Three waves of opposition to transgender bodies

G. Samantha Rosenthal is a scholar of transgender history.

Here's a recent article:

Pseudoscience Has Long Been Used to Oppress Transgender People: Three major waves of opposition to transgender health care in the past century have cited faulty science to justify hostility. G. Samantha Rosenthal & The Conversation US. Scientific American. February 12, 2024.

Rosenthal argues that there have been "three waves of opposition to transgender health care". I organized this blog post based on them.

Eddie Clark phrased this simply (Bluesky):

"...one of the UK's most widespread colonial exports was its 19th century, homophobic criminal code, which continued to corrupt its colonies long after the UK's exit from them.
Now doing the same with transphobic laws. As in so many contexts, transphobia is plagiarised homophobia."

Wave 1: Nazi Germany

Rosenthal writes: "In 1933, when the Nazis rose to power, they cracked down on transgender medical research and clinical practice in Europe."

One important beginning in modern trans history: "In 1919, the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, which became the world’s leading center for queer and transgender research and clinical practice" just as "the new science of hormones was just reaching maturation and entering mainstream consciousness." Following an "Enlightenment-era effort to classify and categorize the world’s life forms," some scientists "developed a hierarchy of human types based on race, gender and sexuality. They were inspired by social Darwinism, a set of pseudoscientific beliefs applying the theory of survival of the fittest to human differences." Everyone was classifying queer/trans people, but some wanted to do so for political liberation and others for genocide.

Gender-affirming care has existed in the United States since the 1940s. Rosenthal says: "Puberty blockers, hormone therapies and anatomical surgeries are neither experimental nor untested and have been safely administered to cisgender, transgender and intersex adults and children for decades," and opposition to this "has historically been rooted in pseudoscience."

Learn more

This history is known. Historians can ask questions:

“So who are the Bad Gays of Weimar Berlin? Were they the ambisexual performance freaks whose audacious and aggressive sexuality and playful confusion of gender norms triggered an entire society into fascism, as though the Nazis were an allergic reaction? Or were they people like Ernst Röhm, whose worship of masculine vitality… and who followed that impulse towards lifting fascists to power? Were they people like Friedrich Radszuweit, cautious and apolitical men who decided to stand back and stand by while fascism gained steam? Were they people like Hirschfeld, complicated and ambivalent men with deep reservoirs of idealism, knowledge, and compassion who were limited by their blind spots, shaped by and shaping racist and eugenic discourses, and often willing to accept rights for some at the expense of others?”

— Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. Bad Gays: A Homosexual History. London: Verso, 2022.

In late 2022, for the first time, "a court acknowledged the possibility that trans people were persecuted in Nazi Germany." — New Research Reveals How the Nazis Targeted Transgender People, Laurie Marhoefer, The Conversation, September 21, 2023.

This result followed 20 years of activism. In January 2023, the German parliament "dedicated the [annual Holocaust] remembrance to those killed by Nazis because of their gender identity and sexual orientation. The body also acknowledged decades of post-World War II persecution against LGBTQ+ people in Germany." — The Advocate

For more information about the colonial-era and industrial-era construction of "homosexuality," please read "There Were Gay Nazis". It's a 7-minute read on Medium.

See also this 2008 report from Human Rights Watch, "This Alien Legacy: The Origins of "Sodomy" Laws in British Colonialism."

Gay Neo-Nazis in the United States: Victimhood, Masculinity, and the Public/Private Spheres
Blu Buchanan
GLQ (2022) 28 (4): 489–513.
October 1, 2022
https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-9991299
The author said on Twitter: "This was YEARS in the making, and I hope it’s a valuable launching point for future scholar-organizers."
It's rentable from Duke University Press for $15 for 48 hours.

On evolving biological knowledge ("A Doctor’s Case Against Assigning Sex at Birth," Assigned Media, April 8, 2024), Emry Cohen, MD writes:

"It was not until 1923 that Theophilus Painter discovered the X and Y sex chromosomes, which was later confirmed by Tijo and Levan in 1956 where they were able to definitively describe human chromosomes. For those keeping track at home, this means that our knowledge of chromosomes and any of the resultant deeper understanding of sex occurred three years after Christine Jorgensen trail-blazed her way to international fame by transitioning to become a woman in the early 1950s."

Wave 2: 1970s

Rosenthal writes: "In 1979, a research report critical of transgender medicine led to the closure of the most well-respected clinics in the United States."

"In the 1950s and 1960s, transgender medicine bounced back in the U.S. Scientists and clinicians at several universities began experimenting with new hormonal and surgical interventions. In 1966, Johns Hopkins became the first university hospital in the world to offer trans health care.

By the 1970s, trans medicine went mainstream. Nearly two dozen university hospitals were operating gender identity clinics and treating thousands of transgender Americans. Several trans women and men wrote popular autobiographical accounts of their transitions. Trans people were even on television, talking about their bodies and fighting for their rights."

Rosenthal continues: A 1979 study by Meyer and Reter was "homophobic and classist in design" insofar as it defined the success of gender transitions by whether the people had "straight marriages and...gender-appropriate jobs." So: "The study exemplified the pseudoscientific beliefs at the heart of transgender medicine in the 1960s through the 1980s, that patients had to conform to societal norms – including heterosexuality, gender conformity, domesticity and marriage – in order to receive care. This was not an ideology rooted in science but in bigotry."

Willow Maclay and Caden Gardner, Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema (Repeater, 2024):

“The end of the 1970s, with the publishing of and support for The Transsexual Empire, the Johns Hopkins University halting trans surgeries and the closure of many other gender clinics, in addition to the HIV/AIDS crisis, heralded a dreadful new decade for many trans people. Indeed, transness was further pathologized by the medical community. After years of research, the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-III (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) was finally published in 1980 and employed the term ‘gender identity disorder’ (GID) to label those who were transsexual.

This would immediately have an impact, largely negative, and meet resistance. Much like homosexuals and their fight to have homosexuality removed from the DSM — a fight they ultimately won in 1973 — many trans people resented the pathologizing, medicalizing, and labeling entailed in having to be diagnosed with GID. The Standards of Care tied to being diagnosed with GID meant a long process full of contingencies and evaluation, often lasting years.”

Wave 3: Post-Covid

Chase Strangio: "Though contemporary political assaults on trans lives began in 2016, it was only in 2019 that the right found a fruitful opening for attack: Since 2020, 24 states have passed bills barring trans kids from participating in sports aligned with their gender identities." ("Trans Visibility Is Nice. Safety Is Even Better," New York Times, Feb. 15, 2024)

Hil Malatino (Trans Care, 2020) refers to "the present moment, when trans lives are recurrently and brutally utilized as a political wedge issue in order to consolidate horrifyingly ascendant forms of ethnonationalism and the ongoing violence of neoliberal austerity. This produces forms of hypervisibility that wear us out, that cultivate hyperalertness and anxiety that, for so many of us, make getting out of bed and getting through the day difficult."

Malatino goes on to mention the 2018 New York Times headline "‘Transgender’ Could be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration"; it was predictable, yet still felt shocking. Malatino explains:

"The strategy being deployed by the Department of Human Services under Trump — interpreting gender as reducible to biological sex, where biological sex is wrongly understood to be radically dimorphic and grounded, fundamentally and irrevocably, in the aesthetic appearance of the genitals at birth — is old hat. I lived and taught in the southern United States for years; I've listened to conservative politicians repeat this idiocy over and over again in order to attempt to push through transphobic legislation."

Rosenthal writes: "And since 2021, when Arkansas became the first U.S. state among now at least 21 other states banning gender-affirming care for minors, we have been living in a third wave."

See my article: 2024 anti-transgender initiatives in the US

As the anti-trans people would have it, as explicated by Charlie Jane Anders,

"The story goes something like this: Once upon a time, there were only a small number of trans people. And they were Good Trans People, who lived with dysphoria for years before going through the system and proving themselves, and at last having surgeries. They accepted that they weren't really ever going to be their real gender — they were going to be flawed facsimiles of men and women, and they knew that they were allowed to exist thanks to the charity of everybody else. These Good Trans People did everything in their meager power to walk unnoticed among the normal people, hoping for a modicum of tolerance and understanding. They were grateful for whatever crumbs the world tossed their way.

But then along came these Trans Activists, who are Bad Trans People. They imposed a heinous "gender ideology," which insisted that trans men are men and trans women are women, and non-binary people are valid. This is outrageous, and flies in the face of everything that good, decent people believe. But there are still Good Trans People out there, who do not subscribe to this harmful ideology — who know their place."

— Charlie Jane Anders, I'm Proud To Be a Bad Trans Person, September 8, 2021