By Matt Simonette

Staff writer

Independent scholar and filmmaker Susan Stryker spoke as part of Chicago History Museum’s “Out at CHM” series on GLBT history May 8, documenting part of the transgender community’s historical struggle against oppression.

Stryker was co-writer, director and producer of the film “Screaming Queens: The Riots at Compton’s Cafeteria.”

She said that while the term “transgender” is relatively new, the community it represents is not. Many U.S. cities began legislating against appearing in opposite-sex dress in the 1850s.

“If they were regulating against it, there must have been a lot of people doing it,” Stryker said, adding that numerous people at the time relocated to larger cities in order to find more freedom of expression.

“If you are someone who doesn’t quite fit in, you have to be in a city,” Styker said of transgenders at the time.

In 1851, Chicago became the second city to legislate against non-gender conforming dress, following Columbus, Ohio, in 1848. The Chicago law clumsily read, “no one should appear in public wearing a dress that does not belong to a person of their sex.”

Stryker also said that implementation of new surgical procedures in the early 20th century brought about new perceptions on gender identity.

“As soon as surgery became survivable, transgender people looked to it to transform their lives,” she said.

Medical alterations to sex organs were available in Europe early on, but not in this country.

“Everything was in place in Germany in the 1930s, but not available in the U.S. Doctors (here) did not have the discourse that said it was okay to do these things to non-intersex people,” Stryker said.

She added that government legislation sometimes blatantly ruled out such practices as well. In 1949, for example, the California state attorney general said that it was illegal for doctors to perform a castration or penectomy.

But in the 1960s, sex reassignment surgeries became available in the states, with Johns Hopkins Hospital becoming the first facility to perform the procedure.

At that point, Stryker said, “Transsexuality becomes a viable identity.”

Like many communities in the 1960s, transgenders joined together for political, social and economic equality. Stryker said one of the movement’s most pivotal moments was the Compton’s Cafeteria riot in San Francisco in August 1966. Stryker concluded her presentation by focusing on activism in the City by the Bay.

Stryker learned about the event while searching for a flyer from San Francisco’s first Gay Pride parade. She has never been able to learn the exact date when it occurred.

Compton’s was located in the Tenderloin, which was heavily populated by transgenders, many of whom were sex workers and lived in the numerous transient hotels scattered throughout the district.

Police were cracking down on gay businesses and meeting spots. “Wartime is a time of heightened sexual surveillance in order to ‘protect’ the troops,” Stryker said, adding that urban renewal was also a factor in the heightened anxiety. The Tenderloin was one of the last affordable neighborhoods for the transgenders.

Since transgenders were largely not welcome in gay bars, they often congregated in Compton’s. When some became rowdy, the police were called. A transgender woman threw coffee in an officer’s face and a riot ensued. A demonstration against Compton’s followed the next night.

It was, according to Stryker, the first “radical burst” of transgender activism that sought both social and economic equality for their community. Until the early 1970s, the San Francisco transgender activists stood against police brutality, gentrification, the Vietnam War and racism, among other causes.

She said that movement died down as the larger GLBT community focused on identity politics and issues of gay equality more than socio-economic issues.

The transgender movement “didn’t solve their problems but created a space wherein San Francisco started treating (transgenders) as people and not social problems,” Stryker said.

See photos from Out At CHM in Freetime.