When Susan Stryker came out as a transgender woman in the early 1990s, mainstream America viewed trans people as jokes or worse. The newly hired Mills College professor recalls they might also be seen as “sad, marginalized” street prostitutes or predators in movies like “Psycho” and “Dressed to Kill.”
Stryker, 59, is gratified to see the social and political gains she and other transgender people have won, especially in the past 10 years. Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner were celebrated on magazine covers, anti-discrimination laws have been passed in some states, and Stryker and others have felt free to express their “deepest sense of self to others.” But Stryker warns that those gains now face “a profound backlash.”
“At this moment in history, when trans existence has become a frontline issue in the culture wars, it’s vital that trans people speak up and speak out, ” said Stryker.
Even people thought to be progressive — notably “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling — have joined in the “fear-mongering” about public restrooms or youth being allowed to express transgender identities, she added.
Stryker’s activism began in the Bay Area, when she was a UC Berkeley doctoral student. She is now one of the leading national voices in transgender studies, as she starts a two-year appointment as Mills’ Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women’s Leadership. She also hosts discussions about transgender representation with the Mills Trans Studies Speaker Series.
The series, presented virtually and free to the public, began earlier this month with a conversation with Sam Feder, the director of the new Netflix documentary “Disclosure,” about transgender depictions in film and TV. Stryker consulted on and appears in the film.
The Mills series also addresses the culture wars with Stryker’s conversation 8 p.m. Wednesday with South African journalist Mark Gevisser, the author of the new book, “The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers.” Stryker said the book looks at how “trans issues are being weaponized by alt-right and reactionary political movements the world over.”
The backlash includes attempts in states to enact so-called “bathroom bills,” which require transgender people to use public restrooms that correspond with their assigned gender at birth. Across the Atlantic, author Rowling wrote in June that she fears for the safety of girls and women “when you throw open the doors of bathrooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman.”
Stryker excoriated the stereotype of trans women being violent predators: “Find me the wave of men pretending to women who are wolves in sheep’s clothing, preying on women and girls in public toilets. I don’t think you will find any statistics, because they are not there. Trans people are the ones being targeted in those public spaces.”
The Oklahoma-born Stryker knows how cultural forces use people’s identity against them. When she came out, the American Psychiatric Association classified gender dysphoria or gender identity disorder as a mental health issue, which encouraged discourse on viewing trans people through a “pathologizing framework.”
“Imagine, if you were heterosexual person, and you think, ‘I really like that guy, but before I go out with him, I have to go to a psychologist have and get a certificate that says I have something called opposite sex identity attraction disorder and I have to go through two years of trial dating to make sure I get approved for a long-term relationship,’” Stryker said. “That’s what it was like to be trans. It was maddening.”
Early in her activism, Stryker co-founded the San Francisco-based Transgender Nation and encouraged trans people to reclaim the label “monster” and redirect the rage they felt by performing an excerpt from her 1993 essay, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix” at an academic conference. Stryker’s performance has been cited as a pivotal moment in the emerging field of transgender studies.
Stryker wrote: “My exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist.”
Stryker said she struggled for years to find work in academia and says her identity probably was a barrier to her employment. She instead wrote non-fiction, worked at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco and made documentaries about trans history, including the Emmy-winning “Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria.”
Academia finally took notice in the mid-2000s, when university students, coming of age in the ’90s and 2000s, wanted their faculty to reflect their more diverse experiences with gender and sexual orientation, Stryker said. Since then, she has taught at Indiana University, served as a professor at the University of Arizona and directed the school’s Institute for LGBT Studies and had visiting faculty positions at Harvard, Yale, Northwestern and Johns Hopkins.
Mills College has long been a leader in trans studies, and the school believes students, faculty and the Bay Area community will benefit from Stryker’s insights on “gender, race, disability and power,” said provost Chinyere Oparah.
Among her duties at Mills, Stryker is teaching an undergraduate seminar on the 2018 novel “Confessions of the Fox,” by trans writer Jordy Rosenberg. “Everything is online right now, but the students I see in my Zoom windows are great and really interesting,” Stryker said. “I like the culture at Mills. It’s a very socially progressive place to work.”
