The University of Victoria (UVic) is a public research university located in the municipalities of Oak Bay and Saanich, British Columbia, Canada. Established in 1903 as Victoria College, the institution was initially an affiliated college of McGill University until 1915. From 1921 to 1963, it functioned as an affiliate of the University of British Columbia. In 1963, the institution was reorganized into an independent university.
Harry Benjamin was a German-American endocrinologist and sexologist, widely known for his clinical work with transgender people.
Fantasia Fair is a week-long conference for cross-dressers, transgender and gender questioning people held every October in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a small Portuguese fishing village and largely gay and lesbian tourist village on the very tip of Cape Cod. This annual event is the longest-running transgender conference in the United States and it provides a week for attendees to experiment with gender-role identities and presentations in a safe and affirming community. The goal of the conference is to create a safe space in which crossdressers, transgender and transsexual people, and nonbinary-gendered people are accepted without judgement, can interact with their peers, and can advocate for their rights. In November, 1980 the event was featured in an article by D. Keith Mano in Playboy magazine and has in ensuing years has continued to generate publicity.
Reed Erickson was an American transgender man and philanthropist that, according to sociology specialist Aaron H. Devor, largely informed "almost every aspect of work being done in the 1960s and 1970s in the field of gender affirmation in the US and, to a lesser degree, in other countries."
Julia Michelle Serano is an American writer, musician, spoken-word performer, transgender and bisexual activist, and biologist. She is known for her transfeminist books, such as Whipping Girl (2007), Excluded (2013), and Outspoken (2016). She is also a public speaker who has given many talks at universities and conferences. Her writing is frequently featured in queer, feminist, and popular culture magazines.
The transgender rights movement is a movement to promote the legal status of transgender people and to eliminate discrimination and violence against transgender people regarding housing, employment, public accommodations, education, and health care. A major goal of transgender activism is to allow changes to identification documents to conform with a person's current gender identity without the need for gender-affirming surgery or any medical requirements, which is known as gender self-identification. It is part of the broader LGBT rights movements.
Aaron H. Devor is a Canadian sociologist and sexologist known for researching transsexuality and transgender communities. Devor has taught at the University of Victoria since 1989 and is the former dean of graduate studies. Devor is the current Chair in Transgender Studies at the University of Victoria, and the founder and subject matter expert of The Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria Libraries. He is also the founder and host of the Moving Trans History Forward conferences. Maclean's, a Canadian weekly news magazine, described Devor as "an internationally respected expert on gender, sex and sexuality."
The Transgender Oral History Project is an initiative by and for the transgender community. TOHP collects interviews and produces multimedia content featuring stories of transgender-identified people, and exists to empower trans folks through sharing stories of their lives. The Transgender Oral History Project is also active in the community, hosting events in many states including Massachusetts, Illinois, Iowa, Seattle, Philadelphia, and New York City.
This article addresses the history of transgender people in the United States from prior to Western contact until the present. There are a few historical accounts of transgender people that have been present in the land now known as the United States at least since the early 1600s. Before Western contact, some Native American tribes had third gender people whose social roles varied from tribe to tribe. People dressing and living differently from the gender roles typical of their sex assigned at birth and contributing to various aspects of American history and culture have been documented from the 17th century to the present day. In the 20th and 21st centuries, advances in gender-affirming surgery as well as transgender activism have influenced transgender life and the popular perception of transgender people in the United States.
Susan O'Neal Stryker is an American professor, historian, author, filmmaker, and theorist whose work focuses on gender and human sexuality. She is a professor of Gender and Women's Studies, former director of the Institute for LGBT Studies, and founder of the Transgender Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona, and is currently on leave while holding an appointment as Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women's Leadership at Mills College. Stryker serves on the Advisory Council of METI and the Advisory Board of the Digital Transgender Archive. Stryker, who is a transgender woman, is the author of several books about LGBT history and culture. She is a leading scholar of transgender history.
Transgender studies, also called trans studies or trans* studies, is an interdisciplinary field of academic research dedicated to the study of gender identity, gender expression, and gender embodiment, as well as to the study of various issues of relevance to transgender and gender variant populations. Interdisciplinary subfields of transgender studies include applied transgender studies, transgender history, transgender literature, transgender media studies, transgender anthropology and archaeology, transgender psychology, and transgender health. The research theories within transgender studies focus on cultural presentations, political movements, social organizations and the lived experience of various forms of gender nonconformity. The discipline emerged in the early 1990s in close connection to queer theory. Non-transgender-identified peoples are often also included under the "trans" umbrella for transgender studies, such as intersex people, crossdressers, drag artists, third gender individuals, and genderqueer people.
Rupert Raj is a Canadian trans activist and a transgender man. His work since his own gender transition in 1971 has been recognized by several awards, as well as his inclusion in the National Portrait Collection of The ArQuives: Canada's LGBTQ2+ Archives.
Beth Elliott is an American trans lesbian folk singer, activist, and writer. In the early 1970s, Elliot was involved with the Daughters of Bilitis and the West Coast Lesbian Conference in California. She became the centre of a controversy when a minority of attendees in the 1973 Conference, including a keynote speaker, called for her removal because of her trans status.
The Zenith Foundation was founded by author and activist Stephanie Castle in 1992 in Vancouver, Canada, along with Christine Burnham, and Patricia Diewold, a clinical psychologist from the Provincial Gender Clinic at Vancouver General Hospital. The foundation started out as a support and advocacy group for transgender rights and also has an active focus on publishing educational pamphlets for the transgender community.
Ariadne "Ari" Kane is a crossdresser, activist, educator, and one of the founders of the Fantasia Fair. She runs Theseus Counseling Services which specializes in gender issues and remains open currently in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Queer community archives are a subset of the larger body of community archives, which are archives and personal collections maintained by community groups who desire to document their cultural heritage based on shared experiences, interests, and/or identities. As such, queer community archives are collections that exist to maintain the historical record of the LGBT community and broader queer community. The term queer community archives, also called gay and lesbian archives, refers to a diverse array of community projects, organizations, and public institutions that maintain these histories.
Chase Joynt is a Canadian filmmaker, writer, video artist, actor, and professor. He attracted acclaim as co-director with Aisling Chin-Yee of the documentary film No Ordinary Man (2020), and as director of the film Framing Agnes (2022). He won two awards at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival for his work on the latter.
The Chair in Transgender Studies is the world's first research chair focusing on the study of transgender individuals, issues, and history. It is housed at the University of Victoria, located in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Unlike any other university department chair at the University of Victoria, the Chair in Transgender Studies is self-funded through philanthropy and private donations. The chair is unique in that it does not grant degrees, but instead works with both community and academic communities to further the advancement of transgender studies. Aaron Devor, the inaugural and current chair, works with researchers, community members, academics, and advocates to advance the study of trans scholarship. The chair focuses on four pillars: original research, continued scholarship, maintenance and growth of the Transgender Archives, and organization of Canada's largest international transgender conference, Moving Trans History Forward.
Liesl Theron is a South African trans activist and the co-founder of Gender DynamiX organisation.
Moving Trans History Forward is a series of interdisciplinary, international, and intergenerational conferences held in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, at the University of Victoria, hosted by the Chair in Transgender Studies. The conferences discuss trans history and activism, and are both academic and open to the public. The conferences also explore new trans research and the issues that impact trans, non-binary, Two-spirit, and other gender nonconforming (GNC) people.
