Genderqueer History
Last updated December 4, 2011. Original was a project for an LGBT American History class by Marilyn Roxie, May 17 2011. Revision made as recent as the last update indicated above. Click here for a bibliography of sources utilized and cited for this project.
History - Beginnings:
While “genderqueer” came into popular use through the late 1990s and early 2000s in the United States, the term had its development in the mid-1990s and implemented far earlier concepts of non-binary identity and expression (e.g. androgyny). Transgender and feminist writings challenging and expanding upon the concept of gender—such as Sandy Stone’s The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto[5] (1987) and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble [6] (1990)—and postmodern theory helped to lay the foundation for the development of a genderqueer community.
Activist and author Leslie Feinberg wrote in Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come (1992):
There are other words used to express the wide range of ‘gender outlaws’: transvestites, transsexuals, drag queens and drag kings, cross-dressers, bulldaggers, stone butches, androgynes, diesel dykes or berdaches—a European colonist term. We didn’t choose these words. They don’t fit all of us. It’s hard to fight an oppression without a name connoting pride, a language that honors us. In recent years a community has begun to emerge that is sometimes referred to as the gender or transgender community. Within our community is a diverse group of people who define ourselves in many different ways. Transgendered people are demanding the right to choose our own self-definitions.
Author, performer, and gender theorist Kate Bornstein described her hope for a community of “gender outlaws” in Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (1994):
Very few groups exist…that encompass the full rainbow that is gender outlawism, and, sadly, groups still divide along the lines of male-to-female and female-to-male gender outlaws…All the categories of transgender find a common ground in that they each break one or more of the rules of gender: what we have in common is that we are gender outlaws, every one of us. To attempt to divide us into rigid categories…is like trying to apply the laws of solids to the state of fluids: it’s our fluidity that keeps us in touch with each other. It’s our fluidity and the principles that attend that constant state of flux that could create an innovative and inclusive transgender community.
By the mid-1990s, a more articulated non-binary community began to emerge with a name: genderqueer. Riki Anne Wilchins, activist and founder of GenderPAC (Gender Public Advocacy Coalition, active 1995-2009), has frequently used the term genderqueer, and been associated with it, particularly due to her editorship of the anthology GenderQueer: Voices Beyond the Sexual Binary in 2002. Wilchins wrote in the spring 1995 newsletter of Transexual Menace, In Your Face:
The fight against gender oppression has been joined for centuries, perhaps millennia. What’s new today is that it’s moving into the arena at open political activism. And nope, this is not just one more civil rights struggle for one more narrowly-defined minority. It’s about all of us who are genderqueer: diesel dykes and stone butches, leatherqueens and radical fairies, nelly fags, crossdressers, intersexed, transsexuals, transvestites, transgendered, transgressively gendered, and those of us whose gender expressions are so complex they haven’t even been named yet. Maybe us genderqueers feel it most keenly because it hits us each time we walk out the front door openly and proudly.
Wilchins wrote about identifying as genderqueer in her autobiography Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender (1997), significantly described on its back cover as “combining the theoretical breakthroughs of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble with the performance revelations of Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw”. In the ‘Photographs from a Movement’ section of the book by Mariette Pathy Allen, a photograph from the Matt Stickney rally in October 1996[7] includes a sign reading “SUPPORT OUR GENDERQUEER YOUTH”.
An archived e-mail newsletter from March 2, 1997[8] included an entry for Genderqueer Boyzzz as a California support group:
Genderqueer Boyzzz
Southern California support/social (and more???) group for people assigned female at birth and raised girl-to-woman who have masculine self-identifications some or all of the time. This is a place where difference is treasured. Meetings are open: Everyone is always welcome.
This early genderqueer group is also mentioned in S/he: Changing Sex and Changing Clothes (1998):
… a flyer concerning Genderqueer Boyzzz offered: “Calling all butches, hermaphrodykes, FTMs, transmen, transboys, transbutches, transfags, transfagdrags, boychicks, girlfags, drag kings, two-spirits, metamorphs, shape-shifters, leatherdyke daddies, leatherdyke boys…”
The neologism of pomosexual (combining the prefix pomo-, postmodern, with -sexual) came into use thanks to an anthology edited by Carol Queen and Lawrence Schimel, PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality (1997), where pomosexuality is described as the “erotic reality beyond the boundaries of gender, separatism, and essentialist notions of sexual orientation.” Not meant to be a new identity label, an anthology of so-called “pomosexuality” included accounts representative of the breaking of the aforementioned boundaries and possibilities, very much in line with earlier visions of gender outlaws and genderqueerness.
Gender Sphere[*] (also known as Sphere and sphere@queernet.org) was initiated as a LISTSERV (mailing list) and website in 1997. From the description:
Sphere is a listserv for people who bend even the boundaries of transgenderism. It’s a bunch of people who identify as both genders, or no gender, or third-gendered… I’m trying to think if I forgot any possibilities :-) We’ll share what it’s like to be queerer than queer, discuss how we fit into trans and other communities, fight the good activist fight, and tell cool stories about our genderf*cked experiences.
We take our name from the idea that gender isn’t a dichotomy (where there’s either male or female) or a continuum (where there’s a rainbow of stuff in between, all in a line and all related to male or female) but a sphere, where male and female are just two of an infinite number of possible points and you can be anywhere on, inside, or outside, the gendered world.
Hosted on Gender Sphere includes “A Queergendered FAQ” (one of the first genderqueer FAQs, created in 1998) and a variety of personal stories about being genderqueer. The term “polygender” appears across the site as a synonym for genderqueer.
By 1998, in Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity,“the gender-queer position” is equated with queer theory and postmodernism. The May 25, 1999 issue of The Advocate includes the word, still in conceptual development, in a list of “the terms that define us”, among words like bisexual, drag, gay, gender identity, and transgender:
GENDER QUEER: A controversial term describing anyone considered “queer” because of how he or she expresses sexuality or gender.
In 1999, the film Gendernauts: A Journey Through Shifting Identities, directed by lesbian German filmmaker Monika Treut, explores the lives of “gender cyborgs” living in the San Francisco Bay Area,” and includes an interview with Sandy Stone describing the “endless” varieties of gender, and profiles those who occupy a “middle ground” between man and woman and a variety of other combinations.
An important early on-line use of “genderqueer” is in ‘My Trans Problem’, an article by E.J. Graff from June 2001 for The Village Voice:
Many of us who are homoqueer, or queer in our sexual desires, are also at least a little genderqueer—more butch or sissy than we’re supposed to be…For lesbians as well, genderqueer (a masculine woman) has at times trumped homoqueer (a woman who has sex with a woman) as the defining stigmata…As many gender-passable homos win a place at the Thanksgiving table, our genderqueered sibs are still beaten, fired, harassed, and murdered not for the sex they have but for the sex they appear to be.
Founded in 2001, GenderQueer Revolution (GQR) arose from founder Alexander Yoo noticing “a distinct invisibility toward people who are genderqueer” in the Southern California gender community. Today, with their slogan “Supporting and Empowering GenderQueer, Genderfabulous Beings. Celebrating Gender-Giftedness in Every One” GQR operates on a national and global level. In an interview I had done, Yoo elaborated on the experience:
I started GenderQueer Revolution first in sort of a Southern California capacity and I started passing out announcements to people through word of mouth, through friends, through people, and I have to tell you I was met through some resistance at various official and unofficial channels, FTM Alliance and my friends and colleges in the gender community, resistance from people. Basically puzzlement as to why I was forming this organization. At one point I was asked, “Well couldn’t you just sort of form a sub-committee or a group within FTM Alliance?” This I was asked by Masen Davis, one of the founders of FTM Alliance. I just very firmly and politely tried to get him to understand that I really can’t do that, because I’m seeing this need across genders, not just within the so-called trans community, but this is a need that exists within and beyond the trans community, and not just within the so-called female-to-male vectors, this is something that exists beyond that, so I really don’t feel comfortable with that question, is more or less how I explained it to Masen, who is a dear friend, then and now, but, as you can see, I was met with some resistance…
The efforts of GenderQueer Revolution grew quickly outside of Southern California, within a year or two. People were starting to see, not only with the online communities that we created, we grew rapidly outside of the Southern California container into a national need, and a national member base. And, rapidly, international, where people were saying, all over the world, this resonates with me, thank you for having this, thank you for creating this community, thank you for having this on-line event, thank you for encouraging others to create these events, how can I host these events in my country or in my state? Helping others to create models for others to form, while also distinctly encouraging organic growth and uniqueness, because one of the things I really detest is saying, “No, no, you have to follow this form.”
One of the things about the suffix -queer, is that it applies to everything. That’s what we’ve also encouraged in GenderQueer Revolution. People, often, who might feel a resonance with genderqueer also probably feel race-queer, or visibly queer, or a myriad of other forms of queer, where they don’t seem to fit or they feel they inhabit other kinds of spaces where those narratives already exist. Spiritually queer - that’s a big one.
Also founded in 2001, United Genders of the Universe launched as an organization, continuing on into the present operating “the only all-ages genderqueer support groups, open to everyone who views gender as having more than two options.”
History - Popularization and Community:
The anthology GenderQueer. Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary, (edited by Joan Nestle, Clare Howell, and Riki Wilchins) was published in 2002 and brought the term credibility with big names in queer theory as editors of this collection of 38 personal experiences of “gender construction, explanation and questioning”. After publication of this anthology, usages of the word on-line and in-print spike and have been on the increase ever since, in instances including: the November 2003 McGill Tribune piece ‘The Gender Neutral Issue’, which details the need for neutral bathrooms (“Genderqueer individuals are not either gender, they are often neither gender. The move toward gender-neutral bathrooms facilitates an overall awareness of the futility of gender distinctions”) ; The Village Voice June 2004 piece ‘Transmale Nation’ troubles the “remaking of manhood in the genderqueer generation”; and evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden’s discussion of genderqueer in her 2004 book Evolution’s Rainbow: Divsersity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People:
Some people feel they inhabit a space between man and woman—a third gender. Because third-gender spaces exist in other cultures, many wonder whether U.S. culture is too rigid to allow a third (or forth) gender —forcing people to locate in one or the other of the two main genders—or whether people actually choose to identify with the main genders. The biggest difficulty with affirming a third-gender identity is knowing what that means. Those transitioning from one traditional binary gender to the other have clear sense of where they want to end up and a clear unhappiness with where they started. Moving to a third gender requires lots of exploring and trying different combinations, some harmonious blends of both genders, others glaring and provocative declarations of resistance. One experimental genre is called gender-queer, or gender-fuck…
From late 2004 on, it is increasingly common for individuals to be identifying themselves as genderqueer. As an example, an October 2004 article in Oregon’s Register Guard ‘Gender Law Back on the Radar Screen’:
[Toby] Hill-Meyer, 21, was born male but today identifies as neither male or female. “I don’t fit into the available categorizations,“ said Hill-Meyer, who prefers the term “gender queer.” Hill-Meyer’s motivations are also political. "I have a friend, an incoming freshman, who is also gender queer. I’m out (of the closet) in part to let people know it’s OK to be gender queer on this campus.”
2005 usages of significance include a Sunday Times September 2005 article citing singer Antony Hegarty’s self-description as a “white gender queer boy”, and AfterEllen in the same month and year with an article on America’s Next Top Model: “for the first time ever on broadcast television, we have all the dynamics in place for a show in which lesbianism is portrayed with much more of a genderqueer sensibility than ever before”.
GQR held an event in West Hollywood June 1st and 2nd, 2006 called G.E.N.D.E.R.S: GenderQueer Equality Now: Deconstructing Everything, Revitalizing S/spirits, “a truly genderqueer celebration. At every step of the way, we’re finding ways to make G.E.N.D.E.R.S. as inclusive, interactive, and experiential as possible, removing that line between performer/presenter and audience, whatever these terms mean anyway. We’re also making sure to go beyond the academic, artistic, artisanal, cause-oriented, psychological/spiritual, crossing race, class, color, ability, sexuality, gender, genderqueer/gendergiftedness, but rather melding seemingly separate spheres.” Also in 2006, GQR launched their Total Wellness! series of events. Founder Yoo explains that in these events, this is “where all these things come together, that health and wellness is not just of the body, but wellness and health encompass many components of the human experience”.
History - Recent Developments:
From 2006 to the present, references in the news and LGBTQ communities have become pervasive; genderqueer appears everywhere from a Fox News report on ‘Crazy Courses’ in 2006 garnering “dishonorable mentions” including Susan Stryker’s UC-Berkeley class Sex Change City: Theorizing History in Genderqueer San Francisco, to a letter published in The New York Times under the heading ‘When Girls Will Be Boys’ in March 2008 from reader Lauren Wissot: “The genderqueer revolution is not about fitting easy definitions. We’re transmen/women as well as gender nonconformists, who run the gamut from post-op transsexuals to those who “pass” as the biological sex we were born into.”
In 2008, genderqueer was listed with a definition equating the term with queer politics in Susan Stryker’s Transgender History:
…from the beginning, a vocal minority insisted on the importance of transgender and gender variant practices for queer politics. Many such people took to calling themselves “genderqueers”. People who use “transgender” to refer only to those who want to live in a gender other that the one assigned to them at birth sometimes use “genderqueer” to mean the kinds of people who resist norms without “changing sex”, but this is not always the case.
Kate Bornstein revisited the concept of “gender outlaws” in the anthology Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation (2010), “collects and contextualizes the work of this generation’s trans and genderqueer forward thinkers”. In April 2010, Jess Five (writer, previously journalist for The New Gay, and a “female-bodied genderqueer straightedge punk atheist vegan anarchist”) developed a seahorse design as a genderqueer symbol, commenting “What animal is more gender queer than a seahorse? The males carries the eggs! They are also very sexually fluid.” While as of yet, there is no universally recognized genderqueer symbol, although attempts to develop flags and other symbols have been made[9], especially within on-line communities such as Tumblr, Livejournal, and gender-related message boards.
Criticism:
2006 book Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity includes an essay by Rocko Bulldagger ‘The End of Genderqueer’, in which the author’s definition and understanding of the term are at odds with media definitions they’ve encountered:
From Time Out New York, February 3, 2005: “Genderqueer: This umbrella term refers to anyone who doesn’t fit into the traditional binary male-female system-from androdykes to trannyboys.” My own personal definition of genderqueer: (1) A person who is painfully deliberate and consciously political in their gender expression. (2) Someone who identifies with efforts to subvert oppressive power dynamics by undermining traditional gender expectations. (3) A person whose gender presentation is over determined by traditionally gendered signs—somebody who displays excessive femininity or masculinity.
Riki Anne Wilchins describes genderqueer’s involvement, or lack thereof, in a movement in several passages of Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer (2004):
…most people still don’t grasp gender as a valid civil rights issue like orientation, race, or sex. What has emerged out of the weak vision is not a movement of genderqueers, but a vibrant and energized transgender movement that is populated mostly by transsexual activists.
…as mainstream feminism continues to struggle with gender expression and identity or ignore these issues altogether, and young genderqueers-perhaps unaware they are enacting a kind of fourth-wave feminism-turn away from mainstream feminism in droves.
As non-binary identities and the term genderqueer itself gain currency, the usage and understanding of such identities and associated terms will be shaped in ways over time that may differ from the way they are understood in 2011, particularly in the relationship between psychological models of understanding gender, gender-related activism, politics, and the struggle for equality.
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Notes:
[4]: Feldman, Stephe. “Neutrois - FAQs.“ Neutrois. 1 Nov. 2006. Web. 15 Apr. 2011. <http://www.neutrois.com/faq.html>.
[5]: Described in The Transgender Studies Reader (2006) as “the protean text from which contemporary transgender studies emerged”.
[6] Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) discussed the theory of gender as performative, including a defense of drag.
[7]: “a procession of speakers mounted the front steps of the downtown Unitarian Universalist Church today to voice their fervent support and concern for suspended crossdressing teen Matthew Stickney…the case quickly attracted a barrage of national media attention as one of a growing number incidents involving transgender and genderqueer gay youth.” In Your Face. "Burlington Rallies for Crossdressing Teen: Transexual Menace Lead Show of Support.” GenderTalk.com. GenderTalk and Gender Education & Media, Inc., 19 Oct. 1996. Web. 20 Apr. 2011. <http://www.gendertalk.com/articles/archive/stickny2.htm>.
[8]: Fagelson, Jim and Loree Cook-Daniels. “Parents’ Network 3-2-97.” Mailing List. Gay and Lesbian Parents Coalition International. Queer Resources Directory, 2 Mar. 1997. Web. 15 Apr. 2011. <http://www.qrd.org/qrd/orgs/GLPCI/1997/parents.network-03.02.97>.
[9]: Roxie, Marilyn. “About the Flag.” GENDERQUEER IDENTITIES. 16 Apr. 2011. Web. 20 Apr. 2011. <http://genderqueerid.com/about-flag>.
[*] Big thanks to quarridors for the info about Gender Sphere!