While cooking up pasta for dinner one December night, the kitchen radio, turned to a public radio station, poured out a story about a family affected by the challenges and choices of its father, who years after marriage and children transitioned to living as a transgender woman.
As the narrator explained, the children took the news in stride at the time, but later their parents’ marriage disintegrated. The story included interviews with the couple’s now-adult youngest daughter, in training to become a marriage and family therapist. She loved her father without question. But her parents’ divorce, she said, complicated her feelings about her father’s transition, something she blamed at the time for the destruction of her family.
As I half-listened while preparing marinara, I reflected on how often of late I’ve heard the voices of transgender people in news report, literature and film, something I don’t recall hearing much five, ten years or more ago. Today, even Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt talk openly about their 8-year-old daughter's preference for dressing as a boy and going by the name John.
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| Kids in the Jolie-Pitt family all wore suits to a recent movie premiere. |
While in the past, these individuals might have been the subject of ridicule or a harrowing tale that ended badly, today their stories and perspectives increasingly are taken seriously and woven into the flow of human experiences reflected in news, popular culture and the arts.
For instance, in September, when social media behemoth Facebook began enforcing a policy requiring members to use their “real” names, protests erupted from entertainers, drag queens and transgender people. They and supporters of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community argued that forcing them to reveal their legal names online could subject them to safety and privacy risks, such as violent acts, stalking and prejudice in their work lives. Ultimately, the trans community’s representatives secured a meeting with Facebook to reach a compromise.
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| Sister Roma, center, was among challengers to Facebook's short-lived "real" names policy. |
This advancement in civic acceptance -- at least in some spheres -- is something that was predicted by at least one historian I interviewed in 2002 for a story I penned about the role of transgender people through history. Sadly, the story -- part of a five-part package -- was prompted by a brutal murder of a transgender teenager in Fremont, California.
I feel a certain pride in having helped shine a light on a group of people, little understood at the time, who have long lived in the shadows but have, nonetheless, always belonged to the human family.
Published Nov. 17, 2002 in the Oakland Tribune/ANG Newspapers
Historical record reveals rich past of transgender people
By Monique Beeler
There's nothing novel about men dressing as women and women passing as men.
As far back as ancient Greece and Babylonia, transgender people fulfilled
central roles in certain temple ceremonies.
Hippocrates tells of Scythian nomads, ferocious warriors who rode horseback
across the steppes but otherwise lived as transvestites. Wearing women's
clothing, he writes, they ``do women's work, live like women and converse
accordingly.''
``Many societies accepted people in the cross-gender role,'' says history and
sexology professor Vern Bullough, author of ``Cross Dressing, Sex and
Culture.'' ``It's hard to say how many there were. There were probably
hundreds of them.''
Through the ages, some cultures proved more accepting than others of people
who preferred living as the opposite sex. Historically, roles available to
transgender individuals have proved as diverse as the human personality,
ranging from artisan weavers to powerful shamans.
Several societies around the world cultivated groups of emasculated men who
performed specific tasks, whether the eunuchs in China who guarded the
emperor's wives and concubines or the castrati of Italian opera who gave up
their genitalia to maintain boyishly high voices for life. Less coerced were
transgender American Indians, who were generally free to follow their own
inner promptings, says Diane Pearson, professor of American Indian Studies at
University of California, Berkeley.
``They could be medicine people, they could be healers, transgender men could
be hunters,'' Pearson says. ``It was how people wanted to develop.''
Some limits applied to women living as men, who likely would have been banned
from joining a war party. In most tribes, a woman with her ability to
menstruate, give and renew life would have been considered too powerful.
``Warrior societies having women ride out with them probably was not the ideal
thing to do, because (menstruating women) override men's power,'' she says.
Practices and attitudes varied among the approximately 600 North American
cultures.
Some groups, including the Zuni, used a term called ``two-spirit,'' a concept
reflected in the black and white photos of a well-known transgender individual
named We'Wha, Pearson says. Famed Western photographer Edward S. Curtis
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| We'Wha, a two-spirit Zuni |
snapped the images in 1886.* Born a man in 1849, We'Wha lived daily life as a woman. In photos, her face with its broad cheekbones and chin and heavy brow clearly appears masculine. Her off-the shoulder dresses, upswept hair styles and accessories such as gold hoops indicate a feminine leaning.
``The anthropologist who worked with him thought he was a woman for years,'' Pearson says. ``Part of his role was as a protector of children.''
When she died in 1896, We'Wha's people buried her in a woman's dress with a pair of men's trousers underneath, signalling her role as a bridge between the roles of men and women, Pearson says.
Other known transgender American Indians include:
- Finds Them and Kills Them, or Osh-Tisch, of the Crow nations (1854-1929). Born male and earned warrior status by joining an attack against a Lakota group for one day only. Thereafter, she dressed and lived as a woman, becoming an accomplished artisan.
- Hastiin Klah, a Navajo medicine person and artist (1867-1937). Born male, he adopted a female role becoming influential in developing the Navajo weaving style.
- Woman Chief, a Crow warrior (early 1800s-1854). Tall and strong, he
became adept at the skills of warriors, hunting, wrestling and horsemanship,
despite being born a woman. Earned a position as a warrior after shooting and
killing several attacking enemies. The Crows sang songs of his prowess and war
powers.
Woman Chief counts as a rare figure in history. Accounts of female-to-male
transgender individuals are less common than those of male-to-female.
Experts say fewer accounts of transgender women exist because typically it has
been easier for women to pass as the opposite sex. Historians report, however,
many instances of women dressing as men to escape the confines of their
prescribed sexual roles. In 18th century Holland, for example, many women
dressed as men to immigrate as colonists to Indonesia.
``Most of them did so to get some of the advantages of the male role,'' says
Bullough, founding director of the Center for Sex Research at California State
University, Northridge. ``We have records of hundreds and hundreds of them.''
Additionally, women were known to have dressed as men to fight in the
Revolutionary War, in the Civil War and with troops on the Western frontier.
Some also dressed as men and worked as cowboys.
``As late as the first World War, a number of women fought as men in the
Russian front,'' Bullough says.
Some institutions proved more difficult for transgender people to infiltrate
or influence, particularly the church.
``There were stories of women dressing as men to enter monasteries,'' says
Bernard Schlager, program director for the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies
at the Pacific School of Religion at Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union.
``The most famous example, of course, is Joan of Arc, dressing as a man and
leading the troops'' on a religious crusade.
Most Christian denominations in the past dealt with the transgender issue by
not talking about it, an approach that slowly has begun to shift in the past
10 to 20 years, Schlager says. Despite relatively greater openness, it took
one recent transgender graduate of PSR two years to find a position as an
ordained minister. Broader acknowledgement of the existence of transgender
people among church members and the population as a whole _ and their right to
full enfranchisement _ is still several years away, Schlager says.
But Bullough says he has seen great progress since the 1950s when transgender
people kept to themselves, meeting only in small, closed groups and avoided
public scrutiny.
Bolstered by the drive for human rights led by the feminist movement and the
gay and lesbian rights movement, the transgender community may be the next to
claim a more prominent civic voice.
``They're almost where homosexual people were in 1969,'' Bullough says. ``It's
changing. It will be interesting watching how much more public transgender
people become.''
* A 2014 Internet search turned up images of We'Wha, but none were
credited to Curtis.
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