Quora answers to "What was it like to be transgender in the 1980s?"

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What was it like to be transgender in the 1980s?

What was it like to be transgender in the 1980s?

Did you have a vocabulary and concepts for your identity and who you were as trans? Who did you identify with? Who were your role models? How did the culture of the 1980s make your life easier or more difficult? What other aspects of the 1980s shaped your identity as trans? How do you think your experience then differed from the experience of people now who have greater internet access to support and visibility in the media?

Anonymous

I was in my 30’s during the 80’s and it was a fabulous time, the dawn of what I consider the modern era in popular culture. At that point, I could still pass for a gay boy in his mid-20’s, but my trans side was becoming harder to suppress. In the 70’s, glam-rock androgyny provided an easy cover for being femme and flashy. By the time the 80’s arrived, that trend had migrated out of gay subculture into the pretty boy new-wave scene and I did too. There were lots of drugs and sex as well, and I was a pretty promiscuous crossdresser. But one step I was not ready to take was transitioning for real, to admit to myself that I didn’t just want to dress like a girl and party.

In retrospect, it’s obvious that I really wanted to be female all along. But in the 80’s, that was too scary a prospect to deal with. I dreaded electrolysis, knew I could never pass, and was afraid I’d be alone forever. There was no trans movement, no internet to research, and nothing but contempt and ridicule for outed transsexuals. The 80’s were politically reactionary, with both feminists and fundamentalists raging with openly transphobic bigotry and judgmental psychiatrists who denied hormones and surgery to all but those who could act like prim and proper straight girls. I was a skinny punk bisexual freak who could not even caricature that kind of standard.

But the 80’s finally gave way to the 90’s, the emergence of gender activism and third-wave feminism. What really broke the ice was the increasingly public visibility of genderqueer dykes and trans men, unheard of in the 80’s. The jargon changed as well, with people openly identifying as queer and transgender, and the political formation of the LGBT alliance. While trans people were still marginalized in both straight and gay worlds, there was finally a queer alternative where you could transition without having to go full-time stealth in heteronormative mainstream culture.

Sarah Phillips, Woman of trans experience

It was hell.

I turned nine in 1980

I had no useful vocabulary to define what I was. I was different. I knew that, physically, I was not a girl. I knew I liked being around girls and doing things that girls did. I knew it would be ‘bad’ to share that with anyone.

I had a sterile dictionary definition of transsexual, no idea how I’d even heard of the word. I knew roughly what a transvestite was. I saw my body self destruct and I didn’t have words for it. My voice broke. My mother said I became quieter. I withdrew. I was unlike anyone else I knew.

Boy George and similar others were making music. I didn’t really notice them. I didn’t feel it was anything to do with me. I didn’t really notice that they were doing anything unusual, I filtered it out.

I identified with no-one. I had no role models. Whilst Caroline Cossey might have been publicly outed in 1981, that news missed me. My parents didn’t read The News Of The World. Apparently, neither did anyone else I know, or else they just weren’t talking about it. I could not have named a single transsexual in the 1980’s.

When I turned sixteen, I started to grow my hair. That was, at least vaguely, culturally acceptable. My mum accepted it. My dad made fun of me. My grandmother hated it and tried to bribe me to get a haircut. I started sixth form college and first met people who identified as gay. I looked at them, was indeed friends with them, but knew that I was not gay. They were different. They saw themselves as men and I did not.

In 1989, I turned eighteen and started university. There was the lesbian and gay society (became the LGB Soc in 1990 and, I assume, the LGBT society around 2000). I had decided I wasn’t gay so I didn’t sign up. That position became difficult soon after when I started being attracted to boys/men.

There was no publicly available internet. There were no “lifestyle” programmes, that I can recall. It was almost a vacuum. I did find an item in one book that said, and I paraphrase slightly, there was a man who got a sex change, lived as a woman, was raped and went back to living as a man again. It was not encouraging.

That was part of my problem. There was very little information about being transgender. What little there was was not encouraging. It was almost organised transphobia in the media, designed to keep me in line. I saw graffiti in public toilets either depicting scenes of men in lingerie performing sex acts on each other or, apparently, transvestites soliciting for sex. Either way it made me uncomfortable and wondering, “I this me? Is this what I’m going to become?”

Given how much negativity I was subjected to in the 80’s I’m amazed I ever transitioned at all and didn’t just give up and take my own life. Fortunately the 90’s gave me a lot more information, some of it even positive.

Anonymous

Seeking help. Small College town. There is a doctor that can help your son. Doctor is contacted. He says he charges $200.00 an hour to help me. My mother realizes she cannot afford it. This doctor is at the college, now a university.

The son goes to the local library. There is a book. It mentions Dr. Money. Speaks of how Dr. Money has treated children who are intersex, damaged from circumcision. How they are raised female. Also speaks of Transsexual. The first time he learns about people who live as the opposite sex.

Through reading, the young person learns that the testicles are the reason he has become so masculine. He then realizes it is time to stop the process and tried to amputate them. Ends up in and out of the hospital. Multiple amputation attempts.

Seeking any help she can, she try’s to find help for her son. He is suicidal and mutilating his genitals. To no avail. There just is no support for a young man who is in need of effective therapy. After all what is transgender? No one has ever herd the term in small town USA. He is then considered Gay. Never given the chance to be recognized accurately. He lives with the stigma of being a gay man who wants to be a girl.

He try’s to work. No insurance. Unable to hold down jobs he ends up back at mom’s house. His father lives on the other side of the country and has turned against him because he is a sinner. His son is a terrible child. His father is a reverend of a Pentecostal church in Arkansas. He abandons his son and never speaks to him again.

Now time goes on and mom dies. Eventually I transition, it is the 90’s.

Today I struggle from the memories of the lack of support in the 80’s. Mutilation and suicide attempts.

Life was hard. I was confused and reactive to the hormones bathing my brain and body. I felt like I was going insane. I have major scars and my mother and I were all alone against a system lacking is support.

I am alive. I survived. I have memories. I have scars.

Today, the support available is a miracle compared to what I didn’t have in the 80’s. I only hope it continues to improve. That any stigma or labels that are hateful and derogatory fade in time and we are no longer killed or treated as if we have no rights for being born the way we are.

The 80’s were a nightmare as a transgender person/woman. Thank goodness they are past.

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