Let's build a list of TRANS FIGHTS
Let's build a list of TRANS FIGHTS
Hey friends!
I've been beefing up on my trans history lately. I'm coming up with a list of dates, locations and occurrences of noteworthy trans-centered struggles, battles and uprisings. Can you help me come up with more?
Here's what I have so far (heavily skewed towards the US, but I'd love to see entries from all over the world)...
- 1933 – Nazis burn the library of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Research, and destroy the institute. Berlin, Germany
- 1959 – The Cooper Do-nuts Riot occurs at Cooper's Do-nuts in Los Angeles, US; rioters were arrested by LAPD.[50] Transgender women, lesbian women, drag queens, and gay men riot, one of the first LGBTQ uprisings in the US.[51] It is viewed by some historians as the first modern LGBT uprising in the United States.
- 1966 – The Compton's Cafeteria Riot occurred in August 1966 by transgender women and Vanguard members in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. This incident was one of the first recorded transgender riots in United States history, preceding the more famous 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City by three years.
- 1969 – The Stonewall riots occur in New York City.
- 1973 – At the 1973 New York City Pride March, Sylvia Rivera speaks out after a flyers were distributed by a critical queer faction opposing performances by drag queens causing an angry disturbance (until Bette Midler, who heard of the disturbance on the radio in her Greenwich Village apartment, arrived, took the microphone, and began singing "Friends"), leading to the dissolving of Marsha P. Johnson's short-lived organization Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR).
- 2021 - wide scale banning of books featuring queer and gender affirming content across US libraries and schools
- 2023 – Montana House Rep Zooey Zephyr barred from MT state house floor, preventing her from fully representing Seat 31 on behalf of her constituency. In response, she voted remotely from a hallway bench outside the official chambers.
- 2025 – US Executive Order 14168 instructs US agencies to deny the existence of transgender people and discriminate against them, leading to a multitude of legal challenges.
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Not U.S.-centric or Western-concept-of-trans-oriented, but the Hijra were oppressed by British colonial rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia)#History
I'm sure digging into the citations and books like
Hinchy, Jessica (2019). Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850–1900. Cambridge University Press
would turn up examples?
Extracted a paragraph from the "preview" by academic paywall:
INTRODUCTION EXCERPT ATTACHED. In 1865, the British rulers of north India resolved to bring about the gradual 'extinction' of transgender Hijras. This book, the first in-depth history of the Hijra community, illuminates the colonial and postcolonial governance of gender and sexuality and the production of colonial knowledge. From the 1850s, colonial officials and middle class Indians increasingly expressed moral outrage at Hijras' feminine gender expression, sexuality, bodies and public performances. To the British, Hijras were an ungovernable population that posed a danger to colonial rule. In 1871, the colonial government passed a law that criminalised Hijras, with the explicit aim of causing Hijras' 'extermination'. But Hijras evaded police, kept on the move, broke the law and kept their cultural traditions alive. Based on extensive archival work in India and the UK, Jessica Hinchy argues that Hijras were criminalised not simply because of imported British norms, but due to a complex set of local factors, including elite Indian attitudes.
That sounds like a terrific resource! My library doesn’t have it, but I’ll ask them what they can do to get me access to the digital copy through Cambridge University Press.
That said, I need to finish the books on my plate first though. :)
If anyone reading this has access and can help, let me know!
I found a copy online, I'll try scanning through the text to find examples next.
found this relevant section in the introduction (page 18):
note especially the footnotes which are sources about resistance; so far the author has indicated most of the resistance came in indirect and passive forms, such as avoiding police and leaving jurisdictions where British colonial rule was more strict about enforcing anti-"eunuch" laws.
Need to keep reading to find if there are any instances of more direct resistance or "battles". You could characterize the whole campaign of British attempts to "eliminate" what they called "eunuchs" as a major fight or struggle, though.
The British passed the "Criminal Tribes Act" in 1871, the second part of which made "eunuchs" illegal and targeted the Hijra, with the explicit goal of eliminating eunuchs & Hijra entirely:
Short timeline:
- 1850s to 1870s - a panic about the Hijra spread among British officials in north India
- 1852 - the Bhoorah murder trial, a Hijra woman was killed which stirred up more panic among British officials and justification of persecution
- 1860 - section 377 of the Indian Penal Code criminalizes all "non-reproductive" forms of intercourse, which remained law until legal battles started in 1991 eventually overturned the law in 2018
- 1865 - annual reports are made to track progress towards eliminating Hijra, this continued into the 20th century
- 1871 - the CTA is passed which criminalized Hijra with the intent to gradually eliminate them