Recovering a Gender‐Transgressive Past: A Transgender Historiography

This chapter tracks the development of the field of transgender history over the past three decades and considers some of the ways in which its emergence has reshaped lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer history, histories of sexuality, and women’s and gender history more broadly. Susan Stryker has published Transgender History, which offers readers both a grounding in terminology and a historical survey of gender‐transgressive folks. There was much hand‐wringing in the field that the rise of gender history would be the downfall of women’s history and that scholars would focus on gender as a system and look away from recovering women’s lived experiences. Compounding the challenge of recovering trans subjects was the issue of terminology. In recovering the absolute celebrity status that Christine Jorgensen received when she returned to the United States in 1952, Joanne Meyerowitz forced historians to acknowledge the centrality of trans people to American history.