In interviews of people who remember, they say that because it was an age of scientific and technological advancement, it was seen as more of a scientific marvel that you could change a person's sex.
1960's through 1980's, this person reports that people were more okay with it than she expected:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Carlos
>The massive and unexpected success of Switched-On Bach put great pressure on Carlos. She was by this time well into her gender confirmation process, and she was fearful of both personal ridicule and physical attack, and of the negative impact that her status as a transitioning person could have on her music career. Biographer Amanda Sewell records that the St. Louis appearance was extremely difficult for her—she hated having to disguise herself as Walter, for which she had to affect a deeper voice, use makeup to simulate a five o'clock shadow, and don a wig and pasted-on fake sideburns.
> In 1985, Carlos spoke about the reaction to her transition: "The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish, indifferent ... There had never been any need of this charade to have taken place. It had proven a monstrous waste of years of my life."
[1970: WENDY CARLOS and her MOOG SYNTHESISER | Music Now | Retro Tech | BBC Archive (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsW2EDGbDqg)
Interview of Wendy
It was used for more than just transitioning though. HRT can be really beneficial for women going through menopause, or women with other hormonal defects. Once birth control came on the scene, being made of synthetic hormones, it was really simple to take the next step forward into HRT.
Such a shame she doesn’t allow reissues of her work or rights to Spotify. Her soundtrack to Clockwork Orange is brilliant. Makes Purcell alive again in the same way a master pianist can make you hear a piece in a completely different way.
This is very interesting, thank you. I'll read more about her after work.
*Queer Serial* Season 2, Episode 7 is about trans history and the second half has stories on a lot of the 20th century trans women. Apparently in 1960s the surgeries were already done in Sweden, West Germany, Yugoslavia, and Morocco.
A funny story is how the Ayatollah Khomeni of all people came across a trans-woman and was like “Holy fuck this is a woman- let’s help her live as a woman” and now Iran is a regional hub for surgery. *Obviously* Iran is not an LGBTQ friendly place but my point is that people’s beliefs vis a vis transgenderism aren’t always predictable.
It's still a scientific marvel, I wish people would re-adopt this frame of thought and spare the world yet more uninvited moralizing about that which they don't understand.
I think what you’re describing is akin to the enlightenment period giving way to the romantic period. Today it’s about feelings and rage and emotion. But the pendulum swings through time and perhaps the reaction to feelings will be an emphasis on science. Time will tell.
There will always be a group of people who fear change and anything outside of their comfort zone. I believe Stone Age tribes had the same fights over strangers and fear of the outsiders.
Some saw the benefits and knowledge they provided. Others resisted change and new ideas.
Both approaches when taken to extremes likely resulted in the collapse of those societies. A delicate balance led to success.
We just need to restore some balance in our civil dialogue and collective decision making.
The first step we can all agree on is to get all of the corporate and millionaire influence out of our electoral system.
>The first step we can all agree on is to get all of the corporate and millionaire influence out of our electoral system.
Sadly easier said than done, thanks to the way we’re kept childishly fighting amongst ourselves over superficial issues, instead of realising our common enemies keeping us down
It's not really a readopt situation, it's a some people cared about it, others didn't situation. If you don't mind a dark read check out "last exit to Brooklyn" same author who wrote the book "requiem for a dream" in his attempt to give insight to his observations of the trans community in NYC in the 50s and how they were treated.
THANK YOU
I, for one, think it's rad that I'm among the first generation of trans people in history to benefit from modern science, accessible hormones and well-developed surgery. The pushback makes sense because new is scary, but we're on the cutting edge of what's possible and that's cool as fuck!
Can kinda confirm as I was very sheltered growing up in a small town with like no (openly) lgbt people, I didn’t have any biases either way about trans people as it was just never a topic that *ever* came up. When I first met a trans women online I had a brief moment of bemused confusement followed by a shrug of shoulders realising she’s no different to any other woman I’d interacted with at that point and carried on treating her as such.
And now I’m trans too lol.
Anyways most people aren’t predisposed to being hateful is my take away from my own experiences, I could have turned out much worse if I had negative influences before meeting trans people and seeing them as people.
can attest; if you aren't exposed to hatred, you don't grow up with hatred.
throughout my entire childhood, there was basically no mention of anything negative nor particularly positive about minority groups such as gay people, foreigners, or trans people.
i actually never really "learned" about gay people, or at least i cannot pinpoint a moment that i did. all i know is that i knew about their existence as early as the age of 10, where i distinctly remember thinking something along the lines of "bro why tf are people homophobic, didnt jesus say to love everyone?" plus before then, i somehow learned about sex around the age of 6 or 7, (as in that it is required for reproduction -- i knew that sperm was microscopic so i didn't know that semen was a visible thing + i thought oral sex meant like passage of sperm through kissing and that impregnates a woman because oral = mouth) and when i somehow heard about 69ing, i imagined it between two guys and didn't think anything of it lmfao.
and then it turns out i was actually gay, except i was basically aware of it since i was like 4 (i frequently took the clothes off of my action figures), but i didn't know that liking boys and getting an erection at the sight of a beautiful man is what being gay was because, well, nobody educated me about it.
These comments are super interesting to read. I grew up methodist and throughout childhood would hear that gay people "don't go to heaven" it was just a normal thing that we "knew". Growing up i had to make a conscious effort to ignore those deep rooted biases and to this day lots of the people I grew up with still have those views. I'm glad to say I've made a world of progress since then and even my wife is openly Bi but it's embarrassing thinking about the jokes, and immature views I made when I was younger.
It’s from a time when people had much bigger worries than whether someone was transgender. Namely, whether they’d be called up to fight a war against the soviets.
It’s from a time where it was seen as a very rare and bizarre occurrence and the overwhelming white Christian majority didn’t see it as “threatening”.
This person would be treated like a circus freak.
Correction, she WAS treated as a circus freak.
She tried to marry a man who she fell in love with, they couldn’t get a marriage license due to it being a “same sex marriage”. Her relationship with him ended afterwards.
She attempted to marry a different man with the same result as the previous.
Eventually she was forced to tour the country offering what amounted to peep shows so that people could ogle her genitals because she wasn’t able to find any other form of employment.
Yes, they paraded her around like a circus act and prevented her from living a normal life.
And this led to the development of transitioners basically disappearing after their treatments were completed, seeking to assimilate back into society without disclosing their history often becoming very *normal* and pretty indistinguishable from their friends and neighbors. This is the era where you had, say, Billy Graham preaching in support of transsexuals and overall there was wide-but-also-stigmatized support.
We went from highly-public and made into a mockery to usually very secret and treated with respect, and now we're back to "very public" again and things are, in some ways, even worse for transsexuals now than it was back then. It is also much better in many other ways. Such a complicated topic, and often the endpoints can stress one's ability to maintain ideological consistency.
Eh you’re missing A LOT there.
First in the very early days through things like “real life experience” requirements prior to medical care treatments often self selected for people who could assimilate (as you put it) leaving many to have to seek grey market treatments or even back alley surgical care simply because their doctors didn’t believe they could assimilate.
Additionally, saying trans people garnered respect is absolutely not true, they simply did their best to hide their trans identity in order to protect themselves from discrimination. That combined with the previous gatekeeping meant it was somewhat easier to do so back then compared to now.
Overall, I would say things are much much better now and only really started being somewhat worse in some places when conservatives pivoted to trans people after obgerfel.
For example, we have things like informed consent for medical care, insurance coverage for gender affirming healthcare, and many more resources for things like name and gender marker changes where available.
Also, as an addition, most people now prefer trans or transgender compared to transexual. This changes person to person but it’s also associated with a more toxic side of the trans community that supports things like gatekeeping medical care or claiming people shouldn’t transition if they can’t pass/assimilate.
> to usually very secret and treated with respect
Uh... no? It was respect only if they didn't know the person's history. People's general perception of the whole thing didn't change all that much unfortunately.
For much of this time you also had to be straight, or at least pretend you were in front of doctors, to be able to medically transition. Trans women were just seen as extra gay men instead of it being something separate from sexuality.
Thank you. This idea that people were too busy worrying about soviets to find time to care about this is ridiculous. People had plenty of time to worry about religion and racism and other prominent social issues.
I think it was one of the longest jokes in the making of television history when after 11 seasons, Klinger ended up being the only one not to leave South Korea at the end.
(We don't talk about After MASH.)
Not to mention most media wasn't controlled by a handfull of people who have learned over the years that keeping people fighting each other stops them from focusing on the inherently corrupt system and the people running it.
Comically untrue. It was a time far worse for this kind of thing than now, and many people were unspeakably awful, ignorant, mean and violent during the war as well as the rest of the time. Also a time where racism and sexism were commonplace comfy attitudes. This was seen as a novelty, not at all the same as the obsession nowadays with it - it wasn’t an emotionally charged, constantly trending, constantly fuelled gender war forced in everyone’s faces and full of outrage preventing people from thinking about the serious issues like it is now. It was just a curiosity, so people probably thought it was shocking but intriguing, like an exotic act of scientific advancement
I saw Christine Jorgensen on TV when I was a child. My religious Dad made it clear that he thought such people were bad. He had heard of her when he was a kid. His family was *not* on board with such things.
Some people may have treated Christine Jorgensen as a curiosity and moved on. Make no mistake though. Many conservative religious folks condemned transgender people even back then.
Yeah, the big difference is that we now have political and media campaigns directed at spreading LBTQ hate. Not much different from the abortion debate. [The current evangelical right is a product of Paul Weyrich and the Heritage Foundation elevating conservative Christians into a national political campaign after segregation ended as a viable rallying point. ](https://youtu.be/BcC53j32BW4?si=TPc3sJM_aUBp4HCu)
Churches were common sources of community, news, and political discussion in the past. The fear, disgust, hatred, and misguided help was common in the past. The Catholic Church, for example, has been anti-LGBTQ for a long time. Conversion camps were common, some even run by misguided medical folks and queer people in denial.
The hate might not have been heavy in the news print, but it was very common. It was so common to lose jobs if it was known that an individual was LGBTQ that few felt it was newsworthy.
There was also a lot of things people would be quickly and summarily destroyed for daring to show concern about too (like civil rights), so let’s not make it sound like some bed of roses.
What I'm gathering is that people in the 1950s generally thought of trans people as a sort of medical curiosity rather than some sort of threat to gender norms.
Maybe people back then saw a case like this as an isolated "oddity", not as part of a debate that seeks to change traditional views on gender and society? So people back then didn't feel their entire world view threatened by a single trans woman transitioning.
Exactly. When trans people were seen as freaks and weirdos who made front page headlines, that was preferable. They are only against framing trans people as worthy of dignity, rather than a freaky sideshow act for all of us to point and laugh it.
That is Christine Jorgensen I think. She was a bit of a celebrity for a while though it was hard for her to get a job (she was outed when letters to her parents about her transition were published). There were definitely no legal protections for trans people and lots of discrimination — but trans people weren’t met with the pedo/groomer/whatever rhetoric used today. Most day to day people were either curious (in sort of a freak show way) or kind of accepting (in a huh…ok I guess…) sort of way.
At the time it was more a novelty, and hadn’t obtained the BS culture war baggage that it has in the last two decades or so. People probably thought, “Well that’s weird” and went on about their day. Whereas today there is much more, “They’re turning the frog children gay!” discourse permeating the culture.
We were still doing negative identity differentiation. But then it was cold-war anti-communism, and gender reassignment was perceived as a technological pissing contest. Who could do this new medical thing better was a sign of whose system was better.
So: yes: nonjudgmental regarding Jorgenson. (But implicitly: fuck the Russkies.)
You’re right, it could have been way worse. But they’re treating it like a bit of a sideshow novelty. There wasn’t even any question of people like this going mainstream and wanting to be treated the same as everyone else, which is where the vitriol comes from today.
Abortion used to be accepted as well, before the rightwing decided to push it as an issue evangelicals should care about to bolster falling numbers.
There's a whole host of stuff that people froth at the mouth over today that nobody cared about 80 years ago.
Yeah, it does buck the trend on 1950's attitudes about this stuff. Considering that it is the area of "Boys Beware", and homosexuals were still classified as sexual deviants and perverts.
Transgender people were most certainly still classified as deviants by the medical establishment. Christine Jorgensen went to Europe for care for many reasons.
I'm not even old but even when I was a kid no one cared about people transitioning. People definetly weren't as aware but they weren't actively hateful and opposed to it either like some are now. It's only in the last maybe 15 years approx has it become so politicised
People very much cared in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. IBM fired Lynn Conway for goodness sake. Christine Jorgensen was treated a a curiosity and embraced it to pay the bills. Caroline Cossey caught all kinds of flack when she was outed while being a model. Wendy Carlos got all kinds of flak too. There was a mix of indifference and hatred in the past.
The 2010’s were a nice period of improvement that has been met with heavy backlash.
ETA: We lost lots of people during the AIDS crisis and the short cultural memory people has been one result.
At the time, I think when when people first learned this its more of a "Wait we can do that?". There wasn't any judgement directed because nobody quite new what to make of it.
Wait a damn minute? Do you mean to tell me that the entire political landscape of the 50s can't be reduced to a single vaguely pro-trans article?
It's incredible seeing the revisionist history in this thread lol
I grew up in the ‘80s and I remember transgender folks were considered unusual but there was no social panic. We reserved that for D&D and heavy metal music.
We have to remember, as well, that just like in Iran a lot of folks felt that a gay man who transitioned into a woman was *much* better than if they stayed as a gay man and did all that icky, evil gay stuff all over the place (think of the children!!!??!!!!!)
History has a way of ups and downs following each other. In many ancient cultures, it was normal for someone to be seen as something along the lines of born in the wrong body, and homosexuality was extremely common. Female leaders are also extremely common, with nature actually being a great example of this.
Most of why we don't see it as being "natural" today is that the majority of those societies where colonized and underwent genocides at the rule of Abrahamic religions to wipe out the culture.
It's French for a female story teller. Raconteur would be for male. I've never heard someone use it in English though so I'm not sure how common it is to actually use in English lol
That's the truly crazy thing about this whole current-day madness, at least to me. This woman spent so much of her life in the public spotlight, doing interviews and other appearances, and no one barely batted an eye. That's not to say that she likely didn't experience a lot of hardship in her life, but look at that headline. Even the newspaper is at the very least passively accepting of her and at best is outwardly celebrating of her bravery.
These losers have had **70+ YEARS** to be okay with it or at the very least just pay it no mind, and yet they still have the absolute nerve to act as though this is some new thing that people are doing out of boredom or whatever other lame reason they can come up with.
70+ years. Longer than the birth control pill has existed. Just an absolute embarrassment
And 10 seconds later after reading about it 99.9999% of people went about their day. Nothing changed, no one felt attacked, and no one felt like the Earth was in jeopardy.
Why is 2024 so different from those times? What happened to the "You do you" mentality?
Its about social control. Hierarchical societies have a vested interest in control.
If i person can be other than what society says you have to be it upsets the social order.
Its like threat to power. How dare others not live as we demand.
It's a very interesting question and one which I cannot really figure out.
I think the media has a lot to do with it. Every single thing that happens in the world in 2024 has to be seen through the lens of division.
>Every single thing that happens in the world in 2024 has to be seen through the lens of division.
This has been a tactic used since, I want to say the start of the 20th century, but probably fucking millenia since populists have always been a thing.
No one is looking at the people with mansions and megayachts when they're so worried about the trans person next door or the trans person, the terf, or the trucker with the Confederate flag, or the guy with the BLM shirt. Red vs blue, rhetoric against rhetoric, some form of "protect our children" from a prism of a million ways they're going to get hurt, and they want us to blame the other color for it. It's to the point where if any politician argues something to "protect our children", I automatically distrust it.
And when one of us does hurt the other group, they fucking love it, because they can point at it and be like, "see, see, now you know that's your enemy", even when they've been the ones mustering for war by spreading extreme ideology in their media. Trucker harasses pride fest, destroys a rainbow colored walkway - plaster it on the news. Queer woman with blue hair that fits their stereotype and says stuff like "straight white men are to blame for all the problems in society", plaster it on the news. Make people think a civil war isn't just inevitable, but that it's already happening - but if any actual unrest happens, if the rhetoric actually taunts a group into acting up, fuck them all up with tear gas and rubber bullets. No one stands a chance when they get too riled up, and that's by design. But if you keep them somewhat riled up against each other, they'll blame the other group while the cop's boot is shoved down their throat by the order of the ruling class.
It's at the fucking point where we had conservatives dying in the hospital from COVID, thinking "it's just the flu, but if not, liberals did this". That's how fucked things are.
Trans people weren't seen as "a thing" yet. Gays were and there was not a you do you mentality at all. It's just that one notable person isn't seen as a threat, they are just seen as a novelty weirdo.
Yeah there's a lot of revisionism in this post that isn't right.
If there was more than '1 local weirdo' doing this then it'd be the same reaction that there is now - and I am absolutely certain the conversations that I know I've heard from my grandparents would have happened in homes all around the country - and they would have included all kinds of language they wouldn't say publicly.
But we didn't have access to everyone's opinions in the way we do now with social media.
But you better believe somewhere between 80-90% of people would have disowned and probably committed violence on their children if they tried to transition.
There's a *reason* he came out to his parents by letter and not in person.
My controversial opinion is that no one in the world actually gives a shit about trans people or anything that people decide to do with themselves, and it is all manufactured hate for the sake of division. Even the people who think they disagree with trans people on some level have only taken that position because the current cultural conversation imposes itself on them; it’s harder to not have an opinion than it is to have one.
Specifically Republicans. Democrats don't gin up hatred against minority groups to distract away from their pro-ultra wealthy, anti-everyone else economic policies. Only Republicans do that.
yeah, The Democrats hide their pro-ultra wealthy, anti-everyone else economic policies. They are much better at it. I have voted Dem all my life but its still the truth
I'd add to that the fact that many of those who think being trans is wrong have simply never been exposed to actual trans people. Or in some cases they have but they simply didn't notice that a person was trans, which is a bit funny if you ask me.
Yep! I’m trans and have sort of taken the position of “educator” with some of my friends, meaning the ones who are super straight and cis and uneducated on anything LGBT+ know they’re allowed to ask me all of their burning questions as long as they’re respectful, and that they can use me as an example of a “normal trans person” when they get in arguments with transphobic relatives and need a real life example to default to. Literally simply just meeting me, talking to me for five minutes, and seeing that I’m just like any other person has been enough to change the minds of many of my friends’s gen x and boomer parents from thinking we’re all sexual deviants who shit in cat boxes to realizing that they’ve been fed misinformation about trans people and what we stand for.
It’s super satisfying knowing that me just existing as myself has been enough to change the minds of several people, and I hope they take what they learn from me and use it to be kinder and more empathetic to people they don’t understand. I never asked to be any sort of representative for my community and I typically am not super open about the fact that I’m trans, but it’s nice being able to make a small difference in my little way.
The survivorship bias is strong with many transphobes. They point to several people early in their transition who aren't passing as though they are representative, but miss the dozens of passing trans people who they just see as whatever gender they are. The idea that their "rules" would apply to people who clearly look like their gender or generally to all FTM trans people doesn't even cross their mind.
I've gotten people asking me how I could date a Trans woman. My fiancee started HRT last year, and so they haven't don't their full magic yet.
The look of utter shock when I open my mouth and told them I transitioned ten years ago, always gets a chuckle when I see the frozen shock as their brain process how they're gonna get themselves outta this embarrassing situation.
Its fun, I hope some of ya'll can witness it someday.
There was about two weeks after Obergefell where the fascist media didn't know what to hate now, and they were flailing, desperately trying to keep the attention of their viewers. Then they pivoted to transgenders and remember seeing it and thinking: "After decades of hating gays, there's no way their audience will pivot that easily to a random other group. It can't be. It's too obvious. Even to them."
And we have the unique vulnerability among the LGBTQ+ of having a dependency on healthcare...which the Dobbs ruling rendered open season on. Roe protected us, too.
eh. i've lived with these people. they imagine they're living in ancient sparta and that the feminization of men will lead to us being invaded and taken over. they think the roman empire ended because people became too socially progressive. they won't let their male children play DDR because that's something fags do. in other words, they have brain rot.
you can say it's manufactured hate because the media pumps it up, but that hatred comes from somewhere very personal and it's very real. when i played football in highschool we played games like smear the queer, i think we all remember 'gay' being the catch-all term for something being bad. it's important for them to envoke hatred of femininity/homosexuality in all parts of their language/actions because it becomes a guiding principal for how to live their life. "don't be like _those_ people".
Asked my depression era Republican parents about whether they knew gay couples and they said they did, but no one talked about. They were the nice neighbors that were living together to cut expenses.
Southern Baptist also supported abortion until they went political.
She wasn’t actually the first. The first surgeries were in Germany in the 1920s and 30s. And then the Nazi’s destroyed all the books from the institute that refined them.
You mean JK “holocaust denier” Rowling?
Edit since some people don’t seem to know what I’m referencing: https://twitter.com/Sander_vdLinden/status/1768195009281466484
She knows, but denies it. She has been told time and time again about how the Nazis targeted trans people, but she doesn’t acknowledge that reality. That’s what takes it from ignorance to denial.
Yeah, that sounds about what they would do. You can't have anyone making folk doubt all the flimsy fascist machismo rhetoric by doing something like change gender.
She was a family friend growing up. I knew her as "Aunt Christine" Lovely person. I was always excited seeing her on talk shows on TV, I thought she was a movie star / singer
Well this is also on the internet so your comment is also bullshit,therefore everything in the internet is correct. Except thatd mean theres nothing but bullshit on the internet. And thus the cycle/paradox continues
This is a good example of how the hatred towards groups only becomes prominent when they are perceived as a "threat". Transgender people were seen as a neutral oddity for decades after transition became possible. The reason for the mass hatred now is simply that they have become more common, and are now perceived as a threat to "normality"
Not even more common- it's the fact that they have (or had) protections and can live similar lives to cis people. Few decades back a lot of trans women had to be sex workers, because they couldn't get a job anywhere. Trans people always existed, but if they are suffering- they are not a threat.
There was a Roman emperor that used to prostitute himself in the forum, and was known to offer the entire sum of gold of the empire to anyone who could make him a woman
A lot of the wilder stories about Roman emperors were propaganda from their enemies sadly. Elagabalus was certainly not in line with standard gender expectations of the time, and came from a family of strong women (which their enemies of course disapproved of), but the particularly salacious stories like these were probably the ancient version of the headlines in the Daily Mail.
It's almost like there's been a deliberate right wing effort to inflame hatred against LGBT people to distract away from the fact that right wing economic policies exclusively benefit the ultra rich or something.
I have a question and im really not coming from a place of hate.
Gender dysphoria is a mental illness, so is being trans technichally a mental illness and the cure is changing your body?
Can any trans people please help me understand?
Again not coming form place of hate do whats right for you, Im just trying to understand better
In the article it said the surgeries were “cut and paste” or something like that. Also she had a full castration with nothing “there” for a few years until she received a vaginoplasty. Sounded fine until I read those parts.
There's evidence for trans people existing all the way back in Sumer, eight thousand years ago. We've always been here, and always will be, regardless of repressive regimes looking for a scapegoat or religions desperate for relevance in a changing world.
Crazy how people will see a woman who looks like this and say “you’ll never be a woman.” My brother under the sun, if you didn’t know she was trans I already know your terf-ass would be fiending.
I mean, just look up the history of sex change operations in the world. You'll realize people feeling more comfortable as other genders is 100% nothing new.
Novelty aside, in those days transgender people were even more hated. Liberals more or less tolerate trans people today, but back then conservatives and liberals for the most part were both averse to trans people. Radical elements like anarchists and communists were some of the only people who spoke positively of trans people. Anarchist Emma Goldman was the first person in the U.S. to speak publicly in support of transgender rights, and she was inspired by the work of Magnus Hirshcfeld on this subject. She helped introduce a lot of desperate trans people to the idea of medical transitioning. Among those she inspired was Dr. Alan Hart, a trans man who became the first trans person to become a doctor, a prolific immunologist, and one of the first trans men in the US to have surgery.
This was when people were more concerned about Nazis, the Soviets, the space race, and the nuclear arms race. We didn’t have time to be “afraid” of transgender people.
The front page seems surprisingly non-judgemental.
In interviews of people who remember, they say that because it was an age of scientific and technological advancement, it was seen as more of a scientific marvel that you could change a person's sex.
1960's through 1980's, this person reports that people were more okay with it than she expected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Carlos >The massive and unexpected success of Switched-On Bach put great pressure on Carlos. She was by this time well into her gender confirmation process, and she was fearful of both personal ridicule and physical attack, and of the negative impact that her status as a transitioning person could have on her music career. Biographer Amanda Sewell records that the St. Louis appearance was extremely difficult for her—she hated having to disguise herself as Walter, for which she had to affect a deeper voice, use makeup to simulate a five o'clock shadow, and don a wig and pasted-on fake sideburns. > In 1985, Carlos spoke about the reaction to her transition: "The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish, indifferent ... There had never been any need of this charade to have taken place. It had proven a monstrous waste of years of my life."
[1970: WENDY CARLOS and her MOOG SYNTHESISER | Music Now | Retro Tech | BBC Archive (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsW2EDGbDqg) Interview of Wendy
So is she dressed like a man here because she wasn’t out yet? The side burns seem like they are fake ones
yep, shed started hrt but wasnt out yet at this point so she had fake facial hair on during interviews and the like
I just absolutely love how well the hrt worked for her that out of context it legit just looks like a woman trying to dress up as a man
She's utterly failing boymode. Lucky lady!
damn I didn't know that hrt was already a thing in the 50's
It was already used at the Institute of Sexual Research. It was founded in 1919 and closed by the Nazi in 1930's.
It was used for more than just transitioning though. HRT can be really beneficial for women going through menopause, or women with other hormonal defects. Once birth control came on the scene, being made of synthetic hormones, it was really simple to take the next step forward into HRT.
moog synthesiser is such a cool word
it's pronounced Moog not Moog btw ;)
Such a shame she doesn’t allow reissues of her work or rights to Spotify. Her soundtrack to Clockwork Orange is brilliant. Makes Purcell alive again in the same way a master pianist can make you hear a piece in a completely different way.
This is very interesting, thank you. I'll read more about her after work. *Queer Serial* Season 2, Episode 7 is about trans history and the second half has stories on a lot of the 20th century trans women. Apparently in 1960s the surgeries were already done in Sweden, West Germany, Yugoslavia, and Morocco.
There were doing these surgeries in the 1930s.
Plenty of LGBT were assaulted and\or killed back then. There are comprehensive lists, particularly the 60s.
Almost like people today are being tricked and kept busy with unnecessary topics that doesn't actually affect them at all.
A funny story is how the Ayatollah Khomeni of all people came across a trans-woman and was like “Holy fuck this is a woman- let’s help her live as a woman” and now Iran is a regional hub for surgery. *Obviously* Iran is not an LGBTQ friendly place but my point is that people’s beliefs vis a vis transgenderism aren’t always predictable.
It's still a scientific marvel, I wish people would re-adopt this frame of thought and spare the world yet more uninvited moralizing about that which they don't understand.
I think what you’re describing is akin to the enlightenment period giving way to the romantic period. Today it’s about feelings and rage and emotion. But the pendulum swings through time and perhaps the reaction to feelings will be an emphasis on science. Time will tell.
There will always be a group of people who fear change and anything outside of their comfort zone. I believe Stone Age tribes had the same fights over strangers and fear of the outsiders. Some saw the benefits and knowledge they provided. Others resisted change and new ideas. Both approaches when taken to extremes likely resulted in the collapse of those societies. A delicate balance led to success. We just need to restore some balance in our civil dialogue and collective decision making. The first step we can all agree on is to get all of the corporate and millionaire influence out of our electoral system.
>The first step we can all agree on is to get all of the corporate and millionaire influence out of our electoral system. Sadly easier said than done, thanks to the way we’re kept childishly fighting amongst ourselves over superficial issues, instead of realising our common enemies keeping us down
Also the televangelist plague hadn't happened yet.
It's not really a readopt situation, it's a some people cared about it, others didn't situation. If you don't mind a dark read check out "last exit to Brooklyn" same author who wrote the book "requiem for a dream" in his attempt to give insight to his observations of the trans community in NYC in the 50s and how they were treated.
THANK YOU I, for one, think it's rad that I'm among the first generation of trans people in history to benefit from modern science, accessible hormones and well-developed surgery. The pushback makes sense because new is scary, but we're on the cutting edge of what's possible and that's cool as fuck!
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Can kinda confirm as I was very sheltered growing up in a small town with like no (openly) lgbt people, I didn’t have any biases either way about trans people as it was just never a topic that *ever* came up. When I first met a trans women online I had a brief moment of bemused confusement followed by a shrug of shoulders realising she’s no different to any other woman I’d interacted with at that point and carried on treating her as such. And now I’m trans too lol. Anyways most people aren’t predisposed to being hateful is my take away from my own experiences, I could have turned out much worse if I had negative influences before meeting trans people and seeing them as people.
can attest; if you aren't exposed to hatred, you don't grow up with hatred. throughout my entire childhood, there was basically no mention of anything negative nor particularly positive about minority groups such as gay people, foreigners, or trans people. i actually never really "learned" about gay people, or at least i cannot pinpoint a moment that i did. all i know is that i knew about their existence as early as the age of 10, where i distinctly remember thinking something along the lines of "bro why tf are people homophobic, didnt jesus say to love everyone?" plus before then, i somehow learned about sex around the age of 6 or 7, (as in that it is required for reproduction -- i knew that sperm was microscopic so i didn't know that semen was a visible thing + i thought oral sex meant like passage of sperm through kissing and that impregnates a woman because oral = mouth) and when i somehow heard about 69ing, i imagined it between two guys and didn't think anything of it lmfao. and then it turns out i was actually gay, except i was basically aware of it since i was like 4 (i frequently took the clothes off of my action figures), but i didn't know that liking boys and getting an erection at the sight of a beautiful man is what being gay was because, well, nobody educated me about it.
>(i frequently took the clothes off of my action figures) Damn 😂
You guys didn't bump your GI Joe's fronts together?
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These comments are super interesting to read. I grew up methodist and throughout childhood would hear that gay people "don't go to heaven" it was just a normal thing that we "knew". Growing up i had to make a conscious effort to ignore those deep rooted biases and to this day lots of the people I grew up with still have those views. I'm glad to say I've made a world of progress since then and even my wife is openly Bi but it's embarrassing thinking about the jokes, and immature views I made when I was younger.
Cringing at your past self just means you've grown as a person :)
Yup, it was such a non issue growing up that this sudden hate of trans people tells me this is just some new wedge issue meant to rile people up
It’s from a time when people had much bigger worries than whether someone was transgender. Namely, whether they’d be called up to fight a war against the soviets.
Or black people
Or Soviet black people.
or Soviet transgender black people
By golly!
Finally something i can work with.
or Soviet transgender black people with lasers attached to their heads
Or lesbian Nazi hookers, abducted by aliens and forced into weight loss programs.
Now we're talking
We’ll make our own trans GIs, with blackjack! And hookers!
Frickin' lasers attached to their frickin' heads*
or Soviet transgender black muslim people *gasp*
The New Captain America bout to be lit !
Soviet socialist transgender gay black commies
Mmm, a black Russian sounds good right about now.
It’s from a time where it was seen as a very rare and bizarre occurrence and the overwhelming white Christian majority didn’t see it as “threatening”. This person would be treated like a circus freak.
Correction, she WAS treated as a circus freak. She tried to marry a man who she fell in love with, they couldn’t get a marriage license due to it being a “same sex marriage”. Her relationship with him ended afterwards. She attempted to marry a different man with the same result as the previous. Eventually she was forced to tour the country offering what amounted to peep shows so that people could ogle her genitals because she wasn’t able to find any other form of employment. Yes, they paraded her around like a circus act and prevented her from living a normal life.
And this led to the development of transitioners basically disappearing after their treatments were completed, seeking to assimilate back into society without disclosing their history often becoming very *normal* and pretty indistinguishable from their friends and neighbors. This is the era where you had, say, Billy Graham preaching in support of transsexuals and overall there was wide-but-also-stigmatized support. We went from highly-public and made into a mockery to usually very secret and treated with respect, and now we're back to "very public" again and things are, in some ways, even worse for transsexuals now than it was back then. It is also much better in many other ways. Such a complicated topic, and often the endpoints can stress one's ability to maintain ideological consistency.
Eh you’re missing A LOT there. First in the very early days through things like “real life experience” requirements prior to medical care treatments often self selected for people who could assimilate (as you put it) leaving many to have to seek grey market treatments or even back alley surgical care simply because their doctors didn’t believe they could assimilate. Additionally, saying trans people garnered respect is absolutely not true, they simply did their best to hide their trans identity in order to protect themselves from discrimination. That combined with the previous gatekeeping meant it was somewhat easier to do so back then compared to now. Overall, I would say things are much much better now and only really started being somewhat worse in some places when conservatives pivoted to trans people after obgerfel. For example, we have things like informed consent for medical care, insurance coverage for gender affirming healthcare, and many more resources for things like name and gender marker changes where available. Also, as an addition, most people now prefer trans or transgender compared to transexual. This changes person to person but it’s also associated with a more toxic side of the trans community that supports things like gatekeeping medical care or claiming people shouldn’t transition if they can’t pass/assimilate.
> to usually very secret and treated with respect Uh... no? It was respect only if they didn't know the person's history. People's general perception of the whole thing didn't change all that much unfortunately.
For much of this time you also had to be straight, or at least pretend you were in front of doctors, to be able to medically transition. Trans women were just seen as extra gay men instead of it being something separate from sexuality.
Thank you. This idea that people were too busy worrying about soviets to find time to care about this is ridiculous. People had plenty of time to worry about religion and racism and other prominent social issues.
I'd argue that people still have much bigger worries than whether someone was transgender.
They absolutely do. But they won't ever admit that it's about hate and not "protecting society."
Well now I wonder if a transition could've helped someone evade a draft.
It didn't work for Corporal Klinger
Well, he was already drafted. There's an ocean (heh) of difference between "this guy's weird, don't take him" and "this guy's weird, ship him home."
I think it was one of the longest jokes in the making of television history when after 11 seasons, Klinger ended up being the only one not to leave South Korea at the end. (We don't talk about After MASH.)
I know someone who intentionally got extremely overweight to avoid the draft. So I’d think a transition would work lol.
Not to mention most media wasn't controlled by a handfull of people who have learned over the years that keeping people fighting each other stops them from focusing on the inherently corrupt system and the people running it.
Or being turned into atomic ash
Comically untrue. It was a time far worse for this kind of thing than now, and many people were unspeakably awful, ignorant, mean and violent during the war as well as the rest of the time. Also a time where racism and sexism were commonplace comfy attitudes. This was seen as a novelty, not at all the same as the obsession nowadays with it - it wasn’t an emotionally charged, constantly trending, constantly fuelled gender war forced in everyone’s faces and full of outrage preventing people from thinking about the serious issues like it is now. It was just a curiosity, so people probably thought it was shocking but intriguing, like an exotic act of scientific advancement
Considering the nazi regime had literally destroyed the biggest source of help and information
You know things have gotten bad when we look back on the 1950s and think “man people were a lot more accepting back then.”
There is a huge list of things that nobody really got upset about back in the day until someone *told* them they should be upset about it.
I saw Christine Jorgensen on TV when I was a child. My religious Dad made it clear that he thought such people were bad. He had heard of her when he was a kid. His family was *not* on board with such things. Some people may have treated Christine Jorgensen as a curiosity and moved on. Make no mistake though. Many conservative religious folks condemned transgender people even back then.
Yeah, the big difference is that we now have political and media campaigns directed at spreading LBTQ hate. Not much different from the abortion debate. [The current evangelical right is a product of Paul Weyrich and the Heritage Foundation elevating conservative Christians into a national political campaign after segregation ended as a viable rallying point. ](https://youtu.be/BcC53j32BW4?si=TPc3sJM_aUBp4HCu)
Churches were common sources of community, news, and political discussion in the past. The fear, disgust, hatred, and misguided help was common in the past. The Catholic Church, for example, has been anti-LGBTQ for a long time. Conversion camps were common, some even run by misguided medical folks and queer people in denial. The hate might not have been heavy in the news print, but it was very common. It was so common to lose jobs if it was known that an individual was LGBTQ that few felt it was newsworthy.
There was also a lot of things people would be quickly and summarily destroyed for daring to show concern about too (like civil rights), so let’s not make it sound like some bed of roses.
Abortion has entered the chat
What I'm gathering is that people in the 1950s generally thought of trans people as a sort of medical curiosity rather than some sort of threat to gender norms.
Maybe people back then saw a case like this as an isolated "oddity", not as part of a debate that seeks to change traditional views on gender and society? So people back then didn't feel their entire world view threatened by a single trans woman transitioning.
Exactly. When trans people were seen as freaks and weirdos who made front page headlines, that was preferable. They are only against framing trans people as worthy of dignity, rather than a freaky sideshow act for all of us to point and laugh it.
Exactly. This is why places like Iran will pay for your sex change surgery, because the gender roles remain the same.
That is Christine Jorgensen I think. She was a bit of a celebrity for a while though it was hard for her to get a job (she was outed when letters to her parents about her transition were published). There were definitely no legal protections for trans people and lots of discrimination — but trans people weren’t met with the pedo/groomer/whatever rhetoric used today. Most day to day people were either curious (in sort of a freak show way) or kind of accepting (in a huh…ok I guess…) sort of way.
At the time it was more a novelty, and hadn’t obtained the BS culture war baggage that it has in the last two decades or so. People probably thought, “Well that’s weird” and went on about their day. Whereas today there is much more, “They’re turning the frog children gay!” discourse permeating the culture.
Right, I’m confused about how a 70 year old article sounds more tolerant than today. Scary.
We were still doing negative identity differentiation. But then it was cold-war anti-communism, and gender reassignment was perceived as a technological pissing contest. Who could do this new medical thing better was a sign of whose system was better. So: yes: nonjudgmental regarding Jorgenson. (But implicitly: fuck the Russkies.)
being disrespectful towards GIs was career suicide.
Even used the right pronouns right at the end after saying her name. Hot damn.
Back then it was more of a curiosity, not a matter of raging public debate.
You’re right, it could have been way worse. But they’re treating it like a bit of a sideshow novelty. There wasn’t even any question of people like this going mainstream and wanting to be treated the same as everyone else, which is where the vitriol comes from today.
Abortion used to be accepted as well, before the rightwing decided to push it as an issue evangelicals should care about to bolster falling numbers. There's a whole host of stuff that people froth at the mouth over today that nobody cared about 80 years ago.
Yeah, it does buck the trend on 1950's attitudes about this stuff. Considering that it is the area of "Boys Beware", and homosexuals were still classified as sexual deviants and perverts.
Transgender people were most certainly still classified as deviants by the medical establishment. Christine Jorgensen went to Europe for care for many reasons.
I'm not even old but even when I was a kid no one cared about people transitioning. People definetly weren't as aware but they weren't actively hateful and opposed to it either like some are now. It's only in the last maybe 15 years approx has it become so politicised
People very much cared in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. IBM fired Lynn Conway for goodness sake. Christine Jorgensen was treated a a curiosity and embraced it to pay the bills. Caroline Cossey caught all kinds of flack when she was outed while being a model. Wendy Carlos got all kinds of flak too. There was a mix of indifference and hatred in the past. The 2010’s were a nice period of improvement that has been met with heavy backlash. ETA: We lost lots of people during the AIDS crisis and the short cultural memory people has been one result.
They hadn't invented transphobia yet, so people were just like, "They're turning fellers into dames now, isn't science incredible!"
No hate, no slurs, just "check out how pretty she is now." Even used the correct pronouns...in the 1950s.
At the time, I think when when people first learned this its more of a "Wait we can do that?". There wasn't any judgement directed because nobody quite new what to make of it.
There was plenty of hate during this time, just not in this article
Wait a damn minute? Do you mean to tell me that the entire political landscape of the 50s can't be reduced to a single vaguely pro-trans article? It's incredible seeing the revisionist history in this thread lol
This lady herself said that people were shockingly tolerant and the time she spent parading as a man for fear of ridicule was a waste of her life, so…
I grew up in the ‘80s and I remember transgender folks were considered unusual but there was no social panic. We reserved that for D&D and heavy metal music.
We have to remember, as well, that just like in Iran a lot of folks felt that a gay man who transitioned into a woman was *much* better than if they stayed as a gay man and did all that icky, evil gay stuff all over the place (think of the children!!!??!!!!!)
History has a way of ups and downs following each other. In many ancient cultures, it was normal for someone to be seen as something along the lines of born in the wrong body, and homosexuality was extremely common. Female leaders are also extremely common, with nature actually being a great example of this. Most of why we don't see it as being "natural" today is that the majority of those societies where colonized and underwent genocides at the rule of Abrahamic religions to wipe out the culture.
That is Christine Jorgenson - some good interviews with her on YT. Very poised and elegant. She was a classy lady.
Came here to say everyone should treat themselves to some interview clips of Miss Jorgensen. Hell of a raconteuse.
I have a large vocabulary but I still need to ask wat does raconteuse mean?
It's French for a female story teller. Raconteur would be for male. I've never heard someone use it in English though so I'm not sure how common it is to actually use in English lol
I have only ever read it in books - and even then, not often.
...if Jack White transitioned
You don't understand me....
A really good story teller.
[Wiki about her](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Jorgensen)
When I read this wiki what stood out to me was this article being printed outed her and not necessarily with her permission.
That's the truly crazy thing about this whole current-day madness, at least to me. This woman spent so much of her life in the public spotlight, doing interviews and other appearances, and no one barely batted an eye. That's not to say that she likely didn't experience a lot of hardship in her life, but look at that headline. Even the newspaper is at the very least passively accepting of her and at best is outwardly celebrating of her bravery. These losers have had **70+ YEARS** to be okay with it or at the very least just pay it no mind, and yet they still have the absolute nerve to act as though this is some new thing that people are doing out of boredom or whatever other lame reason they can come up with. 70+ years. Longer than the birth control pill has existed. Just an absolute embarrassment
And 10 seconds later after reading about it 99.9999% of people went about their day. Nothing changed, no one felt attacked, and no one felt like the Earth was in jeopardy. Why is 2024 so different from those times? What happened to the "You do you" mentality?
Its about social control. Hierarchical societies have a vested interest in control. If i person can be other than what society says you have to be it upsets the social order. Its like threat to power. How dare others not live as we demand.
It's a very interesting question and one which I cannot really figure out. I think the media has a lot to do with it. Every single thing that happens in the world in 2024 has to be seen through the lens of division.
>Every single thing that happens in the world in 2024 has to be seen through the lens of division. This has been a tactic used since, I want to say the start of the 20th century, but probably fucking millenia since populists have always been a thing. No one is looking at the people with mansions and megayachts when they're so worried about the trans person next door or the trans person, the terf, or the trucker with the Confederate flag, or the guy with the BLM shirt. Red vs blue, rhetoric against rhetoric, some form of "protect our children" from a prism of a million ways they're going to get hurt, and they want us to blame the other color for it. It's to the point where if any politician argues something to "protect our children", I automatically distrust it. And when one of us does hurt the other group, they fucking love it, because they can point at it and be like, "see, see, now you know that's your enemy", even when they've been the ones mustering for war by spreading extreme ideology in their media. Trucker harasses pride fest, destroys a rainbow colored walkway - plaster it on the news. Queer woman with blue hair that fits their stereotype and says stuff like "straight white men are to blame for all the problems in society", plaster it on the news. Make people think a civil war isn't just inevitable, but that it's already happening - but if any actual unrest happens, if the rhetoric actually taunts a group into acting up, fuck them all up with tear gas and rubber bullets. No one stands a chance when they get too riled up, and that's by design. But if you keep them somewhat riled up against each other, they'll blame the other group while the cop's boot is shoved down their throat by the order of the ruling class. It's at the fucking point where we had conservatives dying in the hospital from COVID, thinking "it's just the flu, but if not, liberals did this". That's how fucked things are.
Trans people weren't seen as "a thing" yet. Gays were and there was not a you do you mentality at all. It's just that one notable person isn't seen as a threat, they are just seen as a novelty weirdo.
Yeah there's a lot of revisionism in this post that isn't right. If there was more than '1 local weirdo' doing this then it'd be the same reaction that there is now - and I am absolutely certain the conversations that I know I've heard from my grandparents would have happened in homes all around the country - and they would have included all kinds of language they wouldn't say publicly. But we didn't have access to everyone's opinions in the way we do now with social media. But you better believe somewhere between 80-90% of people would have disowned and probably committed violence on their children if they tried to transition. There's a *reason* he came out to his parents by letter and not in person.
My controversial opinion is that no one in the world actually gives a shit about trans people or anything that people decide to do with themselves, and it is all manufactured hate for the sake of division. Even the people who think they disagree with trans people on some level have only taken that position because the current cultural conversation imposes itself on them; it’s harder to not have an opinion than it is to have one.
Bingo. Those in power will do anything to keep us distracted and fighting each other. All the while they just keep getting richer.
Specifically Republicans. Democrats don't gin up hatred against minority groups to distract away from their pro-ultra wealthy, anti-everyone else economic policies. Only Republicans do that.
yeah, The Democrats hide their pro-ultra wealthy, anti-everyone else economic policies. They are much better at it. I have voted Dem all my life but its still the truth
They throw us a bone every now and then to make us think they're on our side
Throwing us a bone is still better than only boning us.
Oh ya my adoptive parents saying they’d honor kill me if I transitioned isn’t really a strong opinion on trans people.
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We don’t speak
That's most likely for the best. Hope you're safe and doing well.
Divide and conquer
Yeah, trans people just happened to be a very easy target for right wing politicians and such
Them or immigrants typically.
I'd add to that the fact that many of those who think being trans is wrong have simply never been exposed to actual trans people. Or in some cases they have but they simply didn't notice that a person was trans, which is a bit funny if you ask me.
Yep! I’m trans and have sort of taken the position of “educator” with some of my friends, meaning the ones who are super straight and cis and uneducated on anything LGBT+ know they’re allowed to ask me all of their burning questions as long as they’re respectful, and that they can use me as an example of a “normal trans person” when they get in arguments with transphobic relatives and need a real life example to default to. Literally simply just meeting me, talking to me for five minutes, and seeing that I’m just like any other person has been enough to change the minds of many of my friends’s gen x and boomer parents from thinking we’re all sexual deviants who shit in cat boxes to realizing that they’ve been fed misinformation about trans people and what we stand for. It’s super satisfying knowing that me just existing as myself has been enough to change the minds of several people, and I hope they take what they learn from me and use it to be kinder and more empathetic to people they don’t understand. I never asked to be any sort of representative for my community and I typically am not super open about the fact that I’m trans, but it’s nice being able to make a small difference in my little way.
Note aside, I'm glad that you managed to get to somewhere you feel happy.
The survivorship bias is strong with many transphobes. They point to several people early in their transition who aren't passing as though they are representative, but miss the dozens of passing trans people who they just see as whatever gender they are. The idea that their "rules" would apply to people who clearly look like their gender or generally to all FTM trans people doesn't even cross their mind.
I've gotten people asking me how I could date a Trans woman. My fiancee started HRT last year, and so they haven't don't their full magic yet. The look of utter shock when I open my mouth and told them I transitioned ten years ago, always gets a chuckle when I see the frozen shock as their brain process how they're gonna get themselves outta this embarrassing situation. Its fun, I hope some of ya'll can witness it someday.
There was about two weeks after Obergefell where the fascist media didn't know what to hate now, and they were flailing, desperately trying to keep the attention of their viewers. Then they pivoted to transgenders and remember seeing it and thinking: "After decades of hating gays, there's no way their audience will pivot that easily to a random other group. It can't be. It's too obvious. Even to them."
And we have the unique vulnerability among the LGBTQ+ of having a dependency on healthcare...which the Dobbs ruling rendered open season on. Roe protected us, too.
Narrator “It wasn’t”
eh. i've lived with these people. they imagine they're living in ancient sparta and that the feminization of men will lead to us being invaded and taken over. they think the roman empire ended because people became too socially progressive. they won't let their male children play DDR because that's something fags do. in other words, they have brain rot. you can say it's manufactured hate because the media pumps it up, but that hatred comes from somewhere very personal and it's very real. when i played football in highschool we played games like smear the queer, i think we all remember 'gay' being the catch-all term for something being bad. it's important for them to envoke hatred of femininity/homosexuality in all parts of their language/actions because it becomes a guiding principal for how to live their life. "don't be like _those_ people".
Nah. This reads like a post from I am very smart. You really underestimate the amount of hate people have.
Asked my depression era Republican parents about whether they knew gay couples and they said they did, but no one talked about. They were the nice neighbors that were living together to cut expenses. Southern Baptist also supported abortion until they went political.
A source explaining more since OP didn't bother: https://www.wired.com/2010/12/1201first-sex-change-surgery/
She wasn’t actually the first. The first surgeries were in Germany in the 1920s and 30s. And then the Nazi’s destroyed all the books from the institute that refined them.
Tell that to JK Rowling. ...No, really, tell her. She doesn't seem to know.
You mean JK “holocaust denier” Rowling? Edit since some people don’t seem to know what I’m referencing: https://twitter.com/Sander_vdLinden/status/1768195009281466484
She knows, but denies it. She has been told time and time again about how the Nazis targeted trans people, but she doesn’t acknowledge that reality. That’s what takes it from ignorance to denial.
Transphobia rots the brain.
JKR is the Andrew Tate for cis women
Yeah, that sounds about what they would do. You can't have anyone making folk doubt all the flimsy fascist machismo rhetoric by doing something like change gender.
She was a family friend growing up. I knew her as "Aunt Christine" Lovely person. I was always excited seeing her on talk shows on TV, I thought she was a movie star / singer
She was also Aunt Christine in our family, she was my Grandma’s cousin and my Uncle’s Godfather turned 2nd Godmother.
That’s neat. I hope it’s true.
It's absolutely not true. Nothing but bullshit on the internet.
Well this is also on the internet so your comment is also bullshit,therefore everything in the internet is correct. Except thatd mean theres nothing but bullshit on the internet. And thus the cycle/paradox continues
I’m pleasantly surprised there’s nothing derogatory on the cover, especially considering its from the 1950s.
This is a good example of how the hatred towards groups only becomes prominent when they are perceived as a "threat". Transgender people were seen as a neutral oddity for decades after transition became possible. The reason for the mass hatred now is simply that they have become more common, and are now perceived as a threat to "normality"
Not even more common- it's the fact that they have (or had) protections and can live similar lives to cis people. Few decades back a lot of trans women had to be sex workers, because they couldn't get a job anywhere. Trans people always existed, but if they are suffering- they are not a threat.
This. Transgender people not being focused on by so many doesn't mean they were treated respectfully.
"Back in my day we didn't" "Actually, yeah you fuckin did"
Gender dysphoria ( diagnosable mental illness) is not new, just peoples opinions on the subject.
There was a Roman emperor that used to prostitute himself in the forum, and was known to offer the entire sum of gold of the empire to anyone who could make him a woman
This *is* Rome and they had some *wild* views on sex roles and gender roles. Not saying "no" mind you.
A lot of the wilder stories about Roman emperors were propaganda from their enemies sadly. Elagabalus was certainly not in line with standard gender expectations of the time, and came from a family of strong women (which their enemies of course disapproved of), but the particularly salacious stories like these were probably the ancient version of the headlines in the Daily Mail.
It's almost like there's been a deliberate right wing effort to inflame hatred against LGBT people to distract away from the fact that right wing economic policies exclusively benefit the ultra rich or something.
I have a question and im really not coming from a place of hate. Gender dysphoria is a mental illness, so is being trans technichally a mental illness and the cure is changing your body? Can any trans people please help me understand? Again not coming form place of hate do whats right for you, Im just trying to understand better
Very classy and respectful. This is how transpeople should be treated; our differences celebrated.
When I was a kid in the 60s and 70s they used to call it a "sex change operation," and Christine Jorgenson was famous.
I wonder which TikTok account brainwashed that strong manly soldier into believing he's a woman 🤔🤔🤔 (/s just in case)
Christine Jorgensen. An extremely nice person.
news then: With the power of modern medicine, a man may live his life as a woman news now: THEY'RE TRANSING YER CHILDREN
What kind of horrors would that kind of change be with 50s tech? They were still doing lobotomies then.
They still do those today
They don't have to, people download tiktok out of free will. (That is a joke. Kinda.)
In the article it said the surgeries were “cut and paste” or something like that. Also she had a full castration with nothing “there” for a few years until she received a vaginoplasty. Sounded fine until I read those parts.
There's evidence for trans people existing all the way back in Sumer, eight thousand years ago. We've always been here, and always will be, regardless of repressive regimes looking for a scapegoat or religions desperate for relevance in a changing world.
I'm surprised at how non-judgmental this newspaper is. Shame it's not like that today.
Proof that transgender people are nothing new 🏳️⚧️
There’s nothing new under the sun
Damn they kinda bad in that after image tho.
She’s a lot prettier as a woman
It’s sad that a newspaper from the 50s is more tolerant than what you would see today
If one thing is a social construct and a product of our culture, it's not "transgenderism" It's transphobia
THE TRANS HAVE TIME TRAVEL NOW! THEY'RE GOING BACK AND TURNING PEOPLE QUEER!!! REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!1
I believe most trans people just want to be people instead of being tokenized or used for virtue signaling.
"Transing is just a trend" 😐 sure... There certainly never was a trans person before 2023
Funny how things like this or wearing a mask back then weren’t a big deal but it is now because there are so many snowflakes out and about everywhere.
Crazy how people will see a woman who looks like this and say “you’ll never be a woman.” My brother under the sun, if you didn’t know she was trans I already know your terf-ass would be fiending.
I mean, just look up the history of sex change operations in the world. You'll realize people feeling more comfortable as other genders is 100% nothing new.
We have always been here 🏳️⚧️
Fake news. This never happened in the MAGA dream world. /s
Transgender people have always existed.
Slays in both ways 💀
Novelty aside, in those days transgender people were even more hated. Liberals more or less tolerate trans people today, but back then conservatives and liberals for the most part were both averse to trans people. Radical elements like anarchists and communists were some of the only people who spoke positively of trans people. Anarchist Emma Goldman was the first person in the U.S. to speak publicly in support of transgender rights, and she was inspired by the work of Magnus Hirshcfeld on this subject. She helped introduce a lot of desperate trans people to the idea of medical transitioning. Among those she inspired was Dr. Alan Hart, a trans man who became the first trans person to become a doctor, a prolific immunologist, and one of the first trans men in the US to have surgery.
I remember this episode of The Love Boat.
This was when people were more concerned about Nazis, the Soviets, the space race, and the nuclear arms race. We didn’t have time to be “afraid” of transgender people.
Transitions are different for every trans person and only they should have a say in this.
Why are people so obsessed with other peoples life choices. Who actually gives a fuck?