Theme: autogynephilic MtF transsexualism
Accompanying narrator: Virginia Prince
Summary: In this piece, Virginia Prince summarizes her origin story, but there's a lot to Prince's story that isn't being told here that can be found in other sources, notably Zagria's biography of Prince in A Gender Variance Who's Who. It's anachronistic that the Stonewall Reader introductory blurb mentions Prince's "journey with her gender identity". The text itself says TVism (transvestism). (I hope I will not be accused of anachronism if I identify the underlying cause as autogynephilia.) Prince's Society for the Second Self was specifically for straight crossdressers and Prince advocated against sex reassignment surgery.
Theme: homosexual MtF transsexualism
Accompanying narrators: Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera
Summary: The lifestyles and pysch profiles of gay drag queens are different from straight crossdressers like Prince, in many ways, large and small. The interviews with Johnson and Rivera both mention "hustling" ("Who were the kinds of people you met up at Forty-second Street when you were hustling up there?", "Were you still hustling at the time?"), presumably referring to sex work with male clients. (The essays in this section of the Stonewall Reader are possibly not the optimal source for the theme I want to focus on to the extent that they focus narrowly on the Stonewall riot? I will likely want to pull up other sources to complete this research project.)
Theme: queerness as political religion
Accompanying narrators: Martha Shelley
Summary: Shelley isn't just calling for gay rights (acknowledged as a weird exception, not normal, tolerated within the liberal order), but calls for radical queers to defy Society's assumptions. "We want you to be uneasy, be a little less comfortable in your straight roles. And to make you uneasy, we behave outrageously [...]". One imagines that Shelley's analogue in the current year would be talking about being trans, not gay: the identification with the project of dismantling sexual morality seems to be more important than any real psychological condition (such as actually being a gynephilic female).
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There seem to be at least two etiological trajectories leading to MtF transsexualism, distinguished by sexual orientation: homosexual transsexuals (basically, the far right tail of feminine gay men: "inverts" in classical terminology) and autogynephilic transsexuals (in Anne Lawrence's immortal phrase, "men who love women and want to become what they love"). (It doesn't have to be two ontologically strictly distinct types for the model to be useful.)
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You can totally see this in our readings when you know what to look for. E.g., Arnold in Torch Song Trilogy is clearly HSTS. (The theory summarizes the regularities that are already there.)
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Thus, the culture concept of "trans" as a single cateogry that "carves reality at the joints" (and even more so, "LGBTQ" as one thing) is a historical artifact of how various political fights have played out in Western culture. (E.g., Most of the trans women in western countries are AGP-taxon; they're not really the equivalent of, say, the Somoan fa'afafine, who are HSTS-taxon. Lesbians and gay men and AGP men largely live different lives and don't necessarily naturally congregate. &c.)
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Queer, or LGBTQ, then, can be seen less as a natural sexuality category, but more of an ideology, like a religion. ("Political religion" is an apt phrase.) It's not (just) that people are queer and naturally find that the LGBTQ community represents their interests. The causality goes the other way, too: people get socialized (at, e.g., university classes like this one) into LGBT culture and identify with it.
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The political religion is not necessarily in its neurotype-demographic members' interests! E.g., a lot of AGP men are better off not transitioning given the inadequacies of current technology. A lot of "pre-gay" kids in the current year are getting socialized as trans, which is not obviously in their long-term interests. The oppositional aspects of LGBT culture are a choice; people who have the same underlying neurotype need not embrace smashing the heteropatriarchy. (It's plausible people of the same neurotype in the past were disproportionately monks and nuns, respected places within Society's power structure despite not being part of a standard reproductive unit.)