Following is a brief history of the world's understanding of transgender behavior and how it has been viewed and dealt with over time. It is in the form of questions, both to get the little gray cells working and to give me material for next month's column, in which you will find the answers.
Q: The first documented movement for the civil rights of crossdressers and transgenderists occurred in the early 1900's in what country?
Q: Homosexuality, Eonism, androgyny, sexual perversion, psychic hermaphrodism and transvestism are early terms for what we now call_____________?
Q: What German sexologist, and himself an openly gay crossdresser, distinguished the concept of "transvestism" from homosexuality in 1910?
Q: Who, developing the above theory, further distinguished transsexuals from transvestites?
Q: When and where did the first recorded modern attempt to surgically transform a man to a woman occur?
Q: What era in American politics so fueled a movement of conformity that anyone violating well-defined gender boundaries was targeted as a threat to national security?
Q: Who first used the term "transsexual"? When?
Q: In 1953 Alfred Kinsey proposed a wide-ranging study of the actual occurance of TGism in the U.S. What happened to that proposal?
Q: Who was luckier. He had his transsexual research generously funded by a private foundation and eventually became known as the "American father of transsexualism."
Q: "Ex G.I. George Jorgenson returns home as blonde bombshell, Christine Jorgenson" was the big headline in American newspapers in what year?
Q: Wher was the first official gender identity clinic in the U.S.?
Q: What was the first cross-dressing organization in the U.S. and who was the founder?
Anyone who knows a majority of the above answers needs to get out more! However, one can learn about the present and prepare for the future by knowing one's past. I am indebted to Gordene Olga Mackenzie whose book,Transgender Nation offers much more than a history of the phenomenon of TGism.
Tune in next month for the answers!
Dr. Anderson is a therapist in the San Francsico Bay Area. She can be reached at 415-776-0139. This article originally appeared in Devil Woman, the newsletter of the Diablo Valley Girls.
© 1996 by Barbara Anderson & 3-D Communications, Inc.