concern. (The two bodies merged in 1998, becom-
ing Gender Education and Advocacy, or GEA.)
The year 1994 also saw the formation of a direct-
action group, Transsexual Menace, a name chosen
in memory of the lesbian activists in the women’s
movement, who formed the organization Lesbian
Menace in the 1970’s. Initially formed on the occa-
sion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall
riots in New York City to challenge the gay and les-
bian movement to address transgender concerns,
Transsexual Menace mirrored in some ways the
national AIDS protests of ACT UP, using direct
political actions as a vehicle for public dialogue.
Anti-transgender prejudice and violence were also
addressed through the GEA’s taking on the sponsor-
ship of the annual Day of Remembrance for those
killed and the associated Remembering Our Dead
project.
One of the GEA’s efforts was focused on the bru-
tal murder of twenty-one-year-old Brandon Teena in
the winter of 1993. Born a biological female, by her
late teens she had decided to present as a male,
adopting suitable clothing and manners of speech
and body language. After a series of relationships
with women, Teena’s identity was exposed in the
town of Falls City in southern Nebraska, where he
was murdered by two outraged men who were
friends of the woman he was then dating, who sup-
ported him after the revelation. The case was the
subject of two films of the 1990’s—a documentary,
The Brandon Teena Stor y(1998), andBoys Don’t Cr y,a
1999 feature film that brought transgender con-
cerns to a national audience for the first time.
That year also saw the creation of the first non-
profit lobbying organization devoted primarily to
the promotion and protection of the needs of
transgender persons within the American legal sys-
tem at all levels of jurisdiction. The National
Transgender Advocacy Coalition monitors legisla-
tive activities related to transgender persons at the
federal, state, and local levels and works for “the ad-
vancement of understanding and the attainment of
full civil rights for all transgender and gender vari-
ant people in every aspect of society.”
Increased Visibility A notable contribution to
transgender visibility in the 1990’s was the expan-
sion of the number of transgender autobiographies
and the appearance of openly transgender charac-
ters in works of fiction, such as Feinberg’s ground-
breaking 1993 novelStone Butch Blues, awarded the
1994 Stonewall Book Award for literature (sponsored
by the American Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian,
Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table).
Paralleling the increased transgender political
and literary presence was a sharp increase in the
1990’s of research in several of the social sciences
specifically addressing transgender populations.
Common themes were advice for counselors and
practitioners in the medical and mental health fields
on effectively serving transgender people, and ex-
plorations of gender identity in contexts as varied as
family studies, anthropology, public policy, and his-
tory, with oral histories and personal paper collec-
tions of transgender people identified as such for
the first time. Documentary films devoted exclu-
sively to transgender subjects also began to appear,
the earliest being the 1996Transsexual Menacefrom
Rosa von Praunheim, recording the actions and phi-
losophy of this group over the first years of its exis-
tence. A more generic treatment of transgender
emergence and liberation work,Transgender Revolu-
tion, appeared in 1998, followed in 1999 byGender-
nauts, which examined the online community cre-
ated by female-to-male (FTM) transgender people
in San Francisco. The Bay Area also saw the found-
ing in 1996 of FTM International, which hosted the
first FTM Conference of the Americas in San Fran-
cisco that year. The separate populations of female-
to-male and male-to-female transgender people
gave further input to research during the closing
years of the 1990’s in works such asFTM: Female-to-
Male Transsexuals in Society(1997),S/he: Changing Sex
and Changing Clothes(1998), andTransmen and FTMs
(1999).
Impact The emergence and vigorous public pres-
ence of transgender individuals during the last de-
cade of the twentieth century laid the foundations
for publications on more specific aspects of the com-
munity in the early twenty-first century. Transgender
people became more visible as subjects of research
and activism, in fields as varied as biology, politics,
civil rights law and legislation, history, psychology,
and medicine, challenging established categories
and forcing a reevaluation and redefinition of gen-
der and how it was created and maintained.
Further Reading
Devor, Holly.FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Soci-
ety.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.866 Transgender community The Nineties in America