There and Back Again: Trans people in the West are losing ground in their struggle for rights

RU

19th century: The struggle begins

The Western history of the trans rights struggle is inseparable from that of the LGBTQ+ movement as a whole. In the mid-19th century, the German lawyer and scientist Karl Ulrichs, a pioneer of sexology, introduced the term Urning (the German for “Uranian”) — a person with a male body and the “soul of a woman.”

In 1862, Ulrichs announced to his family and friends that he himself was an Urning (a revelation our contemporaries refer to as a “coming out”). The researcher recounted how even as a child he'd felt different from other boys. By his admission, he was more feminine in character, often secretly wore women's clothes, played only with girls, and wanted to be a girl himself — even if, as he grew older, he lost interest in the dressing-up part. Ulrichs' contemporaries recalled that he behaved like a conventional man, although he continued to experience attraction to people of the same sex.

In the 1860s Ulrichs traveled extensively in Prussia, continuing to publish his sexological research. Getting to know other Urnings, the researcher developed his theory, adding new categories that are similar to today's notions of bisexuality and transgenderism. During his lifetime, Ulrichs' writings were often banned for their radical ideas. He insisted that being a Uranian is not a crime and therefore criminal penalties for same-sex sexual activity should be abolished.

After Ulrichs died in 1895, his fight for the rights of LGBT people was continued by another German sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld. The young scientist (he was 27 years old at the time of his predecessor's death) practiced medicine in Magdeburg. He often received male patients driven to the verge of suicide by the realization of their homosexuality and found on their bodies scars and other signs of suicidal acts. Hirschfeld worked hard to convince his patients to abandon their decision to end their lives.

20th century: First LGBT organizations

In 1897, Hirschfeld and a group of like-minded academics founded the Scientific and Humanitarian Committee — the world's first LGBT rights group. The committee demanded the decriminalization of same-sex relationships and raised awareness of homosexual relations in an effort to build public tolerance.

In 1919, Hirschfeld opened the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, the world's first research institution to study human sexuality. The institute employed psychiatrists, gynecologists, and surgeons. It had a library of more than 20,000 books on sexology. By 1930, Hirschfeld, along with surgeon Erwin Gohrbandt, began performing so-called “genital transformation” surgeries on patients who required a transfeminine transition (from male to female sex characteristics). Patients also received hormone therapy. The doctors meticulously documented all procedures, and the institute's research attracted the attention of the global scientific community.

The development of the Institute of Sexual Science was interrupted by the rise of Nazism in Germany. On May 6, 1933, just four months after Hitler came to power, young Nazis from the Union of German Students broke into the Institute's building and removed all the books — to burn them on May 10 as part of an “Action against the Un-German Spirit.” As Goebbels himself voiced at a bonfire of books burning on one of the capital’s central squares, “The German nation is being purified!” Hirschfeld was not in the country at the time: he was working in France, where he died of a heart attack two years later.

Hirschfeld's colleague Erwin Gohrbandt later joined the Nazis and experimented on prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp. World War II and its aftermath set back the development of a unified European movement for homosexual and transgender rights by several years. In the second half of the 20th century, the center of the struggle for the rights of LGBTQ+ people shifted to the United States.

1950s: America's first trans activists

In the 1950s, the U.S. press took a profound interest in the story of Christine Jorgensen, the first transgender American to undergo gender-affirming surgery. In her autobiography, Christine (born George) wrote that she'd felt she was a woman in a man's body ever since she had been a child. In 1949, at the age of 23, Jorgensen began taking hormones to transition. She later noted that the medication eased the symptoms of her gender dysphoria, helping with her depression and increasing her productivity.

However, since hormones only slightly altered her appearance, in 1950 Jorgensen decided to have surgery. She traveled to Denmark, where she obtained medical clearance and completed the transition: in two operations in 1951 and 1952, she had her penis and testicles removed. Upon recovery, Jorgensen felt more alive and confident, she writes in her autobiography.

On Dec. 1, 1952, the New York Daily News devoted its front page to Jorgensen. Her story elicited responses ranging from favorable to sharply negative, and the press continued to follow her. Christine used the publicity to actively advocate for the rights of transgender people and to raise awareness about the option of surgical transitioning.

Another famous American activist of the time was Louise Lawrence, who was assigned male gender at birth. Knowing the possibility of a surgical transition, Lawrence still limited herself to hormone treatment. As an activist, she built informal ties within the trans community, facilitating the exchange of contacts and information about doctors who handled transition procedures. Lawrence was also an educator, giving lectures on transgenderism.

At one of the lectures, she met another American activist, Virginia Prince. In 1952, the two women founded Transvestia: The Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress. Although Transvestia only had two issues, its launch is hailed as the beginning of a full-fledged transgender rights movement in the U.S.

1960s: Violent resistance

Just as the 1969 Stonewall Riots are considered the beginning of the mass movement for LGBTQ+ rights, a similar landmark event for the trans community happened three years earlier. In 1966, transgender people and crossdressers clashed with police at Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, after which community support and advocacy groups began to spring up across the country.

Compton's Cafeteria was one of the few places in San Francisco where trans people could congregate without fear of harassment. In the 1960s, many states, including California, had century-old laws prohibiting people from wearing clothes of the opposite sex in public. In addition, many transgender women were not welcome in gay clubs, meaning they had to find other places to socialize.

The management of Compton's Cafeteria wasn't notably accommodating either. The managers often called the police in an effort to get rid of such undesirable guests, and the 1966 riot reportedly broke out when a policeman arriving on such a call put his hand on one of the female visitors. The enraged queers overturned tables, threw dishes and cutlery at police officers, and hit them with their heavy purses. The rioters also smashed the police car and set fire to a nearby kiosk in what The Guardian describes as an “unprecedented moment of trans resistance to police violence.”

1970s-2010s: Moving towards recognition

By the late 1960s, trans activists had established strong ties with the queer rights movement, playing an important role in the Stonewall Riots. However, despite standalone victories like simplifying the procedure of changing gender on documents and improving access to health care, the 1970s proved to be a much more trying decade for the American trans community. Many queer activists had begun to distance themselves from transgender people, some believing that trans people were supposedly betraying the queer rights movement due to the fact that, instead of breaking gender stereotypes, they were “adjusting” their bodies to fit them.

This view gained momentum in 1979 after radical feminist Janice Raymond published “The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male.” Raymond argued that trans people are either hostages or supporters of a patriarchal ideology that seeks to oppress women. She also promoted the idea that trans women are a type of rapist looking to invade women's spaces. With the spread of such concerns in the 1970s and 1980s, trans activists found themselves increasingly isolated from the rest of the queer community.

However, progress in recognizing the rights of transgender people in the U.S. continued nonetheless. In 1975, Minneapolis passed the first laws prohibiting discrimination against trans people. In 1977, the New York State Supreme Court ruled that transgender woman Renée Richards, a professional tennis player, was eligible to compete in the women's tournament at the U.S. Open.

In 1987, the American Psychiatric Association added a specific term for transgenderism — “gender identity disorder” — to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). In 1993, Minnesota was the first state to extend anti-discrimination laws to transgender people, and Rhode Island followed suit in 2001.

In 2003, George W. Bush became the first U.S. president to officially receive a trans person at the White House. In November 2008, Silverton, Oregon, elected the first transgender mayor in U.S. history — transgender woman Stu Rasmussen. In 2009, Cher's daughter, Chastity Bono, announced she was starting a gender transition.

In 2013, the new edition of the DSM replaced the term “gender identity disorder” with the less stigmatizing “gender dysphoria.” In 2015, Barack Obama became the first U.S. president to mention transgender people in an address to Congress.

Second half of the 2010s: British hysteria

As the visibility of trans people in the West increased, so did the scale of public debate about their rights. The discussion was particularly heated in the UK when, in the summer of 2017, the authorities announced new measures to protect the rights of LGBTQ+ people, including the proposal to allow for the sex indicated on official documents to be changed without the need for a medical certificate.

Opponents of the initiative voiced the fear that, with its passage, “people with male bodies” would change their gender on paper to enter women-only spaces (restrooms, locker rooms, survivor shelters, or even prisons). The case of Karen White, a transgender woman who committed sexualized violence against two cellmates while in prison, was cited. The Times wrote that the proposed reform would “destroy women’s competitions, allowing former men with greater musculature and testosterone to dominate.”

A split occurred in the queer community as well. At Pride 2018 in London, Get the L Out (meaning L of the LGBTQ+ acronym), an activist group advocating for lesbian recognition as an “autonomous community,” came out with a banner reading “Trans Activism Erases Lesbians.” Pride organizers later apologized, calling the action “shocking and disgusting.”

British trans activist Christine Burns noted in 2020 that the government initiative scandal in 2017 caused newspapers such as The Times and The Sunday Times to increase their coverage of trans people from six to 150 stories a year.

To date, the issue of trans rights remains in the spotlight of British society — with the result that, since 2022, Britons have become even more conservative. The UK lags behind most Western European countries when it comes to recognizing trans rights, but is still ahead of Eastern Europe, according to a report by the Transgender Europe network.

2020s: Transphobia engulfs the U.S.

With Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential election, the controversy over trans rights re-emerged in American society. Trump largely built his campaign on transphobic rhetoric in an effort to appeal to the conservative electorate. After taking office, he continued his onslaught against trans people's rights in full force.

Starting from inauguration day, Jan. 20, Trump signed an executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth,” which reinstated the binary gender model. In another decree, he banned trans people from serving in the military, and his “Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports” order barred female transgender athletes from participating in women's sports. In addition, Trump has rolled back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs across all federal agencies.

Trump tried to ban trans people from military service during his first term, but the Biden administration subsequently rescinded his executive order. Four years from now, Trump's transphobic decisions could also be revisited, but even if they are, the American trans community will remain in a situation of uncertainty in which their rights are either recognized or denied every four years.

Before the current conservative turn in politics, support for trans people in American society had consistently grown for a full decade. An August 2022 poll by the University of Minnesota shows that 83% of respondents believe that trans people deserve the same rights as the cis majority. Importantly, Trump's actions could pose a threat to minorities beyond the U.S., as the country's LGBTQ+ policies, especially under Obama and Biden, have often served as a model for other developed nations. The homophobic and transphobic narratives of the current U.S. administration could be picked up by both authoritarian regimes and Western countries that are undergoing a political right turn of their own.