page_title: History of transgender people in the United States
section_title: 1970s and 1980s
hierarchical_section_title: History of transgender people in the United States / Overview / 1970s and 1980s
caption_attribution_description: English: Taken at Die Untoten, May 2011
context_page_description: European transgender people have been present in the land now known as the United States at least since the early 1600s. Before Western contact, some Native American tribes had third gender people whose social roles varied from tribe to tribe. People dressing and living differently from their sex assignment at birth and contributing to various aspects of American history and culture have been documented from the 17th century to the present day. In the 20th and 21st centuries, advances in sex reassignment surgery as well as transgender activism have influenced transgender life and the popular perception of transgender people in the United States.
context_section_description: Many support organizations for male cross-dressers began in the 1970s and 1980s, with most beginning as offshoots of Virginia Prince's organizations from the early 1960s. Transgender activist Lee Brewster, of the Queens Liberation Front began publishing the transgender women's magazine Queens.  Angela Douglas founded TAO (Transsexual/Transvestite Action Organization), which published the Moonshadow and Mirage newsletters. TAO moved to Miami in 1972, where it came to include several Puerto Rican and Cuban members, and soon grew into the first international transgender community organization.
  Another significant event for activism occurred in 1979, with the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights held in Washington, D.C. on October 14. It drew between 75,000 and 125,000 transgender people, lesbians, bisexual people, gay men, and straight allies to demand equal civil rights and urge the passage of protective civil rights legislation. The march was organized by Phyllis Frye (who in 2010 became Texas's first openly transgender judge) and three other activists, but no transgender people spoke at the main rally.
  The 1970s also saw conflict between the transgender and lesbian communities in America. A dispute began in 1973, when the West Coast Lesbian Conference split over a scheduled performance by the lesbian transgender folk-singer Beth Elliott. Elliott had served as vice-president of the San Francisco chapter of the lesbian group Daughters of Bilitis, and edited the chapter's newsletter, Sisters, but was expelled from the group in 1973 on the grounds that she was not really a woman. In 1977 some lesbians protested the fact that lesbian transgender woman Sandy Stone was employed at Olivia Records. In 1979 lesbian radical feminist activist Janice Raymond released the book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, which she framed as a critique of a patriarchal medical and psychiatric establishment, and which maintains that transsexualism is based on the "patriarchal myths" of "male mothering", and "making of woman according to man's image". Raymond claimed this was done in order "to colonize feminist identification, culture, politics and sexuality", adding: "All transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves .... Transsexuals merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women, so that they seem non-invasive." In this charge, Raymond echoed feminist Robin Morgan's charge at the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference, held in Los Angeles, that pre-op transsexual folk singer Beth Elliott, who had performed the previous day, was "an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a destroyer-with the mentality of a rapist." In particular, Raymond mounted an ad hominem attack on Sandy Stone in The Transsexual Empire. Raymond accused Stone by name of plotting to destroy the Olivia Records collective and womanhood in general with "male energy". In 1976, prior to publication, Raymond had sent a draft of the chapter attacking Stone to the Olivia collective "for comment", apparently in anticipation of outing Stone. Raymond appeared unaware that Stone had informed the collective of her transgender status before agreeing to join. The collective did return comments to Raymond, suggesting that her description of transgender people and of Stone's place in and effect on the collective was at odds with the reality of the collective's interaction with Stone. Raymond responded by increasing the virulence of her attack on Stone in the published version of the manuscript:
  Masculine behavior is notably obtrusive. It is significant that transsexually constructed lesbian feminists have inserted themselves into positions of importance and/or performance in the feminist community. Sandy Stone, the transsexual engineer with Olivia Records, an "all-women" recording company, illustrates this well. Stone is not only crucial to the Olivia enterprise but plays a very dominant role there. The...visibility he achieved in the aftermath of the Olivia controversy...only se
caption: Sandy Stone, as transgender engineer of Olivia Records, was targeted in the 1970s; she has been cited as the originator of Transgender Studies.
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