How FTMs Hijacked Gay Activism (Part 2)

FTMs misled gays about the law and browbeat them in a quest to take over their institutions

Jan 29, 2024

“Now that gay people have begun to make some headway in securing basic civil rights, it would be unfair to leave transgendered people behind.”

–Transgender Equality: A Handbook for Activists and Policymakers (2000)

Gays and transsexuals fought with each other for decades, as I related in Part 1 of this story. The latter group often seemed like it wanted nothing to with the former. (Read Part 1 to see how I’m using terminology.) But in the 1990s, the field of play shifted. Trans activists accused gays of neglecting them. And they argued it was in gays’ interests to fight for a ban on “gender identity” discrimination – a lie.

Women who identified as men (“FTMs”) played an important role in this strategy. To make their case to gays, they hawked the concept of “transgenderism” that the FTM/nonbinary-identified Leslie Feinberg promoted in a 1992 pamphlet. Many gays, they argued, were transgendered in that they dressed in a gender-nonconforming way. Therefore gays should fight for transgender rights. And if they didn’t, they were bigots.

In this post I’ll show how FTMs used this new “umbrella term” of transgender to smuggle their agenda into gay rights orgs, with the immediate goal of writing “gender identity” into discrimination law.

Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins (US Supreme Court, 1989)

In 1989, discrimination law became much more generous thanks to a lawsuit that had nothing to do with gay or trans activism.

In Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, the Supreme Court found evidence of sex discrimination where an accounting firm advised its female employee to wear lipstick and dinged her for assertive behavior. “Sex stereotyping,” it ruled, violated her civil rights under Title VII, a federal law that protected against employment discrimination by “sex.”

Within a few years, civil rights lawyers realized this opened the door to lawsuits against employers that, for example, refused to promote trans workers, or let anti-gay bullying run rampant (see footnotes 3 and 11 at that link) – because they’d be mistreating the workers on the basis of their failure to conform to the norms of their sex. Later litigation wins confirmed the theory. In other words, the fight to extend federal civil rights laws to cover anti-gay and anti-trans employment discrimination was largely won in 1989.

Not entirely won. Advocates in the early 1990s still had to worry about some loose ends:

Courts might misconstrue Price Waterhouse to avoid protecting gay or trans people.
The Supreme Court could change course in the future, interpreting Title VII narrowly once again.
Title VII was not the only civil rights statute in America. That said, it was a federal law on an important subject (workplace discrimination), which meant judges would take cues from Price Waterhouse when figuring out how to apply other laws, like similar state statutes and laws against housing discrimination.
Trans people wanted special protections that didn’t fall under the rubric of sex stereotyping – for example, the right to be referred to by the pronouns of their choice, and to use a restroom designated for the opposite sex.

So it was reasonable for advocates to keep fighting to strengthen the law’s protections for gay and trans workers. They could pursue two strategies:

Impact litigation. Find sympathetic gay and trans victims of discrimination and file tearjerker lawsuits on their behalf, citing Price Waterhouse. If courts ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor, that would bolster the rights of all similar people and solidify the anti-stereotyping principles of Price Waterhouse.
Pass legislation (federal, state, or local) explicitly protecting gay and trans people. You could protect gay people by banning discrimination by “sexual orientation.” You could also ban discrimination by “gender expression” and/or codify the language of Price Waterhouse that protected everyone perceived to violate sex stereotypes. This would cover gay, trans, and gender-nonconforming people. But if you wanted to give trans people unique rights like access to opposite-sex bathrooms, then you’d need some other term. Trans advocates settled on “gender identity.”

“Investigation into Discrimination Against Transgendered People” (San Francisco, 1994)

By the early 1990s, Minnesota and a few random localities sort of recognized trans rights through statutes about “gender presentation” or sexual orientation. But they didn’t use the term “gender identity.”

Then in 1993, MTFs convened a law conference in Houston, TX, where they decided to demand “the right to define gender identity.” This amounted to the right of an individual to decide their legal sex. From that point on, the trans movement fought to codify gender identity into law.

Around that time, a San Francisco government agency called the Commission on Human Rights retained the FTM “gender diversity consultant” Jamison Green to author a report about the travails of “transgendered people” and recommend how the commission could serve them. As an official inquiry backed by a major US city, the document was the first of its kind. Activists throughout the US cited it for years after its 1994 publication.

The report kicked off with a citation-free lyrical essay by Green:

“Gender is the expression of masculinity or femininity, which is a sense of self, a reflection of spirit or soul, and which is perceived by others using numerous social signals that have nothing to do with one’s sex or sexual orientation. When people hold the conviction that gender identity or presentation and physiology must be the same, their reaction to an individual who contradicts that conviction is confusion, agitation, even rage.”

She claimed that the term “transgendered” had originated decades earlier with cross-dressers, and “has been adopted as an umbrella term in an effort to unite the many factions of the gender-oppressed and to build a community.” This new community included many gay people:

“Transgender, in its broadest sense, means mixing elements of both genders, sometimes both sexes. The category covers cross-dressers, transsexuals, masculine women and feminine men. Victims of ‘gay bashing’ are often singled out for their transgender characteristics, which is assumed to–but may not always–reflect an individual’s sexual orientation.”

The report used history to prove that trans was not a social contagion:

“Athena, who sprang full-grown from the forehead of Zeus, may be Western history’s first recorded image of transsexual inclinations. And Hera, jealous of Zeus’s achievement with Athena, parthenogenically gave birth to Hephaestus, the outcast whose passionate soul was driven to create beauty out of pain. These archetypes, these tales of non-biological birth, reflect a desire to re-create oneself in the opposite gender.
“The Theban seer Tiresias was a well-known transsexual; that is, he was transformed into a woman and in later life was restored to his original (though older) form. Because Tiresias had knowledge of both masculine and feminine psyches and experience, Zeus asked him to settle an argument between himself and Hera over whether men or women better enjoyed the pleasures of love. It is said that he voted nine to one in favor of women. If there were no societal need for the transgendered psyche, these myths would not exist. And all archetypes are rooted in actual human experience.
“In China, the male deity Kuan-yin changed sex and evolved into the goddess of mercy. There are many popular tales of Kuan-yin’s adventures, and, traditionally, she is the most popular Chinese god. It is fitting that mercy should be the province of the transgendered, because the power of the transformation teaches compassion to the transformed.”

The report’s bibliography did not contain any learned treatises on Greek or Chinese mythology. This freewheeling approach to scholarship mimicked Feinberg’s canonical 1992 pamphlet, Transgender Liberation (as well as Evan Wolfson’s 1983 law school paper in support of gay marriage).

The report then ran down community members’ testimony. Most of the mistreatment they described, like being harassed by coworkers for their appearance, could have been remedied under Title VII. Civil rights experts could have told Green that. But apparently talking to anti-discrimination lawyers wasn’t part of her inquest into how to protect trans people from discrimination.

The report’s “Findings” were sweeping, ham-handed, and generally unsupported by its flimsy investigation. For example:

“[E]very epoch of recorded history includes evidence of the existence of transgendered persons.”

“Hate violence is perpetrated against transgendered persons as much as, if not more than, any other group.”

“[S]ome transgendered persons may be driven to suicide in response to the severe discrimination they may face on a daily basis.”

The report’s 30 recommendations included protection against “gender identity” discrimination, plunking arrestees in cell blocks matching their “gender identity,” sensitivity training for city employees, and teaching kids that “being transgendered” was “another aspect of human biology that occurs naturally[.]”

Most of the recommendations were aimed, appropriately, at powerful entities like the police department and insurance companies. But one targeted a minority social group:

“That the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual communities educate themselves concerning transgender issues and experience, and encourage their political clubs to more actively fight for transgender rights, and that Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual businesses and organizations affirmatively encourage the participation of transgendered employees, clients and members.”

Remember, this recommendation came from the government – the city of San Francisco was telling its LGB residents to “fight for transgender rights[.]” The year it issued this finger-wag, gay/bi San Francisco men were dying of AIDS at a rate of about four per day.

The report’s “findings” defined gender identity as “the deeply felt knowledge of an individual that he or she is male or female[.]” This is pretty much the same way it’s defined in 2024, and the way gender doctors had defined it for decades – the key is its total subjectivity.

Later that year San Francisco added “gender identity” to the civil rights law, as the report had recommended, but it defined the term differently. It was “a person’s various individual attributes as they are understood to be masculine and/or feminine.”

The city of San Francisco was telling its LGB residents to “fight for transgender rights.”

Employment Non-Discrimination Act (proposed) (1994-)

In 1994, gay rights advocates debuted ENDA, which would protect gay people from workplace discrimination nationwide. Trans advocates demanded that they add “gender identity” protections to the text. The gays didn’t want to do that because they thought it would tank the bill; this enraged trans activists. The two camps fought viciously over this point for over a decade, even as gay orgs assisted trans advocates seeking inclusion in a federal hate crimes bill.

A lesbian drafter of ENDA, Chai Feldblum, was one of the lawyers who opposed including gender identity. In 1993, when she began work on it for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), she favored an “impact litigation” strategy for solidifying trans rights like I outlined above. But over the next few years trans advocates changed her mind – particularly an FTM litigator at National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) named Shannon Minter.

Minter actually thought adding “gender identity” to ENDA – and having it languish on Capitol Hill, reminding the whole world that Congress didn’t intend to protect trans people – would make it harder for trans rights lawyers like her to win Title VII lawsuits. But, in Feldblum’s words:

“Nevertheless, [Minter] believed … that including gender identity in ENDA would thus bring essential visibility and energy to transgender issues.”

That clinched it for Feldblum. She was now all-in for adding gender identity to ENDA. Her flakiness floored me – she wanted to risk legislative and courtroom losses in exchange for “visibility and energy”? But then I spotted a footnote: “As a femme, I …”

Before anyone starts lecturing me about how femmes are actually the most fierce gender, or whatever, let me be clear. I love feminine women. I just want to make fun of the ones who declare themselves to be “femmes” in law review articles.

“Transgender Equality: A Handbook for Activists and Policymakers” (2000)

In 2000, three FTMs joined forces to publish a 96-page guide to US transgender activism.

Green, now identifying as “an author, public speaker and advocate for transgender rights,” wrote the intro essay: another roller coaster ride through world history. The rest of the document was authored (or curated – some pieces were reprints) by Minter and Paisley Currah, a poli sci prof at Brooklyn College.

The Handbook, published jointly by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and NCLR, was part of a series on subjects gay people would be interested in, like the horrors of the ex-gay movement and “the myth of affluence” among gay people.

Green launched in early with the dogma about how trans people weren’t gay:

“In reality, whether a person is transsexual has no direct or predictable connection to his or her sexual orientation … there is no evidence that sexuality plays a direct or uniformly causative role in the development of all transgendered or transsexual people.”

The Handbook created the false impression that banning “gender identity” discrimination would help gays. For example, it printed a speech by a “transgender lesbian” (she was a regular lesbian) in favor of including “gender identity” in an anti-discrimination bill. The text misdefined gender identity:

“Gender Identity refers to people who manifest characteristics not traditionally associated with one’s biological maleness or femaleness. … I am also the victim of discrimination on the basis of gender identity. I was told that my gender presentation was not appropriate in graduate school …

The authors themselves defined “gender identity” as referring “to a person’s internal, deeply felt sense of being either male or female, or something other or in between.”

In some places the Handbook used “gender variant” instead of “gender identity” (emphasis added):

“Including trans-protective language is also extremely important for the many gay, lesbian and bisexual people who are affected by gender-based discrimination, even if they do not identify as transgender. For example, one study … found that ‘[l]esbian and gay lawyers are sometimes advised to … alter their appearance to look less stereotypically gay.’ In short, discrimination on the basis of gender variance is not an exclusively ‘transgender’ issue. Including language that prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender variance and gender stereotypes also protects [gays].”

This was a bait-and-switch. “Gender variance” was not the term that the authors actually advocated be written into law – gender identity was. (I’m drawing that from a different section of the Handbook.)

The Handbook confronted gays head on:

“The effort to move away from the term ‘invert’ and to define homosexuality as same-sex love or sexual behavior, and the drive to accept gay and lesbian people as ‘normal,’ contributed to the marginalization of trans people.”

“Transgendered people have played an active role in fighting for gay rights. Now that gay people have begun to make some headway in securing basic civil rights, it would be unfair to leave transgendered people behind.”

“[I]t would be unprincipled and unethical for GLB people to exclude transgendered people from legislative advocacy for fear of being associated with a group that has suffered even more discrimination and stigmatization.”

Again: the Handbook was published by two gay rights nonprofits. This was like the homosexual version of white women paying Saira Rao and Regina Jackson to come to dinner and call them racist.

The Handbook blackmailed gays:

“[N]othing is more destructive of efforts to win civil rights protections for our communities than internal conflicts and divisions. Those conflicts drain our collective energies and engender bitterness and mistrust that may poison working relationships for years. They also play directly into the ‘divide and conquer’ strategy of our opponents, who are only too happy to see us focusing our limited resources on battling one another. In the long run, making a good faith effort to work for and include trans people is by far the most pragmatic strategy.”

The Handbook said nothing about the possibility of vindicating rights against gender stereotyping under existing law.

Success

In the 1990s many if not all of the big gay rights orgs added “transgender” to their mission statements. HRC started hectoring corporations to come out against “gender identity” discrimination in 2002. By the mid-2000s, NCLR, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, Lambda Legal, and the ACLU (which formerly had a project focused only on gays) were filing “transgender rights” lawsuits.

While ENDA still hasn’t passed, many states have added “gender identity” to their anti-discrimination laws. This has granted men entree to women’s and girls’ changing rooms at the gym and given trans people a cudgel if coworkers at a private entity don’t use their preferred pronouns. (I actually don’t think treating trans-identified men like men is “gender identity discrimination,” literally speaking, but that’s another post.)

Then there’s the question of replacing sex with “gender identity,” which is happening in other areas of law. That’s ruining girls’ sports and subjecting incarcerated women to rape. The trans movement has been able to score wins on that front over the past decade because it hijacked gay rights institutions in the 1990s.

I’m not pinning this success entirely on Jamison Green’s masculine wiles. Funders – philanthropists, foundations – are part of any story about nonprofits. Some of them must have been interested in gender medicine or changing the law and culture around sex.

Nor do I want my focus on FTMs to be taken as a dismissal of MTFs’ role in advancing trans rights in the 1990s. Importantly, they formed their own trans-specific orgs (Riki Wilchins with GenderPAC; Jessica Xavier with It’s Time America; Mara Keisling with National Center for Transgender Equality) and petitioned feminist communities to include them (Dana Rivers with Michfest). But the leaders of the charge to fuse gay and trans in this pivotal period were FTMs.

How did FTMs get the idea to glom onto gay rights, and why were they so quickly successful? Because they knew the gay world’s folkways and weak links (femmes). They chose the gays because they’d been gay; because they were gay.

This post was lightly edited on Sept. 29, 2024.

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