Historian Susan Stryker calls for action amid wave of anti-LGBTQ+ attacks

Susan Stryker discussing the intro of her talk. Photo by Patricia Krepel.

When Susan Stryker gives lectures around the country, she often starts with the same sentence: “Thank you for inviting me here to commit a thoughtcrime in Florida.”

But when Stryker visited Willamette’s Salem and Portland campuses on March 3 and 4 to talk about local and national transgender history, she noted that what used to be a thoughtcrime in some parts of the country has now become a thoughtcrime nationally. 

Stryker is an award-winning historian, professor and filmmaker specializing in transgender American history. She founded the first-of-a-kind Transgender Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona, where she teaches Gender and Women’s Studies and has published books on transgender history, queer culture and gender theory.

Approximately 250 people filled the Paulus Lecture Hall at the Willamette Law School in Salem on the third and more listened from an overflow room. The event was years in the making, according to the Gender and Resource Advocacy Center Director Lisa Logan, who was mentored by Stryker during their time in graduate school.

Q Wilson (’27) introduced Stryker and talked about the impact her work had on his and many others’ views of gender. “I look at my peers, professors, mentors and friends and see a sea of people who have undoubtedly been shaped by this work in a revolutionary way,” he said. Stryker’s research and thinking have also “unequivocally touched” fields like biology, psychology, public health and history, according to Wilson.

Stryker’s talk focused on instances throughout history where trans populations played an important role and how they can help make sense of the present and future of those communities. 

One example she discussed is Compton’s Cafeteria, a building in San Francisco where hundreds of queer dissidents crushed a police raid in 1966 — three years before the Stonewall Riots — after years of harassment and discrimination. A transgender woman threw coffee at a police officer, triggering the riot and marking a pivotal moment in the history of transgender resistance. Stryker is one of the leading historians studying the Compton’s Cafeteria riots and interviewed several participants for her 2005 documentary “Screaming Queens.”

Compton’s Cafeteria is now owned by GEO Group, a multimillion dollar corporation that runs private prisons and immigrant detention centers nationwide. “It’s an atrocity that this historic site of trans resistance to police violence is now a site of incarceration,” Stryker said.

Speaking on the transgender presence throughout history, Stryker noted that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, drag performances and the transgender experience were nothing new, according to Stryker. Brigham Morris Young, the son of Mormon prophet Brigham Young, was known to be a “female impersonator” who performed under the stage name Madam Pattrini throughout Utah. Drag at the time was not considered “queer coded” or “gay entertainment,” which shows that attitudes around gender and cross-dressing change over time, Stryker said.

She also told the story of Frances Thompson, a formerly enslaved transgender woman who gained national attention in 1876 for being arrested in female clothing. Thomson was the first known transgender person to testify before Congress after being raped by a group of white men, some police officers, during the 1866 Memphis Massacre. Both events sparked national debates on civil rights in the South, and Thompson’s story may have impacted the outcome of the highly-contested 1876 presidential election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden, Stryker said.

“There was certainly an explicit attempt to use the weaponization and dehumanization of a Black trans woman in a highly contentious election,” she said, drawing a parallel with recent attacks on LGBTQ+ communities for political gain.

Stryker also explained the Trump administration’s recent prohibitions of using words related to sexual orientation and gender identity on government websites and showed that there is extensive precedent for governments censoring transgender communities. In the Nazi regime, for instance, many burned books were from the library of Magnus Hirschfeld, a doctor and LGBTQ+ activist who Hitler deemed “the most dangerous Jew in Germany,” according to Stryker. 

The transgender community was among “the first things Nazis were after,” she said — the story repeated itself in the United States, as before the Red Scare that targeted perceived socialists nationwide, there was a Lavender Scare that targeted the LGBTQ+ community and perceived them as risks to national security. “There were actually more suspected homosexuals ejected from government employment than communists,” she said in regards to the Lavender Scare during the Cold War.

Stryker highlighted a parallel to the attacks on LGBTQ+ federal employees under the second Trump administration, especially the push against employee resource groups that allow minorities to find community in the workplace, which have existed for decades.

Stryker tries to find snippets of local transgender history wherever she visits to tailor her lectures to her audience. She found that Alan L. Hart, an early twentieth-century resident of Albany — 24 miles south of Salem — was one of the first openly transgender people to gain a medical degree and is believed to be the first person nationwide to get gender-affirming surgery. Hart attended what is now Lewis & Clark College and Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in Portland and underwent a hysterectomy at the University of Oregon Hospital in Eugene in 1917. Hart excelled as a novelist, doctor and scientist throughout his life and pioneered the use of X-rays in the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis, according to Stryker. 

Stryker’s talk came at a difficult time for queer and transgender communities. Less than two months before her visit to Willamette, Trump signed executive orders to only recognize two biological sexes, remove funding for K-12 schools that supported trans students, deny trans athletes the opportunity to participate in sports according to their gender, and prohibit gender-affirming care for Americans under 19 at institutions that receive federal funding — despite research showing that gender-affirming care can have substantial benefits for trans people’s mental health.

Despite the attacks on transgender communities, Stryker highlighted minor “wins” she deems worth celebrating. The Compton Cafeteria building was recently added to the National Registry of Historic Places and is the first site on the registry that “traces its historic relevance to transgender social history,” Stryker said. 

“It’s just one little thing in a tsunami of bad stuff,.” Stryker noted. She finds it surprising that it was added during the first few weeks of the Trump presidency, and joked that the current president will eventually blame it on “the deep state.” 

In other news Stryker celebrated, the U.S. Senate blocked a bill that would have codified prohibitions for trans youth in sports and punished schools that did not segregate their teams by sex assigned at birth. Republicans failed to reach the 60 votes necessary to end a filibuster just hours before Stryker’s lecture.

She ended the talk by demanding action against LGBTQ+ violence. “Whatever it is that happens to us, whatever things are going on now, that’s a message in a bottle for the future,” Stryker said. “There will be people who receive that message and will know that we were here and we did not comply in advance.”