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There never was an LGB golden age
Rummage through the archives of the past and all that glitters in the conservative mind is not gold. The halcyon aura that surrounds the 1950s and 60s is shot through with hate, bigotry, and rampant homophobia, yet as anti-trans activists would have you believe trans people only emerged wholesale after the LGB folk won their rights. This is both a blatant distortion of history and falls for the same conservative mantras used throughout that period to keep gays in their place. One only has to search a newspaper archive to see just how weaponised queer identities were, and how modern conservatives are rehashing the same playbook.
Two arguments in particular have troubling echoes of the past. The first is the pathologizing of trans and queer identities, the second is the conjoining of trans people and paedophilia and sexual violence. Pathologizing non-heteronormative sexualities arose out of the desire to find an explanation as to why non-straight people existed, to find a “cure” for them, and to enable queer people to lead normative lives. In part this was seen as a positive thing in the 1860s, as up to that point queer men especially were regularly prosecuted, beaten, and killed by the State for expressing their sexuality. By finding a supposed medical cure the intent was to provide a framework back to heteronormativity. Of course, this turned into a horrific narrative which demonised queer men, which in turn led to them being seen as perverts, pederasts, and a danger to children. Exactly the same language used against trans and queer people today was used to campaign against the legalising of homosexuality in the 1940s and 50s.
Organisations such as the LGB Alliance and Sex Matters ignore this history, preferring to wipe the queer liberation movement clean of trans people. The problem is that up until the 1950s there was no clear delineation between queerness and trans identities, as sexuality and gender expression were viewed as rooted in the same kernel within the human condition. As trans person was as much an invert as a homosexual, and it is telling that the majority of surviving trans narratives from the 1920s to 1950s are trans men who ended up in married heterosexual relationships. Trans people were deemed queer, and their fight for normative rights posed a direct threat to queer liberation because if a trans person could socially…
