Gill-Peterson, Jules, “A Short History of Trans Misogyny”

Introduction: Femmes against Trans

The term “trans” is promoted by the Global North and meant to be inclusive and boundary-crossing but carries the risk of oversimplifying diverse identities.

We are living in the global era of trans, a shortened or prefixal version of the word transgender. As an umbrella promoted by the global North, trans is a hyper-inclusive category under which a constellation of gender identities and styles are meant to find their home. As a prefix, trans- is also a kind of boundary-crossing energy, a refusal to be contained by binaries, and attachable to nearly anything: not just people around the world in countless cultures and languages, but also animals, molecules of animate matter, or digital technology.

Prefixal trans politics promise a queer utopia of gender in which everyone else is set free by getting rid of a backward trans womanhood. This is an origin story that is rarely told.

The word ”transgender” rose to popularity in the 1990s in two distinct but related births:

a largely white activist world in the San Francisco Bay Area, where people long involved in queer organizing began to rally around transgender as a nonmedical, avowedly political category for trespassing the enforced boundaries of gender.

Swaths of people in the United States who had previously traveled under disparate and even incompatible signs were suddenly lumped together under a single umbrella, including transvestites, drag queens, cross-dressers, street queens, hair fairies, butches, studs, bois, faggots, femmes, gender fluid and genderfuck people, and transsexuals.

But the far bigger shadow cast by transgender came through its second birth in the well-funded NGO industrial complex. There, transgender was institutionalized by social service organizations working in US cities and was swiftly adopted for parallel international development work across the global South.

Street girls and sex workers dismissed the transgender label. The term “gay” was one particular sticking point, with orgs wanting to separate gender and sexuality.

Transgender’s great accomplishment has thus been to disavow the very people it claims to urgently represent: poor women of color.

A Short History of Trans Misogyny tells a story in four acts that valorizes the experience, genius, and desires of trans women and trans femininity in the face of misogyny, racism, poverty, and state violence.

The term “trans-feminized” is used to describe groups subjected to transmisogyny despite their not identifying with the transgender identity. (e.g. Hijra, Two-Spirit people, street queens, etc.)

The book tells a series of global stories from the early 19th century to the present day. The word global is meant to highlight how colonialism and capitalism have devastatingly standardized diverse peoples and cultures.

without a clear understanding of what distinguishes trans misogyny from broader misogyny, or its connections to homophobia, we risk collapsing the political differences between trans and non-trans women, as well as leaving the door open to trans-exclusionary feminists to characterize trans women as “privileged males” who don’t experience misogyny at all.

Trans misogyny formed first as a mode of colonial statecraft that modeled for individuals how to sexualize, dehumanize, and aggress trans-feminized people through panic, beginning with police officers.

Historically, gender and sexuality, or what is gay and what is trans feminine, have been blurred for most people.

This book investigates three of trans misogyny’s most enduring manifestations: 1) trans panic, 2) the downward mobility of embracing womanhood under wage-labor capitalism, 3) the betrayal of trans-femininity in the post-Stonewall gay movement.

Ch. 1, ”The Global Trans Panic,” narrates the emergence of state violence from the 19th century until 2020. Moral panics targeting trans feminine people were a form of statecraft.
Ch. 2, “Sex and the Antebellum City,” asks why trans womanhood is so strongly associated with sex work. The answer comes in the remarkable life of Mary Jones.
Ch. 3, “Queens of the Gay World,” studies street queens and how gay and lesbian political movements ultimately betrayed trans femininity in the 1970s to secure their respectability as men and women. The 1970s was also when Western feminism had a falling out with trans women.
“This book’s conclusion, ‘Mujerísima and Post-scarcity Feminism,’ poses a bold new trans feminism for the twenty-first century and critiques the flaccid trans misogyny of the present in both anti-trans feminism and queer and trans movements.”

This book gives little space to trans-exclusionary feminism because it has had far less impact on trans women and trans-feminized people than colonialism, the policing of public space, the criminalization of sex work, and the betrayal of street queens.

It’s also untrue that American feminists, even lesbian feminists, were solidly anti-trans in the 1970s. Recent work by historians has cast doubt on how popular TERF beliefs ever were outside of a few loud agitators—

1. The Global Trans Panic

The targeting of South Asian Hijra for British statecraft

The global trans panic had no single architect or origin, but traces of its emergence are archived during the 19th century in Northwestern Provinces of colonial India.

In 1852, a hijra named Bhoorah was murdered, and her lover, Ali Buksh, was charged with the crime. The court, via Judge Unwin, declared Bhoorah had been a prostitute and alerted colonial officials to what he considered an immoral hijra underground and the Bhoorah’s death as the tip of the iceberg of a “eunuch problem.”

In truth, hijra history is extremely long, complex, and difficult to reconstruct. But in the mid-nineteenth century, hijras were found throughout the subcontinent. They were known for performing in public, mostly by dancing and singing. And they demanded badhai, gifts of money to which they were spiritually entitled at the birth of a child, or a marriage. The role of hijras in blessing and supporting the reproduction of the household was tied to their unique and sacred infertility.

Hijras were born male and initiated into a discipleship through which they lived as girls. They were popularly associated with castration, but not all in the 1850s underwent surgery.

hijras were one of many types of ascetics throughout the subcontinent who lived, at times, at a great distance from British notions of gender, family, and religion.

Hijras were not then, and are not today, transgender. They were pulled into orbit of the Western gender system by the global trans panic.

In short, this chapter argues that the violence of a trans panic made hijras trans feminine in the eyes of the British. Over time, colonial trans-femininization began to alter hijras’ self-perceptions, but that process trailed the immediate disruption of their way of life.

The British Empire used the rhetoric of moral reform to justify their colonization efforts, crusading under the cause of ending the global sex trade.

The idea that hijras were male prostitutes with a secret government became the pretext for a statewide campaign to secure moral order by exterminating them.

In 1871, the colonial government passed the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA), the second half of which set out procedures targeting hijras and making their entire way of life illegal.

Hijras were treated differently from Indian sex workers, a difference that starts to explain what constitute trans panic. Unlike women sex workers, hijras were considered to be engaged in “professional sodomy,” adding a loaded moral outrage.

In 1870, two “men” in London were arrested and charged as sodomites for simply wearing women’s clothing. The Boulton and Park case helped cement the link between crossdressing and sodomy.

The CTA wasn’t very successful as many hijras were able to evade its enforcement and its implementation withered by the end of the 19th century.

Although the intervening history is too complex to reduce to any one cause, the British trans panic in the colonial era seems to have played a lasting role in sexualizing hijras and actually pushing them toward sex work by criminalizing their previous way of life. Thus, through the policing and economic disruption brought about by trans panic, what began as an accusation and a British fiction became the condition of many hijras.

Hijras became targets for violence by men, namely police officers. Their sexualized femininity became the target for violent punishment in a way that would recur countless times around the world in a similar pattern.

US targeting of Indigenous Badé (Two-Spirit people)

In the 1870s in the US, federal agents began entering Indigenous communities confined on reservations to enforce laws banning practices the settler state considered threats to its sovereignty.

Badé (sometimes spelled baté) is a Crow word for a respected social role that today might fall under the Two-Spirit category.

Badé were incarcerated, had their hair cut off, and were made to wear men’s clothing.

Two-Spirit people across the Americas, babaylan of the Phillippines, and mahu of Hawaii were targeted as trans-feminized “sodomites” under colonial expansion.

What was trans about the panic was not that the people being targeted themselves were inherently trans women, but that they were trans-feminized by the conflation of male femininity with immoral sodomy and sex work.

The fact that the state’s enforcers were policemen in each case is also important. After all, the global trans panic was not only about the general violence waged against populations now trans-feminized by the state; the panic also inaugurated the killability of trans women on an interpersonal scale. A new relationship between men and trans femininity was taking shape, leading to a world in which trans panic would eventually become the legal defense it remains today.

American “fairies” & the working class: Jennie June, Loop the Loop, and Nancy Kelly

Jennie June (1874–?) was a self-identified “androgyne” who lived her life as a woman in the United States. She is notable for being one of the first people to write extensively about her experience as a trans feminine person, publishing The Autobiography of an Androgyne in 1918 and The Female-Impersonators in 1922.

By 1895, according to June, working-class men in New York knew what trans femininity looked like, and some of them actively desired girls like her precisely because they were trans. Trans femininity was not only publicly visible in certain neighborhoods; it was seen as different from generic womanhood.

In this era, especially in the working-class world, what is now conventionally separated out in American culture as “gender” and “sexual orientation” were a single category. Seemingly, men killed fairies and trans women for largely the same reasons: their sexualized femininity.

The “fairies,” as they were popularly called, were recognizable by their waxed eyebrows, powdered cheeks, bright colors, and effeminate body language or speech. Unlike the idea of “same-sex” or homosexuality, it was their difference from men, their femininity, that advertised their availability. Regular men could have sex with fairies without suffering the loss of their masculinity and being considered queer, because fairies were effeminate—culturally legible replacements for women. As long as men played the active role when having sex with fairies, they weren’t regarded as any more unusual than men who paid for sex with women. This cultural norm lasted surprisingly long, well into the 1940s.

Loop the Loop (named after the Coney Island roller coaster) was a fairy and sex worker who lived full time in women’s clothing. She could be described more closely as a trans woman by contemporary standards.

Nancy Kelly was a Black female impersonator working in the Chicago South Side drag circuit of the 1940s. She worked local clubs as a dancer, where a single good night could earn her forty dollars— compared to the twelve dollars a week she earned at her day job as a dishwasher, where Kelly dressed as a man

For that kind of money, [Kelly] was willing to risk the danger of working and going out in public dressed as a woman. For Kelly, femininity was a matter of economics, not the expression of an inner identity.

The stories of these working-class fairies don’t clarify the difference between homosexuality and trans femininity. While Loop the Loop was more recognizably like a contemporary trans woman, Nancy Kelly was more like a gay man who only got up in drag for pay. According to the logic of trans panic, however, this difference was unimportant. What they had in common was an opportunity for a certain kind of life in the overcrowded, overpoliced working-class neighborhoods of New York City and Chicago. Trans femininity was not an expression of an inner gender identity but rather a mode of public appearance that paid, whether through sex work or dancing in a nightclub.

Trans panic born in the 19th century was a phenomenon with a global reach, via both colonial state power and interpersonal street interactions.

Panic and trans-feminization produced similar experiences for vastly different kinds of people around the world who had little in common—other than being targets. The men who picked up fairies on the street, or who paid to see female impersonators dance in nightclubs, acted out the same structure of violence when they threatened, assaulted, or robbed them as the colonial state in India or the settler-colonial state in America. This was the same violence wielded by municipal police forces that raided bars and locked people up for cross-dressing. The blending of state violence with interpersonal violence is a signature outcome of the global trans panic, a deadly merger that persists to this day.

Joseph Pemberton’s murder of Filipino trans woman Jennifer Laude

On October 11, 2014, US Marine Joseph Pemberton murdered Jennifer Laude, a Filipina transgender woman, in Olongapo, Philippines.

The US initially refused to give up Pemberton:

The 1998 Visiting Forces Agreement between the two countries, a central plank of American imperialism in a former colony, granted the US jurisdiction over lawbreaking servicepeople.

Trans and anticolonial activists protested and demanded the end of US military presence and imperialism. In late November, a murder charge was formally filed and Pemberton was transferred to joint US-Philippine custody. In December, 2015, Pemberton, utilizing the trans panic defense and reducing the charge from murder to homicide, was sentenced to 6-12 years in prison. Tragically, in September of 2020, far-right Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte granted Pemberton a pardon.

CeCe McDonald

On June 5, 2011, CeCe McDonald, a Black transgender woman, and her friends were attacked by a group hurling transphobic and racist threats. One of them, Dean Schmitz, was wielding a broken beer bottle. McDonald defended herself with a pair of fabric scissors, resulting in Schmitz’s death.

McDonald was arrested and charged with second-degree murder, sparking outcry from LGBTQ+ and racial justice activists who argued that she acted in self-defense. In May 2012, she pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree manslaughter and served 19 months in prison.

“My idea,” [McDonald] explained in one letter, “is that when a man’s ego and reputation are at stake, they fold into the pressure of society’s idea of what masculin/ity is. For me, it comes off as if femininity, homosexism, or transgenderism is contagious and that the man’s masculinity is jeopardized with the association of the fem-man and/or (trans)woman.”

Laude’s and McDonald’s stories dramatize three key features of the subject of this book. These features highlight the role social and state forces play a role in trans panic and its violence:

Trans misogyny is part of an expression of a perceived killability of trans women and larger state-sponsored pattern of violence.
Killers are often successful in claiming that the killing of trans women is rational.
Trans misogynist violence is interpreted as a legitimate response to “trans panic.”

Closing

Trans-feminizing violence and trans misogyny are not limited to those who explicitly identify as trans women. Instead, this violence targets a broader range of individuals perceived as deviating from normative gender expectations, particularly those who appear feminine but are classified as male. This broader targeting suggests that the violence is less concerned with specific identities and more with policing and punishing gender nonconformity in general, especially as sanctioned by the state.

Trans misogyny and historical trans panic have forced trans women into informal economies like sex work, limiting their life opportunities.
Stereotypes and anti-sex-work feminism often misrepresent sex work among trans women as purely degrading, ignoring the nuanced, sometimes chosen nature of this work.
Ethnographic research shows that Black trans sex workers integrate sex work with other types of labor, situating it within broader economic strategies and reflecting similarities with non-trans Black women’s experiences.

2. Sex and the Antebellum City

Chapter two explores the complex social, racial, and gender dynamics in New York City during the antebellum period, focusing on the life of Mary Jones, a Black trans woman and sex worker. Jones’s life became sensationalized in the New York press, highlighting the racial tensions in post-abolition New York.

The Sensationalized Story of Mary Jones

In 1836, Mary Jones was arrested after a white stonemason, Robert Haslem, alleged that Jones had stolen his wallet after he solicited her for sex.

During Jones’s arrest, it was revealed that Jones was wearing women’s clothing and her “right name” was Peter Sewally. This discovery shocked the public and the police, leading to intense scrutiny and sensationalized media coverage. Her case was heavily racialized, with newspapers and court records describing her in derogatory and satirical terms. (“Beefsteak Pete”, “Man-Monster”)

Jones gave testimony in court and her response indicated how her trans femininity was tied up with both her race and class, rather than just a personal identity:

Jones was asked: “What induced you to dress yourself in Women’s Clothes?” Her answer formed the single longest piece of testimony recorded. “I have been in the practice of waiting upon girls of ill-fame and made the Beds and received the Company at the door and received the money for the Rooms etc,” she said. “And they induced me to dress in women’s clothes, saying I looked so much better in them and I have always attended parties among the people of my own Colour dressed in that way—and in New Orleans I always dressed in this way.”

The sensationalism surrounding Jones was driven more by racial anxieties than by her gender identity (emphasis mine):

The cause of her infamy wasn’t that she was really a man under her women’s clothing; rather, the satire of her clothes and wig had to do with her being free and Black. “Sewally has for a long time past been doing a fair business,” the Herald reported, “both in money making, and practical amalgamation, under the cognomen of Mary Jones.” The phrase “practical amalgamation,” not the putative mismatch between her womanhood and her body, was the scandal.

After the trial, a lithograph of Jones, captioned “The Man-Monster,” appeared around Manhattan. Jones was illustrated as fashionable and elegant, holding a man’s pocketbook in one hand (a wink to the trial), and with a serene and confident expression. This caricature was intended to mock Jones’s audacity as a Black woman who transgressed gender, and especially racial, boundaries.

![[Mary_Jones_Lithogram.jpg]]

The sensationalization of Jones’s trial was meant to satirize abolition:

If this was how free Black New Yorkers lived, daring to consider themselves equal to white people in all matters, the fact that behind their fine clothing and deportment lay sex work was all the proof needed that the national abolition of slavery would inevitably lead to the “amalgamation” of the races.

The satirization of Jones was meant to illustrate the duplicity of free Black people: Just as Haslem, a white man, was tricked by Jones, so too would everyone else if slavery were to end nationally.

Jones’s testimony offers a rare glimpse into her perspective, suggesting her trans womanhood was a regular part of Black life in NYC and New Orleans:

“I have always attended parties among the people of my own Colour dressed in that way —and in New Orleans I always dressed in this way.”

Why did Jones emphasize being at home among Black people? Why mention New Orleans? The satirization of Jones and limited words from Jones herself, make it hard to fully trust the historical record. Gill-Peterson employs “critical fabulation,” a method developed by Black feminist historians to rigorously speculate when working with incomplete records, to imagine the fuller possibility of Jones’s testimony.

Building on the last chapter’s concept of trans-feminization as a condition imposed by the state on entire populations, this chapter argues that sex work emerged for trans-feminized people as one of their only viable ways of life.

As a Black trans feminine person in a city with changing and contradictory racial, gendered, and economic dynamics, Jones had little opportunities for economic stability. For Jones, sex work offered a rare economic opportunity.

In this context, it’s not hard to imagine why sex work was appealing to Jones. Whatever her military stint amounted to, it implies she had tried to make it as a man at least once. But the downward mobility of living as a woman was ironically minimal on top of the economic situation of free Black workers after emancipation. By choosing to live as a woman, Jones was hardly forgoing a lucrative career as a street cleaner or oyster vendor. However she got her start, by living in a brothel and doing domestic work in addition to streetwalking she was a fairly typical sex worker. And she was in good company. The explosion in the city’s sex economy tracks with the surge in its population and the money brought by industrialization.

Trans Womanhood and Sex Work

Sex work attracted women marginalized from marriage and economy: Sex work was overwhelmingly a woman’s profession. Like Jones, it tended to attract women who were unable to fulfill the moral imperatives that defined the American nineteenth century: the cult of true womanhood and separate-spheres ideology.

While sex work was largely women-run, the financial returns were often overshadowed by high costs such as brothel rent and maintaining fashionable appearances. Sarah Williams, a free Black sex worker, charged her clients a flat rate of just two dollars in 1835.

Due to lack of historical records, it’s difficult to identify how many sex workers were trans. But Mary Jones wasn’t alone. Sally Binns, a white sex worker and theatre actor, was profiled by the Whip. The Whip treated Binns in an interesting manner: profiling her like a woman but also referring to her as a man. She was “not quite a woman; by no means a man.”

Lavinia Edwards, an Irish immigrant in London, lived as a woman and pursued a career in theatre acting. Her death in 1833 revealed her trans identity. This came as a surprise to everyone around her, including those closest to her.

Tales of trans feminine “deception” became increasingly common toward the end of the 19th century, becoming part of press and lore of cities from London, to New York, to Chicago.

Jones’ life, along with Sally Bins and Lavinia Edwards, evidences how tightly contemporary trans femininity tracks with historical shifts in state power and economy:

The three had very little in common, except that they worked in the service and nightlife economy. Each of them seems to have found in trans womanhood a way of life that amplified their social and economic mobility. Edwards was a poor immigrant from colonial Ireland. Like Binns, the theater merged the possibility of living as a woman with a nightlife job. And like Jones, Binns found sex work to be one of the only ways to make enough money to purchase the autonomy she needed—until she saw her name printed in the flash press.

While histories of trans femininity stretch back much further than this period, the first few decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the growing relationships between trans womanhood, public space, and economic mobility that remain important to this day. As increasingly wage-driven economies like England and the United States were enforcing a strict gendered division of labor, women as a class were experiencing a long-term decline in their economic, social, and political power that had begun centuries earlier among peasants in Europe, and increasingly across the world through colonialism.

Though not a form of liberation, the potential of sex work and the anonymity of the city made trans womanhood into a window of opportunity.

The Historical “Ungendering” of Black People

Mary Jones’s reference to New Orleans, and her travels there from NYC, was remarkable. New Orleans was “the Cotton Kingdom,” a bastion of white economic dominance and enslavement. Despite the dangers, including risk of being re-enslaved, Jones’s journey speaks to her resourcefulness in leveraging her identity for survival and mobility.

Black feminists, such as Hortense Spillers, describe the “ungendering” of enslaved Africans: Slavery erased the traditional identities and kinship bonds of enslaved Africans, making them more like commodities— fungible property to control.

Through the infliction of extreme brutality that destroyed their prior identities, enslaved Africans were made exchangeable through a common rate as commodities. “Under these conditions,” explains Spillers, “we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender specific.”

In Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, C. Riley Snorton explores how Black people in the antebellum era experienced and navigated gender in ways that were flexible and adaptable, rather than fixed or rigid. This enabled many to strategically gain more freedom. For example, it was common practice for those escaping slavery to cross-dress.

Mary Jones in New Orleans

It’s uncertain why Jones visited New Orleans. However, using critical fabulation, it’s possible the city’s vibrant free Black culture and events like Mardi Gras, which features cross-dressing, likely appealed to her.

Trans women have historically done sex work is because it allows them to navigate the fraught and often contradictory conditions they faced. To them, it was just another job within a broader service economy.

The reason why trans women like Mary Jones have historically done sex work is simple: it’s a job that embraces contradiction, instead of moralizing work and value. It wasn’t that she had no other choice, or no choice at all. Sex work didn’t replace “real” work, either. Jones did domestic work, and she sold sex because the service economy arose in this era as the informal sibling to industrial capitalism and slavery.

Like the hijras in British India from chapter 1, Jones is part of the story of how Euro-American forces trans-femininized people around the world without any regard for who they might have otherwise been, pushing them into similar lines of work out of which something resembling trans womanhood emerged as a play for mobility.

Mary Jones’s life serves as an example of how trans-feminized people survived in the wake of violent state upheaval.

For those who were trans-femininized by the state, the trajectory of their lives was conditioned by the massive liquidation of the countless cultural, linguistic, religious, and kinship idioms that had previously governed their ways of life. Jones was an early example of what could come in the aftermath of such violent upheaval. In the wake of slavery, there was no home, cultural or literal, to return to. She lived by crossing certain gender and color lines, exploiting their many contradictions as much as they criminalized her in return. And for it, she earned a sacred place in a long tradition of Black speculation.

The academic approach employed by historians inadequately portray the inventiveness of Jones’s life. Instead, Salacia, a 2020 short film by the artist Tourmaline, paints Jones’s life much more vividly and artistically.

Timeline of events 1799-1865

1799: The Gradual Emancipation Act passes in New York. Children born to enslaved women after July 4, 1799, are considered free but required to serve their mother’s owner until their mid-20s. This begins the development of a free Black community in New York.
1815-1861: The Antebellum period is the period preceding the American Civil War. It is most closely associated with the U.S. South that was dependent on an expanding slavery system and plantation economy.
1820s to 1860s: The Cult of True Womanhood dominated American society, prescribing a set of virtues for women, particularly white, middle- and upper-class women, emphasizing purity, submissiveness, domesticity, and encouraging separate spheres ideology.
1827: New York State abolishes slavery, freeing all remaining enslaved people. This leads to heightened racial tensions as Black people assert their freedom in a still racist society.
1834: Violent anti-abolitionist riots befall New York City. White mobs attacked Black neighborhoods and abolitionist institutions, underscoring the precarity of free Black people.
1836: Mary Jones is arrested and sensationalized. Her case highlights the intermixed tensions of gender, race, and class in a rapidly changing NYC.
1861-1865: American Civil War

3. Queens of the Gay World

The Gay Outlaw and Pre-Stonewall Queer Culture

City of Night (1963), written by Mexican-American novelist John Rechy, explores the lives of “gay outlaws” across various American cities, from New York to Los Angeles. The novel is a loosely autobiographical snapshot of queer life before the gay liberation movement.

The protagonist, a figure described as a “youngman,” represents the archetype of the gay outlaw—a male hustler whose sexuality is economic, not an identity. The gay outlaw has long been a romantic fantasy in American queer culture and historical memory, symbolizing dissent against the stifling conservative conventions of 1950s America.

The gay outlaw navigates post-WWII American cities, driven by a wanderlust, alienated but longing for connection. However, the chapter challenges this romanticized view, suggesting that the gay outlaw’s life is not as solitary or antisocial as often depicted.

Miss Destiny and the Role of Trans Street Queens

After the protagonist arrives in Pershing Square, the novel introduces Miss Destiny, a composite character made of half-truths and inspired by a queen Rechy knew. Miss Destiny is a street queen, a poor trans woman who embodies both the marginalized and the magical in the gay underworld. Like Marsha P. Johnson, Miss Destiny is an enchanting figure that gives character to the gay scene.

Originating from the gay world, Queen is a term of endearment for central queer figures. Historically, “queen” blended gender nonconformity, sexuality, and flamboyance. Revisionist history, in service of US identity politics and its tidy identity boxes, sees gay men and trans women as completely separate groups, despite their shared history of gender nonconformity. A queen is now just a metaphor, a relic of a now anachronistic era when gay men were perhaps less sure of their distance from trans femininity.

In the mid-1960s, a researcher in anthropology, Esther Newton, decided to study drag queens. Newton argued, against the grain, that gay people were on the whole culturally similar to the rest of America— a stunning claim at the time. Her book, Mother Camp (1979) is a study of professional “female impersonators” or drag queens. She documented a wide variety of people, from different classes, affected by the stigma of homosexuality who were forced to gather furtively.

Newton observed that the drag queen was the central symbol of being gay. The drag queen was the purest incarnation of the stigma attached to effeminacy. While many gay people tried to closet or mask themselves, drag queens embraced effeminacy. They made a career out of being gay. They were revered, performing on stage in defiance of a collectively shared stigma.

Newton observed a major class division in 1960s drag. The professional female impersonator was only in drag on-stage. They considered themselves men doing a job, and appealed to the class status of professionalism. They were perhaps the most highly valued icons in the gay world.

On the other hand, street queens were at the very bottom of the gay social hierarchy. They embraced effeminacy on and off stage, attempting to live as women. They faced social and professional marginalization because of their publicly visible gender nonconformance, often locked out of even the most menial jobs. Per Newton, street queens’ lives revolved around “confrontation, prostitution, and drug ‘highs.’”

Street queens were regarded as the bravest and most combative in the gay world, having nothing to lose. In the 1966 Compton Cafeteria riot, street queens started a melee with the police. And most famously, in 1969, street queens led the NYC Stonewall rebellion.

The Decline of Trans Femininity in the Gay World

As the gay rights movement gained mainstream visibility in the 1970s, there was a growing emphasis on masculine norms and a distancing from the effeminacy and trans femininity embodied by street queens.

The post-Stonewall pride movement demanded people publicly proclaim their identity, which revolutionized how gay culture managed stigma. “Muscles, moustaches, and leather were the new calling cards of gay men.” Queens were no longer the heroes of gay male culture.

In 1973, being gay was no longer considered a mental illness and was removed from the DSM. Now homosexuality could be seen as normal. Cross-dressing and taking hormones didn’t fit into this vision of gay men as respectable men.

However, trans women had their own path to respectability: the transsexual— a white and middle-class ideal that used hormones and surgery to pass as cis women and disappear into respectable American society.

Street queens were poor and couldn’t afford to medically transition. The 1970s transsexual, medical model explicitly kept out poor girls who didn’t pass well, did sex work, or wouldn’t compromise to live a normative lifestyle.

Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson helped found the gay liberation movement after the Stonewall riots. And just a few years later, they were excluded by that same gay movement for their trans femininity, marking a violent end to the street queens’ reign.

Today, Rivera and Johnson are celebrated as “trans women of color,” as if that were a clear-cut category that differentiated them from gay men. However, neither of them made the distinction at the time. They were street queens. In any case, the police didn’t care how someone identified; they were treated horrifically by the police and prison system.

Sylvia Rivera got involved in the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA) at NYU in 1970. From the beginning, some didn’t want her involved. Rivera was “copying and flaunting some of the worse aspects of female oppression.” In September 1970, Rivera and Johnson led a five-day-long protest occupation of Weinstein Hall. As soon as the cops appeared, most non-trans protestors abandoned them. The non-trans gay activists, expecting a life of upward mobility from their NYU degree, were not willing to risk confrontation with the police. Rivera and Johnson saw themselves as true adherents to the gay liberation movement, rather than a separatist trans movement.

Street queens’ understanding of gay liberation was more radical and concrete than that of the GAA membership. This led Rivera and Johnson to found Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). Rather than a split over gay and trans interests, the split was rooted in class. The street queens of NYC were young, poor, people of color constantly targeted by violence. Consequently, police and prison violence hit street queens the hardest. However, STAR’s radical political vision was unpopular in the respectability politics of mainstream gay activism, the newly masculine gay movement, and growing anti-trans tenor of some lesbian feminists.

The policing and attack on street queens in the US became the internal counterpart of the colonial project that had policed and attempted to erase hijras and other gender nonconforming people.

In the 1970s, the US gay and lesbian movement turned on trans femininity, allying with the state to police the streets and rid cities of their queens. They reasoned that if they sold out the queens, they might be welcomed into a sanitized middle-class citizenship.

Legacy and Reinterpretation of Street Queens

The street queens, like Miss Destiny from City of Night, represent the tragedy and grandeur of Shakespearean monarchs, embodying a mortal male body and a divine feminine body. Denied access to transsexual technologies, she inherited an older lineage of trans femininity. She forged an exalted, spiritual form of high femininity out of poverty and marginalization. Tragically, she lived like a paranoid ruler, expecting betrayal, having her realness denied and being brought back down to earth as a mere man in a dress.

But Destiny’s tragic fall wasn’t predestined or ordained by fate. Her fall, like those of Rivera, Johnson, and other street queens, was the result of transphobia, poverty, and systemic exclusion from the gay community and broader society.

The Black trans woman today represents a tragic figure who endures the worst of multiple oppressions, and yet represents a revolutionary figure that will righteously lead us to a better world. Trans women of color like Rivera and Johnson are flattened to mere symbols, rather than individuals with nuanced desires and lives. Confining trans women of color to inspiring martyr unfairly places both too little and too much on an individual.

In the academic field of queer theory, trans women of color have often been instrumentalized for theoretical purposes. In Bodies That Matter (1996), Judith Butler uses Venus Xtravaganza’s life and tragic death as an example of the limitations of performativity and the risks of pursuing conventional femininity within oppressive systems.

While Xtravaganza’s participation in ball culture and her pursuit of “realness” aimed to subvert traditional gender norms, Butler argued that these acts, instead of destabilizing power structures, ultimately reinforced them. Butler suggests that Xtravaganza’s desire to achieve conventional womanhood, rather than embracing a more radically queer or subversive identity, left her vulnerable to the very systems of oppression that devalue and endanger trans women of color.

Butler thus blames Xtravaganza for her own death— a result of her desire for a “normal” life and a misreading of the social dynamics of power. “If Venus wants to become a woman,” Butler wrote, “and cannot overcome being a Latina, then Venus is treated by the symbolic precisely the ways in which women of color are treated. Her death thus testifies to a tragic misreading of the social map of power.”

Butler reduced Xtravaganza’s life to a theoretical lesson about the dangers of conforming to traditional gender roles, overlooking the real, human desires that motivated Xtravaganza and that shouldn’t be dismissed as politically naïve.

Only those who see no future for women like Venus Xtravaganza, those whose theories of challenging norms rely on the martyrdom of trans women of color, would overlook her sophisticated explanation of the conditions of her life, work, and womanhood to conclude that she died for a naive fantasy.

The Lessons of Street Queens

Today, trans women of color like Xtravaganza are presented not as tragic failures but as near goddesses. The trans woman of color appears as a political symbol, representing intersectional consciousness. Yet they remain a theoretical figure to be invoked, stripped of the complexities of their agency and lived realities. Had liberal trans-inclusive political political movements, or academia, engaged with trans women of color in a committed way, their primary concerns would be prison abolition, police violence, and sex work— not a theoretical gender politics or that they merely deserve to be rescued form death.

Modern representations of trans women of color, like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, have turned them into almost saint-like figures. This glorification distances us from their real struggles and the unfinished work they started, especially as the LGBTQ+ movement has become more gender-normative. The redemption of tragedy romanticizes the lives of trans women of color, treating their suffering as a necessary precursor for some future justice, instead of immediately confronting their struggles.

Street queens, like Miss Destiny, held important political and spiritual power. Their defiance against oppression, whether from the police, society, or even God, symbolizes the strength needed to lead movements for trans-feminism and broader social justice. Their legacy continues, inspiring future generations to continue the fight for equality and recognition.

The lesson from street queens is not one of enduring suffering for some future utopia, but of what it takes to build a truly trans-feminist movement. The queen is someone who knows what she wants, the reality of the oppression she faces, and is willing to fight for justice, for her divine birthright.

Conclusion: Mujerísima and Scarcity Feminism

Trans Femininity as Target

Trans womanhood is appropriated and used as a symbol in other people’s movements—whether progressive, queer, or even conservative politics—yet they often don’t materially engage with or embrace trans womanhood.

When movements claim to act in our name, or use our image as their rallying cry, it is often to imagine a world where trans womanhood is implicitly obsolete, no longer needed in gender’s abolition or an infinite taxonomy of individual identities beyond the binary. The use and abuse of trans womanhood secures otherwise-contrary versions of gender-based politics, from intersectional and queer feminism to white women’s fascism and Christian fundamentalism. The cavalry in the global gender wars line up on their opposing sides, cannons ablaze, but each agrees not to admit the premise they share: trans femininity is not integral to the future they are fighting for.

Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERF) such as Janice Raymond and Kathleen Stock invoke the image of trans women as deceitful predators preying upon naive cis women. While journalist like Abigail Shrier condescendingly cast trans masculine people as pitiable victims caught up in a cultural virus. In reality, trans women are more than four times as likely to experience intimate violence than non-trans people of all genders. In their formulation, trans women bear the original sin of maleness.

Trans panic relies on circular logic, where to be a woman is to be in constant danger and to be a man is to be inherently violent:

On the one hand, it charges that trans women are not women, because their “gender” is really a dangerous sexuality, reducible to an inherently violent penis (though actual men with penises, who outnumber trans women in the world by massive numbers, are conspicuously not the central targets of such TERF campaigns). On the other hand, it claims that non-trans “sexuality” is truthfully a matter of gender (or sex, used synonymously). Women are biologically endangered by penises, and men are driven to legitimate homicidal rage at their sight.

Once trans women are dehumanized, they’re worthy of any punishment and even extinction. In TERF’s view, “transgenderism” is a social phenomenon that will stop reproducing once trans people stop receiving social and institutional recognition and support.

While trans-masculine or nonbinary people are occasionally deemed rescuable by people like Shrier if they were to renounce and detransition—a horrifically demeaning and genocidal prospect in itself—anti-trans politics has proven itself strident in its goal of eliminating trans womanhood by any means necessary, to the point that when right-wing media targets trans men or trans-masculine people for harassment or misinformation, they often misgender them in a way that implies they are trans women.

“Too Much” Femininity?

Trans women are often viewed as “too much.” In turn, many mistakenly try to downplay their exceptionality and uniqueness, assimilating them into respectable femininity:

Trans women are extra. Trans femininity is too much. The first mistake of any trans-inclusive feminism is to confine itself by flattening what makes trans femininity and womanhood different from the generic standard. Championing the inclusion of trans women by saying they are indistinguishable from non-trans women is the product of a scarcity mindset. So, too, is claiming that trans femininity has a stable definition or that trans femininity fits neatly into the trans umbrella, or even the LGBT umbrella. Their assimilation into a whole is always a concession to the fear there isn’t enough to go around, whether it be money, power, language, or even gender. To make trans-feminist demands smaller in unifying through sameness with non-trans women, or with all trans or LGBT people, is a mistake.

The violence and exclusion trans women face are anxious attempts to enforce boundaries that don’t really exist. Trans women are not an isolated group, they are part of a larger social web. Gay men’s cultures were forged out of the same spaces as trans womanhood. Non-trans women have shared downward mobility and sex work under capitalism. Other non-trans women have been excluded from womanhood based on racist grounds. Straight men depend on the validation of their desire for trans women’s femininity to consolidate their manhood.

Trans misogyny shares core traits with both general misogyny and homophobia: the policing of femininity that is seen as inappropriate or excessive.

Much of liberal feminism has relied on minimizing, if not rejecting or attempting to transcend, femininity. In an attempt for equality with men, and to dodge the charge of women as irrational and unserious, liberal feminism has claimed that women are the same as men, adopting masculinity as the default model of authority and respect. This strategy of respectability politics has, ironically, devalued femininity.

What if, instead of a scarcity mindset, trans feminism embraced and celebrated “excessive” femininity?

What if trans feminism meant saying yes to being too much, not because everyone should become more feminine, or more sexual, but because a safer world is one in which there is nothing wrong with being extra? Abundance might be a powerful concept in a world organized by a false sense of scarcity. What if trans feminism dedramatized and celebrated trans femininity as the most feminine, or trans women as the most women? How might trans women lead a coalition in the name of femininity, not to replace or even define other kinds of women, but to show what the world might look like for everyone if it were hospitable to being extra and having more than enough?

Travestis, Mujerísima, and “Good Enough” Politics

There is a burgeoning trans-feminist movements, led by travestis in Latin America, seeking a different path: mujerísima.

Mujerísima is a Spanish neologism formed of mujer (woman) and the superlative -ísima, which denotes the highest degree of something. Although something is lost in translation, in English it might be read as “the most woman.”

Mujerísima celebrates the excessive femininity of trans women and rejects assimilation:

mujerísima underlines a fierce commitment to being unabashedly the most feminine, or the womanliest of all, in a loudly travesti way, manifestly different from the normative ideal of womanhood. Mujerísima is part of a travesti rejection of assimilation, including into transgender womanhood. In Latin America, home to trans-feminist traditions stretching back decades, mujerísima can be spoken with a trans-feminist inflection.

Travestis are a group of trans-feminine people in Latin America, with complex relationships with gender and sexuality. Travestis challenge Western transgender norms, refusing to separate gender from sexuality, and reject state-controlled and institutional identities like “transgender” or “transsexual.” Instead, they emphasize collective survival, joy, (sexual) pleasure, and the “good enough” approach to life, resisting perfectionist ideals that often dominate Western activism.

Travesti is a vast category of identity, culture, class, and politics that differs throughout Latin America. Notably, travesti is not a Spanish or Portuguese translation of transgender. of transgender. Not only does travesti precede transgender by decades; it often challenges, competes with, or outright opposes transgender (transgénero in Spanish and transgênero in Portuguese) and transsexual (transexual in both languages).

Travesti is a vernacular category of trans femininity, meaning it isn’t subservient to medical textbooks or other self-appointed experts.

Separating gay men from trans femininity is the mission of an intrusive, NGO-driven gentrification of identity politics beginning in the 1990s. Travestis frequently conceive of themselves through sexuality and often prioritize their overlap with gay cultures.

Travesti is defiant, forged out of marginalized class and race, and state violence. Travesti refuses to be trans, woman, or even intelligible. Their history of state violence, especially under dictatorship regimes in countries like Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, shapes their politics, which reject the state’s authority to define their lives.

Travesti political organizing rejects the Western model of state recognition as universally applicable. In fact, this model can whitewash the lives of people who don’t live up to Western ideals. Rather than fitting into the broader trans category, travesti identity is seen as culturally and geographically specific.

For example, travesti activists in Argentina criticized the country’s 2012 Gender Identity Law (LIG) and the broader human rights framework of gender self-id. They argued that while the LIG was a major step forward in terms of transgender rights, it ultimately reinforced the binary of “man” and “woman,” legally erasing the existence of travestis. Ultimately, travesti activists challenged the very legitimacy of the state to regulate gender and sexuality. As activist Marlene Wayar put it, “We travestis are not men or women; we are constructions of personal substance, our own absolutely and highly personal body of laws.”

Rather than flattening and homogenizing ways of life, travestis seek a “good enough” model:

Unlike the international trans politics that homogenize and flatten different ways of life, Wayar doesn’t demand perfection or unity in this vision of trans feminism. Her concept of political action isn’t predicated on finding the right language, or the right identities, to include everyone in their imagined proper place. Instead of demanding that every individual be obligated to find their true self and present it to the state for evaluation, this version of travesti politics rejects the project of idealism and its impossible search for a home in language or law. Wayar takes the angle of lo suficientemente bueno—“the good enough.”

Wayar’s “good enough” travesti politics is fundamentalist materialist. Political action follows from the needs and challenges of everyday life, rather than abstract ideals of human rights and state recognition that arbitrarily decides who is deserving and undeserving.

Travesti politics, in Wayar’s terms, are about what’s good enough for everyone, not perfection for some and suffering for others. She advises queer, trans, and feminist movements to give up the quest for the perfect language, or law, to govern identity. The good enough keeps us present, attuned to what is here in the world, instead of asking to wait for our reward until we find perfection or utopia. And what is already here is the grace, divinity, and power of our queens.

Mulher: A Travesti Anthem

In the music video for “Mulher” (2017), Linn da Quebrada, a Brazilian travesti artist, narrates a night working the streets, embodying an unapologetically excessive femininity. Dressed in glittering silver, she asserts her power as the “diva of the gutter” while interacting with men from all classes. The video moves from individual encounters, where pleasure and violence blur, to scenes of sisterhood as other travestis gather to support and protect each other. When Quebrada is assaulted by clients, her fellow travestis rescue her, and the video shifts to a serene epilogue, where they embrace, heal, and celebrate their collective strength and joy.

“Mulher” illustrates the power, complexity, and transformative potential of travesti politics. Travestis challenge conventional gender norms, resist state-imposed categories, and celebrate an unapologetically excessive femininity. The video exemplifies how travestis reclaim their bodies, sexuality, and experiences in the face of violence, criminalization, and marginalization, transforming these into sources of pride, power, and solidarity.

“Mulher” announces that the kingdom of the queens is not what awaits in heaven after a pious lifetime of suffering and tragedy. Femininity is the reward, here and now. Sexuality signals its arrival in the fleshy present. Heaven is already here on earth, growing with each demonstration in the streets and each ceremonial commitment to the sanctity of travesti femininity in shades richly Black and Brown, linking with the struggles of non-travesti women who have been policed by misogyny and racism. Strangely, wondrously, the travesti politics of the good enough, though they set aside the impossible threshold of perfection, are nothing like pragmatism. What’s good enough is not predetermined or static, which means it has no limit. What’s good enough can grow and change over time, without a prescribed end, meaning it can deliver on the vastness of mujerísima. What proves to be good enough for travestis, for trans-feminized people around the world, and for the divinity of trans femininity itself, is nothing less than the most. Will you demand it all?