Two big anti-trans and anti-gay events in 1970s California

The final paragraph of Chapter 3 of Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema by Willow Maclay and Caden Gardner (Repeater, 2024):

“The end of the 1970s foreshadowed the incoming political and cultural backlash against the LGBTQ community. Gay men and women were the target of many discriminatory firings that made the news around this time. In 1976, physical education teacher Steve Dain made national news when he was fired from his position due to being a trans man. For years, Dain was the most visible trans man in the United States. He was blackballed from teaching for the rest of his life, despite having won his court case against the Northern California school district. The positive gains seen in the election of Harvey Milk for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1978, and his role in leading the successful fight against the homophobic Briggs Initiative/California Proposition 6 soon turned to tragedy when Milk and pro-gay rights San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by disgruntled Supervisor Member Dan White. The subsequent 1979 White Night Riots in San Francisco, in reaction to White’s light sentencing, showed widespread anger. These systems and institutions of authority had no interest in protecting queer and trans people. This would only get worse in the Reagan years of the 1980s.”

I didn't know Steve Dain, and I don't remember ever hearing of him before. I grew up on the opposite US Coast. Dain died in 2007.

What interests me about this is that, in addition to Renee Richards playing tennis, here was another 1970s U.S. sports "scandal" where the scandal was that the person in sports was trans. Indeed, one website says: "Steve lost his job and went to court. He was briefly a media topic, but the very next day the Renée Richards story pushed him off the front page."

Of course, transphobes got overexcited at the 1936 Berlin Olympics too.

Another thing that interests me is that Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated in 1978, while Dain was fighting in court. The paragraph is telling a history that links transphobia and homophobia in California: the transphobia that ousted Dain, the homophobia that killed Milk and Moscone.

More about his trial at the website The Berkeley Revolution.