meaningless slur, not a real person. I didn't even know what the word really meant.

I began to dawdle over breakfast during shift changes, asking both waitresses questions. After weeks of inquiries, they invited me to a demonstration, outside Kleinhan's Music Hall, protesting the Israeli war against Egypt and Syria. I was particularly interested in that protest. The state of Israel had been declared shortly before my birth. In Hebrew school I was taught "Palestine was a land without people, for a people without a land." That phrase haunted me as a child. I pictured cars with no one in them, and movies projected on screens in empty theaters. When I checked a map of that region of the Middle East in my school geography textbook, it was labeled Palestine, not Israel. Yet when I asked my grandmother who the Palestinians were, she told me there were no such people.

The puzzle had been solved for me in my adolescence. I developed a strong friendship with a Lebanese teenager, who explained to me that the Palestinian people had been driven off their land by Zionist settlers, like the Native peoples in the United States. I studied and thought a great deal about all she told me. From that point on I staunchly opposed Zionist ideology and the occupation of Palestine.

So I wanted to go to the protest. However, I feared the demonstration, no matter how justified, would be tainted by anti-Semitism. But I was so angered by the actions of the Israeli government and military, that I went to the event to check it out for myself.

That evening, I arrived at Kleinhan's before the protest began. Cops - in uniforms and plainclothes - surrounded the music hall. I waited impatiently for the protesters to arrive. Suddenly, all the media swarmed down the street. I ran after them. Coming over the hill was a long column of people moving toward Kleinhan's. The woman who led the march and spoke to reporters proudly told them she was Jewish! Others held signs and banners aloft that read: "Arab Land for Arab People!" and "Smash Anti-Semitism!" Now those were two slogans I could get behind! I wanted to know who these people were and where they had been all my life!

Hours later I followed the group back to their headquarters. Orange banners tacked up on the walls expressed solidarity with the Attica prisoners and the Vietnamese. One banner particularly haunted me. It read: Stop the War Against Black America, which made me realize that it wasn't just distant wars that needed opposing. Yet although I worked with two members of this organization, I felt nervous that night. These people were communists, Marxists! Yet I found it easy to get into discussions with them. I met waitresses, factory workers, secretaries, and truck drivers. And I decided they were some of the most principled people I had ever met. For example, I was impressed that many of the men I spoke with talked to me about the importance of fighting the oppression of gays and lesbians, and of all women. Yet I knew they thought they were talking to a straight man.

From then on, my Friday nights were also reserved for meetings of Workers World Party (WWP) and its youth group, Youth Against War and Fascism (YAWF) . I saw that I didn't have to sail around the world to join the struggle for justice! But when I joined the organization, everyone thought of me as a man. I had a bushy beard, and I had been passing, full-time, for more than four years, so I didn't contradict their assumptions.

I divided my free time between educational meetings and protest demonstrations against racism and war, sexism and anti-gay bigotry, and in defense of Native sovereignty and prisoners' rights. The moment I joined a larger movement for social justice, I wasn't struggling alone anymore. It felt so good to win important battles. I felt connected to struggles around the world.

However, I lived in fear of what the police would do to me if I was arrested. And although my comrades fought alongside me, shoulder to shoulder, I felt they didn't really know me. I longed to live openly and proudly as a transgendered person - not as a man. But what if I told them about myself and they didn't accept me? Would I have to return to fighting back daily as an individual? The fear of loss began to tear me apart.

On March 8, 1973, I attended my first celebration of International Women's Day. Before the meeting began, all the Workers World Party women were reading over each other's speeches; all the men took organizational tasks, so I was on security. I watched the women together, and the men, and I couldn't find my place among either. Later that night I had a terrible dream: I was standing in a small, airless room; one of the walls was a dam with tremendous water pressure behind it; small cracks split the plaster. I woke up drenched in sweat.

I called Jeanette Merrill, who had helped found the Buffalo branch of Workers World Party. I remember asking her husband, Eddy, to leave the room. I can't recall how I explained my situation to Jeanette or what words I chose to explain that I was a "he-she" who had experienced such hatred and violence because of my gender expression that I couldn't live safely or find work. When I finished,Jeanette said she didn't completely understand, but she knew oppression when she heard it.

In the weeks that followed, the WWP's women's caucus meetings and women's self-defense classes were opened to me. The leading women sat down with each member to explain my situation and help them relate to me sensitively. One by one, the men and women of my organization visited me at home. Each brought a cake or pie or soup or an entire case of beer, and adjusted themselves to listen to me in a different way. I told them about my life; each one told me about their own.

Eddy Merrill, who I had asked to leave the room while I talked to Jeanette, waited patiently for an opportunity to talk to me. One night, he found me standing in the WWP literature room with tears in my eyes. The small store room was filled with pamphlets and books - slim and thick - about history, politics, and science. I had been an insatiable reader growing up, but I had stuck to fiction. Outside the classroom, I had made it a policy not to read non-fiction books, because I feared I wasn't smart enough to understand the facts inside.

But I had reached a point where I really wanted to educate myself about the past and present of the world I lived in. However, as I stood in the literature room leafing through book after book, I couldn't comprehend what I read. I told Eddy I felt stupid.

"Don't worry," he reassured me. "These are books you'll read later. First you need to understand the events and the people they're talking about. It's like a foundation. Pretend you're building a brick wall - one brick at a time."

"Eddy," I sighed, "I really want to learn. But I'm terrible at history. I don't even know how to approach the subject." Eddy offered to help me study, so I took him up on it. But he didn't start me out on a diet of history. He dropped four quarters into the literature money box and handed me a pamphlet about an anti-racist struggle in a factory I knew very well, "Come over for dinner after you've read it," he offered, "and we'll talk." Eddy nodded toward the books. "Some of the answers you're looking for are in there. But whenever someone has the courage to talk about an oppression that hasn't been discussed before, they make a contribution. I have a feeling you will, too."

I spent many exciting hours talking to Eddy about politics. Before he lent me each book, he'd talk to me about it. After I'd read it, we would sit and discuss the ideas. I began studying political science ferociously. I had thought Marxists were all white men. Eddy introduced me to the important writings of Che Guevara, Nkrumah, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Rosa Luxemburg. I read insatiably and soon felt confident enough to attend weekly WWP classes, many of them led by women I quickly learned that the real proof of understanding a complex idea was how clearly you could state it.

Like many among the generations of working-class Jews before me, I discovered that Marxism was a valuable science, not a religion. In fact, I began to view the anticommunism that had been drummed into me since childhood as an unexamined cult ideology.

Suddenly, history didn't seem boring at all. I began to see the seasons - or stages - of history. I learned that human society has undergone continuous development and has been transformed many times over the course of centuries.

One fact rocked my thinking: All of our earliest ancestors lived in communal societies based on cooperation and sharing. I knew that many Native peoples on this continent had still lived communally, even as colonialism stormed these shores. But I didn't know that was true all over the planet.

Group cooperation required respect for the contributions and insights of each individual. Communal societies were not severed into have and have-nots. No small group held power over others through private ownership of the tools necessary to sustain life. Therefore the earth, sky, and waters were not viewed as property that could be bought or sold. The word communist derives from communal.

All my life I had heard the cynical view that intolerance and greed were products of a flawed human nature. But "thou shalt not steal" would have been a bewildering command to people who lived in societies where everyone ate or everyone starved because their survival relied on teamwork. I realized that human nature has changed along with the organization of society.

While I didn't expect to find my own modern self-definitions or consciousness mirrored in the economic systems of our earliest ancestors, I wondered if some form of transgender had existed in early communalism. I began examining the roots of women's oppression. I studied Frederick Engels's classic work, Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Then I turned to a pamphlet by Dorothy Ballan, one of the founding women of my organization, entitled Feminism and Marxism. I read as much as I could find written by socialist feminists in the women's liberation movement who researched the material origin of sexual oppression.

I was surprised at what I discovered. In these ancient communal societies, blood descent - the basis for paternal inheritance today - was traced through mothers. Women enjoyed equality and respect for their vital roles in both collective production and reproduction. Women were the heads of gens, which were kinship groups that bore little resemblance to today's patriarchal nuclear family. Since blood descent was traced through the mothers, women headed these extended economic units.

A man lived with his mother's family. If he married a woman, he left his mother's economic unit and became a part of his wife's gens. There he was surrounded by all of her relatives in her household. And if the woman wanted a "divorce," she merely asked him to pack up his personal possessions and leave. He then had to move back to his own mother's household, with all of her relatives. How could a man beat or abuse a female partner in those societies? Where was the material power for male domination?

However, the material basis for women's oppression is precisely what today's ruling- class "fathers" do not want opened up to scrutiny. They seek to shape history in their own image. To hear the bible-thumpers, you'd think that the nuclear family, headed by men, has always existed. But I found that the existence of matrilineal societies on every continent has been abundantly documented. Up until the fifteenth century, a great majority of the world's population lived in communal, matrilineal societies. This was true throughout Africa, large parts of Asia, the Pacific islands, Australia, and the Americas. If all of human history were shrunk to the scale of one year, over 360 days of historical time belong to cooperative, matrilineal societies.

A deeper understanding of the roots of women's oppression had great meaning to me, particularly because of my experiences growing up as a girl in a woman-hating society. But my oppression was not just based on being "woman." Was there a material basis for transgender oppression? Surely transsexual women and men, or people like me who expressed their gender differently, were not merely products of a high-tech capitalist system in decline. I came full circle to one of my original questions as well: Have we always existed?

I felt further from an answer than ever before. Fortunately, feelings are not facts.

In the meantime, the economic crisis of 1973 was wreaking havoc on my life. I could not find work anywhere. Even the temp agencies had no job openings - at least not for a he-she like me. I made my decision to move to New York City. Since that's where the Workers World national headquarters was located. I knew I would get help in finding an apartment and a job, and I looked forward to becoming a journalist for Workers World newspaper.

As I said tearful goodbyes to my friends in the Buffalo branch, I asked several of them, "Do you think I'll ever find the answers I'm looking for?" They each reassured me I would. As a parting gift. Jeanette and Eddy gave me one of their own old volumes of Lenin's writings. They had inscribed it: "To Les, with great expectations." That precious gift is next to me on my bookshelf as I write these words.

But at the time, I feared their expectations were unrealistic.

The author, circa 1973.

The Give Away

I found my first clue that trans people have not always been hated in 1974. I had played hooky from work and spent the day at the Museum of the American Indian in New York City.

The exhibits were devoted to Native history in the Americas. I was drawn to a display of beautiful thumb-sized clay figures. The ones to my right had breasts and cradled bowls. Those on the left were flat chested, holding hunting tools. But when I looked closer, I did a double-take. I saw that several of the figures holding bowls were flat chested; several of the hunters had breasts. You can bet there was no legend next to the display to explain. I left the museum curious.

What I'd seen gnawed at me until I called a member of the curator's staff. He asked, "Why do you want to know?" I panicked. Was the information so classified that it could only be given out on a "need to know" basis? I lied and said I was a graduate student at Columbia University.

Sounding relieved, he immediately let me know that he understood exactly what I'd described. He said he came across references to these berdache practically every day in his reading. I asked him what the word meant. He said he thought it meant transvestite or transsexual in modern English. He remarked that Native peoples didn't seem to abhor them the way "we" did. In fact, he added, it appeared that such individuals were held in high esteem by Native nations.

Hopi illustrations. Note the left figure is depicted as wearing hair trans style - half up and half down.

Then his voice dropped low. "It's really quite disturbing, isn't it?" he whispered. I hung up the phone and raced to the library. I had found the first key to a vault containing information I'd looked for all my life.

"Strange country this," a white man wrote in 1850 about the Crow nation of North America, "where males assume the dress and perform the duties of females, while women turn men and mate with their own sex!"

I found hundreds and hundreds of similar references, such as those in Jonathan Ned Katz's ground-breaking Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A., published in 1976, which provided me with additional valuable research. The quotes were anything but objective. Some were statements by murderously hostile colonial generals, others by the anthropologists and missionaries who followed in their bloody wake.

Some only referred to what today might be called male-to-female expression. "In nearly every part of the continent," Westermarck concluded in 1917, "there seem to have been, since ancient times, men dressing themselves in the clothes and performing the functions of women. . .."

But I also found many references to female-to-male expression. Writing about his expedition into northeastern Brazil in 1576, Pedro de Magalhaes noted females among the Tupinamba who lived as men and were accepted by other men. and who hunted and went to war. His team of explorers, recalling the Greek Amazons, renamed the river that flowed through that area the River of the Amazons.

Female-to-male expression was also found in numerous North American nations. As late as 1930, ethnographer Leslie Spier observed of a nation in the Pacific Northwest: "Transvestites or berdaches ... are found among the Klamath, as in all probability among all other North American tribes. These are men and women who for reasons that remain obscure take on the dress and habits of the opposite sex."

I found it painful to read these quotes because they were steeped in hatred. "I saw a devilish thing," Spanish colonialist Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca wrote in the sixteenth century. "Sinful, heinous, perverted, nefarious, abominable, unnatural, dis-gusting, lewd"—the language used by the colonizers to describe the acceptance of sex/gender diversity, and of same-sex love, most accurately described the viewer,not the viewed. And these sensational reports about Two-Spirit people were used to further "justify" genocide, the theft of Native land and resources, and destruction of their cultures and religions.

But occasionally these colonial quotes opened, even if inadvertently, a momentary window into the humanity of the peoples being observed. Describing his first trip down the Mississippi in the seventeenth century, Jesuit Jacques Marquette chronicled the attitudes of the Illinois and Nadouessi to the Two-Spirits. "They are summoned to the Councils, and nothing can be decided without their advice. Finally, through their profession of leading an Extraordinary life, they pass for Manitous,—That is to say, for Spirits,—or persons of Consequence."

Although French missionary Joseph Francois Lafitau condemned Two-Spirit people he found among the nations of the western Great Lakes, Louisiana, and Florida, he revealed that those Native peoples did not share his prejudice. "They believe they are honored ..." he wrote in 1724, "they participate in all religious ceremonies, and this profession of an extraordinary life causes them to be regarded as people of a higher order. . . . "

But the colonizers' reactions toward Two-Spirit people can be summed up by the words of Antonio de la Calancha, a Spanish official in Lima. Calancha wrote that during Vasco Nunez de Balboa's expedition across Panama, Balboa "saw men dressed like women; Balboa learnt that they were sodomites and threw the king and forty others to be eaten by his dogs, a fine action of an honorable and Catholic Spaniard."

Osh-Tisch (Finds Them and Kills Them), from the Crow nation, was reportedly the leading badé . In the late 1890s, when a government agent jailed the badé, cut off their hair, and made them wear men's clothing, Crow Chief Pretty Eagle ordered the agent to leave their land

This was not an isolated attack. When the Spaniards invaded the Antilles and Louisiana, "they found men dressed as women who were respected by their societies. Thinking they were hermaphrodites, or homosexuals, they slew them."

Finding these quotes shook me. I recalled the "cowboys and Indians" movies of my childhood. These racist films didn't succeed in teaching me hate; I had grown up around strong, proud Native adults and children. But I now realized more consciously how every portrayal of Native nations in these movies was aimed at diverting attention from the real-life colonial genocide. The same bloody history was ignored or glossed over in my schools. I only learned the truth about Native cultures later, by re-educating myself—a process I'm continuing.

Discovering the Two-Spirit tradition had deep meaning for me. It wasn't that I thought the range of human expression among Native nations was identical to trans identities today. I knew that a Crow bate, Cocopa warrhameh, Chumash joya, and Maricopa kwiraxame' would describe themselves in very different ways from an African-American drag queen fighting cops at Stonewall or a white female-to-male transsexual in the 1990s explaining his life to a college class on gender theory.

What stunned me was that such ancient and diverse cultures allowed people to choose more sex/gender paths, and this diversity of human expression was honored as sacred. I had to chart the complex geography of sex and gender with a compass needle that only pointed to north or south.

Barcheeampe, the Woman Chief, was an acclaimed hunter and warrior, praised in songs composed by the Crow people. When all the chiefs and warriors assembled for council, Barcheeampe sat as a chief, ranking third in a band of 160 lodges.

You'd think I'd have been elated to find this new information. But I raged that these facts had been kept from me, from all of us. And so many of the Native peoples who were arrogantly scrutinized by military men, missionaries, and anthropologists had been massacred. Had their oral history too been forever lost?

In my anger, I vowed to act more forcefully in defense of the treaty, sovereignty,and self-determination rights of Native nations. As I became more active in these struggles, I began to hear more clearly the voices of Native peoples who not only reclaimed their traditional heritage, but carried the resistance into the present: the takeover of Alcatraz, the occupation of Wounded Knee, the Longest Walk, the Day of Mourning at Plymouth Rock, and the fight to free political prisoners like Leonard Peltier and Norma Jean Croy.

Two historic developments helped me to hear the voices of modern Native warriors who lived the sacred Two-Spirit tradition: the founding of Gav American Indians in 1975 by Randy Burns (Northern Paiute) and Barbara Cameron (Lakota Sioux), and the publication in 1988 of Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology. Randy Burns noted that the History Project of Gay American Indians "has documented these alternative gender roles in over 135 North American tribes."

Will Roscoe, who edited Living the Spirit, explained that this more complex sex/gender system was found "in every region of the continent, among ever) type of native culture, from the small bands of hunters in Alaska to the populous, hierarchical city-states in Florida."

Another important milestone was the 1986 publication of The Spirit and the Flesh by Walter Williams, because this book included the voices of modern Two Spirit people.

I knew that Native struggles against colonialization and genocide—both physical and cultural—were tenacious. But I learned that the colonizers' efforts to outlaw, punish, and slaughter the Two-Spirits within those nations had also met with fierce resistance. Conquistador Nurio de Guzman recorded in 1530 that the last person taken prisoner after a battle, who had "fought most courageously, was a man in the habit of a woman. . . ."

Just trying to maintain a traditional way of life was itself an act of resistance. Williams wrote, "Since in many tribes berdaches were often shamans, the government's attack on traditional healing practices disrupted their lives. Among the Klamaths, the government agent's prohibition of curing ceremonials in the 1870s and 1880s required shamans to operate underground. The berdache shaman White Cindy continued to do traditional healing, curing people for decades despite the danger of arrest."

We'Wha, a lhamana . wearing the ceremonial regalia of Zuni women. We'Wha was an accomplished weaver and potter and spent six months in Washington, D.C. in 1886, meeting President Grover Cleveland and others who never realized this six-foot Zuni was a lhamana . In 1896, We'Wha died and was buried in a woman's dress with a pair of men's pants underneath.

Native nations resisted the racist demands of U.S. government agents who tried to change Two-Spirit people. This defiance was especially courageous in light of the power these agents exercised over the economic survival of the Native people they tried to control. One such struggle focused on a Crow badé (boté) named Osh-Tisch (Finds Them and Kills Them). An oral history by Joe Medicine Crow in 1982 recalled the events: "One agent in the late 1890s . . . tried to interfere with Osh-Tisch, who was the most respected badé. The agent incarcerated the badés, cut off their hair, made them wear men's clothing. He forced them to do manual labor, planting these trees that you see here on the BIA grounds. The people were so upset with this that Chief Pretty Eagle came into Crow Agency, and told [the agent] to leave the reservation. It was a tragedy, trying to change them."

How the badés were viewed within their own nation comes across in this report by S. C. Simms in 1903 in American Anthropologist: "During a visit last year to the Crow reservation, in the interest of the Field Columbian Museum, I was informed that there were three hermaphrodites in the Crow tribe, one living at Pryor, one in the Big Horn district, and one in Black Lodge district. These persons are usually spoken of as 'she,' and as having the largest and best appointed tipis; they are also generally considered to be experts with the needle and the most efficient cooks in the tribe, and they are highly regarded for their many charitable acts....

"A few years ago an Indian agent endeavored to compel these people, under threat of punishment, to wear men's clothing, but his efforts were unsuccessful."

A nadleeh referred to as "Charlie" by photographer Adam Clark Vroman who took this photo at the Navajo hogans at Bitahoochee in 1895.

White-run boarding schools played a similar role in trying to force generations of kidnapped children to abandon their traditional ways. But many Two-Spirit children escaped rather than conform.

Lakota medicine man Lame Deer told an interviewer about the sacred place of the winkte ("male-to-female") in his nation's traditions, and how the winkte bestowed a special name on an individual. "The secret name a winkte gave to a child was believed to be especially powerful and effective," Lame Deer said. "Sitting Bull, Black Elk, even Crazy Horse had secret winkte names." Lakota chief Crazy Horse reportedly had one or two winktemves.

Williams quotes a Lakota medicine man who spoke of the pressures on the winktes in the 1920s and 1930s. "The missionaries and the government agents said winktes were no good, and tried to get them to change their ways. Some did, and put on men's clothing. But others, rather than change, went out and hanged themselves."

Up until 1989, the Two-Spirit voices I heard lived only in the pages of books.But that year I was honored to be invited to Minneapolis for the first gathering of Two-Spirit Native people, their loved ones, and supporters. The bonds of friendship I enjoyed at the first event were strengthened at the third gathering in Manitoba in 1991. There, I found myself sitting around a campfire at the base of tall pines under the rolling colors of the northern lights,drinking strong tea out of a metal cup. I laughed easily relaxed with old friends and new ones. Some were feminine men or masculine women; all shared same-sex desire. Yet not all of these people were transgendered,and not all of the Two-Spirits I'd read about desired people of the same sex.Then what defined this group?

I turned to Native people for these answers. Even today, in 1995. I read research papers and articles about sex/gender systems in Native nations in which every source cited is a white social scientist. When I began to write this book, I asked Two-Spirit people to talk about their own cultures, in their own words.

Chrystos, a brilliant Two-Spirit poet and writer from the Menominee nation, offered me this understanding:"Life among First Nation people,before first contact, is hard to reconstruct. There's been so much abuse of traditional life by the Christian Church. But certain things have filtered down to us. Most of the nations that I know of traditionally had more than two genders. It varies from tribe to tribe. The concept of Two-Spiritedness is a rather rough translation into English of that idea. I think the English language is rigid, and the thought patterns that form it are rigid, so that gender also becomes rigid.

"The whole concept of gender is more fluid in traditional life. Those paths are not necessarily aligned with your sex, although they may be. People might choose their gender according to their dreams, for example. So even the idea that your gender is something you dream about is not even a concept in Western culture—which posits you are born a certain biological sex and therefore there's a role you must step into and follow pretty rigidly for the rest of your life. That's how we got the concept of queer. Anyone who doesn't follow their assigned gender role is queer; all kinds of people are lumped together under that word."

Does being Two-Spirit determine your sexuality? I asked Chrystos. "In traditional life a Two-Spirit person can be heterosexual or what we would call homosexual," she replied. "You could also be a person who doesn't have sex with anyone and lives with the spirits. The gender fluidity is part of a larger concept, which I guess the most accurate English word for is 'tolerance.' It's a whole different way of conceiving how to be in the world with other people. We think about the world in terms of relationship, so each person is always in a matrix, rather than being seen only as an individual—which is a very different way of looking at things."

Chrystos told me about her Navajo friend Wesley Thomas, who describes himself as nadleeh-like. A male nadleeh, she said, "would manifest in the world as a female and take a husband and participate in tribal life as a female person." I e-mailed Wesley, who lives in Seattle, for more information about the nadleeh tradition. He wrote back that "nadleeh was a category for women who were/are masculine and also feminine males."

Spotted Eagle holding grandson.

The concept of nadleeh, he explained, is incorporated into Navajo origin or creation stories. "So, it is a cultural construction," he wrote, "and was part of the normal Navajo culture, from the Navajo point of view, through the nineteenth century. It began changing during the first half of the twentieth century due to the introduction of western education and most of all, Christianity. Nadleeh since then has moved underground."

Wesley, who spent the first thirty years of life on the Eastern Navajo reservation, wrote that in his initial fieldwork research he identified four categories of sex: female/woman, male/man, female/man, and male /woman. "Where I began to identify gender on a continuum—meaning placing female at one end and male on the other end—I placed forty-nine different gender identifications in between. This was derived at one sitting, not from carrying out a full and comprehensive fieldwork research. This number derived from my own understanding of gender within the Navajo cosmology. "

I have faced so much persecution because of my gender expression that I also wanted to hear about the experiences of someone who grew up as a "masculine girl" in traditional Native life. I thought of Spotted Eagle, who I had met in Manitoba, and who lives in Georgia. Walking down an urban street, Spotted Eagle's gender expression, as well as her nationality, could make her the target of harassment and violence. But she is White Mountain Apache, and I knew she had grown up with her own traditions on the reservation. How was she treated?

"I was born in 1945," Spotted Eagle told me. "I grew up totally accepted. I knew from birth, and everyone around me knew I was Two-Spirited. I was honored. I was a special creation; I was given certain gifts because of that, teachings to share with my people and healings. But that changed—not in my generation, but in generations to follow."

There were no distinct pronouns in her ancient language, she said. "There were three variations: the way the women spoke, the way the men spoke, and the ceremonial language." Which way of speaking did she use? "I spoke all three. So did the two older Two-Spirit people on my reservation."

Spotted Eagle explained that the White Mountain Apache nation was small and isolated, and so had been less affected early on by colonial culture. As a result, the U.S. government didn't set up the mission school system on the White Mountain reservation until the late 1930s or early 1940s. Spotted Eagle said she experienced her first taste of bigotry as a Two-Spirit in those schools. "I was taken out of the mission school with the help of my people and sent away to live with an aunt off reservation, so I didn't get totally abused by Christianity. I have some very horrible memories of the short time I was there."

"But as far as my own people," Spotted Eagle continued, "we were a matriarchy,and have been through our history. Women are in a different position in a matriarchy than they are out here. It's not that we have more power or more privilege than anyone else, it's just a more balanced way to be. Being a woman was a plus and being Two-Spirit was even better. I didn't really have any negative thoughts about being Two-Spirit until I left the reservation."

Spotted Eagle told me that as a young adult she married. "My husband was also Two-Spirit and we had children. We lived in a rather peculiar way according to standards out here. Of course it was very normal for us. We faced a lot of violence, but we learned to cope with it and go on."

Spotted Eagle's husband died many years ago. Today her partner is a woman.Her three children are grown. "Two of them are Two-Spirit." she said proudly."We're all very close."

I asked her where she found her strength and pride. "It was given to me by the people around me to maintain," she explained. "If your whole life is connected spiritually, then you learn that self-pride—the image of self—is connected with everything else. That becomes part of who you are and you carry that wherever you are.

What was responsible for the imposition of the present-day rigid sex gender system in North America? It is not correct to simply blame patriarchy, Chrystos stressed to me."The real word is 'colonization' and what it has done to the world. Patriarchy is a tool of colonization and exploitation of people and their lands for wealthy white people."

"The Two-Spirit tradition was suppressed," she explained, "Like all Native spirituality, it underwent a tremendous time of suppression. So there's gaps. But we've continued on with our spiritual traditions. We are still attached to this land and the place of our ancestors and managed to protect our spiritual traditions and our languages. We have always been at war. Despite everything—incredible onslaughts that even continue now—we have continued and we have survived."

Like a gift presented at a traditional give away, Native people have patiently given me a greater understanding of the diverse cultures that existed in the Western hemisphere before colonization.

But why did many Native cultures honor sex/gender diversity, while European colonialists were hell-bent on wiping it out? And how did the Europeans immediately recognize Two-Spiritedness? Were there similar expressions in European societies?

Thinking back to my sketchy high-school education, I could only remember one person in Europe whose gender expression had made history.

A 1594 Theodor de Bry engraving of Balboa using dogs to murder Two-Spirit Native people.

They Called Her "Hommasse"

Joan of Arc has been claimed as a symbol by everyone from Church fathers who canonized her to French right-wing nationalists. Frequently, Joan of Arc is portrayed in art as an extremely feminine woman. Given the charges of transgender that led to her murder, it's more likely Joan looked like this rendition in a seventeenth-century painting, attributed to Jean de Caumont.

Didn't Joan of Arc wear men's clothes?" I asked a friend over coffee in 1975. She had a graduate degree in history; I had barely squeaked through high school. I waited for her answer with great anticipation, but she dismissed my question with a wave of her hand. "It was just armor." She seemed so sure, but I couldn't let my question go. Joan of Arc was the only person associated with cross-dressing in history I'd grown up hearing about.

I thought a great deal about my friend's answer. Was the story of Joan of Arc dressing in men's clothing merely legend? Was wearing armor significant? If a society strictly mandates only men can be warriors, isn't a woman military leader dressed in armor an example of cross-gendered expression?

All I knew about the feudal period in which Joan of Arc lived was that lords owned vast tracts of land and lived off the forced agricultural labor of peasants. But I made the decision to study Joan of Arc's life, and her story opened another important window on trans history for me.

In school, we'd quickly glossed over the facts of Joan of Arc's life. So I hadn't realized that in 1431, when she was nineteen years old, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake by the Inquisition of the Catholic Church because she refused to stop dressing in garb traditionally worn by men. And no one had ever taught me that her peasant followers considered Joan of Arc—and her clothing—sacred.

I discovered that more than ten thousand books have been written about Joan of Arc's extraordinary life. She was an illiterate daughter of the peasant class, who as a teenager demonstrated a brilliant military leadership that helped birth the nation-state of France. What impressed me the most, however, was her courage in defending her right to self-expression. Yet I was frustrated at how many texts analyzed Joan of Arc solely as an individual, removed from the dynamics of a tumultuous period and place. I was particularly interested in understanding the social soil in which this remarkable person was rooted.

A virgin (center figure) of the Klementi tribe in Albania, circa 1910. Daughters had no say about when and to whom they were married. But if a virgin swore before twelve witnesses that she would never marry, that person was then recognized and ranked as a man, wore men's clothing, carried weapons, ate with other men, and worked as herdsmen of sheep and goats.

Joan of Arc was born in Domremy, in the province of Lorraine, around 1412. Only half a century before her birth, the bubonic plague had torn the fabric of the feudal order. One-third of the population of Europe was wiped out, whole provinces were depopulated. Peasant rebellions were shaking the very foundations of European feudalism.

At the time, France was gripped by the Hundred Years War. French peasants suffered plunder and violence at the hands of the marauding English occupation armies. The immediate problem for the peasantry was how to oust the English army, a task the French nobility had been unable to accomplish.

Joan of Arc emerged as a leader during this period of powerful social earth-quakes. In 1429, dressed in men's clothing, this confident seventeen year old presented herself and a group of her followers at the court of Prince Charles, heir to the French throne. In the context of feudal life, in which religion permeated everything, Joan asserted that her mission, motivation, and mode of dress were directed by God. She declared her goal: to forge an army of peasants to drive out the English. Prince Charles placed her at the head of a ten-thousand-strong peasant army.

The rest is history that has been replayed again and again in text and film. Unable to read or write, Joan of Arc dictated a letter to the King of England and the Duke of Bedford, leader of the English occupying army in Orleans, demanding they leave French soil, vowing, "[I]f you do not do so, you will remember it by reason of your great sufferings."

On April 28, 1429, Joan led a march on Orleans. The next day, she entered the city at the head of her peasant army. By May 8, the English were routed. Over the next months, she further proved her genius as a military strategist and her ability to inspire the rank-and-file soldiers by liberating other French villages and towns and forcing the English to retreat.

Joan persuaded Charles to go to Rheims to receive the crown. It was an arduous trip—long and dangerous—through territory still occupied by English troops. Although her army was exhausted and famished along the way, they forced the English to yield still more turf. As Charles was crowned King of France, Joan stood beside him, holding her combat banner. The French nation-state, soon to be fully liberated from occupation, was born.

Catalina de Erauso was a Basque who cross-dressed and traveled to South America in the early 1600s as a conquistador. S/he and fellow soldiers slaughtered many Native peoples. While the Church and French ruling class saw Joan of Arc and her transgender expression as a threat, de Erauso, who fought on the side of colonialism, won the Pope's blessing to continue cross-dressing.

On May 23, 1430, Joan was captured by the Burgundians, French allies of the English feudal lords. The Burgundians referred to her as hommasse, a slur meaning "man-woman," or masculine woman. Had she been a knight or nobleman, King Charles would have offered a ransom for Joan's freedom, since ransom was the customary method of freeing knights and nobility captured in battle. Even the sums were fixed—one could ransom a royal prince for 10,000 livres of gold, or 61,125 francs. Once ransom was offered, it had to be accepted. But Joan's position as military leader of a popular peasant movement threatened the very French ruling class she helped lift to power. The French nobility didn't offer a single franc for her release. What an arrogant betrayal. How anxious they must have been to be rid of her.

The English urged the Catholic Church to condemn Joan for cross-dressing. The king of England, Henry VI, wrote to the infamous Inquisitor Pierre Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais: "It is sufficiently notorious and well-known that for some time past a woman calling herself Jeanne the Pucelle (the Maid) , leaving off the dress and clothing of the feminine sex, a thing contrary to divine law and abominable before God, and forbidden by all laws, wore clothing and armour such as is worn by men." Buried beneath this outrage against Joan's cross-dressing was a powerful class bias. It was an affront to nobility for a peasant to wear armor and ride a fine horse. This offense was later elaborated in one of the charges against Joan that claimed she dressed "in rich and sumptuous habits, precious stuffs and cloth of gold and furs."

The Burgundians sold Joan of Arc to the English, who turned her over to the Inquisition in November 1430. Joan was held in a civil prison in Rouen, France, an English stronghold at that time. She was reportedly guarded by English male soldiers who slept in her cell, in violation of the Church's own rules. She was shackled in a small iron cage "in which she was kept standing, chained by her neck, her hands and her feet," according to the locksmith who built the cage.

Liberte (Angelique Brulon) was a decorated officer in Napoleon's infantry, serving in seven campaigns between 1792 and 1799 that liberated much of Europe from feudalism. Liberte joined her husband's regiment after he was killed in warfare. Liberte "came out" during the war and became a hero to French women who wanted to replace Joan of Arc for having been so loyal to the nobility.

Joan's trial began in Rouen on January 9, 1431. The Grand Inquisitors condemned Joan for cross-dressing and accused her of being raised a pagan. Church leaders had long charged that the district of her birth, Lorraine, was a hotbed of paganism and witchcraft. One of the principal accusations against Joan was that she associated with "fairies," a charge leveled by the Church in their war against paganism. (Which, incidentally, derives from the Latin paganus, meaning rural dweller or peasant.) The Church was waging war against peasants who resisted patriarchal theology and still held onto some of the old pre-Christian religious beliefs and matrilineal traditions. This was true of peasants in the area of Lorraine, even in the period of Joan's lifetime. For instance, the custom of giving children the mother's surname, not the father's, still survived there.

Scapegoating Joan of Arc and the area of her birth fueled the Church's reactionary campaign. And the more Joan of Arc was idolized by her followers, the more she posed a threat to the Church's religious rule. Article III of the Articles of Accusations stated this clearly: "Item, the said Joan by her inventions has seduced the Catholic people, many in her presence adored her as a saint...even more, they declared her the greatest of all the saints after the holy Virgin " No wonder the Church fathers feared her!

On April 2, 1431, the Inquisition dropped the charges of witchcraft against Joan, because they were too hard to prove. Instead, they denounced her for asserting that her cross-dressing was a religious duty compelled by voices she heard in visions, and for maintaining that these voices were a higher authority than the Church. Many historians and academicians view Joan of Arc's wearing men's clothing as inconsequential. Yet the core of the charges against Joan focused on her cross-dressing, the crime for which she ultimately was executed. However, the following quote from the verbatim court proceedings of her interrogation reveals it wasn't just Joan of Arc cross-dressing that enraged her judges, but her cross-gendered expression as a whole:

While this portrait of Nzinga, King of Angola from 1624 to 1653, is quite idealized, she ruled as a king, cross-dressed, and defeated the Portuguese army in many battles

You have said that, by God's command, you have continually worn man's dress, wearing the short robe, doublet, and hose attached by points; that you have also worn your hair short, cut en rond above your ears, with nothing left that could show you to be a woman; and that on many occasions you received the Body of our Lord dressed in this fashion, although you have been frequently admonished to leave it off, which you have refused to do, saying that you would rather die than leave it off, save by God's command. And you said further that if you were still so dressed and with the king and those of his party, it would be one of the greatest blessings for the kingdom of France; and you have said that not for anything would you take an oath not to wear this dress or carry arms; and concerning all these matters you have said that you did well, and obediently to God's command. As for these points, the clerks say that you blaspheme God in His sacraments; that you transgress divine law, the Holy Scriptures and the canon law; you hold the Faith doubtfully and wrongly; you boast vainly; you are suspect of idolatry; and you condemn yourself in being unwilling to wear the customary clothing of your sex, and following the custom of the Gentiles and the Heathen.

Even though she knew her defiance meant she was considered damned, Joan's testimony in her own defense revealed how deeply her cross-dressing was rooted in her identity. "For nothing in the world," she declared, "will I swear not to arm myself and put on a man's dress."

But by April 24, 1431, Joan's judges claimed she had recanted, after having been taken on a tour of the torture chamber, and brought to a cemetery where she was shown a scaffold that her tormentors said awaited her if she did not repent. Joan allegedly accused herself of wearing clothing that violated natural decency, and agreed to submit to the Church's authority and wear women's apparel. She was "mercifully" sentenced to life in prison on bread and water—in women's dress.

Afro-Mexicana revolutionary from Michoacan, one of many cross-dressed female warriors and revolutionaries who have helped make history. Another example was Chui Chin, a Chinese revolutionary, cross-dressing feminist who was tortured and beheaded in 1907 for her efforts at organizing an uprising against the Manchu dynasty. She founded a militant newspaper in Shanghai called The Chinese Women's Journal , organized an army, and helped plan an insurrection.

However, since Joan could neither read nor write, did she know the exact details of what she was signing? This is an important question, because cross-dressing was not a capital offense at that time. And the Inquisition did not have the power to turn a heretic over to the secular state for execution. But the church judges were empowered to condemn a relapsed heretic.

Did Pierre Cauchon, the Inquisitor, trick Joan into making her mark on a document that signed away more than she'd realized? Perhaps Cauchon later revealed the exact contents of the phony confession in hopes she would renege. Or were parchments switched? Witnesses described Joan making her mark on a short declaration; the confession in the court records is very long.

Whatever the case, Joan recanted the alleged abjuration within days and resumed wearing men's clothes. Her judges asked her why she had done so. when putting on male garb meant certain death. According to the court record she said she had done so "of her own will. And that nobody had forced her to do so. And that she preferred man's dress to woman's." Joan told the judges she "had never intended to take an oath not to take man's dress again." The Inquisition sentenced her to death for resuming male dress, saying "time and again you have relapsed, as a dog that returns to its vomit. . . ."

Joan of Arc was burned alive at the stake on May 30, 1431, in Rouen. She was nineteen years old. The depth of her enemies' hatred toward her transgender expression was demonstrated at her execution, when they extinguished the flames in order to prove she was a "real" woman. After her clothing was burned away and Joan was presumed dead, one observer wrote, "Then the fire was raked back and her naked body shown to all the people and all the secrets that could or should belong to a woman, to take away any doubts from people's minds."

Joan of Arc suffered the excruciating pain of being burned alive rather than renounce her identity. I know the kind of seething hatred that resulted in her murder—I've faced it. But I wish I'd been taught the truth about her life and her courage when I was a frightened, confused trans youth. What an inspirational role model-a brilliant transgender peasant teenager leading an army of laborers into battle.

Franklin Thompson (Sarah Emma Edmonds) fought for the Union Army in the Civil War. Some 400 male Civil War soldiers were discovered to have been born female. Many of them fought for the pro-slavery Confederacy; just being transgendered doesn't automatically make each person progressive. Like the old trade union song asked, it's a question of "Which side are you on?"

But one aspect of the information I'd gathered left me puzzled. Why did the feudal ruling class and the Church abhor her transgender so violently, while the peasants considered it so sacred? There's no question how much Joan of Arc was honored by the peasantry. Even the Church admitted that the peasants considered her the greatest of all the saints after the holy Virgin.

It's also clear that Joan of Arc's cross-dressing was central to that reverence. Gay historian Arthur Evans noted that before Joan was captured by the Burgundians: "[W]henever she appeared in public she was worshipped like a deity by the peasants. The peasants believed that she had the power to heal, and many would flock around her to touch part of her body or her clothing (which was men's clothing). Subsequently her armor was kept on display at the Church of St. Denis, where it was worshipped."

According to Professor Margaret A. Murray, "The enormous importance as to the wearing of the male costume is emphasized by the fact that as soon as it was known in Rouen that Joan was again dressed as a man the inhabitants crowded into the castle courtyard to see her, to the great indignation of the English soldiers who promptly drove them out with hard words and threats of hard blows."

I could not answer, yet, why the peasants venerated Joan of Arc's cross-dressing. But I thought back to a clue buried in the condemnation of Joan by her judges. What did they mean when they charged that her cross-dressing was "following the custom of the Gentiles and the Heathen?" What custom? Were there other examples of cross-dressing among the peasantry? Did the peasants consider transgender itself to be sacred? If so, why?

I had no idea where to find the answers to these questions.

Part 2

Our Sacred Past

Concepts that have proved useful

in the constitution of an order of things

readily win such authority over us

that we forget their earthly origins

and take them to be changeless data.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

I remember riding a bus in the middle of the night during a bitter snowstorm in the early months of 1976. I was traveling, along with many other activists, to a political conference in Chicago. Unable to sleep, I read a xeroxed copy of a Workers World pamphlet so new the typeset copies weren't yet back from the printers. That landmark pamphlet—a Marxist examination of the roots of lesbian and gay oppression—was authored by Bob McCubbin, a gay man I worked with in our New York City branch. I had known Bob was working on that history, but I'd had no concept of how his research and analysis would impact on my life.

I found myself in those pages. For the first time since I'd acknowledged my own sexual desire to myself, I felt released from a layer of unexamined shame. Bob presented an overview of human history so I could see that same-sex love had always been part of the spectrum of human sexuality. He provided examples of early communal societies that honored all forms of human love and affection. Bob analyzed how and why the division of society into classes led to increasingly hostile attitudes by rulers towards same-sex love. And to my surprise, he included examples of acceptance of transgender in cooperative societies.

As I shivered next to a bus window thick with ice, I cried with relief. I realized how important it was for me to know I had a place in history, that I was part of the human race.

This map shows the many parts of the world where anthropologist Hermann Baumann documented male-to-female transsexual priestesses.

As I read and reread that pamphlet in the years that followed, I saw that I could also approach trans history from a materialist point of view. So I went back and took another look at the charge by Joan's Inquisitors that she followed "the custom of the Gentiles and the Heathen." In my family, gentiles meant non-Jews. But I remembered Engels's use of the term gens and it occurred to me that the French clerics were referring to free farming communities still organized into gens, the family unit of cooperative matrilineal societies.

The figure on the left is a trans enaree priestess. This image is from a gold plaque on a late fourth-century c.e. tiara from the Karagodeuaskh Tumulus on the Kuban River.

I wanted to go back further, to dig around for prehistoric evidence of transgender in communal societies in Europe. But how could I? Although these early communities were cooperative up until about 4000 B.C.E.—estimated to be the end of the Stone Age, or the Neolithic period—these ancient farmers and hunters left no written records.

So I combed through books, periodicals, and news clippings devoted to the history of Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. I searched for the earliest written records of any forms of trans expression. Much to my surprise, I found a lot of information.

For example, I discovered abundant evidence of male-to-female transsexual women priestesses who played an important role in the worship of the Great Mother. Extensive research by scholars has revealed that this goddess, not male gods, was venerated throughout the Middle East, Northern Africa, Europe and western Asia.

The Great Mother was emblematic of pre-class communalism. Today, many scholars describe her as a female goddess. But perhaps those who revered her saw this divinity as more complex. While it's impossible today to interpret precisely how people who lived millennia ago viewed this goddess, Roman historian Plutarch described the Great Mother as an intersexual (hermaphroditic) deity in whom the sexes had not yet been split.

A qalla priestess of the goddess Cybele, from the mid-second century c.e.

Worshipping Heviosso, in Abomey, Africa. This is the region that is famous for Amazon warrior women.

A Sakpota dancer in Dahomey, Africa.

The Great Mother's transsexual priestesses followed an ancient and sacred path of rituals that included castration. These transsexual priestesses continued to serve the Great Mother in societies in which class divisions were just developing. They are documented in Mesopotamian temple records from the middle of the third millennium B.C.E., and are also found in Assyrian, Akkadian, and Babylonian records.

Many Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Near Eastern goddesses were served by transsexual priestesses, including the Syrian Astarte and Dea Syria at Hierapolis, Artemis, Atargatis, Ashtoreth or Ishtar, Hecate at Laguire, and Artemis (Diana) at Ephesus. Statues of Diana were often represented draped with a necklace made of the testicles of her priestesses.

Transsexual women priestesses known as gallae were found in such large numbers in Anatolia, an area which today is part of Turkey, that some classical texts report as many as five thousand in some cities. The gallae served the Great Mother, known to the Phrygians as Cybele, whose worship is believed to date back to the Stone Age.

Was the sacred service of transsexual priestesses a practice rooted in communal matrilineal societies? Or was it an example of men, living under patriarchy, castrating themselves in order to wrest this position from women? Not all researchers and historians agree.

For example, historian David F. Greenberg's findings seem to support the first position. He concludes that evidence of trans shamans, "among peoples whose later ways of life have been very diverse, suggests that the role does date back to the late Paleolithic (if not earlier)."7

Feminist researcher Merlin Stone is a prominent spokesperson for the latter argument. She wrote about the transition in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures from communal to early class divided societies. Stone argues: "It seems quite possible that as men began to gain power, even within the religion of the Goddess, they replaced priestesses. They may have initially gained this right by identifying with and imitating the castrated state of the son/lover; or in an attempt to imitate the female clergy, which originally held the power, they may have tried to rid themselves of their maleness by adopting the ritual of castration and the wearing of women's clothing."8

Stone's argument rests on a biological determinist definition of these transsexual priestesses as men. But how could priestesses who had "rid themselves of their maleness" expect to curry much favor with the new wealthy men who so valued males over females? Besides being bereft of "maleness," these priestesses continued the practice of matrilineal goddess worship that rivaled the patriarchal religions of new male-dominated ruling classes.

And what about the statement that the female clergy "originally held the power"? From where did women's "power" derive in cooperative societies? Was it based on holding the spiritual reins?

A Yoruba ritual in Brazil. Note the double-edged axe of Shango, the deity who is represented as all sexes. The Amazons also reportedly carried double-edged axes.

A young male dressed as a Hindu deity at the Kumbh Mela festival in Allahabad, India in 1989.

Anthropologists have reconstructed patterns of life in Stone Age Europe, in much the same way as paleontologists have rebuilt models of dinosaurs. The Stone Age was a span of human development before the use of metals, when tools and hunting implements were fashioned from stone. Humans lived by hunting and food gathering; group labor was cooperative.

In these early societies, most men hunted while most women developed a division

of labor in large centers of production and shared the responsibility of child-care. Women didn't rule over men, the way men dominate women in a patriarchal society. There were no signs of pharaohs and emperors, queens or presidents, who lived in luxury while others toiled in squalor. Leadership could not be coerced or bought, so it had to be earned through group respect.

The family structure of these societies was matrilineal and matrilocal—meaning women headed the family groupings and the collective homes. Blood descent and inheritance were traced through women.In these Stone Age societies, women were so respected that anthropologist Jacquetta Hawkes concluded, "Indeed, it is tempting to be convinced that the earliest Neolithic societies throughout their range in time and space gave woman the highest status she has ever known."9

But did these cooperative societies only have room for two sexes, fixed at birth? It has become common for social scientists to conclude that the earliest human division of labor between women and men in communal societies formed the basis for modern sex and gender boundaries. But the more I studied, the more I believed that the assumption that every society, in every corner of the world, in every period of human history, recognized only men and women as two immutable social categories is a modern Western conclusion. It's time to take another look at what we've long believed was an ancient division of labor between only two sexes.

Our earliest ancestors do not appear to have been biological determinists. There are societies all over the world that allowed for more than two sexes, as well as respecting the right of individuals to reassign their sex. And transsexuality, transgender, intersexuality, and bigender appear as themes in creation stories, legends, parables, and oral history.

As I've already documented, many Native nations on the North American continent made room for more than two sexes, and there appeared to have been a fluidity between them. Reports by military expeditions, missionaries, ethnographers, anthropologists, explorers, and other harbingers of colonialism cited numerous forms of sex-change, transgender, and intersexuality in matrilineal societies—societies where men were not in a dominant position. In these accounts—no matter how racist or angrily distorted by the colonial narrative voice—it is clear that transsexual priestesses and other trans spiritual leaders, or medicine people, have existed in many ancient cultures.

It's not possible in many of the following examples to make a distinction between transsexual, transgender, bigender, or mixed gender expression. However, trans spiritual leaders played a role in far-flung cultures all over the world.

For example, African spiritual beliefs in intersexual deities and sex/gender transformation among their followers have been documented among the Akan, Ambo-Kwanyama, Bobo, Chokwe, Dahomeans (of Benin), Dogon, Bambara, Etik.Handa, Humbe, Hunde, Ibo, Jukun, Kimbundu, Konso, Kunama, Lamba, Lango,Luba, Lulua, Musho, Nuba, Ovimbundu, Rundi, Shona-Karonga, Venda, Vui-Kongo,and Yoruba.

A nat dancer in Myanmar (Burma),

Transgender in religious ceremony is still reported in the twentieth century in west Africa. And cross-dressing is a feature of modern Brazilian and Haitian ceremonies derived from west African religions. 11

In addition, male-to-female shamans have been recorded among the Aramanans in southern Chile and parts of Argentina. 12 They are also reported among the Guajire, a cattle-herding people of northwest Venezuela and northern Colombia,13 and the Tehuelche, who were hunter-gatherers in Argentina. 14

Transgender historian Pauline Park, who is Korean American, wrote to me abouttrans spiritual expression in Asia:

Transgendered identities and practices have been documented in every traditional Asian society. In some Asian traditions, transgendered figures perform religious or quasi-religious functions. One such example is the basaja of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi (the Celebes). 16 The hijra of India also can be understood in a religious context, in relation to the mother-goddess Bahuchara Mata, though some hijras also worship the Hindu god Shiva in his manifestation as the half-man, half-woman Ardhanarisvara. 11 Finally, the mudang must be mentioned. The Korean mudang was a shaman or sorceress who frequently was a transgendered male, and like many other shamanic traditions, the idea that combining the characteristics of both sexes and both genders could connect one to a transcendent spiritual realm seemed to underlie the practice.

In ancient China, the shih-niang wore a combination of female, male, and religious garb. 19 In Okinawa, some shamans took part in an ancient male-to-female ceremony known as winagu nati, which means, "becoming female."20 And trans shamans were still reported practicing in the Vietnamese countryside in the mid-1970s.21

A Two-Spirit Tolowa medicine person.

Female-to-male priests also exist—and most importantly, even co-exist with male-to-female shamans. Among the Lugbara in Africa, for example, male-to-females are called okule and female-to-males are named agule. 22 The Zulu initiated both male-to-female and female-to-male isangoma. While male-to-female shamans have been part of the traditional life of the Chukchee, Kamchadal, Koryak, and Inuit—all Native peoples of the Arctic Basin—Inuit female-to-males serve White Whale Woman, who was believed to have been transformed into a man or a woman-man.23 And female-to-male expression is part of rituals and popular festivals with deep matrilineal roots in every corner of the world—including societies on the European continent.

Women and trans spiritual leaders continue to coexist in this century. Although South African Zulu diviners are usually women, some are male-to-female diviners. 24 Among the Ambo people of southern Angola, even in this century, women—including trans women—serve the deity Kalunga.25

The African male youth on the left is representing a female.

And in several areas of the world, the replacement of trans shamans with nontrans women spiritual leaders was a result of patriarchal pressure. For example, Walter Williams wrote that in South America, "Among the precontact Araucanians, the Mapuche, and probably other people, shaman religious leaders were all berdaches. When the Spanish suppressed this religious institution because of its association with male-male sex, the Indians switched to a totally new pattern. Women became the shamans."

A Haitian march through Brooklyn, New York, in 1993.

Although these brief examples of trans expression are limited to spiritual contexts, thousands of books, essays, and field research cite transgender, bigender, transsexuality, and intersexuality in societies on every continent, in every stage of development. I'm not arguing that all of these examples from diverse cultures are identical to modern Western trans identities. Nor am I trying to unravel the matrix of attitudes and beliefs around trans expression in these societies. The importance for me is the depth and breadth of evidence underscoring that gender and sex diversity are global in character, and that trans people were once revered, not reviled. How else could a trans person be a sacred shaman? In communal societies, where respect could not be bought or sold or stolen, being a shaman, or medicine person, was a position of honor.

So how and why, I wondered, did attitudes towards trans people plummet so drastically?

Why Bigotry Began

The earliest written edicts I could find against cross-dressing and sex-change were in Deuteronomy. Did that make Jews responsible for the rise of this bigotry? I hoped not, since I was sick to death of blame.

I grew up fighting anti-Semitism with balled-up fists. I was one of only four Jewish kids in my grade school. Our absence during religious holidays reminded the bullies who we were, so there was always a fight waiting for me around the school entrances. Jews were not allowed on the school playground. I thought the other kids made up the rule, but years later I discovered it was a parent who had given the instruction to his son and to others to enforce the edict, because, he said, "Jews killed our God!"

I can still remember the night in 1965 when my father, Irving, made an announcement to the whole family at the dinner table: "The pope says the Jews aren't responsible anymore for the crucifixion of Christ!" He added, "Tonight I'll get the first good sleep I've had in two thousand years! " Though it was funny, the socalled absolution didn't blunt the hatred I faced as a Jewish teenager.

But being Jewish presented me with my own questions. Why did the religious men I knew thank god every morning in their prayers that they weren't born women? And how could I reconcile myself to the fact that Deuteronomy and Leviticus—two of the five books of Mosaic law—condemned my cross-dressing and my sexual desire? My resolute insistence on cross-dressing had already cut short my religious education at our synagogue. So where, and to whom, could I go for understanding about how these laws came into being? I felt trapped between the anvil of religious laws I didn't want to defend and the hammer of anti-Semitism.

In my own life, Jews seemed to be a very small part of a larger, dominant culture steeped in bigotry and intolerance. I didn't see how Judaism could be responsible for that.

The more I researched the early Hebrews, the more I understood that blaming Judaism for the rise of biases against women, transsexuals, cross-dressers, intersexuals, lesbians, and gay men is not only anti-Semitic, it's a diversion from the realunderstanding of why oppression arose.

Where did the culpability really lie?

The Hebrews were one of many Semitic tribes that migrated from Arabia into the Fertile Crescent region over a long period, estimated by many scholars to be from about 1500-1250 B.C.E. These nomadic cattle breeders conquered one city after another from the inhabitants of Palestine, increasingly subjecting them to their rule. But what was won on the battlefield had to be defended by constant warfare. Other nomads were equally anxious for this fertile land. The territory conquered by the Hebrews stood at a crossroads of trade routes that allowed the Hebrews to develop extensive commerce.

The accumulation of wealth in the form of herds, agriculture, and trade led to deepening class divisions among the Hebrews, so no wonder the religious beliefs and laws began to reflect the interests of the small group who owned the wealth and their struggle to strengthen their control over the majority.

The communal religious beliefs of the Hebrews had not been fundamentally different from that of other polytheistic tribal-based religions of that region. They worshipped numerous deities, including Yahweh.

So where did transphobic and gender-phobic laws in Deuteronomy spring from? Deuteronomy flatly condemns cross-dressing: "The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God."1 And male-to-female surgery was denounced: "He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter the congregation of the Lord."2

The patriarchal fathers wouldn't have felt the need to spell out these edicts if they weren't common practice. But why did they consider cross-dressing and sex-change such a threat? What was going on among the Hebrews at the time Deuteronomy was written?

Scholars hotly debate the date, as well as the authorship, of these laws. Estimates range from the eleventh to the seventh centuries B.C.E. But what is clear is that Deuteronomy reflects the deepening of patriarchal class divisions among the Hebrews, who lived in and around communal societies that still worshipped goddesses such as Astaroth, Ishtar, Isis, and Cybele. And remember, ritual sex-change was a sacred path for many priestesses of these matrilineal religious traditions.

The condemnation against "cross-dressing," historians Bonnie and Vernon Bullough wrote, "formed part of a campaign against the Syrian goddess Atargatis. who was probably a Syrian version of the Assyrian goddess Ishtar. In some of the worship ceremonies, the followers of Atargatis dressed in the clothes and assumed the role of the opposite sex, just as their Greek counterparts did."4

In addition, the laws warned against Jews cross-dressing. These rules forbade Jewish men from using makeup, wearing brightly colored clothes, jewelry, or ornaments associated with women, or shaving their pubic hair. Women were told to keep their hair long, while men were to keep theirs clipped short.' On the one hand, these rules could be seen from the point of view that cross-dressing and cross-gendered expression as a whole retained an integral connection to the worship of the Mother Goddess.

But it's also important to remember that wealthy Hebrew males were trying to consolidate their patriarchal rule. That means they were very much concerned about making distinctions between women and men, and eliminating any blurring or bridging of those categories. That would also explain why the rules of ownership of property and the rights of intersexual people were extensively detailed in Jewish law. 6

The Hebrews and Judaism were not to blame for the rise of patriarchy or oppression. Class divisions were responsible for the growth of laws that placed new boundaries and restrictions across bodies, self-expression, and desire—as well as fencing off property and wealth. And the Hebrews weren't even the first society to split into classes, or to develop increasingly patriarchal laws. That transformation took place in societies all over the world.

More than a century ago, Frederick Engels explained the importance of these dramatic changes in human society. Engels compared the significance of research into early forms of kinship by Lewis H. Morgan7 to Darwin's theory of evolution. Morgan, who studied the North American Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) and numerous tribes in Asia, Africa, and Australia, documented that matrilineal kinship historically preceded patriarchal families. Engels and Karl Marx saw Morgan's studies as proof that the oppression of women began with the cleavage of society into male-dominated classes based on private ownership of property and the accumulation of wealth.

I believe the same historic overthrow of communalism was also responsible for trans oppression.

In every society in which human labor grew more productive with the use of improved tools and techniques, people stored up more than what they needed for immediate consumption. This surplus was the first accumulation of wealth. Generally, men, who had primarily been wild-game hunters, domesticated and herded large animals, which represented the first wealth. Men, therefore, were in charge of stockpiling this abundance: cattle, sheep, goats, horses, and the surplus of dried and smoked meats and hides, milk, cheese, and yogurt.

Prior to this surplus, tools, utensils, and other possessions were commonly owned within the matrilineal gens. As wealth accumulated in the male sphere of labor, the family structure began to change, and men began to pass on inheritance to their male heirs. Those who had large families and other advantages gathered and stored more surplus. These inequalities, small at first, became the basis of the enrichment of some male tribal members over the women and the tribe as a whole.

This material imbalance led to the unplanned and unconscious transformationof human society. Communal societies, in which labor was voluntary and collective, gave way to unequal societies in which those who owned wealth forced others to work for them—an enforced social relationship of masters and slaves. This tookplace at different times in different places over a period of manv centuries.

No matter where or when this occurred, everything that had once been considered natural was turned on its head in the service of the new owning classes. Creation of a slave class required the branding—either literally or figuratively—of some people as "different," and therefore unworthy of a free status. This stigma, whether race, nationality, religion, sex, or gender, was meant to dehumanize the individuals and justify their enslavement.

Shackling a vast laboring class meant creating armies, police, courts, and prisons to enforce the ownership of private property. However, whips and chains alone couldn’t ensure the rule of the new wealthy elite. A tiny, parasitic class can't live in luxury off the wealth of a vast, laboring class without keeping the majority divided and pitted against each other. That is where the necessity for bigotry began.

I found the origin of trans oppression at this intersection betw een the overthrowof mother-right and the rise of patriarchal class-divided societies. It is at this very nexus that edicts like Deuteronomy arose. Law, including religious law. codified class relations.

The earliest overthrow of mother-right took place in the fertile river valleys of Eurasia and northeast Africa during the period of about 4500 to 1200 B.C.E. In this new social structure, riven by inequality, male ruling class attitudes toward women and trans people grew more and more hostile, even toward transgendered queens and kings.

For example, Hatshepsut, a woman who ruled Egypt in the fifteenth century B.C.E. , "assumed masculine attire, was represented as god and king, and wore the symbolic false beard. In murals she was pictured with short hair, bare shoulders, and was usually devoid of breasts. S/he described herself by male names." Ruling with the support of the temple community, Hatshepsut built grand monuments in honor of the god Amun. Yet after her death, she and the god she honored faced a campaign of hostility, with her second husband attempting to erase all memory of her. 8

Some eight hundred years later, in the seventh century B.C.E., King Ashurbanipal (Sardanapalus), the last of the Assyrian kings, was described by a physician in his court as spending a great deal of his time dressed in women's clothing. Key nobles used reports of Ashurbanipal 's cross-dressing to justify overthrowing him. Ashurbanipal waged a defensive military campaign against these rivals but was twice defeated in battle. As a result, his rule was limited to his capital city. Finally facing defeat, Ashurbanipal set fire to his palace, killing everyone in it—including himself.9

Hostility to transgender, sex-change, intersexuality, women, and same-sex love became a pattern wherever class antagonisms deepened. As a Jewish, transgender, working-class revolutionary, I can't stress enough that Judaism was not the root of the oppression of women and the outlawing of trans expression and same-sex love. The rise of patriarchal class divisions were to blame.

And I found that wherever the ruling classes became stronger, the laws grew increasingly more fierce and more relentlessly enforced.

But They Had Slaves!

What was I taught in school about Greek antiquity? I recall only one moment. It was springtime, and I was gazing out the window, longing to be released from school. My teacher's voice droned, the harsh lights buzzed overhead, the giant clock ticked. At that very moment my teacher rapped on my desk and ordered me to pay attention. I sat bolt upright and tried to concentrate, which is the only reason I heard the following statement so clearly: "Greek democracy was the highest expression of ancient civilization."

I slumped back down in my chair and listened half-heartedly to a stream of facts and dates. Suddenly I heard the word "slaves." I urgently raised my hand and asked, "Were there slaves in Greece?" As the other kids giggled, I guessed I had missed that part of class. Later that day I wandered down to a stretch of woods tucked along the edges of my neighborhood. As I placed pennies on the train tracks and crouched waiting for the train to roar past, I thought about my teacher's earlier statement that "Greek democracy was the highest expression of civilization." If it was so civilized, how come they had slaves?

I've heard some gay men and lesbians exclaim that, out of all of human history, ancient Greek society was the most accepting of same-sex lovers. But I wonder, how happy were the gay slaves? The word democracy has a pleasant ring, but democracy for whom? The political reality is that Greek democracy was a form of state based on the authoritarian rule of the slave-owning patricians over the enslaved majority.

I found that, as with virtually every ancient people, the early tribes of Greece were communal and matrilineal. But the rise of the Greek city-states during the eighth to sixth centuries B.C.E. was based on slave labor, plunder, and trade. The longer the ruling patricians held power, the more women's status became degraded and expressions of human love became subject to legal dictate.

It's true I did find many, many trans references in Greek culture, religion, art, and mythology. But whatever homage trans expression still enjoyed was a holdover from the communal past. It was hard for the Greek patriarchs to diminish the honor that transgender and intersexuality still held among the laboring class. The patriarchal priests in Greece were hemmed in by the popularity of ancient religions—some dating from matriarchal times—and by schools of secular philosophers who played a vital role in politics and education. 1 Wherever ancient rituals still persisted in Greece, so did trans expression. There were numerous festivals, rituals, and customs in which men dressed in women's clothing, and women wore men's clothes and beards . 2

Greek mythology was also filled with references to sex-change, intersexuality, and cross-dressing. Many mythological heroes and gods cross-dressed at one time or another, including Achilles, Heracles, Dionysus, and Athena. "Literal and metaphoric sex change," notes classical scholar P. M. C. Forbes Irving, "seems to have been a subject of considerable imaginative interest in the ancient world and had some importance in ancient religion."3

But changing attitudes toward trans people and the sharpening patriarchal classdivisions are reflected in the Greek legends, in the same way that the mythologicaldefeat of goddesses by male gods mirrored the overthrow of matrilineal societies.For example, Kaineus (Caeneus) , a female-to-male figure in mythology, is viewed as a "scorner and rival of the gods."4 He is driven into the earth by the Centaurs who considered Kaineus an outrage to their masculinity.

Dionysus, also known as Bacchus, was one of the gods who replaced the pre-class goddesses. But Dionysus was represented as a transgendered, cross-dressing god—a hybridization of the old beliefs and the new. During the rites of Dionysus, females-known as ithyphalloi—dressed in men's clothes and carried large phalluses, and men dressed in women's apparel.5

Dionysus held great popularity with the most downtrodden, notes Forbes Irving:

Perhaps the most striking feature of Dionysus, and one which seems particularly relevant to his role as a shape-shifter, is that although he becomes one of the greatest of all the gods he retains in his myths and many of his cults a marginal character. He is above all the god of the weak and oppressed, especially women, and an opponent of the established order.6

The slave-owners were not easily able to impose their brutal system, or their beliefs, on peoples who had once lived freely and worked cooperatively. The patricians couldn't rule without fighting wars and crushing rebellions.

To my surprise, I discovered that one particular group of warriors who fought against this enslavement was considered transgendered, at least by the Greeks—the Amazons. I knew a little about the Amazons because they were such a symbol of freedom and resistance for modern feminists. However, I had always thought of these warriors as "woman-identified women." But were the Amazons also an example of transgender resistance?

The ancient Amazons fought in the gateway between freedom and slavery, between the overthrow of matrilineal communal societies and the ascendancy of patriarchal class rule. Numerous battles between Amazon warriors and the Greek armies are documented in art and legends. The double-edged axe the Amazons reportedly carried in battle has become a symbol of modern feminist pride.

Yet while the Amazons are almost always portrayed as feminine, there is evidence the Greeks thought of them as transgendered. Classical writer Pliny the Younger referred to "the race of the Androgynae, who combine the two sexes…Aristotle adds that in all of them the right breast is that of a man, the left breast that of a woman."7

The right breast of a man, the left breast of a woman—this sounds very much like a description of the Amazons. The only thing I had heard about the legendary Amazons was that they surgically removed their right breast because, they were archers. But that had always struck me as a rather simplistic explanation.

To the Greeks, these Amazons were masculine women who bore themselves like men. And they weren't the only transgendered Scythians. The Greeks were well aware of the transsexual priestesses among the Scythians, who were trading partners and competitors in the Black Sea. And even in legends, the Amazon leaders were paired in battles with Greek male warriors such as Achilles, Theseus, and Heracles-all of whom were reported in mythology as having cross-dressed at one time. In addition, the Amazons were believed to have a spiritual connection with Dionysus, the transgendered god.8

And was the Amazon's weapon—the double-edged axe—a "man's" armamentmerely because it was a weapon of war, or did it symbolize intersexuality?

Greek historian Plutarch wrote that Heracles gave Queen Omphale the double axe he had taken from a defeated Amazon as a spoil of war; both Heracles and Omphale were reported to have cross-dressed. Eventually, the axe was given in homage to Zeus Labrandeus, who was represented in a bronze statue as a beardless deity holding the double axe, the upper body bearing four rows of breasts. So the axe passed, as Delcourt concluded, "from a warrior-woman to a hero and a queen who have exchanged clothing; afterwards it goes to a father-god represented as having breasts; indications of androgyny are particularly abundant here."9

Were the Amazons a shining example of transgender resistance? If so, Scythian Amazons are part of the overlapping history of women and trans people. And I knew that the Amazons were not the only female warriors associated with transgender.

I remembered the description of female-to-male warriors of the Tupinamba, in northeastern Brazil, described in 1576 by Pedro de Magalhaes de Gandavo. Heandother explorers renamed the river that flowed through that area the "River of the Amazons," after the Scythian warriors. And I recalled that both a double-edged axe and cross-gendered expression were central to worship by African and Brazilian followers of the Yoruba deity Shango—a divinity believed to appear at times as a man and other times as a woman.

As I began to write this chapter, I thought about how the past has been interpreted only from the standpoint of women and men, without taking transgender, bigender, transsexuality, or intersexuality into account. Later that afternoon I received an e-mail from Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling, a respected bio-geneticist and feminist from Brown University. She called my attention to a short article that appeared in the British Daily Telegraph on February 13, 1995. The clipping, headlined "She-Men," announced the discovery of evidence of transgender, including women warriors, in Iron Age graves in southern Russia by British archeologist Timothy Taylor. "I think I have identified females who moved into a male sphere as well as men who cross-dressed," Taylor wrote. 10

It's time for a fresh look at history. And this time, I don't intend to be left out!

Natural Becomes "Unnatural"

When I say I am a gender outlaw in modern society, it's not rhetoric. I have been dragged out of bars by police who claimed I broke the law when I dressed myself that evening. I've heard the rap of a cop's club on the stall door when I've used a public women's toilet. And then there's the question of my identity papers.

My driver's license reads Male. The application form only offered me two choices: M or F. In this society, where women are assumed to be feminine and men are assumed to be masculine, my sex and gender expression appear to be at odds. But the very fact that I could be issued a license as a male demonstrates that many strangers "read me" as a man, rather than a masculine woman.

In almost thirty years of driving I've heard the whine of police sirens behind my car on only three occasions. But each time, a trooper sauntered up to my car window and demanded, "Your license and registration—sir." Imagine the nightmare I'd face if I handed the trooper a license that says I am female. The alleged traffic infraction should be the issue, not my genitals. I shouldn't have to prove my sex to any police officer who has stopped me for a moving violation, and my body should not be the focus of investigation. But in order to avoid these dangers, I broke the law when I filled out my driver's license application. As a result, I could face a fine, a suspension of my license, and up to six months in jail merely for having put an M in the box marked sex.

And then there's the problem of my passport. I don't feel safe traveling with a passport that reads Female. However, if I apply for a passport as Male, I am subject to even more serious felony charges. Therefore, I don't have a passport, which restricts my freedom to travel. I could have my birth certificate changed to read Male in order to circumvent these problems, but I don't see why I should have to legally align my sex with my gender expression, especially when this policy needs to be fought.

Why am I forced to check off an F or an M on these documents in the first place? For identification? Both a driver's license and a passport include photographs! Most cops and passport agents would feel insulted to think they needed an M or an F to determine if a person is a man or a woman. It's only those of us who cross the boundaries of sex or gender, or live ambiguously between those borders, who are harassedby this legal requirement.

Many of my transsexual sisters and brothers are required legally to amend their birth certificates before they can change their other identification papers to con-form to their lives. But states have different policies on changing birth certificates—some simple, some grueling. Why should transsexual men and women be harassed,or denied the right to travel, merely based on which state they were unlucky enoughto have been born in?

I am told I must check off M or F because it is a legal necessity. But when I was a child, I was required to check off race on all legal records. It took mighty, militant battles against institutionalized racist discrimination to remove that mandatory question from documents. The women's liberation movement won some important legal victories against sex discrimination too, like ending the policy of listing jobs in "female" and "male" categories. So why do we still have to check off male or female on all records?

Why is the categorization of sex a legal question at all? And why are those categories policed? Why did these laws arise in the first place? I grew up thinking that lawwas wisdom that hovered above society. But I came away with another view after researching the ancient Roman edicts that segregated the sexes into separate and distinct legal categories.

As class divisions deepened in ancient Roman society, the sexes were assigned an increasingly unequal status. Once property-owning males ascended to a superior social position, those categories could not be bridged or blurred without threatening those who owned and controlled this new wealth. Ownership of property and its inheritance, paternity, legitimacy, and titles became vital legal questions for the newruling elite. The heterosexual family, headed by the father, became a state dictate because it was the economic vehicle that ensured wealth would be passed on to sons.

Everyone who was not born a male heir to property bore the wrath of the newsocial system. Just as the status of women was degraded, so was everything that was "not male"—transgender, gender-bending, sex-change, and intersexuality. A woman could not become a man, any more than a slave could become a ruling patrician. Males who were viewed as "womanly" were an affront to the men in power.

Eventually, even a god like Dionysus couldn't get away with such feminine flamboyance. The rituals of Dionysus had endured in Rome even after Christianity became the state religion of the wealthy. But as the god became scorned by the Christian ruling classes, Dionysus's status was downgraded from a man-woman—a double-being, doubly powerful—to effeminate, an increasingly despised gender expression.

Hatred and contempt for women partly accounts for the growing hostility of the ruling classes toward men they considered too feminine. The Romans also used the Greeks' acceptance of male same-sex relations as an ideological weapon against this imperial power they had supplanted. But the campaigns by Rome's rulers against the followers of Dionysus might also have been a militaristic appeal to create Rambo-like soldiers. War was becoming a profitable business venture in Rome, and Dionysus was a "make love, not war" god who encouraged soldiers to desert their posts in battle.

In 186 B.C.E., the Roman Senate banned the bacchanalia—the pleasure-centered festivals of the worshippers of Dionysus. Attitudes of the ruling elite toward women, same-sex love, and transgender are documented by Roman historian Livy's summary of a consul's argument in favor of the ban: "A great number of adherents are women, which is the origin of the whole trouble. But there are also men like women, who have joined in each other's defilement. Do you think, citizens, that young men who have taken this oath can be made soldiers?"3

Of the some seven thousand people arrested under this ban, most were from the laboring class. That was no accident. "The class nature of this oppression is evident," notes gay historian Arthur Evans, "when we realize that the ancient worship of Bacchus was most popular with the lower classes."4

For a while, transgender expression, like same-sex love, was permissible for the wealthy Roman leisure class because it wasn't seen as a threat to the patricians. But when factional battles broke out among the rulers themselves, transgender sometimes became a convenient political charge. The most famous example is Elagabalus, emperor of Rome in 218 C.E., who often appeared in women's clothing and makeup, and publicly declared one of his male lovers to be his husband. The ruling class faction who opposed him ordered the Praetorian Guard to assassinate Elagabalus in 222 C.E. His mutilated body was dragged through the streets of Rome, and thrown into the Tiber River.5

In 342 C.E., Emperor Constantine elevated Christianity to the status of a state religion. The fusion of religion with state power set the stage for strengthening antitrans laws during slavery, as well as sweeping feudal witch hunts that later targeted trans people.

The laws continued to tighten like a noose. Less than four decades after Constantine's act, on August 6, 390 C.E., the rulers Valentinian, Arcadius, and Theodosius addressed an edict to the vicar of the city of Rome:

We cannot tolerate the city of Rome, mother of all virtues, being stained any longer by the contamination of male effeminacy…Your laudable experience will therefore punish among revenging flames, in the presence of the people, as required by the grossness of the crime, all those who have given themselves up to the infamy of condemning the manly body, transformed into a feminine one, to bear practices reserved for the other sex, which have nothing different from women, carried forth—we are ashamed to say—from male brothels, so that all may know that the house of the manly soul must be sacrosanct to all, and that he who basely abandons his own sex cannot aspire to that of another without undergoing the supreme punishment [death by fire]. 6

But shortly after the law passed, at least one dramatic act of resistance to this murderous anti-trans legislation was recorded. The head of the militia in Thessalonica in northern Greece, a Goth named Butheric, arrested a famous circus performerwho was well-known for his femininity. But the performer was loved by the masses. When news spread of his arrest, the people rose up in rebellion and killed Butheric. The outraged Gothic authorities reportedly rounded up the nearby population and butchered three thousand people as collective punishment.7

The very fact that these rulers were still trying to ban any form of trans expression demonstrates deep beliefs still persisted from communalism. But the repressive laws aimed at further oppressing trans people, gay and lesbian love, and women formed part of the Corpus juris civilis—the Roman body of law that was later used as the foundation for religious and secular law in Europe, England, and the United States.8

However, in its decline, the hierarchy of the Roman empire was too weak to wage an all-out war against transgender and same-sex love. Slavery contained the kernel of its own destruction—people who were chained, starved, and beaten didn't work at peak efficiency, and the economic system required constant warfare to replenish slaves. These huge military expenditures bankrupted Rome. That's why the Roman Empire and its slave-based system of production disintegrated—not because of moral degeneration.

I wondered why the Roman edicts and terror hadn't been enough to reshape all trans people into the strictly defined categories of what was legallv appropriatebehavior and dress for women and men. Then I realized that I am part of a vast movement of people who have been shamed and threatened and beaten and arrested because of the way we define our sex or express our gender. And many of us have emerged stronger and prouder.

Part 3

"Holy War" against Trans People

Although I may have daydreamed my way through the Middle Ages, I do remember leaving high school with a certain feeling about feudalism. I had the impression that it was an epoch in which the Catholic Church rounded up Jews, Muslims, women of all sexualities, gay men, herbalists, scientists—anyone they could get their hands on—for torture and execution, and the serfs did nothing but subserviently till the land.

As a Jewish, transgendered lesbian, I wasn't wild about returning to study this period of Western European history, but I really wanted to understand more about the cryptic charge that Joan of Arc's cross-gendered expression was "following the custom of the Gentiles and the Heathen." I'm glad I did take another look at this period, however, because I realized why transgender was such a threat to both the Church and the feudal ruling class as a whole.

The feudal landlords waged war against communalism from the mid-eighth century well into the twelfth century. Feudal warlords and their powerful armies tried to privatize communally-held land. But both communal and enslaved peasants fiercely resisted feudal bondage. Peasant rebellions erupted throughout these centuries.

The Catholic Church, a powerful ally of the ruling class, played a pivotal role in suppressing this resistance. The Church was the one powerful institution that could bring all of Western Europe under one political system, because it provided the learning, organization, and structural framework. As a result, the Church became the defining institution of feudal life.

But the interests of the Church were decidedly economic, since it claimed ownership of one-third of the soil of the Catholic world—by far the biggest landowner. 1 And forcing peasants to bow to the belief that private ownership of the land and gross inequality was divinely inspired very much served the interests of the entire feudal ruling class.

But turning free peasants into enslaved serfs necessitated breaking communal bonds and beliefs. That's why, I believe, ritual and festival trans expression were targeted.

The association of transgender with communal religious worship and beliefs so enraged the Christian hierarchy that in 691 C.E. the Council of Constantinople decreed: "We forbid dances and initiation rites of the 'gods,' as they are falsely called among the Greeks, since, whether by men or women, they are done according to an ancient custom contrary to the Christian way of life, and we decree that no man shall put on a woman's dress nor a woman, clothes that belong to men."2

The Church tried to demonize transgender by linking it with witchcraft, and by banning and suppressing it from all peasant rituals and celebrations. As early as the sixth century C.E., the Christian writer Caesarius of Aries (now in southern France) denounced the pagan practices of ritual transgender. Sixthand seventh-century synods repeatedly condemned cross-dressing during the popular New Year's holiday. In the ninth century, a Christian guidebook dictated penance for men who practiced ritual cross-dressing and cross-gender behavior. And a thirteenth-century Inquisitor in southern France denounced trans religious expression. 3

In about 1250, a group of males dressed as women danced their way into thehouse of a wealthy landowner, singing: "We take one and give back a hundred. " That verse referred to a popular belief that the "good people"—bonae in Latin—exercised the power to bestow prosperity upon any house in which they were given gifts. According to one account:

The suspicious wife of the farmer did not accept the claim of the female impersonators to be bonae and tried to end their revel, but in spite of her protestations they carried out all the goods from her house. Perhaps for this as well as similar reasons bishops were requested to look out for throngs of demons transformed into women, which seems like a prohibition against male cross-dressing.

Yet while the early Church fathers denounced all cross-gender behavior, they demonstrated their hypocrisy by canonizing some twenty to twenty-five female saints who cross-dressed, lived as men, or wore full beards. According to medieval legends, these cross-dressed female-to-male saints lived and worshipped as men for their entire adult lives. Their birth sex was only discovered after their deaths. These saints included Pelagia, Margarita, Marinus (Marina), Athanasia (Alexandria). Eugenia, Appollinaria, Euphrosyne, Matrona, Theodora, Anastasia, Papula, and Joseph (Hildegund). In addition, the Church canonized women with full beards: Galla, Paula, and Wilgefortis (Uncumber).5 The legendary Pope Joan, who was chronicled during the thirteenth century, allegedly ruled as John Anglic. His statue stood with those of other popes in the Cathedral of Siena in the fourteenth century, but by the sixteenth century, historians considered the account of his reign to be merely legend.6

Had the Church fathers forgotten the edicts of Deuteronomy? That's hard to believe, since they continued to invoke the injunctions throughout the Middle Ages,I believe that since a fusion of matrilineal beliefs with patriarchal culture was prevalent during the early development of class society, these cross-gendered saints could be attributed to the persistence of ancient worship and beliefs about transgender.

More than a century ago, German scholar Herman Usener argued that the similarity of the legends about female-to-male saints represented survival of the beliefs surrounding the goddess Aphrodite of Cyprus. Usener noted that Aphrodite was also named Pelagia and Marina—the same names as two of the cross-dressed Catholic saints. Aphrodite's female followers reportedly dressed in men's garb to sacrifice to her, and male-to-female transsexual priestesses served this goddess. 7

Historians Vern and Bonnie Bullough, who have made enormous contributions to the study of cross-dressing during feudal times, attribute the Church's acceptance of female-to-male saints to the fact that they were admired for aspiring to the higher social status of men. It's true that men were considered superior, but female-to-male expression was specifically censured, even for the pious. Saint Jerome denounced it in the fourth century, and a canon of the Synod of Ver in the ninth century demonstrates that the Church had encountered and condemned transgendered females centuries before Joan of Arc was born.

The canon stated, "If women who choose chastity in the cause of religion either take on the clothes of a man or cut their hair, in order to appear false to others, we resolve that they should be admonished and criticized, because we consider that they err through a great ignorance rather than zeal." 8 The charges of cross-dressing lodged against Joan of Arc certainly were political—as were all the accusations she faced. But she didn't just challenge .^K, men on their own playing Held. Nor was she merely a pawn in the bloody war between England and France. Joan of Arc was also a prisoner of the class war waged by the French feudal nobility against their own peasantry. Of course she made the French rulers tremble; this transgendered female saint led a peasant army.

As I argued earlier, I believe the French nobility and the Church feared both Joan of Arc's assertion that her transgender expression was a religious duty, and the fact that her transgender washeld in such reverence by the peasants, because both recalled beliefs in an ancientrival religion from a competing economic system. Scapegoating Joan of Arc and the "radical" region of her birth fed the counter-revolutionary terror against the communal farmers and the peasantry as a whole.

I think the Church fathers may have canonized a constellation of female-to-male trans saints because they were forced to compete with the old religion still popularly embraced by the peasants. The Church hierarchy must have had a tough time trying to convert peasants from their joyous, pro-sexual, cross-gendered religious rites to the gloom and doom of medieval Catholicism. I believe the clerics tried to coopt popular images of transgender, but with a twist—these female-to-male saints were remarkably pious. Trans images that drew the devotion of peasants to the religion ofthe owning class would have been valuable in recruitment.

Several of these saints paid dearly for their renunciation of their birth sex, and all of them had to keep their change of sex secret. In cooperative societies, transgender, transsexual, and intersexual people lived openly, with honor. But in a class-divided society like medieval Western Europe, the Church's legends of the female-to-male saints introduced the concept of "passing"—being forced to hide a trans identity.

There are no known Christian male-to-female saints. Throughout the Middle Ages, this expression was only officially permitted during carnivals and festivals, when the laws of the land were temporarily lifted. Otherwise, male-to-female trans-gender and cross-dressing were stigmatized by the Church as witchcraft.9

Yet cross-gendered expression, whether male or female, was part of virtually all peasant festivals—including Halloween, a holiday with roots in Celtic, matrilineal society. After Celtic society transformed from matrilineal to patriarchal, the ruling classes bowed to patriarchal gods, while the laboring class maintained its beliefs in the ancient nature-based goddess religion. 10 The Celt feast days included Samhain, a festival celebrated on November 1, that Christians later called All Hallow's Eve—Halloween. The Celt Winter Solstice persisted under Christianity as the Feast ofFools. Transgender played a prominent role in both holidays. Maybe this had something to do with why I was exempt from arrest for cross-dressing on Halloween!

While the Church denounced male-to-female trans expression as witchcraft. they co-opted it for their theatrical productions. Trans theatrical performance in manyparts of the world was rooted in communal rituals in which trans expression was considered sacred. For example, trans actors are famous in Japanese Noh drama, which stems from dengaku, a folk dance performed during rice planting and harvesting, and Chinese opera derives from the songs and dances of ancient religious festivities. In early Greek Athenian drama, male actors played the female roles; these dramas were originally performed during the festivals honoring Dionysus, a time when women and men engaged in cross-gendered worship. 11

In Western Europe, theater had become such a popular ideological vehicle throughout the periods of slavery and early feudalism that by the tenth century the Catholic Church appropriated the transgender it had not been able to uproot from peasant festivals and rituals into its own dramatic rituals. In Church pageants and liturgical dramas, male actors were allowed to flaunt Deuteronomy by wearing women's clothing. 12 While priests denounced male femininity and cross-dressing, they didn't mind exploiting for their own interests the popularity of transgender in Church dramas.

And what about the flamboyant style of the Church fathers themselves? To this day, priests dress in floor-length gowns, bright colors, jeweled rings, and other adornments that many men wouldn't be caught dead in. In fact, sending a boy into the priesthood used to be referred to as putting a boy "into skirts." 13 Did this trans fashion in the Church evolve from the transsexual priestesses of the goddess religions?

The Church fathers may have hoped to co-opt the transgender expression that the peasants still revered, but it became the undoing of liturgical drama. "Indeed, festive and anarchic components steadily infiltrated liturgical drama," concluded historian Peter Ackroyd, "taking their final shape when Latin was replaced by vernacular in the thirteenth century. Just as the Church authorities were mocked by cross-dressers during the Feast of Fools, so the comic uses of transvestism slowly despiritualized religious drama."14

Although the Church encouraged peasants to kneel before bearded or female-to-male saints and enjoy transgender in liturgical drama, it opposed any trans customs that were connected to pre-class matrilineal beliefs. By the late fifteenth century, the Catholic Church fathers were slowly banishing the Feast of Fools from cathedrals. 15 Transgender was one of many targets of the landowner's war, waged under a religious banner.

The "Holy" Inquisition, begun in 1233, and the witch trials were weapons of terror and mass murder that took a staggering toll in human life from Ireland to Poland. Twenty years after Joan of Arc's execution, in 1451 the Inquisition was officially authorized to battle witchcraft as a major crime. Many peasant women, accused of being witches, were tortured and killed. These included women who followed the older rural-based religions, lived independently, held small amounts of land, or passed down folk medicinal knowledge, such as midwives who shared their knowledge of methods of birth control and abortion. Significantly, witches were accused of having the power to change sex. 16

Because of the feudal landlords' economic interest in strengthening patriarchal inheritance and rule, they increasingly partitioned the sexes in the name of god. This drive to differentiate man from woman fueled a frenzied campaign against intersexuality. In the fifteenth century, for example, the Church put a rooster on trial at Basel. The cock was charged with having laid an egg. The rooster's lawyer argued that the act was involuntary, and that animals were not capable of making pacts with the devil. The court found the cock innocent, but attributed the act of laying the egg to a sorcerer masquerading as a cock. As a result, the rooster and the egg in question were burned at the stake. 17

Although the Church engaged in rivalries with landowners and monarchs, it knew where its overall class interests lay. Trans people, women charged with lesbianism, gay men, Muslims, Jews, herbalists, healers—anyone who challenged feudal rule was considered a threat and faced extermination. Even scientists were targeted because their research negated religious dogma. The Inquisitors came armed with the Bible, as well as with swords and instruments of torture to put down peasant uprisings. But all the might of the feudal landowners didn't crush the resistance of the peasants once and for all—they continually rose up against the rule of powerful landlords and their feudal theology.

Frequently the feudal period is explained simply from the point of view of the growth of the Church, but as I have shown, religion itself became a propaganda weapon of the ruling rich. For example, under feudalism, which was based on private ownership of the land, the Lord's Prayer urged, "Forgive us our trespasses." Trespassing was a crime that could only have arisen in a society where individuals claimed vast expanses of soil as their own. But as a money-based capitalist system overthrew feudalism, the prayer changed to, "Forgive us our debts."

As agricultural feudalism grew more efficient, requiring fewer serfs, peasants struck off to the cities, dreaming of making their fortunes there. Some cities were administrative centers, most were commercial, grown up from market towns. An economy based on money, not land, was beginning to emerge. By the fifteenth century, towns in Western Europe were more vital to society than the feudal kingdoms. In the cities and the rural areas, the ranks of propertyless workers who were dependent on daily wages swelled. Hardly better off were the many small farmers who tilled their plots of land as leaseholders, renters, and sharecroppers.

Yet whether the spark was the privatization of commonly-held forests or urban bread shortages, impoverished farmers and laborers rose up in righteous rebellions.

One night, as I stayed up late reading a popularly written book about "drag" history, I was startled to read a paragraph about an uprising of farmers in which the leaders cross-dressed. To my great frustration, there was no source cited for this information. However, that brief paragraph proved to be all I needed.

Leading the Charge

At dusk on May 13, 1839, a call of horns, drums, and gunfire could be heard across the western Welsh countryside. The turnpike gatekeeper, accustomed to insults from farmers who had to pay tolls to use the roads, may have thought little of the sounds. But if the gatekeeper assumed it was simply revelers, he was wrong. Armed male peasants, dressed as women, thundered up on horseback, waving pitchforks, axes, scythes, and guns. As they stormed the gate their leader roared: "Hurrah for free laws! Toll gates free to coal pits and lime kilns!" These demands were punctuated by a cacophony of music, shouts, and shotgun blasts. The rebel troops smashed the toll barriers and rode away victorious.

They called themselves "Rebecca and her daughters."1

During the next four years many Rebeccas, leading thousands of their crossdressed daughters from diverse parts of Wales, led local constables and British troops on a merry chase as they destroyed the turnpike toll barriers that were bleeding the poor even poorer. Farmers frequently could not afford to travel to get supplies or sell at the markets because the labyrinth of roads was privately owned by individuals who charged steep tolls at every interval. "Rebecca and her daughters" received widespread popular support, which reflected the "growing solidarity, resolve, and openness of the disaffected population."2

Imagine turning on the news channel and seeing male-to-female cross-dressers leading an angry demonstration against the Ku Klux Klan. Or watching a movie in which powerful and dignified striking male workers wore dresses and wigs and called each other sister. That was not the image of cross-dressers I grew up seeing portrayed in popular culture. At best, transgender has been treated as comedic. At worst, this form of self-expression has been characterized as anti-social behavior.

That's why I think it's so important for everyone, particularly trans people, to know that cross-gendered warriors led important battles that helped shape history. I say cross-gendered because these activists didn'tjust cross-dress, they also adopted the names, identities, and familial relationships of another sex. The male-to-female leaders went to the trouble to curl the coifed horsehair wigs on their heads. That's cross-gendered behavior.

And many of these leaders didn'tjust cross-dress in their lifetime in order to leada rebellion, but rather they were part of ongoing trans groups that organized festivals, which mocked authorities and sometimes erupted into uprisings. "In fact, thedonning of female clothes by men and the adopting of female titles for riots weresurprisingly frequent, in the early modern period," wrote historian Natalie ZemonDavis, who made a ground-breaking study of these rebellions. 3

Throughout Europe in the later Middle Ages into the sixteenth century, maskingand cross-dressing as another sex were still an integral part of urban carnivals withancient roots. 4 These festivals were organized by male societies—begun in ruraltimes as organizations ofyoung, single men. In France and northern Italy, thev werecalled the Abbeys of Misrule; in England and Scotland, the Lords of Misrule and theAbbots of Unreason. In French cities, the male leaders of these groups took titlesusing words like Princess, Dame, and especially Mother: Mere Folle and her Chil-dren in Dijon, Langres, and Chalon-sur-Saone, Mere Sotte and her Children inParis and Compiegne, and Mere d'Enfance in Bordeaux.5

The Abbeys acted as courts, with mock jurisdiction over marriages. The courtspunished transgressions among their own members, elders, and neighbors. The Abbots issued coins, which were tossed to spectators lining the festival routes. Between carnival days, these organizations defended popular concepts of morality through noisy masked demonstrations known as charivaris, scampanate, katzenmusik, and cencerrada. In Wales this tradition was known as the ceffylpren. 6

Trans leaders were in the front ranks when the licensed days of festival "misrule" exploded into real rebellion. City fathers in Rouen in 1541 ordered their sergeants to pull an Abbot right off a festival float because the pointed anti-clerical political satire attacked them too sharply. At Dijon in 1576, Mere Folle and her children humiliated the King's Grand Master of Streams and Forests in Burgundy—both for beating his wife and for destroying for his own profits the forests he was supposed to protect. In Lyon in the 1580s, the Lord of Misprint and his followers took advantage of festival license to protest war, the high cost of bread, and empty market stalls. In 1630, Mere Folle and her Infanterie led an uprising against royal tax officers in Dijon. As a result, a furious royal edict abolished the Abbey. 7

For the most part, historians report male-to-female trans leadership in these urban uprisings and earlier rural rebellions. But does that mean there were no cross-gendered female leaders? As a social science, history, like anthropology, is subject to all the prejudices of the society in which it is based, so historians' sexism may well have skewed their observations, resulting in under-documenting the role of female-to-male leadership.

Some historical accounts, however, do note rebellions led by cross-dressed women described as masculine. One account from England mentions an unruly crowd of cross-dressed women and men in 1 53 1 . Another report from England in 1 629 noted: "'Captain' Alice Clark, a real female, headed a crowd of women and male weavers dressed as women in a grain riot near Maldon in Essex." In still another instance, "The tax revolt at Montpellier in 1 645 was started by women and led down the streets by a virago [masculine woman] named La Branlaire, who shouted for death for the tax collectors that were taking the bread from their children's mouths."8

And whether or not masculine women were in the lead, women took to the streets. "Women turn up rebukingpriests and pastors, being central actors in grain and breadriots in town and country, and participating in tax revolts and other rural disturbances." Davis notes that "In England in the early seventeenth century ... a significant per-centage of the rioters against enclosures and for commonrights were female, while David Jones has found them animportant element in enclosure riots in Wales into thenineteenth century."9

As demonstrated by the "Rebeccas," cross-genderedleadership of uprisings was notjust an urban tradition. In1631 , bands of rebels in the dairy and grazing areas of Wiltshire, England, rioted against the king's enclosure of theirforests, led by cross-dressed males who referred to themselves as Lady Skimmington. In 1829, the War of theDemoiselles in the Pyrenees erupted after passage of aharsh new forest code. The peasants dressed in long whiteshirt-dresses and wore women's hats, as they fought to defend their rights to wood and pasturage in the forests. 10

Many historians dismiss the female attire the malepeasants wore as simply a convenient disguise. It's frustrating to me that historical examples of cross-dressing are socasually dismissed. When women military leaders like Joanof Arc cross-dressed, some historians claim men's clotheswere most suited for warfare. Then why would male peas-ants choose women's clothes for battle? And since w hen is a dress an effective disguise? Cross-dressing is a pattern in rebellions in far-flung countries. And most importantly,this tradition appears to have ancient roots.

For instance, references to fairies crop up in a numberof accounts of peasant rebellions continents apart. TheCatholic Church had waged systematic war against beliefin fairies, which it linked to paganism—a holdover frommatrilineal communal beliefs. And rememberJoan ofArchad been accused by her Church judges of consorting withfairies.

Belief in fairies continued to be linked to strugglesagainst large landowners. In England, for example, the"servants of the Queen of the Fairies" led Cade s Rebellionin 1450-51 in Kent and Essex. These peasants broke intothe Duke of Buckingham's land and took his bucks anddoes. 11 Of the White Boys of Ireland, know n by their femi-nine white overshirts, a 1762 Tipperarv informant wrote"...above 500 men frequently assemble with shirts over their clothes doing whatever mischief they please by night, under the sanction of being fairies, as they call themselves The fairies are composed of all the able young fellows from Clonmel to Mitchelstown." These resisters announced that their goal was "to dojustice to the poor if any farmer dismissed a servant or a shepherd no one dared to take his place unless 'he had more interest with the fairies."' 12 In Beaujolais in the 1770s, French male peasants dressed as women attacked surveyors assessing their lands for a new landlord. "In the morning, when the police agents came, their wives knew nothing, and said they were 'fairies' who came from the mountains from time to time."13

The economic interests of the eighteenth-century British ruling classes were challenged at home and abroad by urban and rural workers, many of whom were cross-dressed. In England: "To cite but four examples, toll gates were demolished by bands of armed men dressed in women's clothing and wigs in Somerset in 1731 and 1749, in Gloucester in 1728 and in Herefordshire in 1735."14

Just as the European ruling class faced fierce resistance when it tried to impose cultural and physical genocide on Native nations of the Americas, the British elite ran into intense insurgency when it tried to impose its cultural values and colonial aims on its "empire." In 1736 in Edinburgh, Scotland, "the Porteous Riots, which were sparked by a hated English officer and oppressive custom laws and expressed resistance to the union of Scotland with England, were carried out by men disguised as women and with a leader known as Madge Wildfire."15

Some of the most extensive examples of trans leadership are documented in the rural and anti-colonial struggles in Ireland. From 1760 to 1770, the White Boys created peasant troops in Ireland for "restoring the ancient commons and redressing other grievances" and they "leveled great numbers of enclosures, sent many threatening letters, rescued property which had been seized by landlords for non-payment of rent, compelled cloth weavers to lower the price of their goods" and forced masters to release unwilling apprentices. 16 Although ultimately the White Boy movement was suppressed by sheer force of arms, their legacy inspired the rise of the nineteenth-century Molly Maguires and Ribbon Societies. 17

Still other guerrilla bands formed in Ireland. "By the 1820s the 'Lady Rocks' were frequent; their robing was complete with bonnet and veil. In the early 1 830s a whole new society calling themselves the 'Lady Clares' was to mushroom in Clare and adjoining counties; in this case the 'official' costume was women's clothing."18 The Ribbonmen and the Molly Maguires were part of this militant peasant tradition. The Molly Maguires, who dispensed popularjustice around 1843 in Ireland, "were generally stout active young men, dressed up in women's clothes," according to historian Trench. 19

I was excited to find these detailed accounts of nineteenth-century guerilla warfare by cross-dressed farmers and agricultural workers in Ireland and Wales. Once I feared examining history, terrified that I might find that trans people have always been hated. Instead I've discovered that bigotry is a relatively recent historical development that had to be forced on human beings for several thousand years before it took hold. Buried in the history of the Middle Ages and right up to the dawn of the industrial revolution, the ancient respect for transgender had not been rooted out, even after centuries of illegality and violent punishment under slavery and feudalism.

And despite numerous local and royal edicts banning masking and mumming,festival days continued to be marked by women dressing and masking as men, andmen as women. Trans expression emerged in culture throughout Europe in holidaycelebrations, rituals, carnival days, masquerade parties, theater, literature, andopera. That's why cross-dressing is still part of holiday festivals today in the UnitedStates, like the Mummer's parades, Mardi Gras, and Halloween.

Halloween! Finally I'd found the answer to why I did not face arrest for "cross-dressing" that one day of the year. I could never have guessed as a young butch in the barsthat I was safe from police arrest on October 31 because peasants held onto a transgender tradition throughout centuries of repression. It seemed incredible to me thatcenturies of draconian laws and sheer terror couldn't suppress these trans customs.

Yet although trans expression continued to exist among all classes in society, what a difference social privilege made! For the ruling elite, transgender expressioncould still be out in the open with far less threat of punishment than a peasant couldexpect. For example, when Queen Christina of Sweden abdicated in 1654, shedonned men's clothes and renamed herself "Count Dohna."20 Henry III of Francewas reported to have dressed as an Amazon and encouraged his courtiers to do likewise.21 But for the most oppressed, trans expression was not only a part of their beliefsystems and their festivals, it was incorporated into their battles against the rulingclasses.

And this tradition continued right up to the start of the industrial era. In the earlvnineteenth century, cross-dressed workers led some early labor struggles against thegrowth of capitalism. Even after many peasants were driven from the countrysideinto urban production, a number of accounts show that the tradition of transgenderleadership of militant rebellion persisted. The peasants packed their traditions, along with their few belongings, and brought them to the cities. In the earlv 1830s.for example, striking miners in southern Wales terrified scabs who were stealingtheirjobs by paying midnight visits dressed in cattle skins or women's clothes.22

A significant chapter from labor history is the early Luddite Rebellions in whichweavers, angered at how their bosses exploited them, smashed the looms they operated. One revolt occurred in Stockton, England, in 1812, where "General Ludd'swives"—two male workers dressed as women—led an angry crowd of hundreds todestroy the looms and burn down the factory. An account of the rebellion states:

[O]n Sunday, April 14, crowds milled about the town, broke windows,and threatened vengeance on the owners of the steam looms. Led bytwo men disguised as women, who were hailed by their Followers as 'General Ludd's wives,' they stoned the house ofJoseph Goodair, anowner of steam looms, at Edgeley and later returned with reinforce-ments to fire his house and cut up the work in the looms beforedestroying the looms themselves. When, four days Later, rioting wasstopped by the military at Stockport, it broke out at Oldham.23

For laborers, the rise of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, signalled greateranonymity and its flip-side, alienation. When the capitalists were the underdog, fighting feudalism and all its ideological baggage, they prided themselves on their enlightened and scientific view of the world and society. But once in power, they became afraid of the very laborers they had called into the streets to overthrow feudalism. So the capitalists increasingly made use of many of the old prejudices, particularly those that suited their own divide-and-rule policies.

I don't imagine that the peasants and workers who cross-dressed for battle thought about themselves in the same way as modern-day drag queens or transsexuals or heterosexual crossdressers do. I grew up as a factory worker, so I can't compare my consciousness to that of a serf under feudalism, either.

But "Rebecca" was, and I am, part of huge, exploited laboring classes. This is an important connection between a cross-dressed peasant and me. Transgender has been outlawed by the ruling classes of both our systems—feudal nobility and modern industrialists alike. The Stonewall Rebellion in Greenwich Village led by Black and Latina drag queens and the insurgency of Rebecca and her daughters in Wales are both uprisings against oppression, led by cross-dressed individuals.

These examples of transgendered leadership have great meaning for me. I grew up unable to find myself anywhere in history. Now I have examples of transgender in the leadership of social change. Here were peasants who cheered their cross-gendered leaders. Here were moments in history when transgender was a call to arms, when cross-dressed people fought forjustice in the front ranks.

This is part of our history as trans people. And every single child today—no matter how their sex or gender is developing—needs to know about these militant battles and the names of those who led them: Joan of Arc, Rebecca, Mere Folle, Captain Alice Clark, Madge Wildfire, Molly Maguire, General Ludd's wives.

If I had known about these heroic struggles, I might have imagined as a child that cross-dressed workers could lead their trade union sisters and brothers on picket lines or that trans housing activists could inspire tenants to keep the rent strike strong. I might have pictured myself in those ranks!

Not Just Passing

Some of the males who regularly cross-dressed during festivals, and were part of transgender festival organizations, may have been much like heterosexual bigendered males today who can only cross-dress in the safety of their own homes, support groups, or during certain holidays. But how did people who were transgendered survive?

I'm not the first person to live as another sex. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were many accounts of people criminally charged with living as another sex. Passing from female-to-male was so widespread throughout Europe during those centuries, particularly in Holland, England, and Germany, that it was the theme of novels, fictionalized biographies and memoirs, plays, operas, and popular songs.

But those who passed became gender outlaws. Courtroom and police records cite punishments carried out against transgendered people—from flogging to death. As a result, we'll never know the depth and breadth of the passing population, because it was an underground phenomenon.

Most accounts passed down to us today are of those who were caught and exposed. The reasons that these individuals offered for their life decisions were made under duress in front of police and magistrates. I can glean little from their words, except how frightened they must have been. Today, although the authentic stories of their lives have been lost to us, many people speculate about those individuals, and why they chose to pass. My life is subject to the same conjecture.

"No wonder you've passed as a man! This is such an anti-woman society," a lesbian friend told me. To her, females passing as males are simply trying to escape women's oppression—period. She believes that once true equality is achieved in society, humankind will be genderless. I don't have a crystal ball, so I can't predict human behavior in a distant future. But I know what she's thinking—if we can build a more just society, people like me will cease to exist. She assumes that I am simply a product of oppression. Gee, thanks so much.

I'ye heard this same argument applied to the life and death of jazz musician Billy Tipton, who in 1989 painfully bled to death from an ulcer rather than go to a doctor. The coroner lost no time in announcing to the world that Billy Tipton had been born female. Since Billy Tipton left no personal records, all we really know is that he lived his life as a man. That was his almost lifelong identity, and it should be respected.

But a great debate has raged about why Tipton chose to live as a man. One group argued that he and others passed solely because of women's oppression—specifically economic inequality—at a time when women couldn't easily become successful jazz musicians in this country. Another group argues that Billy Tipton passed in order to escape lesbian oppression. Do either of these arguments fully explain the lives of thousands of females who have lived as men?

First, let's talk about who can pass as another sex. My same friend reminds me periodically that she too might have passed as a man a century ago to escape women's oppression. She stares right past my gender expression as she speaks. I study her as she's talking: she is about 5'3", has narrow shoulders and broad hips, tiny hands and feet, and delicate features, and her gender expression is definitely not masculine. How could she pass?

I don't want to burst her bubble. Everyone deserves untrammeled dreams. But I want to tell her that perhaps I could believe that, in the dead of winter, if she was bundled up against the cold, with a hood or hat covering her head, some man in a deli might call her "sir." But could she pass as male on board ship, sleeping with and sharing common facilities with her fellow sailors for decades and not be discovered?

Of course, hundreds of thousands of women have dreamed of escaping the economic and social inequities of their lives, but how many could live as a man for a decade or a lifetime? While a woman could throw on men's clothing and pass as a man for safety on dark roadways, could she pass as a man at an inn where men slept together in the same beds? Could she maintain her identity in daylight? Pass the scrutiny of co-workers? Would she really feel safer and more free?

How could females have lived and been accepted as men without hormones or surgery? They must have been masculine; they must have been transgendered. If they were not, how could they pass? We don't know how each of the thousands who passed from female to male over the centuries would define themselves today—whether as transgender or transsexual or drag or any other modern definition. The point is that their gender expression allowed them to transition.

I just don't believe that the debate about why "women pass as men" can be understood only in the light of women's, or of lesbian and gay, oppression. It has to be viewed in the context of trans history in order to make sense.

I'm no stranger to women's oppression. I know that it operates like destructive machinery that grinds up even those who are born female but grow up identifying as another sex. But if passing from female to male is just an attempt to escape economic inequality, then why do we find transgendered individuals—both female-to-male and male-to-female—among the ruling elite and the privileged leisure classes? What about King Ashurbanipal of Assyria or Queen Christina of Sweden? And what about the artists' circles in Paris of transgendered authors and painters from wealthy families like John (Radcliffe) Hall and Gertrude Stein?

Look at George Sand, the nineteenth-century novelist. It's true that she could not have published without a male nom de plume at that time. But if that's all there was to her identity, why did she wear men's clothing? Why was she attacked for masculine behavior? And if it was just a question of lesbian oppression, what was she doing in bed with Chopin?

If passing from female to male is simply motivated by the need to escape lesbian oppression, then why have females who have passed as males chosen other men as lovers? Liberte (Angelique Brulon) was a decorated officer in Napoleon's infantry, and served in seven military campaigns between 1792 and 1799 that liberated much of Europe from feudalism. She fought in the same regiment as her husband had, and eventually reached the rank of sergeant-major. Because women were barred from fighting in the army, many French women later held Liberte as an anti-royalist hero they hoped would replace Joan of Arc, who had seemed to be so loyal to the French throne. 1

And many females knew when they made their life decision to live as men that they might never be able to risk the danger of revealing their secret by taking any lover. Finally, if so many females have passed as men only to escape women's oppression, then why have so many males passed as women? While it is biologically easier for a female to pass as a young boy than for a male to pass as a woman, there are many, many examples in the modern era of those who passed from male to female.

Mile. Jenny Savalette de Lange, for example, was only discovered to have been born male after her death in 1858. She had managed to get hold of a birth certificate that designated her female, was reportedly engaged to men six times, and had been given a pension and a free apartment by the king of France. Newspaper and magazine accounts include many other cases of women who were discovered to have been born male, including a woman who had been married for more than six years before she was exposed in 1937, Josephine Montgomery who was in a San Quentin women's prison in 1950 when authorities made the discovery, and Mrs. Adele Best who had lived as a woman for fifty-four years and had been married to men three times. 2

At the close of the seventeenth century, the punishment for cross-dressing in England was to be dragged in an open cart through streets filled with a hostile mob to be publicly hanged.3 Yet even in the face of such terrifying penalties, transgender males, known then as "mollies," continued to gather in underground societies. Between 1707 and 1730, when Societies for the Reformation of Manners launched attacks against "effeminate sodomites among the London poor," more than twenty "molly houses" were raided in London, and a number of those patrons were hanged or pilloried as a result.4 But, in a striking parallel to the Stonewall Rebellion over three hundred years later, when a Covent Garden molly house was raided in 1725, the crowd, "many of them in drag, met the raid with determined and violent resistance."5

In the 1770s, German historian Johann Wilhelm von Archeholz described a London pub called the Bunch ofGrapes: "On entering the room the guard found two fellows in women's attire, with muffs and wide shawls and most fashionable turban-like bonnets ... it turned out that each member of the club had a woman's name...."6

Transgender gatherings were seemingly widespread throughout seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe.Drag balls were reported in seventeenth-century Lisbon. In early eighteenth-century France, there were societies ofmale cross-dressers who wore ribbons and powder and called each other by women's names. And in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic, some transgender males referred to each other by female nicknames. 7

An 1813 account of a police raid in Victorian England described the patrons of a pub: "Many of the habitues took on female appellations as well as female dress ..." Police who raided one of their meetings were reportedly so fooled bv at least one of the patrons that they didn't arrest the person.8 At a trans ball in Paris in 1864, "there were at least 150 men, and some of them so well disguised that the landlord of the house was unable to detect their sex." 9

A famous case of transgender persecution in nineteenth-century England was the arrest of male-to-female theater performers Stella (Ernest) Boulton and Fanny (Frederick) Park outside the Strand Theater on April 28,1890. They were tried on charges of "conspiracy to commit a felony." Boulton's mother testified in defense of Stella and explained that her child had dressed as a girl since age six. Stella and Fanny were both acquitted. 10

The lives of people who have transitioned from female to male can't be understood without taking into account those who have passed as male to female. In order to understand the lives of people who have passed as another sex in an)direction, it must be remembered that trans people have always existed, but were once viewed with respect as vital, contributing members of our societies.

We have not always been forced to pass, to go underground, in order to work and live. We have a right to live openly and proudly. When we are denied those rights. we are the ones who suffer that oppression. But when our lives are suppressed, everyone is denied an understanding of the rich diversity of sex and gender expression and experience that exist in human society.

I have lived as a man because I could not survive openly as a transgendered person. Yes, I am oppressed in this society, but I am not merely a product of oppression. That is a phrase that renders all our trans identities meaningless. Passing means having to hide your identity in fear, in order to live. Being forced to pass is a recent historical development.

It is passing that is a product of oppression.

Part 4

From Germany to Stonewall

When I was a teenager, during moments when I was under siege, I wondered if anyone would ever fight alongside me as if my battle were their own. What would motivate someone who didn't face the same hatred and abuse to join me as an ally.

I owe an enormous debt to Frederick Douglass—the great orator, writer, and abolitionist -for helping me answer that question. As a young adult, I was gripped by the power of Douglass's thinking and his use of language. As I read I came across this set of questions he had posed: "Why am I a slave? Why are some people slaves, and others masters? Was there ever a time when this was not so? How did the relations commence?"1

I shivered with recognition. It wasn't that the racism, brutality, and bondage this former slave had endured mirrored my own experiences. Yet his oppression made him burn with questions that sounded so similar to mine. What connects us, Douglass was explaining to me, is that we're up against a common enemy.

As I read further, I discovered that Frederick Douglass had steadfastly defended the right of women to vote. Douglass was one of thirty-one men who attended the first Women's Rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York. All the men, including Douglass, risked being labeled "Hermaphrodites" and "Aunt Nancy Men" by enemies of women's suffrage. 2

Douglass was the only man to address that convention. He declared that women's suffrage was a right, and "Our doctrine is that 'right is of no sex.'"3 Those wise words could apply to the trans communities today.

But we as trans people can't liberate ourselves alone. No oppressed peoples can. So how and why will others come to our defense? And whom shall we, as trans people, fight to defend? A few years before he died, Douglass told the International Council of Women, "When I ran away from slavery, it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights of women, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act."4

I believe this is the only nobility to which we should aspire—that is, to be the best fighters against each other's oppression, and in doing so, build links of solidarity and trust that will forge an invincible movement against all forms of injustice and inequality.

Ifyou are not transsexual, transgender, or intersexual, if you're not a cross-dresser, bigender, or drag queen or king, then per-haps you already understand that defending our right to be who we are is inextricably tied to your own right to explore and define who you are. Each individual has a stake in trans liberation.

But what relationship does trans liberation have to already existing movements for change? For example, what is the basis for the coalitions that have already been cemented between lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans people in many parts of the UnitedStates? What does trans liberation mean for the women's movement? And ultimately, what kind of larger movement will it take to win lasting social and economic justice?

As to the question of what connects lesbian, gay, bi, and trans people, I think the answer can only be found by examining the relationship between body, desire, and gender expression. Since I was a teenager I have pondered the connection between my sexuality and my gender expression. Every aspect of my spirit and style as I walk down the street, straighten my tie, or touch a child's hair is a demonstration of my individual gender expression in motion; the white-capped river of my desire for the woman I am married to is my sexuality. Since these are tightly braided aspects of my identity, I fight for my right to be whole.

However, perhaps the biggest societal misunderstanding about the trans population continues to be the assumption that all transgender or transsexual people are gay. That's not true. The majority of lesbian women, gay men, and bisexuals are not transgendered or transsexual, and the majority of trans people are not lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Nor can the sexuality of some trans people be easily categorized.

Although it's important to mark the broad boundaries of "lesbian, gay, and bi" in order to fight the oppression and build community , what happens to the borders of these categories for the trans community when the dunes of sex and gender shift?When a masculine female-to-male cross-dresser is married to a bisexual drag queen, is this a heterosexual relationship? The trans population is a reminder that not everyone who is heterosexual is straight!

Some people refer to my love relationship as lesbian, because they consider the fact that my wife and I are female to be a biological determinant of our sexuality.Others, who label me as "looking like a man," assume we live in a safe heterosexual space. Neither exactly corresponds to my life.

People stare at me wherever I go. Some who gawk at me shift between seeing me as a very feminine man and an extremely masculine woman. I unnerve them because they can't determine my sex. So are my love and I lesbian women, mother and son, lesbian woman with gay male friend, or some other combination? Our relationship is Teflon to which no classification of sexuality sticks.

But to those fueled by hatred of diversity, anyone who cross-dresses or changes their sex is "queer." As a result of the fact that masculine women and feminine men are assumed by bigots to be lesbian and gay, the oppressions have overlapped. And this has been true for many centuries.

For example, today's bible-thumpers condemn gay and lesbian love by quoting 1 Corinthians 6:9, which lumps together homosexuality with all forms of "immorality." But from the Geneva Bible (1560) to the American Standard Bible (1901), the word used was "effeminate." Even the Phillips Translation as late as 1958 still uses the word "effeminate. "The Revised Standard Bible in 1946 was the first text to revise "effeminate" to "sexual perverts," which later became "homosexual perversion" in the New English Bible in 1961.5

And brutal laws that decreed death for the crime of male femininity—like the Code of Theodosius in 390 C.E.—have been recorded by historians as anti-gay laws. But those laws were also murderously anti-trans. Theodosius the Great condemned "All of those who are accustomed to condemn their own manly body, transformed into a womanly one, to undergo sexual practices reserved for the other sex, and who have nothing different from women, will pay for this crime among the avenging flames, in front of the people."6 Feminine homosexuals were targeted under these broad gender laws, while some masculine homosexuals were considered exempt.

Even as recently as the last century, feminine cross-dressing males caught up in sweeping arrests have been assumed by prosecutors to be gay. In the nineteenth century, most European cities enforced civil statutes against public cross-dressing, and female-to-male cross-dressers were regularly arrested in Berlin and St. Petersburg. 7 While drag performance—male and female -took center stage in nineteenth-century English speaking theater, well-known drag actors who wore women's clothing in public faced arrest. Transgendered performers Boulton and Park were arrested on felony charges for just that reason, and their trial was a harbinger of the witch hunt against male femininity that later led to the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895.8

So were these trials focused on the sexuality of those arrested, or their gender expression? The two "crimes" were entwined in prosecutors' minds. Yet of fourteen drag actors studied by a German physician at the turn of the century—eight of whom wore women's clothes at home—only six were gay. 9

But there are lesbian and gay trans people—transsexual, transgender, and drag -and we have played a leadership role in the birth of two major movements for lesbian and gay liberation in the last century.

Many of us have come to think of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion as the birth of the lesbian and gay liberation movement. But in fact, the first historic wave of gay liberation, from 1869 to 1935, began in Germany. It was a dynamic and widening movement that grew to be international in scope, and left its mark on other social and political movements, as well as on literature and the arts.

In this movement, which rose on the ground swell of a struggle by German workers to win the most basic democratic rights, transgender activists were in the lead. In 1897, the first gay liberation organization was born in Germany the Scientific Humanitarian Committee. Its founder and notable leader throughout much of the organization's thirty-five years was Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld—who was gay, Jewish, socialist, and reportedly a crossdresser. 10 Hirschfeld coined the word transvestite in 1910 and wrote the germinal works on the subject. 11 One of Hirschfeld's contributions was his conclusion, based on his research, that sex and gender expression were not automatically linked, meaning that not all lesbian women and gay men are transgendered and not all transgendered people are lesbian or gay.

The Committee published a yearbook that reported on movement activities, as well as on literary, historical, anthropological, and scientific studies on same-sex love, and transgender. The stated goals of the Committee were to win the abolition of the anti-gay German law Paragraph 175, to enlighten public opinion, and to encourage sexually oppressed people to fight for their rights. In order to carry out its objectives, the Committee held regular public forums, organized speaking tours nationally and internationally, and sent literature to other governments about the need for the decriminalization of same-sex love. 12

One of the debates that took place in the context of this movement is still being hotly argued: Are we born with our sexuality already coded for life, do we develop sexuality as we mature and interact with the world, or is there an as yet undetermined connection between the two? Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the grandfather of gay liberation, and Hirschfeld were part of this debate. They believed that homosexuals were members of a third sex. For example, a gay man was thought to be a female mind in a male body. As a result, some German lesbians and gays fought against their persecution on the basis that they could not change their sexual orientation because it was inborn. Others argued that this was a weak, defensive argument, and that human rights should be fought for on the basis of justice, not pathology. 13

But there was a big difference between the internal debate over nature versus nurture within the movement, and the rise of the Nazi eugenics movement that used the argument of "birth defects" to carry out mass genocide. The German lesbian and gay movement won significant support from the working class and the socialist movements, but the rise of fascism smashed all the workers' organizations. The Nazis also crushed the German Homosexual Emancipation Movement—which was largely middle-class in character. As a result, much of the valuable history that had been gathered has been lost to us forever. Hirschfeld was forced to flee the country and, while in exile, watched a film of his Institute being burned to the ground. More than ten thousand volumes from the Institute's special library were destroyed in those flames.

The Homosexual Emancipation Movement, which had begun to spread to other countries, is an important example of one of the historic moments when lesbian, gay, and transgendered struggles have been entwined.

I was lucky enough to be part of the Second wave of lesbian and gay liberation in the 1960s and 1970s. When I came out as a young butch, I found those pre-Stonewall bars filled on weekends with other transgender outlaws. On weekdays, in the factories, butches like myself were referred to as he-shes much as our drag queen sisters were labeled she-males. Some bigots referred to me as it, which was meant to strip me of my humanity. The hyphenated pronouns illuminated a limitation of pronouns in the English language. "She" and "he" are customarily used describe both the birth sex and the gender expression of an individual. But he-she and "she-male" describe the person's gender expression with the first pronoun and the birth sex with the second. The hyphenation signals a crisis of language and an apparent social contradiction, since sex and gender expression are "supposed" to match. That was our crime: our gender expression didn't match the one we were socially assigned at birth. That's what made us gender outlaws.

Some people used to say we "looked gay," but unless we were holding hands with our lovers or walking out of a gay bar, it was not our sexual desire that made us visible -it was our gender expression. As drag kings and drag queens, we were the visible tip of a huge iceberg. We were gay gender-benders. (Language is an imprecise tool. You can only be considered gender-bent in a society that is gender-rigid.) Since no one had ever seen the diversity of the lesbian, gay, and bi populations, most people assumed that being gay meant being transgendered. We thought so, too.

Our daily life was so hard for us that we couldn't help but struggle. That's why we were on the front lines of battles that helped birth the early gay liberation movement. And that's why it was no accident that gender outlaws led the Stonewall Rebellion. That historic uprising against police violence began shortly after 1 a.m. on June 28, 1969, when the cops raided the Stonewall, a gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village.

The patrons of the bar, particularly the African-American and Latina drag queens, kings, and transsexuals, were expected to endure humiliation, slurs, and brutality in silence. But on that muggy summer night, gay trans anger exploded. The patrons of the bar, and the crowd that gathered, fought back against the police so valiantly that the cops were forced to retreat. The uprising continued for four nights running, and has come to be known as the Stonewall Rebellion.

In the years that followed, lesbian and gay liberation was born. As thousands of lesbians and gay men took to the streets in cities all over the country, our diversity was visible—race, nationality, class, abilities, region, and many other differences. The spectrum of gender expression within this huge population also became apparent. The erroneous belief that being lesbian or gay meant you were automatically transgendered was visibly challenged.

Today, a quarter century after the Stonewall Rebellion rocked the world, a new rising movement is demanding trans liberation. The coalescing of this young movement, organizing and fighting back against sex and gender oppression, is enabling the world to see the diversity in trans communities. We are now able to challenge the assumption that transgender is an expression of sexuality, because for the first time in history the wide range of sexuality in the trans community is clear: we are heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian, gay, and asexual.

So I view the trans population as a broad circle and the lesbian, gay, and bisexual communities as another large circle. These two circles partially overlap. I am one of the people who has a foot in each of these communities, and, like a person with a foot in one of each of two rowboats, I have a deep personal hope that they don't move in opposite directions.

I hope those of us who do overlap can serve as bridges, because I think our communities are natural allies and all our strengths are magnified by solidarity. However, there are obstacles placed in our path to keep us from uniting.

The lesbian, gay, and bi communities in the United States have been subject to a steady stream of gender-baiting attacks. For instance, during the campaign in NewYork City for a lesbian and gay civil rights law (this was before bi inclusion). our movement was baited by newspaper editorials which asked: "What do these people want, men in high heels to be firefighters?" The only correct answer is: "Any cross-dresser would know to wear sensible shoes on a job like that! This is gender-phobia and job discrimination as well. We won't stand for it!" That's how to defeat gender-baiting.

A timid denial that "We're not all like that" only serves to weaken the entire fightback movement. We can never throw enough people overboard to win approval from our enemies. Should we try to argue that we're as "normal" as those who organize against our civil rights? Forget it! I am queer and proud of it.

As a longtime butch lesbian activist, I urge my lesbian, gay, and bi sisters and brothers to take the initiative to form a lasting coalition to struggle against trans oppression. And as a transgendered fighter, I call on transsexuals, transgender, bigender, and intersexual activists to fight the oppression faced by lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals. Like trans-phobia and gender-baiting, homophobia has been used in an attempt to drive a dangerous wedge between potential allies.

I understand that many heterosexual transsexual and transgender people have been justly angered by a lifetime of accusations that their sex-change or gender expression is merely a result of being ashamed to admit they are gay. No one wants the identity they are willing to live for-or to die for to be invalidated or misunderstood. But while not all lesbian, gay, and bi people face trans oppression, all trans people experience anti-gay bigotry. To the bigots and bashers, all trans expression is "queer." Distancing ourselves from the lesbian, gay, and bi movement will not make us safer. But fighting lesbian and gay oppression head-on will.

While the lesbian, gay, and bi and trans populations do not experience identical oppressions, or voice the same grievances and demands, in the current-day United States, our communities have been strengthened by forming coalitions on campuses, in workplaces, and in political protests.

At the same time, the trans communities—made up of a majority of heterosexuals with decades of their own organizational history—are also an independent, autonomous movement. Like lesbians who are also active in both the L/G/B/T coalition and the women's movement, or like lesbians and gays of color who are also vital leaders in their national liberation movements -many lesbian, gay, and bi trans people play an integral role in an autonomous trans movement as well.

Those who are truly committed to building coalitions know that listening and demonstrating sensitivity to each others' oppressions and demands will create greater mutual understanding and unity. While there are centuries-old misconceptions about trans people, the most powerful way for peoples who face different oppressions to understand each other is by fighting back shoulder to shoulder.

Frederick Douglass, and the diverse combatants at Stonewall, helped me realize that people who don't experience a common oppression can make history when they unite to fight a common enemy.

To Be or Not to Be

"You were born female, right?" The reporter asked me for the third time. I nodded patiently. "So do you identify as female now, or male?"

She rolled her eyes as I repeated my answer. "I am transgendered. I was born female, but my masculine gender expression is seen as male. It's not my sex that defines me, and it's not my gender expression. It's the fact that my gender expression appears to be at odds with my sex. Do you understand? It's the social contradiction between the two that defines me."

The reporter's eyes glazed over as I spoke. When I finished she said, "So you're a third sex?" Clearly, I realized, we had very little language with which to understand each other.

When I try to discuss sex and gender, people can only imagine woman or man, feminine or masculine. We've been taught that nothing else exists in nature. Yet, as I've shown, this has not been true in all cultures or in all historical periods. In fact, Western law took centuries to neatly partition the sexes into only two categories and mandate two corresponding gender expressions.

"The paradigm that there are two genders founded on two biological sexes began to predominate in western culture only in the early eighteenth century," historian Randolph Trumbach notes in his essay, "London's Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making ofModern Culture."1 Trumbach explains that as late as the eighteenth century, in northwestern Europe, feminine men and masculine women—known as mollies and tommies respectively—were thought of as third and fourth genders.

But how many sexes and genders do exist? All too frequently, this question is presented as an abstract one, like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? But the search for the answer to this question has to be understood within the context of oppression.

Those of us who cross the "man-made" boundaries of sex and gender run afoul of the law, are subject to extreme harassment and brutality, and are denied employment, housing, and medical care. We have grown up mostly unable to find ourselves represented in the dominant culture.

So how can we have a discussion of how much sex and gender diversity actually exists in society, when all the mechanisms of legal and extralegal repression render our lives invisible? Gender theorists can't just function as census takers who count how much sex and gender diversity exists; they must be part of the struggle to defend our right to exist, or most of us will be forced to remain underground.

The more inclusive the trans liberation movement becomes, and the more visible our movement is in society, the more clearly sex and gender variation will be seen. However, as the trans movement grows and develops, part of its impact has been to pose questions: What is the relationship between birth sex, gender expression, and desire? Does the body you are born with determine your sex for life? Howmany variations of sex and gender exist today?

The gradations of sex and gender self-definition are limitless. When I first opened an America Online account, I tried to establish the nom de net "stone butch"or "drag king." I discovered these names were already taken. As I later prowled through AOL and UNIX bulletin boards, I found a world of infinite sex and gender identities, which cyberspace has given people the freedom to explore with a degree of anonymity.

But although this fluidity and variation exists, there still aren't many more words to express sex and gender than there were when I was growing up. All of the complexity of my gender expression is reduced to looking "like a man." Since I'm not a man, what does it mean when people tell me I look like one? When I was growing up, other kids told me I pitched baseballs and shot marbles "like a boy." As a youngadult, I suffered a torrent of criticism from adults who admonished me for standing, walking, and sitting "like a boy." Strangers felt free to stop me on the street to confront me with this observation. Something about me was inappropriate, but what?

The "gender theory" I learned in school, at home, in books, and at the movies was very simple. There are men and women. Men are masculine and women are feminine. End of subject. But clearly the subject didn't end there for me.

I had no words to discuss this with anyone. The way I expressed myself was wrong.There was no language to dispute this because the right way was assumed to be natural. Thank goodness, by the time I was sixteen years old the women's liberation movement was beginning to vocally denounce the outrageously separate and unequal indoctrination of girls and boys. For the first time, I was able to separate m\birth sex from the gender education I received as a girl. Since sex and gender had always been seen as synonymous when I was growing up, disconnecting the two to as a very important advance in my own thinking.

In addition, one of the gifts the women's movement gave me was a closer look ai the values that have been attached to masculinity and femininity. In my social education, masculinity had been inaccurately contrasted as stronger, more analytical, more stable, and more rational than femininity.

But it was not until the rise of the movement for transgender liberation that I began to see the important distinction between the negative gender values attached to being masculine or feminine and my right to my own gender expression, I am subjugated by the values attached to gender expression. But I am not oppressing other people by the way I express my gender when I wear a tie. Nor are other people's clothing or makeup crushing my freedom.

Both women's and trans liberation have presented me with two important tasks. One is to join the fight to strip away the discriminatory and oppressive values attached to masculinity and femininity. The other is to defend gender freedom—the right of each individual to express their gender in any way they choose, whether feminine, androgynous, masculine, or any point on the spectrum between. And that includes the right to gender ambiguity and gender contradiction.

It's equally important that each person have the right to define, determine, or change their sex in any way they choose—whether female, male, or any point on the spectrum between. And that includes the right to physical ambiguity and contradiction.

This struggle affects millions of people, because, as it turns out, sex and gender are a lot more complicated than woman and man, pink and blue. As the brochure of the Intersex Society of North America explains: "Our culture conceives sex anatomy as a dichotomy: humans come in two sexes, conceived of as so different as to be nearly different species. However, developmental embryology, as well as the existence of intersexuals, proves this to be a cultural construction. Anatomic sex differentiation occurs on a male/female continuum, and there are several dimensions. " 2

In an article entitled, "The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough," geneticist Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling stresses that "Western culture is deeply committed to the idea that there are only two sexes." But, she adds, "If the state and the legal system have an interest in maintaining a two-party sexual system, they are in defiance of nature. For biologically speaking, there are many gradations running from female to male; and depending on how one calls the shots, one can argue that along that spectrum lie at least five sexes—and perhaps even more."3

The right to physical ambiguity and contradiction are surgically and hormonally denied to newborn intersexual infants who fall between the "poles" of female and male. If doctors refrained from immediately "fixing" infants who don't fit the clear-cut categories of male and female, we would be spared the most commonly asked question: "What a beautiful baby! Is it a boy or a girl?"

And imagine what a difference it would make if parents replied, "We don't know, our child hasn't told us yet."

Why are infants being shoehorned into male or female? As Fausto-Sterling points out, "For questions of inheritance, legitimacy, paternity, succession to title, and eligibility for certain professions to be determined, modern AngloSaxon legal systems require that newborns be registered as either male or female." As a result, infants are surgically and hormonally manipulated into one sex or the other after birth, sometimes without even the parents' knowledge. Fausto-Sterling concludes that society, therefore, "mandates the control of intersexed bodies because they blur and bridge the great divide."4

Intersexuality is not news; it's been recorded since antiquity. Creation legends one very continent incorporate a sacred view of intersexuality. But with the rise of patriarchal, sex-segregated societies in Greece and Rome, for example, intersexual babies were burned alive, or otherwise murdered. In recent centuries, intersexuals were ordered to pick one sex in which to live, and were killed if they changed their minds.5

What's news is hearing courageous intersexual people voice their own demands. Day-old infants can't give informed consent to genital surgery. Inter-sexed babies have a right to grow up and make their own decisions about the body they will live in for the rest of their lives. Parents need counseling; intersexual youth need intersexual advisors. These are basic human rights, yet they are being violated every day. Cheryl Chase, founder of the Intersex Society of North America describes this nightmare:

When an intersexual infant is born, the parents are confronted with a shocking fact that violates their understanding of the world. Physicians treat the birth of such an infant as a medical emergency. A medical team, generally including a surgeon and an endocrinologist, is roused from bed, if need be, and assembled to manage the situation. Inter-sexual bodies are rarely sick ones; the emergency here is culturally constructed. The team analyzes the genetic makeup, anatomy, and endocrine status of the infant, "assigns" it male or female, and informs the parents of their child's "true" sex. They then proceed to enforce this sex with surgical and hormonal intervention. The parents are so traumatized and shamed that they will not reveal their ordeal to anyone, including the child as he/she comes of age.The child is left genitally and emotionally mutilated, isolated, and without access to information about what has happened to them. The burden of pain and shame is so great that virtually all intersexuals stay deep in the closet throughout their adult lives. 6

Even reactionaries might agree with the struggle against the surgical alteration of infants, but with a twist: Let no man put asunder what God has brought together.However, this argument must not be used as a weapon against the rights of trans-sexual adults who choose sex-reassignment surgery. Not all transsexuals want or can afford that elective. But for those who do, there's no contradiction between the rights of transsexuals and those of intersexuals. The heart of the struggle of both communities is the right of each individual to control their own body.

I can remember standing in front of an abortion clinic in Buffalo, my arms linked with others in the dim glint of dawn, with cold rain dripping off my face. We wei e defending the women's health clinic against a right-wing assault on the right of women to choose abortion. I certainly knew politically what I was supporting. But that morning, perhaps because I was so miserably cold and wet, I felt the intersection of the demands of the trans movement and the women's movement in my own body. The heart of both is the right of each individual to make decisions about our own bodies and to define ourselves.

That is a right of each woman, each intersexed person, each transsexual man or woman—each human being. I believe that people who don't identify as transsexual also have a right to hormones and surgery. There are many of us who have wanted to shape our bodies without changing our sex. Since sex-reassignment programs won't prescribe hormones or arrange surgery for a person who does not identify as a transsexual, we have to lie, buy hormones on the street, or go to quacks who sell prescriptions for a hefty fee.

Legions of people in this society do all sorts of things to make themselves more comfortable in their own bodies: myriad types of cosmetic surgery, nose jobs, piercing, tattooing, augmentation, liposuction, dieting, bodybuilding, circumcision, bleaching, coloring, and electrolysis. But many of the people who add, subtract, yji figure used in a chief's funeral, reshape, Or adorn their bodies Criticize those New Ireland Lelet Plateau, Papua New Guinea. transsexuals who elect surgery for their life decisions. I believe that the centuries-old fears and taboos about genitalia, buried deep in the dominant Western cultures, make the subject of surgical sex-change highly sensational. Today some opponents of sex-reassignment argue that sex-change is merely a high-tech phenomenon, a consequence of people being squeezed into narrow cultural definitions of what it means to be a woman or a man because surgical and hormonal options are now available. It's true that the development of anesthesia, and the commercial synthesis of hormones, opened up new opportunities for sex-reassignment. However, the argument that transsexuals are merely escaping rigid sex roles doesn't take into account ancient surgical techniques of sex-change developed in communal societies that offered more flexible sex and gender choices.

It all comes down to this: Each person has the right to control their own body. If each individual doesn't have that right, then who gets to judge and make decisions? Should we hand over that power to the church or the state? Should we make these rights subject to a poll?

And equally important to me is the right of each person to express their gender in any way they choose. But currently, strangers don't have to ask a parent if their infant is a boy or a girl if the child is dressed in pink or blue. Even gender color-coded diapers are now marketed in the United States.

As I researched this book, I was surprised to discover that this pink-for-girls. blue-for-boys gender assignment is a relatively recent development in the United States."In the last century in this country, babies of all sexes wore little white dresses, which didn't seem to skew the gender expressions of these generations of children. Furthermore, the pink-blue gender values used to be just the opposite.

"Gender-based color schemes were adopted only at the onset of the twentieth century, as plumbing, cloth diapers, and color-fast fabrics became more available,"wrote historians Vern and Bonnie Bullough. "However, different countries adopted different color schemes. In fact, there were heated arguments in the American popular press that pink was a more masculine color than light blue."8

How did the current pink and blue finally get assigned? Pink became a "girl's" color and blue a "boy's" in the United States in the early twentieth century after a media circus surrounding the acquisition of Thomas Gainsborough's painting Blue Boy and Sir Thomas Lawrence's Pinkie by wealthy art aficionado Henry Edwards Huntington.9

But the problem with the binary categories of pink and blue is that I'm not so easily color-coded, and neither are a lot of people I know. I've been taught that feminine and masculine are two polar opposites, but when I ride the subways or walk the streets of New York City, I see women who range from feminine to androgynous to masculine and men who range from masculine to androgynous to feminine. That forms a circle—a much more liberating concept than two poles with a raging void in between. A circle has room on it for each person to explore, and it offers the freedom for people to move on that circle throughout their lives if they choose.

Even today, when sex and gender choices have been so narrowed, when there are such degrading and murderous social penalties for crossing the boundaries of sex and gender, many of us can't—and don't want to—fit. We have to fight for the right of each person to express their gender in any way they choose. Who says our self expression has to match our genitals? Who has the right to tell anyone else how to define their identities? And who has the right to decide what happens to each of our bodies? We cannot let these fundamental freedoms be taken away from us.

But those rights can't be won and protected without a fight. Strong bonds between the women's and trans liberation movements would put even more muscle into that struggle.

Sisterhood: Make It Real!

I feel the combined weight of women's and trans oppression in my own life. I am forced to battle both, simultaneously. As a result, I personally experience the relationship between women's and trans liberation, because these demands overlap in my own life.

Everywhere I've traveled across the United States talking about fighting trans oppression—from a crowded potluck supper in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to an overflow audience in a cavernous university auditorium near Northampton, Massachusetts—women of all ages turn out, enthusiastically ready to discuss how the trans movement impacts on women's liberation.

We need to expand that dialogue, because women don't just need to understand the links between what they and trans people suffer in society, they need to realize that the women's and trans liberation movements need each other. Sex and gender oppression of all forms needs to be fought in tandem with the combined strength of these two movements and all our allies in society.

The development of the trans movement has raised a vital question that's being discussed in women's communities all over the country. The discussion revolves around one pivotal question: How is woman to be defined? The answer we give may determine the course of women's liberation for decades to come.

The question can't be considered without understanding that women face such constant dangers and harassment, day-in and day-out, that the attempt to define woman is generated by the need for safe space and clear-cut allies. That's a completely valid need. But how can we create safe space for women?

I think that if we define "woman" as a fixed entity, we will draw borders that would need to be policed. No matter what definition is used, many women who should be inside will be excluded.

Let's look first at the question of how woman can or cannot be defined. Some women hold an "essential," or biological definition, that one is born woman. Others, who define themselves as social constructionists, argue that women share a common experience. I don't think we can build women's communities or a liberation movement based on either.

A biological definition of woman is a dangerous direction for the women's movement to take. To accept that biological boundary would mark a definite break with the key principle of the second wave of women's liberation in the United States: that biology is not destiny. Simone de Beauvoir wrote, "One is not born but one becomes a woman." 1 The heart of that wisdom is that one should not be limited in life or oppressed because of birth biology. This is a truth that has meaning to all trans people and all women.

Of course, as a result of the oppression women face growing up in such a violently anti-woman environment, some women draw a line between women as allies and men as enemies. While it's understandable that an individual might do so out of fear, this approach fails as theory. It lumps John Brown and John D. Rockefeller together as enemies and Sojourner Truth and Margaret Thatcher together as allies. This view of who to trust and who to dread will not keep women safe or keep the movement on course.

One of the gifts of the women's liberation movement in the seventies was the understanding that our oppression as women is institutionalized—or built into the economic system. But this same system also tyrannizes entire nationalities, subjugates people because of who they love, denies people their abilities, works people near to death, and leaves many homeless and hungry. And last but not least, this system grinds up those who don't fit a narrow definition of woman and man.

A view that the primary division of society is between women and men leads some women to fear that transsexual women are men in sheep's clothing coming across their border, or that female-to-male transsexuals are going over to the enemy, or that I look like that same enemy. Where is the border for intersexual people—right down the middle of their bodies? Trans people of all sexes and genders are not oppressors; they, like women, rank among the oppressed.

After years of television and Hollywood movies and schooling full of prejudice, all of us have absorbed a biological definition of what is "normal" and what is not. But in a society rife with internal struggle, even a hard science like biology) can be misused in an attempt to justify inequality and oppression. While we were dissecting frogs, biological determinism crept into our classrooms.

Biological determinism isn't just a recognition that some people have vaginas and others have penises. It is a theoretical weapon used in a pseudo-scientific way to rationalize racism and sexism, the partitioning of the sexes, and behavior modification to make gender expression fit bodies.

As I argued earlier, historical accounts suggest that although our ancestors knew who was born with a vagina, who was born with a penis, and whose genitals were more multi-faceted, they were not biological determinists. And although women's reproductive abilities contributed to a general division of labor, it was not a hard-and-fast boundary and it was not the only boundary.

It's true that women's ability to bear children and breast-feed in many cases helped to determine an overall division of labor. Human babies go through a long period of infancy during which they need to be nursed and nurtured. But by all accounts, childcare in communal cultures was a collective task, not the responsibility of each mother, nor of every woman, since not every woman bore children. 2

I would suggest that we haven't had all the information with which to challenge the cultural construction of the modern view of childcare. For instance, in some pre-class societies, both parents went through the ritual pain of bearing a child and both were responsible for infant care. 3

Any look at the early division of labor in cooperative societies has to take into account the reports by hundreds of social scientists of "women" in early cooperative societies who hunted and were accepted as men and "men" who worked among the women and were accepted as women. Then why do anthropologists continue to refer to them as women hunters and men gatherers, particularly when this insistence on their "immutable" biology flies in the face of the way these people were accepted by their own societies?

So although reproduction delineated a rough boundary of human labor, it was not decisive in determining sex/gender. Many communal societies accepted more than two sex/genders and allowed individuals to find their own place within that spectrum.

The people we would call male-to-female transsexuals in these early societies ritually menstruated and wore "the leaves prescribed for women in their courses." 4 That means that all the women had a relationship to fertility and birth—including those born with penises. A 1937 account of the North American Mohave by Alfred L. Kroeber describes a male-to-female initiation ritual for youths of ten to eleven years old, which, though provided by a white anthropologist, contrasts with the dominant Western view that sex/gender is fixed at birth.

In the morning the two women lift the youth and take him outdoors. One of the singers puts on the skirt and dances to the river in four stops, the youth following and imitating. Then all bathe. Thereupon the two women give the youth the front and back pieces of his new dress and paint his face white. After four days he is painted again and then is an alyha. Such persons speak, laugh, smile, sit, and act like women.5

A further account of the youths after the ceremony shows that they assumed female names. In addition:

They insisted that their genitals be referred to by female terminology.After finding a husband, they would simulate menstruation by scratch-ing between their legs with a stick until blood was drawn. When they were "pregnant," "menstruations" would cease. Before "delivery" a bean preparation would be ingested that would induce violent stomach pains dubbed "labor pains." Following this would be a defecation, designated a "stillbirth," which was later ceremoniously buried. There would then ensue a period of mourning by both husband and "wife."6

At the other end of the spectrum are accounts that some of the men hunters in communal societies who had been born female were believed not to menstruate.7 So all the men—even those born with vaginas—were seen as outside the women's reproductive circle.

We need to combat the idea that a simple division of labor between women and men in communal societies has left us with today's narrow sex and gender system.Much evidence exists that many pre-class societies respected many more paths of self-expression. It was the overthrow of communalism and the subsequent division of society into classes that mandated the partitioning of the sexes and outlawed any blurring of those "man-made" boundaries. And we are left with those arbitrary and anti-human restrictions today.

Our histories as trans people and women are inextricably entwined. In the past, wherever women and trans people were honored, you can find cooperative, communal production. And societies that degrade women and trans people are already cleaved into classes, because those patriarchal divisions mandate a rigid categorization of sex and gender.

But how does this understanding help us today? If we reject a fixed biological boundary to define women as a group, what about the view that women share a common oppression? I believe this is also a perilous approach that can particularly lead to glossing over racism and class oppression.

Two broad currents emerged within the second wave of women's liberation in the United States. One was represented by feminists who analyzed women's oppression from a socialist-materialist viewpoint, the other by those who examined the psychological construction of woman. Both branches identified women as a group defined by oppression. Both currents recognized that arguments of biological determinism have been used by the patriarchal ruling classes for centuries as a weapon to justify women's oppression.8

However, since the rise of feminism, the definition of "woman" has been increasingly linked to a number of shared bodily experiences, like rape, incest, forced pregnancy, and battering. The underlying assumption is often that this physical oppression, experienced as a result of having a biologically female body, is the defining element of "womanhood." But women are not the only ones who experience the horrors of rape, incest, sexual humiliation, and brutality. And common bodily experiences that the majority of women on this planet share are hauling water and carrying firewood or working on an assembly-line—those are class experiences.

Do all women share the same experiences in society? What about the male-to-female transsexual women who have helped build the women's movement over the years? They experience women's oppression on a daily, even hourly basis. So if facing women's oppression defines being a woman, how long do you have to live it before you're "in"? Many lesbians went through a long period of heterosexuality before coming out. Would anyone argue that they should be excluded from lesbian gatherings because they were heterosexual during their formative years?

Do white women share the exact same experience as women of color? Do poor women and rich women share an identical experience? What about the experiences of disabled women, single mothers, lesbians, Deaf women? Women endure many different hardships and experiences. The sum total of our experiences and our resulting strengths and insights are just a small part of how many ways there are to be "woman" in this society.

Recently I had coffee with someone I've known since she was a teenager. "I don't think of you as a woman," she explained to me quite cheerily, "but as a very, very sensitive man—the kind that is so sensitive they don't really exist." I asked her how she arrived at this categorization.

"Well," she said, "I grew up without any real power as a girl. So I learned how to use being a woman to get around men's power, and that's not something I see you doing."

What she really meant was she learned to use being "feminine" to get around men's power. But I grew up very masculine, so the complex and powerful set of skills that feminine girls developed to walk safely through the world were useless to me.I had to learn a very different set of skills, many of them martial. While we both grew up as girls, our experiences were dissimilar because our gender expressions were very different. Masculine girls and women face terrible condemnation and brutality—including sexual violence—for crossing the boundary of what is "acceptable"female expression. But masculine women are not assumed to have a very high consciousness about fighting women's oppression, since we are thought to be imitating men.

As the women's movement of the seventies examined the negative value s attached to masculinity and femininity in this society, some thought that liberation might lie in creating a genderless form of self-expression and dress. But of course androgyny was itself just another point on the spectrum of gender expression.

In addition, gender doesn't just come in two brands, like perfume and cologne. Take masculinity, for example, particularly since there's an underlying assumption that the brutal and insensitive behavior of some men is linked to masculinity. Yet not all men dress, move, or behave in the same way. The masculinity of oppressed African-American men is not the masculinity of Ku Klux Klan members. Gender is expressed differently in diverse nationalities, cultures, regions, and classes.

And not all men in any given group express their masculinity in the same way. At a recent speaking event, I couldn't help but notice a man in the audience who was very masculine, but there was something in his gender expression that held my attention. At a later reception, he told me that he learned his masculinity from women—butches had mentored him as a young gay male. He learned one variation of an oppressed masculinity.

Those who are feminine—male and female—don't fare any better when it comes to assumptions about their gender expression. Feminine girls and women endure an extremely high level of sexual harassment and violence simply because of their gender expression. A great deal of woman-hating resides in attitudes towards femininity. And a great many bigoted generalizations are made about femme expression like: "The higher the heels, the lower the IQ; the higher the skirt the lower the morals." So femme women are also not assumed to have a very high consciousness about fighting women's oppression.

And what about males who are considered "effeminate"? Feminists have justifiably pointed out that the label is inherently anti-woman. But it is also anti-trans, gender-phobic, and anti-feminine.

The oppression of feminine men is an important one to me, since I consider drag queens to be my sisters. I've heard women criticize drag queens for "mocking women's oppression" by imitating femininity to an extreme, just as I've been told that I am imitating men. Feminists are justifiably angry at women's oppression—so am I! I believe, however, that those who denounce drag queens aim their criticism at the wrong people.

This misunderstanding doesn't take gender oppression into account. For instance, to criticize male-to-female drag performers, but leave out a discussion of gender oppression, lumps drag queen RuPaul together with men like actor John Wayne! RuPaul is a victim of gender oppression, as well as of racism.

There is a difference between the drag population and masculine men doing cruel female impersonations. The Bohemian Grove, for example, is an elite United States club for wealthy, powerful men that features comedy cross-dressing performances. But that's not drag performance. Many times the burlesque comedy of cross-dressed masculine men is as anti-drag as it is anti-woman.

In fact, it's really only drag performance when it's transgender people who are facing the footlights. Many times drag performance calls for skilled impersonations of a famous individual, like Diana Ross orJudy Garland, but the essence of drag performance is not impersonation of the opposite sex. It is the cultural presentation of an oppressed gender expression.

Our oppression and our identities—as drag queens and kings—are not simply based on our clothing. The term "drag" only means "cross-dressing" to most people.By that definition, we are people who put on garb intended for the opposite sex as a kind of masquerade. It's true that the word drag is believed to have originated as a stage term, derived from the drag of the long train of dresses male actors wore. But in fact, it is our gender expression, not our clothes, that shapes who we are.

Hopefully, the trans liberation movement will create a deeper understanding of sex and gender oppression. Everyone has a stake in the struggle to uncover how much cultural baggage is attached to the social categories of man and woman.

In addition, the women's movement has an opportunity to make a tremendous contribution by reaching out to all who suffer from sex and gender oppression.Drag queens and kings, and many women who have not been a part of the women's liberation movement, do not necessarily reflect the same consciousness as those who have been part of a collective movement for change for twenty years. But that doesn't mean that they don't feel their oppression or don't want to fight for their liberation.

The women's liberation movement that shaped my consciousness exposed the institutionalized oppression of women. The movement revealed that inequality begins at a very early age. But simply looking at the differences between what boys and girls are taught only reveals a broad analysis of sexual oppression. Just as girls experience different messages based on whether they are feminine, masculine, or androgynous, boys do too. It's absurd to think that messages of woman-hating and male privilege will produce the same consciousness in a male youth who grows up believing he will be part of the "good-ole boys club" and one who grows up fearing humiliation and violence at the hands of men. If the consciousness of male-to-female transsexuals was shaped early on by "male privilege," then why would they give it up?

What is the consciousness of a child who is assigned one sex at birth, but grows up identifying strongly with another sex? We need to examine how many ways there are to be a woman or a man, and how gender oppression makes sex-role conditioning more complex.

Everyone who is living as a woman in this woman-hating society is dealing with oppression every day and deserves both the refuge of being with other women and the collective power of the women's movement.

All women need to be on the frontlines against all forms of sex and gender oppression in society, as well as in fighting all expressions of gender-phobia and transphobia. In the simplest of terms, these twin evils are prejudices we have been taught since an early age. Gender-phobia targets women who are not feminine and men who are not masculine. Transphobia creates fear of changing sex. Both need to be fought by all women, as well as by all others in society.

As a rape survivor, I understand the need for safe space together—free from sexist harassment and potential violence. But fear of gender variance also can't be allowed to deceptively cloak itself as a women's safety issue. I can't think of a better example than my own, and my butch friends', first-hand experiences in public women's toilets. Of course women need to feel safe in a public restroom; that's a serious issue. So when a man walks in, women immediately examine the situation to see if the man looks flustered and embarrassed, or if he seems threatening; they draw on the skills they learned as young girls in this society to read body language for safety or danger.

Now, what happens when butches walk into the women's bathroom? Women nudge each other with elbows, or roll their eyes, and say mockingly, "Do you know which bathroom you're in?" That's not how women behave when they really believe there's a man in the bathroom. This scenario is not about women's safety—it's an example of gender-phobia.

And ask yourself, if you were in the women's bathroom, and there were two teenage drag queens putting on lipstick in front of the mirror, would you be in danger? If you called security or the cops, or forced those drag queens to use the men's room, would they be safe?

If the segregation of bathrooms is really about more than just genitals, then maybe the signs ought to read "Men" and "Sexually and Gender Oppressed," because we all need a safe place to go to the bathroom. Or even better, let's fight for clean individual bathrooms with signs on the doors that read "Restroom."

And defending the inclusion of transsexual sisters in women's space does not threaten the safety of any woman. The AIDS movement, for example, battled against the right-wing characterization of gay men as a "high-risk group. " We won an understanding that there is no high-risk group—there are high-risk behaviors. Therefore, creating safety in women's space means we have to define unsafe behavior—like racist behavior by white women towards women of color, or dangerous insensitivity to disabilities.

Transsexual women are not a Trojan horse trying to infiltrate women's space. There have always been transsexual women helping to build the women's movement—they are part of virtually every large gathering of women. They want to be welcomed into women's space for the same reason every woman does—to feel safe.

And our female-to-male transsexual brothers have a right to feel welcome at women's movement events or lesbian bars. However, that shouldn't feed into the misconception that all female-to-male transsexuals were hutches who just couldn't deal with their oppression as lesbians. If that were true, then why does a large percentage of post-transition transsexual men identify as gay and bisexual, which may have placed them in a heterosexual or bisexual status before their transition? There are transsexual men who did help build the women's and lesbian communities, and still have a large base of friends there. They should enjoy the support of women on their journey. Doesn't everyone want their friends around them at a time of great change? And women could learn a great deal about what it means to be a man or a woman from sharing the lessons of transition.

If the boundaries around "woman" become trenches, what happens to intersexual people? Can we really fix a policy that's so clear about who was born "woman"?And there are many people, like myself, who were born female but get hassled for not being woman enough. We've been accused of exuding "male energy." Now that's a frighteningly subjective border to patrol. Do all women—or should all women—have to share the same "energy"?

If we were going to decide who is a "real" woman, who would we empower to decide, and how could the check-points be established? Would we all strip? How could you tell if a vagina was not newly constructed? Would we show our birth certificates? How could you determine that they hadn't been updated after sex-reassignment? DNA tests? The Olympics tried it, but they had so many false results they went back to relying on watching somebody pee in a cup for the drug test as the "sex" test.

I understand that it took the tremendous social upheavals of the sixties and seventies to even begin to draw the borders of women's oppression. When I was growing up, no one even acknowledged that the system was stacked against women. But the women's liberation movement laid bare the built-in machinery of oppression in this society that's keeping us down. It's not your lipstick that's oppressing me, or your tie, or whether you change your sex, or how you express yourself. An economic system oppresses us in this society, and keeps us fighting each other, instead of looking at the real source of this subjugation.

The modern trans movement is not eroding the boundaries of women's oppression. Throughout history, whenever new lands and new oceans have been discovered, maps have always been re-charted to show their relationship to each other.The modern trans liberation movement is redrawing the boundaries to show the depth and breadth of sex and gender oppression in this society. It is this common enemy that makes the women's and trans communities sister movements for social justice.

What does it mean to be a woman in this society? How many different paths lead to woman? How varied are our experiences, and what do we share in common? Isn't this the discussion we need to have in order to continue to build a dynamic women's movement? And yet, we can't even begin the examination until all those who identify as women are in the movement. It's not a definition that's going to create sale space. Definitions have created some pretty unsafe space for many of us who were born female.

Let's open the door to everyone who is self-identified as woman, and who wants to be in women's space. (Not every woman wants that experience.) Let's keep the door unlocked. Together we can plot tactics and strategy for movement-building. And we can set some good-sense ground rules for what constitutes unsafe behavior.

What should the sign on the door of the women's movement read? I think the key to victory are these three simple words: "All women welcome."

But in addition to fighting women's oppression, we need to recognize and defend other sites of sex and gender oppression and organize an even larger struggle. The women's and trans liberation movements are comprised of overlapping populations and goals. Perhaps the unity of our two huge movements for justice will birth a new movement that incorporates the struggles against all forms of sex and gender oppression.

The combined power of women, trans people, and all of our allies could give rise to a powerful Sex and Gender Liberation movement!

Making History

Whenever people who have been silenced and persecuted for millennia begin to organize and voice their demands, others who are wounded by oppression lift their heads and sniff the air, sensing instinctively that a fresh wind of change is blowing. The trans liberation movement is ushering in just such change.

Change is the thing that most ofus hope for, especially when we are suffering, but it's not something we necessarily have come to expect. We've all heard the cynical recitations, "You can't fight City Hall," or "The more things change, the more they stay the same." And we've been taught that the way things are today is pretty much the way they've always been—dog eat dog.

But that's a damn lie! Change and development are characteristics of everyone and everything that exists—including human society.

The history I've presented in this book is the granite basis for my belief that oppression is not the future of humanity. If world history had really been accessible to all of us, we would have been taught early on in life that our ancestors lived in societies that enjoyed much more humane social relations than we do. That fact, in and of itself, would have given many of us confidence about our ability to change the society we live in.

Similarly, I am heartened by the realization that hatred of sex and gender variation is not rooted in human nature. The more I dig, the more I find that although what we think of as gender today has been expressed differently in diverse historical periods, cultures, regions, nationalities, and classes, there appears to have always been gender diversity in the human population. And there is just as much evidence that sexes have not always been arbitrarily squeezed into hard-and-fast categories of woman and man, and that fluidity between sexes is an ancient path.

I have presented all this information, gleaned from thousands of books, essays, oral accounts, articles, and other sources about societies in which trans people were honored. And I've offered an overview about the oppression of trans people under slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. In the face of all this information, our trans liberation movement needs to examine the economic structures of the societies in which trans people were honored and those in which we were condemned. It is timeto talk about class divisions, because a society of haves and have-nots is based onjustthat—divisions.

The fact that on a scale of one year, more than 360 days of human history belongs to cooperative, communal life gives me concrete hope about what could be achieved,with the powerful tools and technology that exist today, if we plan all production to meet the needs of everyone, without having to take the question of profitability intoaccount. Eliminating the race for profits from manufacture and exchange removesthe motive for pitting people against each other.

Tolerance and respect for human variation, including sex and gender diversity, resulted from the fact that people worked cooperatively with collectively ownedtools and other materials. But everything around us today that supports life—factories, agricultural machinery and land, hospitals, scientific laboratories -was all built through collective human labor, yet most of it is privately owned by individuals.

Just recently, a front page article in the New York Times reported that one percentof the families in the United States own forty percent of the wealth that we all pro-duce week-in and week-out. In fact, the Times noted that the polarization of wealthand poverty in the United States was greater than in any other industrialized country. 1 What the Times didn't see fit to print was that the rich get richer because the poorget poorer. That's an important cause-and-effect to omit!

As a messenger on Wall Street years ago, I remember seeing an old man, dressedin dirty rags, eating out of a garbage can next to a sleek double-stretch limousine.Some good-hearted person might think the solution to such glaring economic disparity would be to redistribute the wealth from rich people to poor people.

Anyone who has ever played Monopoly knows that when you've run out of little pieces of paper money at the end of the game, you lose. But even if the banker wereto give you some more money, you'd still lose. That's because the one who ownsBoardwalk and Park Place and all those utilities is just going to take your monevagain when you land on their property.

Real-life monopoly is not a game for people who can't find ajob, or who have runout of money altogether. Recently a young woman at a party asked me, "What do youdo for a living?" I replied, "I don't know," and my own answer made me anxious. I don't own property, a business, or a factory, so I don't live off other people's labor. I have to work for wages or I'd starve. But since I am gender-ambiguous, it's almostimpossible for me to get a job. Every month it's a scramble for my half of the rent, and it's even harder to deal with working full-time at survival, when at the same timeI have to cope with threats on the street, or harassment on the subway. This system 1 live under doesn't work for me!

Capitalism is one of the most irrational economic systems imaginable: those whodo the most, get the least, and those who do the least, get the most. How can such a system continue? It couldn't if the vast, laboring majority got together to fight for a new, more equitable economy.

Keeping people divided—that's the purpose of making people fearful of thosewho dress differently, or who change their sex, or whose sex is not either-or. That's the function of pitting lighter-skinned people against those with darker skin, nationality against nationality, men against women, straight against lesbian, gay, or bi, abilities against disabilities, young against old. Divide-and-conquer is a crude weapon, but it has proven historically effective—that is, right up to the point where people wake up and realize that they have a material need for unity.

So what is the solution? Are sex and gender oppression so ingrained in people after centuries of campaigns to justify trans persecution that this bigotry can no longer be eradicated? Should we even try? Where would we begin?

When I was growing up in the stifling repression of the 1950s, I couldn't have imagined that the wave after wave of revolutionary struggles throughout the 1960s and 1970s would follow. The Stonewall Rebellion was part of those battles for change. I can remember seeing the banners of the young gay liberation movement flying at rallies in defense of the Black Panther Party, and against the Vietnam War.

But many of us who were working in the sixties enjoyed a higher standard of living, partly because the powers that be decided a liberal guns-and-butter approach would be most effective to dampen any domestic struggle against the Vietnam War. That's why the Johnson administration beefed up spending for social services—the same vital services that are being slashed today. It was an attempt to keep the youthwho were opposing the war and the Black, Latino, and Native liberation movementsisolated from the mainstream of the working class.

But today, the system isn't working for the majority of people. Many millions areholding down two or three part-time jobs, lack health care, or are one paycheckaway from homelessness. Those in the ruling summits of power in the United Statesare emboldened by the setbacks for workers in the former Soviet Union and EasternEurope, and are trying to crush the trade unions, as well as the gains, like SocialSecurity, unemployment, and welfare, won by militant struggles over the last sevendecades.

At a time when there is no real economic safety net for most working people andour standard of living is under attack, is it any wonder that we are witnessing well-coordinated state-by-state ballot campaigns to strip lesbians, gays, bisexuals, andtrans people of any recourse against discrimination by characterizing our progressive civil rights legislation as "special rights"?

And is it any surprise that the same well-funded movers-and-shakers of these"family values" hate crusades are frequently in the same ranks as those who are vio-lently attacking women's right to reproductive freedom, and are trying to scapegoatimmigrants?

This is divide-and-rule. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't fight for reforms! Alltrans people need basic civil rights, and we need them right now. In the I'm tedStates at the present time, for instance, we have very little recourse against discrim-ination and are struggling to even be included in the broad human rights laid outin the Constitution.

As our contemporary trans movement gathers more and more oppressed sexand gender communities into its vortex, we will formulate extensive demands in thecourse of our struggle. We must demand the decriminalization of all forms of out-lawed sex and gender expression, and gear education to winning social acceptanceof sex and gender variance. We have a right to something as basic as clean toilets that are not marked "women" or "men."

Transsexual women and men, and other trans people, have a right to affordablesurgery and hormones. And all trans people need access to basic health care, without fear of being turned away because of bigotry or lack of money. The trans community is also ravaged by aids; we need aids education and services that are offered in trans-friendly space.

We need to fight discrimination against us in housing and employment, in the military, and in child custody and visitation cases. We need to fight violations of the rights of trans prisoners, and trans victims of police brutality.

High schools, colleges, and universities need to include trans individuals and struggles in their curricula. In addition, the very concept that our current narrow sex and gender system is eternal needs to be challenged by exploring the diversity that has existed throughout human history. We need a fresh reexamination of history, anthropology, and medical science in order to weed out any concepts that sex and gender variation are "abnormal."

Sex categories should be removed from all basic identification papers—from driver's licenses to passports—and since the right of each person to define their own sex is so basic, it should be eliminated from birth certificates as well. And affirmative action—first won to redress some of the historic discrimination based on race and sex—needs to be defended and expanded to include more victims of sex and gender oppression.

Each person should have the right to determine and change their sex—and express their gender in anyway they choose.

But those rights won'tjust fall from the sky. People have a right to food and shelter, and to be free from the threat of sexual or racist violence, too, but all of this takes a struggle.

When I grew up, Jim Crow segregation ordinances were the law of the land. It took the mighty upheavals of the Civil Rights and the Black Liberation movements to remove some of the most reactionary laws and win progressive anti-discrimination and affirmative action legislation. For the first time since the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, the movement won Black elected officials—mayors, governors, congressional representatives. But the crisis of capitalism still remained, and conditions for African Americans in the inner cities are worse now due to years of deep and protracted economic depression.

The development of high tech rendered many of the occupational divisions between men and women obsolete. But it took the women's movement to scrap the categories of "women's'jobs, to make discrimination on the basis of sex illegal, and to demand equal pay for comparable work. Yet, as women as a whole are sinking deeper into poverty, these reforms are not enough!

Law codifies the economic inequality built into a class-divided society. Whether a law has been cloaked as the word of a deity or as springing from precepts of human morality, it is presented as fixed and unchangeable, but it is not. However, advances in production or changes in human consciousness don't automatically change laws. Progressive legislation reflects the gains won through militant marches, rallies, picket lines, and grass-roots organizing; action is what makes laws change.

But it's like a union contract—first you fight to get it, then you still have to fight to defend what you've won from being snatched back.

For trans people, winning progressive legislation and repealing bigoted laws are important stepping stones in our larger struggle forjustice. But the experience of this century has shown that the organic make-up of the profit system inevitably drives il into a cataclysm of economic and social crises that can wipe out the progressive gainsof a lifetime. That's the lesson I learned from the triumph of fascism in Germany.

As aJewish child, I thought fascism gathered without warning, like storm clouds.So when I found a swastika carved into mywooden desktop at school, I feared fascismhad arrived and nothing could stop the storm. It's no wonder that I spent so muchtime studying the real reasons why the Nazis came to power in Germany in the 1930s.

The German economy was in deep decline, and a powerful workers' movementwas challenging capitalist rule itself, as were many in the movements of trans people, lesbians, gay men, women, and socialists. Fascism was unleashed to crush this movement, the working class, and all allied organizations. The rise of the Nazis wasfunded by a segment of the industrialists and bankers. Who paid for the construction of the concentration camps, railroad lines, and ovens? Who profited from theslave labor? Hitler promised to turn around the economy and bring about prosperity, and he delivered. War was still an effective jump start for a stagnant capitalist economy.

War was also "good for business" at the time of the Stonewall Rebellion. But. like any drug, sooner or later quick fixes don't work. When the Pentagon waged waragainst Iraq, the economy didn't revive. So what does the ultra-right wing have to offer now? They won't deliver jobs. The "leaner, meaner" restructuring, along with the high-tech revolution, has meant more skilled workers are flipping hamburgers for minimum wage.

We are faced with either relinquishing what we and earlier generations won in terms of living and working conditions and political gains—or organizing in a broad counteroffensive.

Looking only at the past, it might seem unrealistic to think that we in the United States could muster a force capable of challenging the ruling class. But looking forward, from the reality of today, as the cities crumble and steel mill furnaces cool, as debts pile up and war production becomes a permanent feature of the economy, as people are faced with hunger and homelessness, as the government underfunds out-of-control epidemics like AIDS and breast cancer, the question that must be asked is: Can such a struggle really be avoided?

Isn't it time for the struggle against capitalism to come out of the closet? Isn't it time to shed old illusions, break with ideologies thatjustify exploitation and human misery, and, most important of all, isn't it time to have confidence in our own abilities to give birth to a new world?

From the moment I began to even ask this question as a young activist, I was baited as "communist." Well, it's true! I'm not satisfied with removing the laws that determine what clothes I can wear—not when trans youths are sleeping in abandoned cars, or on sidewalks. A banker can afford to waste food served at elegant dinners, while Black and Latina drag queens are forced to turn tricks in order to buy french fries. What you think the solution is to this social crisis depends on, as the old union song said, "Which side are you on?" I believe these deep social crises require thorough-going social solutions.

Red-baiting, in particular, is supposed to frighten us from challenging the existence of an economic system that's not meeting the needs of the majority. In the Middle Ages, we would have been labeled heretics. I grew up feeling the power of anti-communism during the McCarthy era. But red-baiting, like all other divisive weapons, can be defeated. Allan Berube, a gay, working-class historian, addressed this question in a speech he gave at a lesbian and gay writer's conference in 1995. Berube explained that the Marine, Cooks and Stewards Union in the 1930s and 1940s, which organized the service personnel on board ocean liners and freighters on the West Coast of the U.S., was a multi-national and left-wing union that included many openly gay transgender workers—drag queens.

One of the organizers of the union, now in his eighties, told Berube that the communist trade unionists tried to articulate slogans that reflected the composition of the workers. "One of the slogans they came up with in 1936," Berube told the audience, "was: If you let them red-bait, they'll race-bait; if you let them race-bait, they'll queen-bait. That's why we have to stick together."2

That is just one of the important lessons we need to learn from the movements of the past, just as the struggle to battle trans oppression will contribute what it has learned to other movements and to future struggles.

As. the deepening general social crisis brought on by the decline of the capitalist system is increasingly felt as an urgent issue by millions, we as trans people should feel more confident than ever to reachout to our co-workers, neighbors, friends, families, and loved ones and say: They'retrying to make us fight each other to keepus from uniting to win real change.

While there is no blueprint for the struggles ahead, we can learn both fromengaging a common enemy and fromthe crystallized experiences of the past. In the last 150 years in particular, the working class has grown to be the key force in society. It is the class responsible for producing all the basic goods and services, andit has become the majority class in most parts of the world.

From the first rudimentary and spontaneous resistance of the cross-genderweavers who called themselves "General Ludd's wives" to today, this class has developed rich revolutionary experience and many, many forms of political organization.

As trans people, we have a history of resistance of which we should be proud.Trans warriors stood up to the slave-owners, the feudal landlords, and the capitalist bosses. Today, as trans warriors we are joining the movement for a just societv in greater and greater numbers. By raising the demands of our trans movement withinthe larger struggle for change, we are educating people about our oppression, win-ning allies, and shaping the society we're trying to bring into being.

None of us will be free until we have forged an economic system that meets theneeds of every working person. As trans people, we will not be free until we fight for and win a society in which no class stands to benefit from fomenting hatred and prejudice, where laws restricting sex and gender and human love will be unthinkable.

Look for us—transgender warriors—in the leadership of the struggle to usher in the dawn of liberation.