Some Dates and Events on theTrans History Timeline

577 King Henry III of France frequently crossdressed and while dressed as a woman was referred to as her majesty by his courtiers. Even his male clothes were considered outrageous despite the flamboyant standards of 16th-century France.

1654 Queen Christina of Sweden (often considered bisexual) abdicated the thrown, dressed in men's clothing and renamed herself Count Dohna.

1676 MTF transsexual Abbe Francois Timoleon de Choisy attended Papal inaugural ball in female dress. His memoirs, published postmortem, offer the first written testimony of cross-dressing.

1700s "Molly houses" provided a space for the English gay community to meet, carouse and relate to one another. "Mollies" were men who often crossdressed and developed their own queer culture.

1728 Chevalier D'Eon, born Charles d'Eon, was a famous French spy/ambassador who was born male but lived a significant part of his/her life as a woman. Chevalier's birth sex was a hotly debated question.

1804 George Sand, born Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, became an accomplished French romantic writer as famous for her affairs as for her words. She was the first woman in modern European history to frequently wear men's clothes, shocking her contemporaries.

1839-1844 "Rebecca and her daughters," a group of male-to-female cross-dressers, battled throughout the Welsh countryside destroying road toll barriers, which were making the poor even poorer. These warriors also adopted the names and identities of women.

1850 Crow nation "woman chief" Barcheeampe was spotted by appalled white travelers in Wyoming and Montana; she was renown for her war exploits and for having several wives.

1861 Franklin Thompson, born Sarah Emma Edmonds, fought for the Union Army in the Civil War. During the war, Franklin served as a spy, nurse, dispatch carrier and later was the only woman mustered into the Grand Army of the Republic.

1886 We'Wha, an accomplished Zuni Weaver and potter, was two spirit - born male but lived as a woman. She spent six months in Washington, DC, and met President Grover Cleveland, who never realized this six-foot Zuni maiden was born male.

1897 Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld founded the first gay liberation organization in Germany (the Scientific Humanitarian Committee). Hirschfeld coined the term transvestite and was known to cross-dress himself.

1952 Christine Jorgensen is the first American whose sex reassignment surgery became public. Her surgery caused an international sensation, and for many, she was the first visible transsexual in the media.

1969 Transgender and gender-noncomforming people are among those who resisted arrest in a routine bar raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York City's Greenwich Village, thus helping to ignite the modern LGBT rights movement.

1974 Jan Morris, one of Britain's top journalists who covered wars and rebellions around the globe and even climbed Mount Everest, published Conundrum, a personal account of her transition. The book is now considered a classic.

1989 Celebrated jazz musician Billy Tipton died in Spokane, Washington, revealing that he was a woman. Tipton, who played in big bands in the 40s and 50s, lived for 56 years as a man, marrying several times and raising children.

1991 FTM activist Jamison "James" Green took over Lou Sullivan's FTM newsletter and transformed it into FTM International, Inc., the world's largest information and networking group for female-to-male transgender people and transsexual men.

1993 Cheryl Chase founded the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) to build awareness and offer support to intersex people.

1993 Transgender youth Brandon Teena was raped and murdered in Humboldt, Nebraska. This hate crime brought widespread attention to transgender discrimination and violence and became the subject of the award-winning film, Boys Don't Cry.

1997 Trans activist Leslie Feinberg published Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman, a who's who of transgender people throughout world history that traces the roots of transgender oppression.

Source - Bending the Mold: An Action Kit for Transgender Youth
Lambda Legal (2004)

Pleiades...gas and dust

Genderqueer

Genderqueer is a gender identity. A genderqueer person is someone who identifies as a gender other than "man" or "woman," or someone who identifies as neither, both, or some combination thereof. In relation to the gender binary (the view that there are only two genders), genderqueer people generally identify as more "both/and" or "neither/nor," rather than "either/or." Some genderqueer people see their identity as one of many different genders outside of man and woman, some see it as a term encompassing all gender identities outside of the gender binary, some believe it encompasses binary genders among others, some may identify as a-gender and some see it as a third gender in addition to the traditional two. The commonality is that all genderqueer people reject the notion that there are only two genders in the world. The term genderqueer is also occasionally used more broadly as an adjective to refer to people who are in some way gender-transgressive, and could have any gender identity. . . .

Lisa Jackson & Girl Friday - AOK

The Transgender Rock Music Explosion

by Robert Urban, March 17, 2005 Some of the highest profile transgendered people in the world are musicians, and they have done much to raise positive public awareness for both the transgender community and the broader gay community. Many years ago, Wendy Carlos hit platinum sales status with her 1968 recording Switched-On Bach, which propelled the Moog synthesizer into the public consciousness and won three Grammy Awards. More recently, Israeli singer Dana International won the Eurovision Song Contest, and now plays to sold-out converts around the world.

As with other categories in the larger gay community, transgenders have their own culture and voice, and this is what many trans artists aim to share. In doing so, they not only entertain but also inform.

Here are a few examples of some of the exciting new trans artists making waves across the U.S.

LISA JACKSON
In just a few years time, NYC-based transgender rock powerhouse Lisa Jackson and her band Girl Friday have risen to become one of the top GLBT music acts in the U.S. Lisa began as an occasional cross-dressing rocker playing Blondie songs in small clubs on the lower east side of Manhattan, but her “fem side,” as she calls it, eventually got the best of her. Good thing too: with great support from both GLBT and hetero fans, Lisa came to life, let the lady within come out, and started cranking out her own original songs.

Lisa is utterly fascinating to watch onstage. She deconstructs the typical, over-glitzed drag-queen look, and instead goes for a softer, quasi-Alicia Silverstone, middle-America mall-teen image. With little makeup, no cheap glitter, no spike heals, and no big hair, there is nothing "gaudy" about Lisa. She lets her considerable natural beauty shine through.

With her realistic "everygirl" approach to the feminine, and the fact that she really sings, (and plays great rock guitar), Lisa is poised on the cutting-edge of the new cross-dressing rock revolution. On the band's latest CD I Am AOK, Lisa's original song lyrics praise the bravery of those who dare to be "different," and promote tolerance of gender and sexual orientation differences.

“I hope those of you out there that are thinking about performing, and maybe putting on a dress for the first time, if you are feeling a little off beat--please go for it," says Lisa. "There are people around that will lift you up and help you make your dreams come true." . . .

A Sense of Anxiety a Shirt Won’t Cover

By ALEX KUCZYNSKI
Published: June 14, 2007

ON a recent afternoon, Dr. Michelle Copeland, a plastic surgeon whose offices face the Metropolitan Museum of Art, clicked her computer’s mouse as images of young men’s torsos flickered across the screen. Unlike the ancient Greek statues of Herakles or the bronze discus throwers in the newly renovated galleries across the street, the young men in Dr. Copeland’s digital images were a bit different: Rather than bearing the broad, flat chests of Greek athletes, their pectoral areas assumed a fuller, more feminine shape.

The patients were found to have enlarged male breasts, a condition known as gynecomastia. While it is not a new disorder, more men are seeking treatment for it, and new statistics from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons show that the majority are adolescent boys.

In 2006, according to the group, nearly 14,000 boys age 13 to 19 underwent surgery to reduce the size of their breasts. That represents 70 percent of all the male patients who had such surgery last year, and an increase of 21 percent over the previous year for that age group.

In a culture that increasingly encourages young boys to be body conscious, demand for chiseled torsos and sculpted pecs is rising, so much so that the number of boys ages 13 to 19 who had breast reduction surgery last year is equal to the total number of all men who had the procedure just two years earlier, in 2004.

The foremost reason is the rise in obesity, according to several plastic surgeons who were interviewed. At the same time, there is a new willingness among pediatricians and plastic surgeons to surgically treat enlarged male breasts.

Often, enlarged breasts are simply part of adolescence, most commonly caused by the hormonal fluctuation of puberty, according to the National Institutes of Health. But in a society that values chiseled abs and Rafael Nadal biceps, adolescent boys are willing to resort to surgery to fix problems their bodies might resolve later on their own. . . .