How We Became Transgender: Anatomy of a Category

Transgender first entered the transsexual social movements of Toronto in the late 1970s and 80s and reorganised the social relations of gender, sexuality, and class. This paper traces the original articulations of the transgender category through the archives of the Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Transsexuals (FACT) and the Metamorphosis Medical Research Foundation (MMRF). These transsexual social movements developed a politics of respectability which attempted to align transsexuality with the expectations of middle-class comportment and normative sexuality. This politics would be contested as transsexual activists began to interface with other social movements and negotiate their relationships with transsexual sex workers and relatively privileged transvestites, who were variously considered socially unacceptable. The term transgender was adopted to name the sexual and class differences that did not conform to the expectations of transsexual respectability and were thus lumped together in this new social category. Transgender collective identity served as a catch-all for these differences and therefore preserved the transsexual politics of respectability within FACT and MMRF. Historicising transgender in the transsexual social movements of Toronto in the 1980s, this paper reveals the sexual and class relations that first necessitated and continue to underlie transgender collective identity today.