It’s a scary time for trans people.
I don’t think I need to list all of the reasons why. If you’re reading this, you’re already aware. It’s been inescapable.
But one stat that I’ve thought about a lot (from Erin Reed’s critical work) is that in 2020, there were just over 100 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in the U.S.
In just the first four months of 2025, there have already been more than 850 bills, the vast majority of which specifically target the trans community.
I’ve been a longtime reader of Susan Stryker’s and was eager to talk to her about how we got to this current moment and how she’s thinking about things overall. Susan’s a historian, one of a handful who helped to forge and legitimize “transgender studies” in academia, and the author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution and When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader.
We also talk about her time with the activist group Transgender Nation, her relationship with Lou Sullivan’s archive, and what effective resistance looks like in the age of Trump.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Jeffrey Masters: I got to know your work as a historian and an academic after you’d already reached this level of notoriety, but I did not know how hard it was originally for you to get a job after you got your PhD. Talk about what was going on during that time.
Susan Stryker: Well, we’re in a very difficult moment historically right now, so everything pales in comparison to the present. But in the early nineties, when I was wrestling with the fact that I really needed to transition if I wanted to go on in life, the climate for doing that was not good. Trans people were still psychopathologized, listed in the DSM as having an identity disorder. It was very easy to be criminalized. We had no civil rights, no employment protections, and there was a great deal of ignorance and stigma. There still is, but this was pre-tipping point, pre-2014, when I think there was a big upsurge in visibility for trans people. So to transition then was kind of to fall off the edge of the cliff, to walk outside the map of most people’s realities. A lot of the assumptions about trans women in particular were, well, you’re going to be standing on a street corner, and that’s what your job is going to be. That was not exactly the right milieu in which to expect to become, say, a professor of early nineteenth-century US religious history.
JM: Is that what you were studying?
SS: Yeah, I actually wrote my dissertation on early Mormon history. But like I said, I was not the right kind of person to be hired in higher education, in spite of my training, because of anti-trans prejudice.
JM: How long did that last?
SS: Seventeen years.
JM: You were outside the academy for seventeen years?
SS: I would joke about it and say if I don’t get a tenure-track job in twenty years of trying, I’m just going to throw in the towel and try a different career. I’d apply every year, and I mean, the academic job market is tough, it’s a crapshoot for everybody, but it was almost like a Zen exercise in absurdity. I’ll apply for jobs I’m well qualified for, and I’ll use the yearly exercise of writing those job letters as a way to meditate.
JM: And torture yourself.
SS: Well, a little reality check. It was very hard for a few years. I call the first seven years after I transitioned my unpaid internship in transgender studies.
JM: Well, it paid off.
SS: I had a friend from graduate school who joked about it when I first came out to him. I said, “I’m transitioning.” He said, “Huh, that’s a gutsy career move.” I got really angry, it’s like, this isn’t a career move, this is my life. But in retrospect, it did become a career as well as an identity, trying to help change gender. I think that’s what my whole adult career has been about, trying to change what gender means and does, and make it something less coercive or punitive, and more a space of agency and freedom for people.
JM: I do want to talk about Transgender Nation, if that’s okay. We’ve talked about the Gay Activists Alliance and the Gay Liberation Front, these short-lived gay groups, but we’ve talked less about the trans activist groups. How did you get involved with them originally?
SS: It has to do directly with me doing community-based archival and historical work. There I was, a soon-to-be freshly minted PhD from Berkeley with zero job prospects, and I just showed up at what was then called the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society and said, hi, I’m unemployed, I have time on my hands, I’m hustling, I’m networking, I want to put my skills to use, I want to learn the trans history of San Francisco, I want to dig into this archive. They said, great, one of our founding members, this guy Lou Sullivan, died recently, and we have his papers. Why don’t you learn how to be an archivist by archiving Lou’s papers?
JM: For the audience, Lou is a legendary trans figure. What was radical at the time was that he was a legendary trans gay man, which was, let’s say, a scandal.
SS: Right, right. And he was one of the founding members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society. I was organizing his papers, writing the collection guide. I call Lou my posthumous transition buddy, because I was transitioning in a trans-feminine direction and identified as a trans lesbian. To read Lou’s journals, it’s like, I know this isn’t the question you asked, but Lou started journaling when he was ten years old. He was a ten-year-old Catholic school girl in suburban Milwaukee, and some of those early journals say things like, “When we got home, we played boys, it was fun,” in a little pink vinyl diary. He journaled from age ten until he was almost forty, he died at thirty-nine. So there’s about thirty years of journals documenting, in a really intimate, thoughtful way, a lifelong relationship to changing gender.
Being privy to someone else’s thoughts and feelings like that, being able to compare and contrast, it’s like, oh, that’s what Lou was going through at this time and place, and that’s what I was going through at this time and place. I felt like I developed a very intimate bond with Lou, posthumously.
So I’d done that work making Lou’s papers available for research use, and was going around publicizing it. There was a group called FTM, female to male, that Lou had founded, that still existed after his death. It was mostly for trans men, but every other month they’d have an open informational meeting, open to the community. I went to say, hey, historian here, Lou’s papers are available, people can go look at them, it’s amazing. At that meeting was a woman named Anne Ogborn, a trans woman, who was there to say, hey, we’re going to organize a caucus in Queer Nation called Transgender Nation. For those who don’t remember Queer Nation, it was one of the two major AIDS activist organizations in the late eighties and early nineties. In San Francisco, the Queer Nation chapter would invite affinity groups to form within it. There was one called Labia, lesbians and bisexuals in action, one called SHOP, suburban homosexual outreach project. Transgender Nation was the affinity group within Queer Nation for working on trans issues.
I showed up and said, hey, we’re forming this group, and they said, great, that’s what I’m here for, let me get involved. Transgender Nation was important to me as a place to say, yes, I am meeting other political trans people, and we’re trying to figure out how to have a trans politics that’s in alignment with gay and lesbian and queer politics and AIDS activism, but from a trans perspective. There was still, and still is unfortunately, a lot of people who are okay with the L and the G, and maybe the B, but don’t want the T to be part of that. That was definitely the case in the early nineties too.
JM: I know that’s a vocal group of people today, but I also think it’s a vocal minority. I don’t think it’s anywhere near majority opinion.
SS: I think that’s true. But I’ll also say, working in museum spaces, or with national boards of organizations, I still run into cisgender gay and lesbian men of a certain age who really don’t want to be associated with the gender trash. Maybe they won’t say that out loud, but maybe they’re saying it a little more loudly than they would have a couple of years ago.
JM: It’s so interesting hearing that, because I’m thirty-six, and I came of age being a proud member of the LGBTQ community, and I didn’t know there was any debate. I just thought we were all one community, and it was accepted fact.
SS: Isn’t that a lovely thought?
JM: I don’t think I’m unusual in that.
SS: I think that’s true, that there’s a generational cohort that’s like, duh, one big boat, what’s the problem?
JM: Along these lines, I want to read something you wrote. You say:
“In many respects, the transgender movement’s politics towards the medical establishment were more like those of the reproductive justice movement than those of the gay liberation movement. Transgender people, like people seeking abortions or contraception, wanted secure access to competent, legal, respectfully provided medical services.”
And then you say the decision to seek medical intervention is “a deeply personal matter about how to live in one’s own body, was typically arrived at only after intense and often emotionally painful deliberation.”
That idea, of the trans movement having more in common with the reproductive rights movement, is that an observation you’ve only had in hindsight, or was that an active debate taking place?
SS: For me it was hindsight, just because of my age. In the early seventies, when some of those things came up, I was in junior high school. But I do think it’s true. I think the major issue for trans people, particularly those who embrace some kind of medical technology to transition, and not everybody does, I really want to resist the conflation of being trans with embracing a medicalized trans identity, because it’s bigger than that. But particularly for trans people who do something medicalized to change their bodies, I think the major issue is about bodily autonomy, and about respectful access to competently provided medical services.
In that sense, changing sex is much more like getting an abortion than like getting a blow job, to put it crudely.
JM: Please do.
SS: It’s not as much about sexuality as it is about saying, my body, my right to decide.
JM: It’s fascinating, in a tragic way, that since then trans rights have gone the same way as abortion rights, in terms of, depending on what state you live in, it could be the safest place in the world to be trans, or one of the least safe.
SS: Exactly. What I see as a historian looking back is that 1973 was a really important year. That’s not one of the years we usually think of, like 1776 or 1492, a big symbolically important year. But I think that’s the year the world order shifted in a more neoliberal direction, austerity, downsizing government, making everybody responsible for their own economic decisions, not the state stepping in to save something, privatizing this, abolishing that. That mindset really sets in around 1973, and in the context of those big geopolitical, socioeconomic transitions toward neoliberalism, identity politics changes a lot too.
One of the things that happens in ’73 is you get both Roe v. Wade and the formal depathologization of homosexuality in the DSM. All of a sudden, in this new political context, you’ve still got trans people looking to access medical care, still looking to depathologize their identities, but they no longer have gay liberation or feminist support for those things, because the women’s movement is like, great, we’ve got abortion rights, the gay movement is like, great, we’ve depathologized homosexuality, and there are trans people still needing those same things, still needing depathologization and access to healthcare, but now they’re part of a much smaller movement, and you start to see trans people getting kicked out of broader political movements in ’73. Famously, that’s the year Sylvia Rivera, one of the most ardent trans and gay liberationists of her generation, was refused the stage at Christopher Street Liberation Day in Washington Square Park.
The famous “y’all better quiet down” speech.
JM: Is there, and I’m all for this sort of inclusion, to state that, is there a good reason, other than bigotry, that trans people should not have been included in the LGB community?
SS: No, I don’t think so. Historically, if you look back, there’s always been a lot of conflation between three different ways of thinking about these issues: ideas about homosexuality, transgender, and intersex. Why do people want to have same-sex relationships? Is it because they’re a normal man wanting to be with a normal man, a normal woman with a normal woman, so you think about it in terms of sexuality, desire, identity? Or do they want that because they’re really a man trapped in a woman’s body, or a woman trapped in a man’s body? Or are they doing that because there’s something physically anomalous about them, a biological cause, that they’re intersex somehow?
I think those three ways of thinking about a similar set of problems are, of course, going to be related. They’re going to share a history in social movements, in the medical management of bodies, in legal discrimination, in policing. We’re all in the same boat, and there’s plenty of overlap in how trans and homo fit together.
JM: And then the population of people that are both trans and queer. I think we’ve kind of educated the public that gender and sexuality are two different things, and I feel like we have to remind people that they’re also intimately intertwined, and we can only forget that.
SS: Yeah, I think there’s been much more focus on gender not being the same thing as sexuality, sex not being the same thing as gender, and many of us have become very adroit at parsing these distinctions. But it’s also important, as you’re saying, to remember it’s all kind of a tangled hairball. When you cough up one thing, you’re going to be coughing up something else along with it.
JM: Thank you for that metaphor.
SS: Yeah.
JM: That really goes to something you write about, which is that in order to get access to medical services, which not all trans people want, but for the people who do, it depends on trans people, quote, “constructing transgender phenomena as symptoms of a medical illness or physical malady, partly because sickness is the condition that typically legitimizes medical intervention.” I think that’s a great tension point. Is there a way of talking or thinking about being trans that could get around that?
SS: For me, that’s why I think the bodily autonomy framework is so important. I don’t want to predicate my sense of being a free person in the world on having the correct diagnosis and being recognized by some established social authority. The medical question is really interesting to me, it’s really deep, and it’s a complicated set of feelings, because I think there really is suffering for trans people, as well as a sense of joy and pleasure and the sublime in being trans. But that suffering, the idea that you reduce suffering by calling it a sickness and receiving a certain kind of treatment, that’s a social organization that makes the suffering somebody feels very individual, like it’s a personal thing that you’re suffering and can be cured of, or fixed, rather than saying maybe the suffering you’re experiencing with a sense of gender dysphoria has to do with social organization.
It has to do with how families are constituted, with social attitudes about men and women, with sexism and misogyny and racism and classism, and that the suffering we feel is rooted not in some individual psychological malady, but in the experience of living in an unjust world that lands on you in a particular way.
I think about an old film from the early days of gay liberation by Rosa von Praunheim, a German filmmaker, who said it is not the homosexual who is sick, but the society that condemns him. There’s a lot in that.
JM: I think there’s also a Sylvia Rivera quote, something like, “I’m not crazy, it’s the world that has made me crazy.”
SS: Yeah, yeah.
JM: I want to drag us back to Transgender Nation. This was a subgroup, as we said, in Queer Nation, but it spun off, and I believe it might’ve outlived Queer Nation.
SS: It outlived Queer Nation, yeah. Transgender Nation was started in 1992 as an affinity group within Queer Nation, which I think lasted only about two years before it dissipated. Transgender Nation outlived that, and was around, on paper, from 1992 through about 1995.
JM: Talk to me about what kind of work they did and what their goals were, because Queer Nation was known for being this militant, confrontational group. Did Transgender Nation take that ethos with it?
SS: Yeah, it did. I’ll say I was just one member, and in some ways on the periphery of it, because I lived in Oakland and it was very San Francisco based. Sometimes they’d call me Transgender Nation Oakland. A lot of the group’s work had two foci, I’d say. One was working within existing LG or LGB organizations to say, hey, what about the trans piece? A lot of that had to do with people wrestling over what this newly energized word “queer” meant, because queer had been around a long time but was considered pejorative, and it’s in the later eighties, early nineties, that there’s this new politicized sense of queer as not exactly gay or lesbian, more a broader critique of heteronormativity and society. The trans piece was to say, well, this is queer too, trans is a different way of critiquing, reacting against, imagining otherwise than the heteronormative matrix out there.
So Transgender Nation would show up at community meetings, the general membership meeting of some organization, or a public town hall, and be very disruptive, blowing whistles or whatever, to say, if this is not a place where queer and trans work is happening, then you’re part of the old guard. So there was a more contestatory politics within what was then predominantly gay and lesbian community, trans people kind of elbowing their way into it.
JM: So some of their activism was pointed inward, at the community itself.
SS: Right, as well as outward. They were also doing things like participating in Copwatch, community-based surveillance of policing, or doing courtroom support work for people who’d been arrested. Somebody’s been arrested for solicitation or cross-dressing or what have you, and they’d show up at their court dates and let them know that people were watching and paying attention. So the question you asked me was about Transgender Nation’s agenda and goals, and it’s like, they didn’t have one. It was just pushing back against whatever felt like it was trying to step on us somehow, and making more space for being trans.
JM: For you personally, as a smart person, as somebody with a PhD—
SS: Having a PhD doesn’t mean you’re a smart person, I’ll just say.
JM: Okay. So let me take the smart out. Having a PhD, do you think that—
SS: No, I am a smart person.
JM: Okay, well, there’s one of us. Did that legitimize your transness in people’s minds?
SS: No, or it didn’t. If anything, I think it took away from street cred. I was a different kind of trans in the early nineties, I’ll just say that.
JM: Different how?
SS: Well, even into the early nineties, there was still this sense of something Sandy Stone wrote about in her essay, “The Posttranssexual Manifesto,” where she says it’s hard to develop a counter-discourse when you’re programmed to disappear. The idea was, if you’re going to transition, you should cut off ties with your previous life, new name, new city, create a plausible backstory, be very cis-passing, as they say today.
JM: Live stealth.
SS: Live in stealth, right, disappear into the woodwork. The slang term for it was woodworking, you were expected to woodwork. That was still very much the case in the early nineties. There was the sense that to be trans, and particularly to be a trans woman visibly, meant you were consigning yourself to some kind of illicit street economy. There was no real sense that you could be out and trans and professional, and have a different critical and political vocabulary for talking about your experience, other than this personalized language of suffering: “Ever since I was a small child I always felt like an X, but I was a Y, but then I got help, and now I’m happy.”
That was kind of the only story available to us. There was very much that sense for me in the nineties of, why are we playing a game we’re not positioned to win? It’s a game you can never win at, so why are you playing, why are you agreeing to the ways trans lives are being channeled and repressed and contained and diminished? That’s just a losing game. Play a different game. Start a different conversation, build a different community, make the world different around you through how you put yourself out into the world and relate to others, start to build a new set of social relations. Don’t play the game in which you’re destined to lose.
JM: Going back to now, in 2016 you wrote that it would be remarkable if we didn’t have a backlash to the progress we’d made for trans people, and that’s come to fruition, as we know. Why did you predict that? Is that just how history has always worked, with backlashes, or is there something else?
SS: As a historian I’m always reluctant to say always or never. What I did see is I don’t think all the negative attention coming to trans people right now is strictly a manipulative distraction from other things. I think there’s something structural at play. The way I think about it most deeply is that I want to think of transness as a practice of freedom. It’s a way of saying, I am like this, I didn’t ask for it, but I am, and this is me, and I’m not asking for more than anybody else in the world, but I’m not willing to settle for less. There’s a sense of wanting to take up my space and not be repressed because of that. But what’s at stake in manifesting a trans identity really does unsettle some very deep assumptions within the modern Western world about what our bodies mean. There’s this ideological belief that the body is a thing that secures your place in the social order, that’s your body, that’s what it means, that means you go in this category, not that one, there’s something permanent and unchanging about the body that guarantees your place in the social order.
I think that way of thinking about bodies and their relationship to social roles and categories comes out of the history of the transatlantic slave trade. There were ideas about the body necessary to think of it as a kind of skin prison, saying, if you have that heritage, if you come from this place, if this is your bodily phenotype, that means you are X.
JM: It means that what we’re doing to you is not bad.
SS: Well, they might even think it could be bad, it’s just, it’s nature, it’s a metaphysical construct of race, saying, there’s a social system that fastens on actual existing biological and physical differences to make the existence of that difference the thing that means this is your social place, not some other social place. If you have that heritage and look like this, then you are property, and you can be used to extract value from, your labor is something that can be completely appropriated by somebody else. That’s an idea that has a history. And developing the legal, philosophical, theological, whatever, justifications for how you make the body mean something, to bind you in place as part of a larger geopolitical and economic structure, the legacy of that is, for trans people who say, you know what, our bodies can mean otherwise.
I’m not in denial of my biology, I’m saying it doesn’t mean what you think it means. In the same way that in the feminist movement you say, just because you have a uterus doesn’t mean you have to be a mother, doesn’t mean you’re a second-class citizen, there’s bodily autonomy there, you can make the biology of your body mean something different. Trans people visibly manifest the fact that our bodies are not, in fact, stable anchors that bind us in an eternal social order. In that sense, it’s deeply, deeply destabilizing to the way society is organized now.
JM: And so if I’m somebody who takes gender biology just as fact, unchangeable, and you’re contradicting that, saying, actually, it might not be, that makes me think I need to question everything I know to be fact. And that’s too much.
SS: Or it kicks the ground out from under your own feet. There’s a sense of panic about it, or a deeply internalized sense of, if what you’re saying is true, that makes my assumed privilege less secure. I think so much of this is unconscious, unthought. I also think, because people who actually change genders are very small in number, we make up kind of a perfect scapegoat community.
JM: For many years, the promise, the operating theory, was that visibility would lead to acceptance, right, just growing representation. And yet we have visibility now, and we see how that’s playing out. So was that theory wrong all along?
SS: I think visibility is just a two-edged sword. On the one hand, I do think it’s important to manifest that trans is a thing that exists in the world. On the other hand, I don’t think visibility alone gets you anything, and certainly right now, I think to be visibly trans is very dangerous. We don’t have time to get into it today, but a lot of the actions of the federal government since January 2025 are really designed to make trans impossible on paper, and increasingly to put trans people in very unlivable and fraught conditions. Within that context, I think it’s important for trans people not to disappear.
JM: You said the administration is making it more and more impossible to be trans on paper, and harder to live a life off paper. Are there any tips or blueprints from history we can pull from for this moment?
SS: I’m always leery of historical analogies, because every situation is different. But I do think we’re in a political moment right now that is without precedent, certainly in the lives of most people who are alive today. There are new threats emerging that haven’t existed in the past. The level of surveillance that happens now, the technological environment we live in that allows so many of our movements and actions to be tracked, the use of emerging AI technologies to combine vast amounts of big data from government databases and compile very detailed records of individual people, that’s a new power of the state. Not new in that states have always done this, but newly sophisticated, extensive, and invasive practices of policing and surveilling the population, which makes some previous ways of resisting less viable. It’s a moment where it’s very difficult to decide where the ground is stable enough to move.
JM: I think about that all the time, how previous resistance tactics, a lot of ACT UP stuff, there was the famous moment where they put a giant inflatable condom over a senator’s house, was it Jesse Helms, to protest, it was a big moment. Today, if they did that to a senator, that senator would fundraise off of it and make a million dollars.
SS: And in the climate we’re in right now, the people who did that, their vehicles would’ve been tracked, their license plates would be in the database, there’d be facial recognition technology, you could compile the records of where they bought whatever. Not even if they were immigrants, and we see what’s happening right now with green card holders, with the suppression of political speech, people who did those kinds of actions to those kinds of targets now would be rotting in a jail in El Salvador within a week.
JM: That’s really dampened the protest movement.
SS: Yeah, because you want to be careful that the way you resist actually does something effective, that it’s not merely symbolic, that it produces some kind of change. It’s very difficult to know exactly what’s the best way of resisting or skirting. This is really new. The targeting of minority populations through the police powers of the state isn’t a new thing, but new groups are being targeted by new means, more extensive means, and that new part is what makes it very difficult to figure out.
JM: Have you experienced a change in your own day-to-day life?
SS: Yeah, I know I’ve been specifically targeted by some well-funded right-wing actors using my name to do Freedom of Information Act requests, trying to track relationships between trans academics. There are things I’ve written as a historian that have been taken down from government websites. I’ve been planning to invite people to the US for seminars and symposia in the academy, and I’ve had to say to them, I don’t think it’s safe for you to come, because of the way the State Department has essentially created a de facto travel ban for gender-incongruent people coming into the United States.
I’m supposed to travel out of the US again in June, and I’m keeping an eye on it. I’m listening, are trans people trying to leave the US having their documents confiscated, are they perhaps not being allowed back in? I haven’t seen those stories yet, but I’m listening for them, because if some things already happening at the state level happen at the federal level, that’s bad. The idea that asserting a trans identity is identity fraud, that for me to say I am a woman, my name is Susan Stryker, would be considered identity fraud, that I would’ve obtained documentation under fraudulent, misrepresenting myself. And if the federal government decides that, and I show up with my legitimately issued US passport and say, that was the before times, this is now.
JM: And that’s happened in Florida and other states, you’re saying this might happen federally?
SS: Right. At the state level, there are laws being passed or advocated for that would make the assertion of a transgender identity an act of identity fraud. There are also, already, for visa applications for people coming into the US, they’re in an impossible situation, because the new rule is you have to state on your visa application your assigned sex and name at birth. So if you show your passport, birth certificate, or whatever, from the country of origin, where you might’ve changed your markers, the US is saying it doesn’t fly here, this is what we need. If you state on your visa application, this is my name, this is my gender as I live it now, they’d say that’s identity fraud for purposes of immigration fraud, and they’d deny the visa and bar you from coming to the US. However, if you did state your birth name, assigned sex at birth, and then present documentation that’s incongruent with that, then you get flagged as trans and perpetrating gender ideology and “woke mind virus,” an enemy of the state, and they’re not going to let you come in either. So there’s a de facto, without saying it outright, no-gender-incongruent-people-can-come-to-the-US policy. They’ve created the administrative mechanism that allows that.
So the question is, when will those things be applied to citizens as well as visitors? Because they’re already going after visa holders who are already here, they’re already going after green card holders, naturalized citizens. They’re creating the state apparatus that allows certain kinds of minoritized life to be discriminated against at will. We are living in a police state now.
I don’t want to end on a bad note, but that’s life right now.
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LGBTQ&A features interviews with the most interesting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in the world. Hosted and produced by Jeffrey Masters. @jeffmasters1
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