Post #2323608

2026-03-31 23:25 UTC

Visionaries: Transgender people as Agents of History *** This article is the full text of a speech I gave to my Unitarian Universalist congregation during Pride Month. It is a brief overview of some of the agentic trans and non-binary people who have affected the course of history. Too often, trans people are seen as passive victims or sidenotes of history, if we are considered to have existed at all. In fact, we are frequently the vanguard of historical events, fully active in the creation of our societies: from technology to cinema to civil rights and revolutions. *** “Good morning, everyone. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is James Baldwin. I’m a transgendered man who has been transitioned for a little over eighteen years. The prelude to today’s service was from the album Switched-on Bach, one of the first albums of popular electronic music to ever be released. This revolutionary work was composed on the Moog synthesizer by Wendy Carlos: a transgender woman and a pioneer of cinematic and electronic music. Wendy Carlos also composed the scores for Tron, The Shining and A Clockwork Orange. In fact, every piece of synthesized orchestra you ever heard in the 1980s—music that for me has always evoked that decade and its energy—at least partially owes its existence to Wendy. We have always been here: as artists, composers, musicians, and authors. Hatshepsut, Pharaoh of Egypt, was assigned female but ruled as king in the 15th century B.C.E. When they came to power, they donned the traditional masculine regalia of the Pharoah and publicly emphasized the qualities of both sexes in themselves to convey the idea that they were both a mother and father to the realm. Hatshepsut’s 22-year reign was a period of great prosperity and general peace for Egypt. They built several major monuments, including the famous Karnak Temple complex. We have always been here, as kings and queens and chiefs, and as their advisors. The Public Universal Friend, born Jemima Wilkinson, identified as neither male nor female. A Quaker, they founded the Society of Universal Friends, practicing egalitarianism, pacifism, and religious universalism. The Public Universal Friend rejected the ideas of predestination and election, and held that anyone, regardless of gender, could gain access to God’s light and universal salvation. (Is this all starting to sound familiar, yet?) The Public Universal Friend was also a passionate abolitionist and persuaded followers who held people in slavery to free them. They could be considered one of the ancestors-in-spirit of modern universalism. We have always been here. As priests and popes, as shamans and seidr, and as hijra, māhū, and bissu. Doctor James Barry was a transgender man who served as a military surgeon in the British Army in the mid-1800s, eventually rising to the rank of Inspector General. He was given command of Britain’s military hospitals, the second-highest medical office in the British Army. He was a pioneer in the development of hospital hygiene long before Florence Nightingale. Barry performed one of the first known successful Caesarean sections in which both mother and child survived. The child was christened James Barry Munnik in Barry’s honor, and his name was passed down through the family, leading to Barry’s name (for better or worse) being borne by a later Prime Minister of South Africa, J. B. M. Hertzog. We have always been here. As doctors and surgeons, and as people pushing the limits of medical innovation. Albert Cashier, an Irish immigrant to Illinois, served as a soldier in the American Civil War. Cashier fought against the Confederacy in 26 separate battles and lived his entire life as a man. When he was outed in his old age, his surviving comrades fought to prevent him being forcibly feminized and charged with military pension fraud. Thanks to their efforts, Cashier retained his pension, and was buried with full military honors, under his male name, at Sunny Slope Cemetery in Saunemin, Illinois. Colonel Amelio Robles Ávila, a transgender man, fought with the Zapatistas from 1913 to 1918 during the Mexican Revolution and fought to support the fledgling government that came after. In 1970, the Mexican Secretary of National Defense recognized Robles as a Veteran of the Revolution. Robles’s male identity was largely accepted by family, society, and the Mexican government, and Robles lived as a man from the age of 24 until his death in 1984. We have always been here. As soldiers, revolutionaries, and war heroes.

Replies (1)

@internet_ryan@lgbtqia.space 2026-03-31 23:26

Many of you may know the names Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, both American gay liberation and transgender rights activists. They are often credited with kickstarting the Stonewall Uprising in 1969, but they weren’t the only trans people on the front line of LGBTQ rights. Carmen Rupe, a Māori trans woman from New Zealand, was a tireless advocate for our rights in the Pacific region from the 1930s until her death in 2009. And here are two other names: Christine Goodwin in the UK, and Lorena Borjas, who is often thought of as the mother of the Hispanic drag and trans femme community in the Eastern USA. We have ALWAYS been here. Not just as the last letter of ‘GLBT’ or ‘LGBT,’ but as the tip of the spear in the fight for civil liberties and human rights. British information technology engineer and trans woman Sophie Wilson designed the ARM microprocessor core, which is used in most electronic devices, including smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles and internet routers. Because of this, she is said to be one of the architects of the modern world. Meanwhile another trans woman, Lynn Conway, invented generalized dynamic instruction handling, an advancement in chip manufacturing still used by most modern computer processors today. We have ALWAYS been here, pushing the boundaries of technology and its connection to the body. That was a very brief list of a few of the transgender and non-binary pioneers in history. There are many, many more. And if after that, you’re wondering why you never knew that your cellphone relies on technology pioneered by transwomen, or why you never knew that one of our local Midwestern Civil War heroes was a transgender man, I can tell you. Systemic, deliberate erasure. The pharaohs who came after Hatshepsut tried to strike their name and accomplishments from the records, or take credit for them, and thousands of years later, archeologists downplayed Hatshepsut’s existence and legacy for decades. The British Army sealed Dr. James Barry’s records for over a hundred years after his death to cover up the fact he was a trans man. IBM fired Lynn Conway in 1968 after she revealed her intention to undergo a gender transition, and only apologized to her in 2020. And in the 1930s, when the Nazis took over Germany, one of their first targets was the Institute of Sexual Research and its library of queer and specifically transgender research and literature. Right now, the current administration is doing its best to erase us. Again. Military records and awards for transgender soldiers are being suppressed, revoked, and destroyed. The National Park Service altered the Stonewall National Monument’s website, eliminating mentions of transgender people and changing “LGBTQ+” to “LGB”, rewriting the history of the riot. Our images are being removed from websites and national museums. In our day to day lives, cis-gender people around us also often deliberately or accidentally attempt to erase us by not respecting our identities, or by denying or remaining ignorant of our contributions. But we have always, always been here. And this, for me, is the meaning of Pride. Not the rainbows and the parades and the commodification of queer identity. Pride is connecting to my friends around the world using the technology my sisters pioneered. Pride is celebrating the ongoing lives of mothers and the birthdays of children safely delivered by Caesarian section in a procedure first perfected by one of my brothers in history. It is pride in the resiliency of my communities, the transgender, non-binary, and intersex communities, as we continue to stand at the front lines of history. This Promethean space that we trans people occupy is not an easy one. Both trans and intersex people are often some of the first to be targeted by tyranny, as we’re seeing today in the USA and other countries. But the people who want to crush us fail to understand something about what it means to be what and who we are. To be transgender means having the courage and the fierce ability to create oneself, as oneself, and this fundamental will-to-self imbues you with a strange power. It’s an internal drive for liberation that is often accomplished at great personal expense, but which has collectively endured every dictator and every would-be tyrant in history. It is a power that comes only from the relentless pursuit of authenticity. And now we’ve reached the end of my time here, but I want to leave you all with a question and a challenge. And that question is this: how often, even in this progressive space, do we tell the stories of trans people as if we’re only survivors? Only victims? Only standing at the fringes, asking for room at the table? What I hope you see now is something larger, something older. And that is that we have always been at the table. In fact, we probably helped to BUILD that table. Trans people are not only the wounded. We are visionaries and agents of history. And when we trans and non-binary people gather here—inside this living tradition of Unitarian Universalism—we’re not simply looking for shelter. We bring our fire, that power in us, to our congregations. Sometimes, we even have to stand up to our fellow church members and set them straight (or not, as the case may be). And that is the spiritual, one might say esoteric, aspect of Trans Pride. So I would call on each one of you to privately reflect on how in the past, you might have thought of transgender and non-binary people as an exception or a disruption to your world, rather than as a foundation of it. If you’ve had a Caesarian section or if know someone who has. If you use a cellphone or a computer with a silicone chip, or listen to electronic music, or take meaning from films like the Matrix Trilogy, or danced to Eddie Izzard—now Suzy Eddie Izzard—I challenge you to consider how the world you live in was also shaped by our hands, our minds, and our voices. And I challenge you to carry that recognition forward into your justice, advocacy, and theology. Because we have always been here. And we always will be. Thank you.”

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