GLR May-June 2026

INTERVIEW

Eli Erlick talks with the author of Transgender History

Trans Oppression Updated

T HE FIRST EDITION of Susan Stryker’s Trans gender History became an instant classic when it was published in 2008. It was the first book to document how the trans movement entered the new millennium and became what it is today. It is one of the best-selling transgender nonfiction books of all time. Eighteen years later, the conversation has only grown more urgent as trans people face unprecedented back lash, and new trans groups routinely emerge. Stryker’s CV is filled with many notable firsts. In 1999, when trans people still often struggled for inclusion in historically gay and lesbian organizations, she became the first executive director of the GLBT Historical Society, one of the world’s largest archives of queer historical materials. In 2013 she

S USAN S TRYKER

in terms of cultural attention to trans issues. We were definitely pre-“tipping point.” It still felt very much like we, as an emerg ing community, were just wrapping our heads around the fact that we indeed had a history. That first edition was a pretty scrappy affair, written quickly based mostly on things I’d learned while digging into the archives of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. It was intended as a book to be used in intro feminist studies classes. Nearly twenty years later, I think the first edition is pretty limited in perspective, but still a good-enough “starter kit” for orienting newbies to the topic of trans history in the U.S. The second edition, published in 2017, addressed some of the limi tations of the first one, primarily I think in situating trans history in a more robust feminist perspective, including greater atten

launched the Transgender Studies Initiative, including the first-ever faculty cluster hire in trans studies, at the University of Arizona, where she directed the Institute for LGBTQ + Studies until 2020. In 2014, she became founding co-editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly , the first peer-reviewed journal of cultural studies, arts, humanities, and qualitative social sciences in trans stud ies. Stryker now holds a distinguished visit ing appointment at Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research. This February, Seal Press released the third edition of Transgender History ,which is 48 pages longer and is “now completely re vised and updated, including a longer, global history and a timely chronicle of the latest wave of anti-trans backlash.” I interviewed Stryker shortly after its publication. —E.E.

tion to questions of intersectionality, and in broadening the content. It covered the re markable expansion of trans discourse and visibility during the Obama years, when trans issues moved from the margins toward the center and were embraced—albeit in a pretty shallow way—as part of neoliberal identity politics. There were rumblings in the distance, as reactionary forces increasingly figured out they could weaponize trans is sues to split liberal coalitions, but for most of the years between the first and second edi tions, the trans social movement was mov ing in a positive direction. That started to change, I think, in 2015– 16. The first big sign of things to come was overturning the Houston Equal Rights Ordi nance based on a trans bathroom panic media campaign. And then of course Trump came to power for the first time. That happened

Susan Stryker.

Eli Erlick: When you wrote the first edition of Transgender History , we lived in a very different time. Trump wasn’t in of fice yet. There was very little academic infrastructure for trans studies—you and Stephen Whittle had published the first Trans gender Studies Reader a couple of years earlier. Fewer than one in ten people reported knowing a trans person. How have today’s debates and demagoguery over transgender people in fluenced this third edition? Susan Stryker: When I wrote the first edition of Transgender History way back in 2007, we hadn’t reached “peak trans” yet Eli Erlick is the author of Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans His tory, 1850-1950 (Beacon Press) and the forthcoming Belonging Through Exclusion: Understanding the Transgender Far Right (Chicago).

right as I was finishing up revisions to the second edition, which ends with a discussion of trans involvement in the 2017 Women’s March. At that time, it was still not clear if Trump’s election was more of a fluke or a sea change. But by the time 2026 rolled around, it was pretty clear that Trumpism was a per sistent feature in contemporary politics, and that the trans move ment of the past few decades had slammed into a wall. Consequently, I felt that the third edition really needed a substantial revision—greater attention to the parallel history of the anti-trans movement that had been gaining power for decades, a shift in focus so that the book included not just ac complishments of trans people but also of the political climate in which we exist, and a recognition that much of the work of the past several decades has been rapidly undone. I think we’ve

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