Homosexuality and transgender

Homosexuality and transgender are two separate concepts. Homosexuality usually refers to characterized by esthetic attraction, romantic love, or sexual desire exclusively for another person of the same gender, while transgender is a matter of gender identity, meaning that a person identifies as a different gender than they were assigned, or no gender at all.

The L(esbian), G(ay), B(isexual), T(ransgender), I(ntersex) community

Magnus Hirschfeld was the most influential (but by no means the only) person who categorised all people who violated heteronormative rules as a third sex/gender, that is gay, lesbian and transgender people and (to some extent) intersex people. While this notion disappeared from scientific discourses during the Second World War, the notion of a "third gender" survived at least until the 1970s; and today's notion of Queer once more includes exactly these groups of people.

Related Topics:
Magnus Hirschfeld - Heteronormative - Third sex - Gay - Lesbian - Intersex - Second World War - Third gender - 1970s - Queer

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The LGB subculture was often the only place where gender-variant people were socially accepted in the gender role they felt they belonged to; especially during the time when legal or medical transitioning was almost impossible; or before transitioning.

Related Topics:
LGB - Gender role - Transitioning

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This acceptance has not been ubiquitous. Like the wider world, the gay community in Western societies did not generally distinguish between sex and gender identity until the 1970s. Instead, it understood itself as a community of people who loved people of the same sex; gender variance was seen as an expression of this desire, not a trait that can be independent of sexual orientation. Therefore, gender variant people were accepted more as homosexuals who behaved in a gender-variant way than as gender-variant people in their own right.

Related Topics:
Sex - Gender identity - 1970s - Sexual orientation

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Also, during the 1970s and 1980s, there was a considerable backlash in the gay and lesbian community towards transgender people http://www.transhistory.org/history/TH_Backlash.html, which culminated in the publication of "The Transsexual Empire" by Janice Raymond http://www.transhistory.org/history/TH_Janice_Raymond.html, a book that claimed feminine androphiliac transwomen were "tools of patriachy for upholding stereotypes of women" and lesbian transwomen were "tools of patriachy, fifth columnists infiltrating women's space and raping women's' bodies". It dismissed transmen as "deluded and misguided lesbians, afraid of the label 'homosexual'".

Related Topics:
1970s - 1980s - Gay - Lesbian - Janice Raymond - Androphiliac - Transwomen - Transmen

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This backlash led to transgender people being excluded from lesbian communities. Within the gay community transwomen were marginalised and often just barely accepted for providing entertainment, while the existence of gay transmen was simply ignored. Only in the 1990s did this change again, with the upcoming label of "queer" once again encompassing all LGBT* people.

Related Topics:
1990s - LGBT

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