Micaela SlotinReading Response 2/18This weeks reading and documentary really put into sharp focus the enormous contributions trans women (especially trans women of color) have made to trans activism, history, community organizing, and scholarship over the past hundred or so years. It also highlighted the enormous difficulties faced by that same community of women- violence, homelessness, poverty, and poor healthcare, all stemming from places of transmisogyny and discrimination. One of the themes that I found myself considering while reading Strykers Transgender History and watching her documentary Screaming Queens was that of labels and language. Strykers book chronicles the development and evolving of terms such as transvestite, transsexual, and transgender, which were all, at different points in time, used to refer to similar or the same) groups of gender-variant people. Present in Strykers documentary was also the label queen, as it was used to refer to drag queens and trans women who lived and worked in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. As I read and watched, I pondered how the use of terminology evolves as activist movements evolve, and especially how we then use those terms when speaking of historical events. For example, today, to call a transgender person transsexual or a transvestite, I feel, would be generally frowned upon by the transgender community- it seems these terms have fallen out of general favor unless they are self-applied labels. At the same time, the term transgender didnt really exist in the cultural lexicon at the time of, say, the Comptons Cafeteria Riot. As such, what words do you use to refer to those women? Do you use the present-day acceptable term transgender, given the current distaste for transsexual and transvestite? At the same time, because there was not as complex a concept of gender variance in those days, is it okay to label these women as transgender when they have had no chance to consider themselves within that framework and apply that label to themselves? It brings up important questions about labels and self-identity that I dont necessarily have the answers to. What blew me away the most in Strykers book was the rampant transphobia and transmisogyny present in the second wave feminist movements of the 1960s and 70s. Last year in queer studies we read about the incident with the Michigan Womyns Music Festival, but I wasnt aware of the rampant transmisogyny present in these movements until reading Strykers book. Most shocking and disturbing to me were the quotes from Janice Raymonds The Transsexual Empire, which, among other things, compared surgeries and medical procedures for trans people with Nazi doctor experiments in the 1930s and 40s. Though I do not agree with them in the slightest, I can somewhat conceptualize how second wave feminists, whose primary focus was on the destruction of the patriarchal and oppressive gender system, could somehow view trans women as appropriating an experience or reinforcing a binary sex and gender system. I cannot, however, even begin to fathom how making connections between surgeries for trans people and involuntary, brutal medical experimentation on prisoners of war could be beneficial to anyones cause or argument. This kind of debate reinforces the incredible importance of intersectionality in feminist and queer movements, especially in regards to trans bodies and lives.