Bonus Episode: Talking Trans History with Susan Stryker
00:42:19
Hosts: Leila McNeill and Rebecca Ortenberg
Guest: Susan Stryker
Producer: Leila McNeill
Music: Cassie Lace by Zombie Dandies
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In this bonus episode, Leila and Rebecca talk with Dr. Susan Stryker, a historian of trans history and director of the Emmy award winning documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria. Stryker discusses her work in trans history, history as activism, and the transformative power of trans history.
Show Notes
WATCH: Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria
Transgender History by Susan Stryker
The Transgender Studies Reader edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle
Transcript
Transcription by Rev.com
(intro music)
Rebecca:
Welcome to this special bonus episode of the Lady Science Podcast. I'm Rebecca, Lady Science's managing editor.
Leila:
And I'm Leila, one of the editors-in-chief of Lady Science magazine. For this bonus episode, we're excited to be joined by Dr. S. Stryker. Dr. Stryker is an associate professor of gender and women's studies, director of the Institute for LGBT Studies and founder of the Transgender Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona. She has written extensively about queer and transgender history and culture. She is the author of Transgender History and the co-editor of the Transgender Studies Reader, and she is the director of the Emmy Award-winning documentary, Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming.
S. Stryker:
Thanks. Glad to be here. Just a quick correction, it's like I am no longer the director of the Institute for LGBT Studies. We have a new director named Jill Koyama. I did that job for five years and I'm happy to pass the baton to the next leader.
Leila:
Awesome. Sorry about that. Thank you.
S. Stryker:
No worries. I need to find out where I need to update my bio information on the web. (laughter) Thanks for flagging that for me.
Rebecca:
Thanks for flagging it for us, too. But yeah, we're super excited to have you here. Just to get started, can you tell us a little bit about what brought you to study transgender history and what your scholarship is focused on?
S. Stryker:
Sure. I'll just say I've always been interested in history. I did a PhD in history at UC Berkeley. It was back in the day a-ways. I'm pushing 60 now, and this is back in the early '80s that I started grad school. At that time, it really wasn't possible to do transgender history. I wasn't publicly out as trans, but I was always really interested in the question of identity. How is it that new forms of both personal and collective identities take shape over time? What's the kind of cultural work that identity does?
I actually did my dissertation on early Mormon history; I did history of religion. But it was a question about identity. It was like in 1825 there's no such thing as a Mormon. 1845, there's an identity. There's a church. There's new forms of kinship. There's a body of scriptural production. There's a transcontinental migration. There's a political movement. There's an anti-Mormon backlash. It's like, how does all of that cultural or political work get done and get articulated through the emergence of a previously nonexisting identity?
There's a way that it was, I would say, a crypto-trans or queer dissertation because what I did after grad school was rather than going into history of religion, it was more about history of sexuality. I could kind of say, "You know, we have this thing called the transsexual or a transgender person." But there was a time when hormones and surgery weren't available to change your body, or there weren't the legal mechanisms for changing your state-issued IDs. There weren't even state-issued IDs that existed. It's like, how is it that this thing called transgender becomes something that exists and there's a cultural politics around it?
I just shifted over from doing one kind of history to do another kind of history about the historicity of identity. But what motivated that for me is that as I was coming out as trans in my later 20s, I had known all along that I had transgender feelings, but I wasn't quite sure how I was going to deal with it or what I was going to do or was I going to transition. Did I need to do that? By the time I was in my 20s, it was like, "Yeah, I really need to do that." That makes my job prospects really complicated because there's so much employment discrimination and stigma and misunderstanding around being trans. But when I felt like, "No, this is personally just what I need to do," what does that mean for my work?
It was really hard, let's say, to try to find a job in the history of early-19th-century US religion as an out trans person. It's like, "Well, why don't I shift my focus away from history of religion to doing history of gender and sexuality because that's what is made available for me to do?" It's like, trans people can talk about being trans, And that's often is all we're allowed to do: we get to be trans for other people. I thought, "Well, I'm a trans person. I'm a historian. I should just be doing trans history because I'm interested in questions of the history of identity anyway. So here we go." It was both a necessity, but it was also what I was able to find to do that spoke to my skillset and let me use my training and do something that I actually really cared about. I think transgender history is utterly fascinating.
Leila:
One thing that I want to note for our readers—not readers, listeners—is that in Screaming Queens, you do cover what it was like when these surgeries were becoming available and what having the language meant. So we're going to link to that in the show notes, so that you all can get a little bit of an idea of what that history was like in the '70s. A question that I have, the work that you're doing at University of Arizona, I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about what transgender studies is generally and what the initiative is in particular.
S. Stryker:
Well, I would say transgender studies is, you can think about it two ways. I mean that you could think about it as there are these people called transgender people and we study them. That's transgender studies. But there's another way that you could think about it, as from a standpoint that takes the kind of knowledge that transgender people have, experiential knowledge from living in the world as trans people. It's like, how do you take that knowledge and put it into conversation with other things that you might want to know or other kinds of expertise?
An example might be disability studies. It's like, well, there are people who have disabilities and you could study people with disabilities. But if you come at the world from a disability perspective, it's like the world looks a little different. Suddenly you find yourself talking about things like curb cuts and wheelchair ramps or different ways of accessing signage on buildings or you're thinking about social policy related to bodily diversity and what gets called a disability and what doesn't. Or you could, say, be doing African American studies and you're studying people who are African American. But you could maybe be thinking in a more abstract or general way about how is it ideas about race came about in the first place? What does Blackness have to do with other forms of racial minoritization?
That's the other half of transgender studies. It's like you could study transgender people, or you could look at the world through a transgender lens and see how the world looks different when you look at it from that perspective. Anyway, I have been doing work in transgender studies for about 25 years at this point. I mean, it's not a new field even if it's just coming onto the radar screen for some people now as trans issues become more visible in society.
I actually feel very fortunate that I've been able to do some of the work that I've been able to do at the University of Arizona. It's not a place that many people would think of as, "Arizona, that's going to be a hot bed of trans scholarship." (laughter) But it's like, who knew it was going to be the place? I got recruited to come to the University of Arizona in 2011 to be the director of the Institute for LGBT Studies. As I was interviewing there, I said, "You know, I totally support queer studies and every letter of the alphabet soup—the Ls, Gs, Bs, and Ts. I'm down for the whole thing, as well as the Q. But my specialty is I work on trans issues and I would love to really bring that to the foreground as part of the kind of leadership that I'd like to exert here." And U of A, they were basically like, "Great. There's not another university that's doing this. That'll help put us on the map in a different way. Let's go." It's just been kind of amazing.
Besides support for the institute and support for publishing this journal, TSQ—Transgender Studies Quarterly—which is an academic, peer-reviewed journal that has its editorial office in Tucson at the University of Arizona. It's published by Duke University Press, but it's run out of U of A. They support that. They have sponsored this absolutely unprecedented hiring, faculty hiring. We have been able to hire four trans faculty members who do trans studies throughout the university in different fields, like medical anthropology and religious studies, adolescent and family behavioral health, Chicano studies, feminist science studies. It's like we're pulling together this very eclectic faculty in trans studies. All of these faculty are working with their grad students and teaching classes and directing dissertations.
It's been really exciting to see trans studies get a kind of institutional foothold at a university and to just see what we can do when we're given some resources and some turf—some conceptual turf as well as literal office space and salaries to do the kind of work that we all want to do.
Rebecca:
Yeah. It's such a fascinating and wonderful thing for the university to throw themselves behind. I feel like so often, universities can talk a great talk about diversity and all that jazz, but yeah, putting institutional weight behind it just seems like such a special opportunity there.
S. Stryker:
Yeah. The thing that really surprised me, my own personal politics are pretty much on the left end of the spectrum. I can be very harsh about or opinionated about neoliberalism and paying lip service to notions of diversity in ways that don't actually change the conditions of life for people who are marginalized and minoritized. But I will have to say, at the University of Arizona, one of the things that happened is because of—I would say, because of changes in the way higher education works and less state support for higher education, and being in this particular state where there's not a lot of state money that goes into the state university, it's very almost quasi-privatized.
The market drives everything. The people high up in the administration of the university were saying, "Transgender studies, that's a hot topic and nobody else is doing this. (laughter) This is a way that we can differentiate ourselves in the academic marketplace. It's like we can have the best transgender studies program in the world and nobody else has got one, so let's do it." It was just like, "Okay, let's do it." Here we go.
Yeah, I'm just excited about the window of opportunity that we've had there and I'm really eager to make a good thing of it. It's very exciting to have that many people on campus who are doing, to me, critically engaged interdisciplinary work on trans studies. I mean, things that run the gamut from the humanities to the social sciences to the harder sciences. Some people have more of a focus on medicine and psychology and other people have more emphasis on culture. So it's a very broad-spectrum approach to what we're doing.
Rebecca:
Now, one of the reasons that we were excited to talk to you is because you've done work in science and technology and society, STS, as well as trans studies. So I was hoping you could talk a little bit about how those two fields have connected for you.
S. Stryker:
Yeah. Well, the first thing I would want to say is that not all trans people decide to transition medically. It's not all trans people go the hormones and surgery route. But that being said, a lot of people do. I think there's a relationship between how is it possible to be a certain kind of trans person and histories of surgery and endocrinology as well as histories of medical discourses, like scientific sexology, as well as forensic questions about psychology. Is being trans a psychopathology? When does it get thought of that way? Trying to do what I think of as an engaged activist kind of historical scholarship. Basically saying trans, where did that come from and why is it structured the way that it is?
It requires engaging with history of medical sciences as well as history of social sciences and, I would say, a deeper intellectual history about how certain kinds of scientific materialist notions of the body come to undergird or underpin the way that we socially categorize people's bodies and identities. So even though my interest in trans whatever comes out of being a trans person and being trained as a historian, it absolutely engages at this really deep level with questions of science and technology, the history of changing technological abilities to intervene in our bodies and to transform our bodies through different kinds of medical and scientific technologies.
Leila:
Do you think that trans studies can provide a different way of thinking about technological change or vice versa?
S. Stryker:
Yeah. I mean I think—(noise) excuse me. I think I do. It can do that, yeah. One of the contemporary problems that I think trans people often face is that we're not considered to be really what we think of ourselves as. It's like, "You can't really be a woman. You were born with a Y chromosome and have a penis." The question then would be, well, why is it that we've come to think about the relationship between some biological aspect of your body and social categorization in a certain way? How is it that the materiality of the body becomes the anchor for how we categorize bodies according to gender? It could be done some other way.
As medical technology has changed over the years, it's like why is it that—I think about it like, why is it that if you cut your body here and make the statement about saying, "I think I'm an X" instead of "I'm a Y," and then a lawyer can sign a piece of paper, or a judge can put a stamp on a piece of paper and then you're "really" that thing? How can it be that that procedure became something that has a reality effect to it? How is it that the emergence of certain kinds of technology allows for people to make a claim about who they really are based on accessing a certain kind of technology? That then stages the other question of what's the relationship between technological change and the construction of certain kinds of truth or reality claims?
I think looking at transness opens a window into these broader questions about technology, science, and reality. If you keep pushing on that question it opens up other questions about could we imagine a postmodern way of thinking about gender and sexuality, just like we could imagine a non-Western way or a premodern way of organizing sexuality and gender really differently than we do? What's the role of science and technology in changing the way that we think about these things? I would just say that thinking about transness inevitably takes us to these questions about truth, science, and technology in ways that you might not expect when you first start thinking about the issues.
Rebecca:
At Lady Science, we really think of history as a social justice project or that it can very much be a social justice project. I was wondering if you could say what you see is the relationship between social justice activism and the study of history and why they might matter to each other.
S. Stryker:
Okay. Well, would it be okay with you if I read a couple of paragraphs from the book that I'm working on, which is called What Transpires Now: Transgender History and the Future We Need, which kind of gets into that? It's just a couple of paragraphs.
Leila:
Go for it.
Rebecca:
Yes, please.
S. Stryker:
Okay. All right. This is the opening of the draft manuscript right now of this book I'm working on about the relationship of trans in the present and why thinking about our history is something that's useful for thinking about social transformation. So here we go:
"Making our identities real is what we trans people do and we bring our worlds along with us. This is our talent, our burden, our necessity, our gift. This is what transpires now, new realities, emergent trans realities flowing across the gap that separates actuality from desire, flowing from what is to what will be. History is not the past. History is a story that we tell in the present, one that reaches back to conjoin what can be known of what has already transpired to our vision of whatever yet may come. History is not a fact, but a promise. It is the assurance that the future will be as different from the current moment as the current moment has become from all that has come before.
"History is a witness that bears testimony to the inescapability of difference and the inevitability of change. To write history can be more than stringing one brute fact after another to fill up the emptiness of time. It can be more than constructing a monument to the violence of the great and powerful, more than the satisfaction of a craving among the people for the sweet comfort of nostalgia at the end of a bitter day. To write history, for those of us who need another world, is to catch sight elsewhere of a radical possibility made visible by the light of a current calamity. History transpires in the here and now. It is the story that makes real, pasts that are unremembered, and actions now unimagined in anticipation of futures that must be summoned forth from a present that demands our daily effort to shatter and transform it."
That's how I think about the relationship between history and activism, that if the world is such in the present that it is not organized in your own interests, that actually studying the past is the thing that shows you that radical difference is actually possible. The past is different than now—and it changed. It changed to these ways that you can materially, empirically recover. That in and of itself, that inescapability of change, is the promise that through our actions the future can be different than now, because it's happened before. That kind of change has happened before. We just have to keep on making history.
Leila:
That was really lovely. Thank you for reading that passage out of your book. I definitely got a little teary-eyed listening to you. (laughs) You've kind of—
S. Stryker:
Thank you. I'll tell my editor that it's working. (laughter)
Rebecca:
Yeah. I think this has been a rough week in the world and that just—it meant a lot to me to hear that today, this week especially I feel like. So thank you for sharing.
S. Stryker:
Yeah. You're welcome. This book that I'm working on, it's overdue. It's been a bit of a struggle. I usually write really fluidly. I started working on this book back in 2015 and I really thought in 2015 the book kind of came about in the post-Caitlyn Jenner media barrage moment, where my agent was saying, "I think this is a good moment to write the big book on 'Trans: What's up with that? Why now?'" I thought, "You're right. I could write that book." So I was able to get a nice contract for a trade book. It's not an academic book, but something aimed at a mass audience. I really thought at that moment as we were thinking about—this is late-Obama, this is anticipating a Hillary Clinton presidency, a continuation of the same kind of federal government that we had had.
I really thought the most important thing that I would be doing in the book was to basically say, "Yeah, trans is coming up, but don't over-celebrate, liberal America. This is not just the latest flavor-of-the-month diversity inclusion thing." There's still a lot of problems around trans. A lot of it has to do with race and class. We just can't over-celebrate this. Let's get down into the weeds about the kinds of structural violence and oppression that trans people face. It's not just all feel-good diversity inclusion stuff, even though Laverne Cox looks fabulous on the cover of Time magazine, all of that. (laughter)
And then the election happens, and that was a book for the previous historical era. It's like, that is not the book that needed to get written. I really needed to rethink what I was doing. What it made me aware of is like, "What's the relationship between what's happening in the present and the past that you need?" That was actually where the current title of the book comes from. This is about what transpires now. It's about transgender history and the future that we need. I mean, that paragraph that I read, it draws on both Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher, as well as Walter Benjamin. There's another paragraph in the introduction where I quote Benjamin more directly.
I say, "The words that began this book deliberately evoke and echo sentiments expressed by the philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin, in their writings on the uses and abuses of history for the present and on the perpetually available capacity nestled within each current moment for our deep narratives of change over time to become undone and rewoven. It's possible, Benjamin famously said, to take control of a memory as it flashes in a moment of danger. Writing in 1940 during the Nazi reign of Europe, his view of history resonates deeply today. 'The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the emergency situation in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency and our position in the struggle against fascism will thereby improve.'"
It's just like, yes, thank you, Walter Benjamin. That is exactly what we're doing now. I mean, that's exactly what I'm trying to do, is to develop a concept of history that is engaged in the present with a fight against fascism. It's not an exactly 100% historically accurate comparison. Fascism in the '30s was one thing and I think what's happening now, I mean, it's vile. It's really scary. It's authoritarian. It's racist. It's not exactly fascism. It's a new thing. It's a new thing that we need to figure out what's wrong now, how we develop an analytic for that, and we develop an analysis and an action plan for what we're going to do. How do you resist what's happening now? I don't think of doing historical scholarship as a kind of escapism. It's not like going back to a time before the troubles and wanting to live there. (laughter) It's a way of engaging. It's a way of engaging with the history of the present. It's like doing a deep history of the present.
Leila:
When is that book supposed to come out?
S. Stryker:
As soon as I finish writing it.
Leila:
Okay. (laughter)
S. Stryker:
I'm on leave of absence from my job in the fall so that I can just keep plowing through. I'm spending about six hours a day writing right now, and will be able to do that through the end of the year. I'm really hoping to have the complete draft done by January, by the beginning of the year. Then I'm sure there will be some revisions or whatever. But I'm anticipating that the book's going to be out in 2019 in time to be part of conversation in the presidential election year in 2020. That's what I'm aiming for at this time.
Leila:
Awesome. We'll definitely keep up with the progress of your book.
S. Stryker:
Thanks.
Leila:
Hopefully we can have you back on when your book comes out.
S. Stryker:
You know where to reach me.
Leila:
Yeah. (laughter) We already kind of covered the next question that I had, so Rebecca, if you want to go on.
Rebecca:
Yeah, yeah. I was just wondering if in your career you have gotten pushback for seeing yourself as both an activist and a scholar.
S. Stryker:
I would say surprisingly not so much. I mean—
Leila:
You must not be on Twitter.
S. Stryker:
Well, I have a Twitter account and I lurk. But I don't post on Twitter a lot because I just think—Social media's really useful. I love seeing what's happening there, but it's not a place to have a reasoned conversation about anything. So I just kind of keep my head down on social media for the most part and don't—I try to not engage in a lot of actual discussion on Twitter. Facebook, it's like because my Facebook it's more like people that I actually know and isn't quite so public. Twitter, you're just showing your underwear to everybody. It's just out there, hanging out there. (laughter)
But I mean, yeah. I see stuff about me on Tumblr. Everybody can have a problem about something and particularly on trans issues. I think because trans community is, in many ways, very—There's a lot of trauma, a lot of historical trauma. A lot of people have been impacted by violence. Sometimes people are fragile or easily triggered. I see that. I have compassion for that. But it doesn't make for easy conversation sometimes. You just know whatever you say in public, it's going to be wrong: somebody's going to have a problem with it.
And yet, I would say that for the most part, I feel like I have a pretty good response in the public. There will be some people who say, "S. Stryker, she's old and she's white. She's got these elitist tendencies." Other people will be like, "For a white chick, she actually gets some of the race and class stuff right." It's all over the map. It's like you can't please everybody. I get a lot of positive feedback. I get criticism. I try to take the criticism really seriously if there's something substantive there. I always want to be open to correction. I want to let what I think of as the more baseless and triggered kinds of reactions against me some time to roll off my back. You can't be too thin-skinned. The world's a big place and you're not going to please everybody.
But in the scholarly world, I do lots of different kinds of writing. Some of the work that I do is that kind of incomprehensible post-structuralist, jargony stuff that almost everybody, except the people who actually do it, hate. I can totally hold my own in that kind of cultural theory conversation. But I also think that it's really important to do work that is public-facing and not just professional or specialist-facing. I think some of that comes from working outside the academy for so long. Like you mentioned, I'm a filmmaker. I've worked in the nonprofit sector. I've been an independent scholar. It was not an easy path for me getting into academe because even though I was well-trained, because of the stigma and discrimination around trans issues it took me 15 years post-PhD to be able to get an academic job. So I worked a lot in the public sector. I really value being able to do public-facing work because I do value the translational work of taking specialist knowledge and making it into "news you can use" in daily life.
There are some academics, who I would say are usually those academics who don't have the aptitude for doing anything public-facing, who want to maybe think of me as more of a popularizer of other people's work. That's fine. I'm tenured. I don't care. I do the work that matters to me and some of it is really theoretical. Some of it's really wonky kinds of historical work. Some of it's more applied policy work. Some of it is about public storytelling that becomes part of the larger cultural conversation. I just think I have a good blend of an activist sensibility and a public-facing part of my work combined with the totally nerdy, wonky, specialist, academic stuff. I just try to make it all feed off each other as much as possible and don't worry so much about what people think.
Leila:
I think that's good advice for especially us at Lady Science, who do probably spend entirely too much time on Twitter. (laughter)
Rebecca:
Oh definitely, arguing with people we shouldn't bother arguing with for the 50th time.
Leila:
Yeah, exactly.
S. Stryker:
Sometimes it just gets under your skin. You can't help it. The more you can go to that namaste place, just the better it is for us all.
Leila:
Well, I don't have any other questions. Do you, Rebecca?
Rebecca:
I do not.
Leila:
Awesome. Well, thanks again for joining us. I'm really glad that we were able to figure out a time to talk. We'll definitely be looking forward to your upcoming book.
S. Stryker:
Well, thanks so much. If you can't wait, I do have this other book called Transgender History. It came from Seal Press. I wrote it back in 2008, but there's a revised second edition that came out last year. You can get it at your independent bookstore locally or, if you must, through Amazon. It's a good basic intro to trans history that totally touches on the history of science and medicine as well as the social history of trans political movements. So that is something that might appeal to your listenership.
Leila:
Awesome. We'll include that in the show notes as well so everyone will be able to find you and find your work. Well, I guess that's it.
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