Jules Gill-Peterson: …restrictions on medical transition actually follow the exact same playbook as restrictions on women’s reproductive health and on abortion. Do we think it’s legitimate for government to exercise that kind of incredible power over individual freedom? If the answer is no, yeah, you’re probably pretty much already on the pro-transgender side.

Alex Lovit:  When you hear the phrase LGBTQ+ history, you might think about the relatively recent past, the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Don’t ask, don’t tell. The fight for marriage equality. For most Americans, our knowledge of queer history doesn’t really extend back before Stonewall. But of course, there have always been gay people. And there have also always been transgender people. Long before Pride Month, LGBTQ+ people were seeking that quintessential American freedom, the right to pursue happiness.

So what can all of us, regardless of our sexuality or gender identity, what can we all learn from the successes and the failures of the LGBTQ+ movement? Well, according to my guest today, there’s a lot we can learn about solidarity and social movements. We need to look past identity and find common ground in everyday issues like healthcare and housing, issues that affect everyone.

You’re listening to The Context. It’s a show from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation about how to get democracy to work for everyone and why that’s so hard to do. I’m your host, Alex Lovit. This episode is the second in our series, Democracy Under Construction. To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the United States, we are focusing on the people, movements, and moments throughout American history that have pushed our country toward inclusive democracy.

My guest today is Jules Gill-Peterson. Jules is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and a scholar of transgender history. LGBTQ+ equality is important, but Jules says that the movement has been limited by the extreme inequality of the American class system. After all, who wants to fight to be part of a system that’s designed to leave most people behind?

Jules Gill-Peterson, welcome to The Context.

Jules Gill-Peterson:  Thanks so much for having me.

Alex Lovit:  We’re doing a series on the podcast right now about the 250th anniversary of the American founding. Basically, the argument of the series is that all the things I value about my country, democracy, diversity, equality, none of those things were really baked in in 1776. So the extent to which those things are true today, it’s because people fought for them over generations and over centuries. And so those are the people we should really be honoring as we think about our history.

So for the LGBTQ rights movement, the simple story is in 1972 73% of Americans said homosexuality was morally wrong. Today, that number is 33%. So that’s a pretty huge shift in public opinion over the course of 50-ish years. Same-sex marriage was illegal everywhere in this country until 2004. Now it’s legal in every state in the union. And in fact, in 48 out of the 50 states, a clear majority of the population supports same-sex marriage. That’s the success narrative. Tell me what’s right about that and what does that leave out?

Jules Gill-Peterson:  Yeah, I mean, those successes are real. I mean, pretty dramatic transformations in just a generation or two. Culturally, in terms of people’s attitudes, the success of gay politics in particular, it’s pretty remarkable. Yeah, those statistics that you just cited. Even the popularity of gay marriage itself. I’m not sure how many people 20 years ago could have predicted that. Even the advocates or activists or orgs fighting for gay marriage probably wouldn’t have expected such a tidal shift in public opinion.

But in other ways, as we’ve seen, political homophobia or political transphobia have just as much purchase today, in some cases more purchase than ever in American history. And so I think part of what’s interesting to me is I think it’s true that there’s this kind of 1960s onward progress narrative that in many ways we’re sort of dealing with today. Was that a good narrative? Was it a little overconfident?

And I think one of the things that I’ve been bringing up a lot in my work, because my area of real deep expertise is transgender history, is the basic question of individual freedom. Who gets to exercise it? Who is granted the blessings of American liberty? Has been a core issue throughout US history. And LGBT people often just have a pretty intimate understanding of what that means.

Do you have enough freedom in your life to go against your family’s wishes, to go against the community pressures bearing down on you? Can you make happiness or pursue happiness as you would define it personally? And so in that sense, I don’t see a clean progress narrative throughout even the 20th century, let alone earlier, but I do see a recurring struggle that really makes me appreciate gay people or even transgender people’s contribution to American political life.

Coordinated political attacks on different minority groups are so recurrent throughout US history. It’s like you think it’s over, think it’s been settled, and then 50 years later, bam, we are right there again. I think what’s really interesting to me is if we go back even further than that ’60s, ’70s reference point, what other history is bubbling up? We’re usually told, “Eh, these identities are pretty recent, right?” And it’s true. People didn’t have gay identities 125 years ago, people did not have transgender identities 150 years ago. But there were people who are unmistakably gay and transgender in the past.

Alex Lovit:  As you’re saying, these identities change over time. And I think that’s a challenge, I’m sure, of writing about transgender history. That gender and sexuality and sex, those are all culturally constructed and those change over time. And then how people define their identities in relation to those of course also changes.

So the word transgender is relatively new. And even the concept of how we tend to think of it today is relatively new. And so people didn’t use that word in the past. Didn’t really necessarily have the same concept in the past. But at the same time, it’s important, as you’re saying, to point out that this is not some new fabrication, there have been trans and gay people throughout history.

So how do you think about that as a historian, how to do respect to the way people thought of themselves at their time, but also translate those into categories we can understand today?

Jules Gill-Peterson:  Well, this is why I love being a historian. It’s not just because I’m the ultimate nerd. I want to understand where things came from and how they changed over time so that we can actually answer these questions. We should understand that people in the past are very different from us, to the point of being almost unrecognizable. And that’s what’s interesting about our predecessors of every kind.

So when it comes to transgender history, of course the political context too is that one of the major political strikes against transgender people today is the claim that “I don’t remember hearing about all this pronouns stuff or gender identities, I never heard about all of this 10, 15 years ago.” And to that, I say, well, yes, transgender as a kind of identity, as a cultural politics, that’s extremely new. But what’s not new is transition. The practices by which people have actually been able to change their sex in a given time and place.

And the history of transition is extremely old. If you were born male and knew that you were meant to be a woman, how would you do that? That’s the existential question that confronts transgender women today. But there’s a version of that question that would’ve confronted a woman like that in 1830 or 1910. That kind of existential practical question, without having to have a strong sense of identity, if you just feel in your body that one thing is wrong and something else would be better, how would you go about pulling that off?

And so as a historian, the way that I approach transgender history is actually without the concept transgender at all. Unless it applies, but it really only applies to maybe the last 50 or 60 years. Before that, you have people who very unmistakably take great pains, in fact organize their entire lives, around becoming women or becoming men without having been born one. And we don’t often get access to their intimate lives. They don’t, unless you get lucky and find a diary in an archive, it’s pretty rare to get that kind of intimate view. So we don’t know too much about what people thought about themselves. But we can certainly find in their actions, in the records they left behind, the fact that people have been throughout the history of the American republic trying very, very hard to do something that people still try really, really hard to do today, which is to say to change their sex.

And part of what’s so interesting to me is that throughout almost all of American history, if you’re becoming a man, that’s arguably a step up in status. You increase your opportunities to work, you command a lot more social esteem, you might even get the right to vote. It’s not the reason people transition, but it brought them a upward mobility that they tended to enjoy.

Whereas becoming a woman, if you’re born male, throughout basically the entirety of US history is just one of the worst practical decisions you could ever make. Women not only have less legal rights in most periods in US history, less property rights, they don’t have the same work opportunities. They’re generally understood to be dependent on men until well until the 20th century. So it’s a really difficult struggle for people who want to transition and become women.

And so then it’s like, once we move past the contemporary identity model, we can say, yeah, that’s something that’s pretty recent. It’s not super historical yet. But this longer term practice of transition actually opens up the whole field of our nation’s history and gives us a chance to ask other kinds of questions.

To me, again, such a nerd, but I am the kind of person who wakes up in the morning and thinks to myself, “Yeah, if I had been born in 1835, what would I have done with the central predicament of my life?” And there’s something to me about that, the relationship of transition to self-reinvention that is just so characteristically American. And it is something I think that distinguishes that history here in the United States from some other countries in the world. So I think it tells us something really interesting about, say, for instance, how transition as a practice, of trying to wrestle some individual freedom out of your life, how it might have contributed to the development of the concept of freedom in this country’s long history.

Alex Lovit:  One complication of looking at the past is just how differently people saw themselves, saw the world. I think another complication for trans history is the interaction with medical science. Which is changing during this time. And there are new discoveries being made about the endocrine system and how sex development works in the human body. Which is not to say that science is objective and free of bias. It very much is biased. So there’s a sense in which these identities are developed in interaction with medicine and science, but also fighting back against some assumptions in the medical world.

How do you think about the relationship between trans identity being developed in culture and then trans identity being enforced through medicine and science and the interaction of those two things?

Jules Gill-Peterson:  It’s such an interesting question. And it’s one that I think I suspect it makes people nervous for political reasons. Like, “Oh, well, okay, so is being transgender just a medical thing?” Well, the hormones and the surgeries have only existed about a hundred years or so, which is, by the way, a very long time in the history of medicine. But not a long time in the history of the human species. What does that mean?

Again, this is a place where history, I think, ought to play the role of answering the question for us. And so it’s like the very basic thing to know is that before the era where modern surgical procedures and modern hormone therapies were developed, people generally were able to successfully change sex as in adopt the real social status of another sex. Actually live that way, be treated that way in the private and public sphere through what I would call passing. That’s the phrase that scholars have used too. Basically changing your clothes, changing your name, changing your appearance. And then adopting all the social roles and labor roles that go along with that. And that was the way people did it.

But one thing to think about is however much physical dysphoria, personal suffering they felt about their bodies, one thing they couldn’t do is sit up at night and say, “Gosh, I really wish I could go to the doctor and do something about it.” Because there was no such doctor. So it’s a really interesting question, how they dealt with that.

But the moment that medical procedures to change people’s sex become reliable, well-developed, this is in the 1940s into the early 1950s, and it is front page news because it’s an exciting pathway in medicine, the moment that that becomes possible, it’s like a revolution in the consciousness of transgender people out there.

And we know this because they would write letters to some of the early transsexuals who were featured in newspapers and say, “Oh my God, I read about you. I read about your story. I read that you went to this doctor and now you’re female. I have to do that. Help me, help me, help me.”

So it’s this amazing moment in the middle of the 20th century where the medical possibility of physically transitioning becomes possible, but very scarce, very difficult to access. When someone decides to change their sex, it basically makes their life very insecure. They basically are at risk of not just being rejected by their family, but they tend to have trouble finding work. Because they need to change their type of work, they tend to struggle passing consistently, they tend to have more trouble with the law, they tend to experience depression. Basically, their lives tend to unravel a little bit.

And the basic arrangement of transgender medicine that emerges in the ’50s and the ’60s and into the ’70s is through the concept, this is the concept they use clinically, of rehabilitation. That before getting access to say the surgery you’ve been dreaming about since you were a little kid, you need to prove that basically you can work your way out of poverty. You need to live as your new sex, but without any of the medical supports that you’re asking for. You need to prove you can do it on your own first, get employed, become independent. And if you’re able to prove it for several years in a row, then we’ll know for sure you deserve to finally be made physically that sex. And then you can change your sex legally.

Middle class people who have actually delayed their transition as long as possible, maybe started families, got married, have white collar jobs, they can pay for their surgery, they have the money saved up already. They tend to sail right through this rehabilitation process.

And so over time, I think actually the biggest problem with the field of transgender medicine is that basically it ends up rewarding the people who already have the most going for them in American society. And I think it goes a long way to explain a lot of the class disparities under the so called transgender umbrella. There are real, real, real differences and disparities in people’s quality of life.

Most people still to this day, and this is before any state introduced any restriction on medical transition, most people don’t actually get to transition physically the way they want to. And there’s a reason for that. It was by design. And there’s something I think very disturbing about that. But also it foreshadows the hyper-competitive, high cost of living, unequal society that a lot of Americans might describe this country as today.

Alex Lovit:  Yeah. It’s almost as if it was a bad idea to tie access to medical care to economic class.

Jules Gill-Peterson:  Almost, right? I mean, this is what I always tell people. I’m like, transgender medicine, should youth be allowed to trans. All these kinds of questions get framed like they’re moral or philosophical dilemmas. Ooh, what is the medical ethics? Do we know enough? And it’s like, no, that’s not the real story. I mean, that version of the story is misleading to begin with, but you know why you should care about these people’s access to medical care? They can tell you how the American healthcare system works like nobody else.

And I think a lot of people have a lot of problems with the American healthcare system. So maybe it would behoove us to think about making things better for this one population as a way to think about how to change healthcare for everyone.

Alex Lovit:  Let me ask about the interaction between the fight for political rights, which is often how we think about civil rights struggles, and the fight for cultural acceptance. How do you think of how those things interact?

Jules Gill-Peterson:  It’s a fabulous question. And I think it’s actually one where transgender history is extremely important for making sense of a number of historical tendencies that are basically blowing up in everyone’s faces right now. Let me explain what I mean.

I’m working on a book right now that’s a history through which the idea or the concept of transgender as a personal and a group identity arose and then the politics that come along with it. Transgender is not a neutral term, it actually is a partisan term. It was invented by middle class professionals, people with college degrees, sometimes with graduate degrees, law degrees, who go into the professions, people who are more likely to be high-educated, quite high income, maybe live in the suburbs.

And part of the history of liberalism is that in the 1960s, we might’ve seen political movements being based on mass democracy, the civil rights movement, mass mobilization, grassroots democracy, students for democratic society, the mobilization against the Vietnam War, the women’s movement. We’re talking about politics as something that requires mobilizing the vast majority of people in order to achieve your objectives.

But since the 1960s and the ’70s, the professional class as college educated people have ascended saying, “Well, I actually studied this, I’m an expert. I have the right policy. I know what to do.” And it’s partly how we start to see class or union-based or labor-based politics disappear or wane in influence. And it also was attached to this politics of self-expression, that the individual’s right to have an identity is the most important thing. And that’s where acceptance becomes really important, and politics starts to seem like, do you recognize and care for and value your transgender neighbors?

And it’s like, that’s great, that’s wonderful, but is that the primary thing that most transgender people are struggling for, the recognition of their neighbors? Or are they struggling for more bread and butter issues like housing, relief from police interactions? Are they struggling to get access to healthcare? Are they having trouble holding down jobs?

And I think it’s that kind of class difference that tells us a lot about how transgender politics in particular got shrunk down to the size of what I actually think are pretty small dilemmas materially. Acceptance, I mean, acceptance is great if it happens. But I think part of the problem is accepting someone else’s gender identity doesn’t necessarily do anything to improve their material circumstances. And I think part of the issue to me is that the way, is actually the fact that transgender rights have hinged so much on cultural acceptance or cultural progress. When maybe what those rights have been trying to secure aren’t really cultural issues at all.

And famously, I think in American history, it’s really hard to found a right to material necessities. I mean, that’s something people have struggled to do in this country. I think maybe the politics of inclusion in some ways have introduced to the public the idea that all transgender people really need is your acceptance. And that might be most true for people in the middle class who can pay for everything else on their own that they need to transition. And for whom being accepted is really meaningful to them. But I think for the vast majority of working class people, acceptance doesn’t really do anything.

So in some ways, I think transgender has been part of the way that liberal politics have tried to separate culture from the economy in a way that I think has been very self-defeating. But also just makes everything so messy and complicated when I think it could just actually be so much simpler.

Alex Lovit:  Yeah. Well, it sounds like that’s a limitation of cultural acceptance, which is great. As you’re saying, but has limited effects. But also political rights, being able to marry whoever you want to marry, that’s great, that’s wonderful. It doesn’t help you put food on the table.

Jules Gill-Peterson:  Well, it does indirectly, I suppose, in that having a two income household with legal stability might increase your odds. I mean, but yes, I agree. I mean, I think, I’m a passionate defender of transgender rights. But then more practically speaking, yeah, rights to secure what?

I think I’ll use one example, single best Supreme Court case for transgender people, 2019, Bostock v. Clayton, in which the Supreme Court basically said that discrimination in employment against gay and lesbian people and transgender people is just straight up sex discrimination. It’s a decision written by Justice Gorsuch, fabulous decision, fabulous conservative case for why you cannot discriminate against people who are transgender without basically engaging in sex discrimination.

As scholars have shown, it’s really hard to bring claims against a workplace. You need to have a lot of money and time and resources. And so in an economy that’s now built around the service sector where most people are working for pretty low wages, working long hours or working multiple jobs, it’s not going to be very many transgender people who decide to make use of that case and fight illegal discrimination in the labor market.

So even though it’s an amazing win, it’ll still be mostly professionals, people in the middle class who have the time to hire a lawyer, who have the time to fight a case in court without it causing them to go bankrupt, who will be able to make use of that right. And I always think about that. Even before any state restricted access to medical transition, and it was perfectly legal, most people still couldn’t do it, it was just too expensive. And so again, it’s like rights are fantastic, I really think there should be a right to transition recognized under American law. I think the Constitution is on my side there. But it’s only as good as we can make good on it at the bread and butter level.

Alex Lovit:  Yeah. So that’s interesting. And as we’ve talked about, class’s intersection with medicine, that controls medical access. And as you’re saying there, class also interacts with political rights and how much people have the power to actually enforce those rights. And then class also interacts with cultural acceptance.

And so as an example of that, the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 is this foundational moment in LGBTQ history. And we often forget who actually led that rebellion, which was largely trans women of color. And in the politics of respectability, this was not respectable. This is a riot that happened at 1:00 AM outside a nightclub. Largely, it was a response to police violence. An immediate and practical problem of these people are getting beaten up and harassed. So that’s 1969.

Already, four years later, Sylvia Rivera, who was one of the leaders of Stonewall, she’s already criticizing the gay rights movement and saying, “You guys are just a white middle class club and are trying to engage in this politics of respectability, and I’m excluded from that.”

How does the politics of respectability play into the LGBTQ rights movement?

Jules Gill-Peterson:  It’s really fascinating. And I think being so front and center about class really just lights the whole thing up. And I think just more broadly, for any nerds listening out there, to me, the main driver in the history of sexuality period is class, not identity.

So before Stonewall, I think most people would probably imagine, right, being gay was illegal maybe. Sodomy was illegal and there was so much social prejudice and people had to be closeted and so the bars were a place they could be free. And that’s 90% of the way there.

The missing 10% of that story, I think, is about class. The stigma of homosexuality caused downward mobility. The criminalization of sodomy made gay men and lesbians, but especially gay men, it made them vulnerable all the time. And it made them vulnerable to losing their jobs, losing their apartments. Basically, it made them vulnerable to falling into poverty at any moment.

And so that’s why police raids on bars like the Stonewall Inn were so tricky and were such a big problem. That’s why early gay rights was so concerned with that and concerned with the police. It really did keep people from going to school, from starting careers, starting families and so on.

And so part of what happens in the aftermath of Stonewall is you have some of the class differences within the gay community, which includes at this time these transsexual women start to become more and more obvious. The transsexual women of color, represented by Sylvia Rivera and some of the other women who at the time might have called themselves street queens, these are people who are living in subsistence poverty, at the very bottom of the social ladder in New York City doing survival sex work. Generally speaking, pretty much homeless, often dealing with addiction, repeated stints in jail because they’re followed by cops everywhere they go. Extreme levels of sexual violence in jail or at the hands of police. I mean, it’s an incredibly traumatizing way of life.

So they have a pretty unvarnished view of politics. They’re pretty clear-eyed about what they think is needed. They need welfare, they need housing, they need money, they need resources. It’s an anti-poverty and an anti-police political program.

Not all gay men really would share that issue. Part of what happens in the aftermath of Stonewall is as everyone’s trying to organize, found political organizations, do their first demonstrations, sit-ins and so on. There’s a sit-in at a building on NYU’s campus that Sylvia Rivera and some of the other street queens help organize. They show up. But in terms of the gay male contingent, it’s college kids, NYU students. They’re all getting together, they’re having a sit-in. They’re protesting NYU Not allowing them to hold a gay dance, but it’s a bigger symbolic thing. And then they find out the NYPD is on the way.

And what happens is as soon as they find that out, basically almost all the white gay college students get up and leave. And they leave the queens alone. The queens won’t leave because they’ve fought the police a million times. They’re not afraid. But they’re like, “Oh, wow, I see.” And you understand, a lot of those college students are like, “I mean, I’ve got a future ahead of me I’m upwardly mobile.” They start to come to this calculus, which I think becomes really definitive for a certain, well, basically for mainstream gay politics, which is like, we actually have a shot of being pretty regular people if we can just convince everyone that being gay is not a strike against us, we can just go on. You’ve got a lot of opportunity if you’re graduating from NYU. Whereas those street queens don’t have any of that going for them.

So there’s a real class difference. It’s not that gay men and transsexual women couldn’t get along, it’s not an identity difference. It’s actually driven by class interests, I think. And that split just grows bigger and bigger and bigger over time. And people’s class interests really do shape their political orientation and shape the rationale or calculus they make about like, “Okay, do I want to put everything on the line in solidarity for people who are poorer or more harshly criminalized than me? Or do I have a pretty good thing going? And if I just try really hard and get rid of this one stigma, I might be okay.” And that I think actually is ultimately the political calculus that a lot of people used from the 1960s onward.

So it’s not as cheery as that progressive story that now I think is quite revisionist and just creates this one big tent. Everyone was marching together and we’re all inspired by Sylvia Rivera and transgender women of color. And it’s like, but that’s not what happened. There were bitter, bitter, bitter disagreements. And middle class people consistently, whether gay or transgender, decided to leave poor transsexual women of color on their own and do their own thing. And they are the ones that went on to found the politics that we recognize today as a LGBT politics. They actually do have a real sense of elitism about them just because they came from this college educated middle class and they really left behind the vast majority of both gay, lesbian and transsexual people who are working class. And because they were left behind increasingly since the 1970s, I think that’s one reason why it’s been really hard to mobilize a large political coalition in favor, say, of transgender youth.

Alex Lovit:  Yeah. Well, so I had a question on my list here about solidarity. And you’re making me think about it differently. There’s this phrase that we use today, the LGBT movement. And I find that phrase a little awkward because it’s this list of mutually exclusive categories. What brings these people together? It sounds like you’re saying the primary problem isn’t solidarity among the L’s, the B’s and the G’s and the T’s, but more of class divisions within that movement. Is that how you understand things?

Jules Gill-Peterson:  Absolutely, yeah, because I think the thing about acronym or umbrella politics is what they assume the people under the umbrella or in the acronym have in common is a shared identity. And that’s just not true because they’re divided by class.

And so I think what I like about solidarity as an alternative concept is what solidarity is about at its root is, I don’t share very much in common with the people that I’m linking arm in arm with. And I’m going to defend the interests of people who are not like me, who are strangers to me, who I might not even share the same interests with because I don’t have to share an identity for my politics to benefit another group of people.

And that I think, again, is one of the things that identity politics really has distorted. I mean, identity politics has the veneer of progressivism sincerely on it, but I don’t think identity politics or acronym or umbrella politics can solve this really lingering issue.

Even just that one example, poor transsexual women of color, they’re now celebrated as heroes. I mean, people have gone back to atone symbolically for how those people were treated. Now they just call them heroes, but the politics still don’t benefit those people at all. Because it’s not a matter of including them in a larger identity movement, it’s about bread and butter issues.

And so to me, those class differences are really challenging. It’s genuinely challenging. And I also think solidarity also means a politics that moves well beyond the identity group and actually could be popular in the basic sense, popular with the majority of people. And I think for better or for worse, and I think it’s mostly for worse, LGBT is associated with college educated elites in the United States. That’s what it’s associated with. And I don’t think that’s an entirely unfounded association. I think it’s actually true because college educated elites created that concept, created that politics. And so we’re leaving so many people behind. And I think, I guess, what I’m calling for is quite challenging, but I think it’s also really clarifying, particularly right now.

Alex Lovit:  Well, help me understand what you’re calling for and help our listeners understand what you’re calling for. Solidarity in the LGBT movement is important. But as you’re saying, that’s limited, we need a broader solidarity. And our politics is about everything. It’s about that, it’s about racial inclusivity, cultural inclusivity, religious inclusivity, it’s about climate policy and education funding and what should the capital gains tax rate be. And in America, we only have the two levers to pull in the general election. I believe that it is our responsibility as Americans to fight for that inclusive future. How do we do that effectively and build that solidarity while fighting for all of these things that we care about?

Jules Gill-Peterson:  Now, if I really knew the answer to that question, I’d be a very well paid political consultant instead of a historian. But with that caveat. No, I mean, I think that is the question of the moment, isn’t it? And this is a funny way to answer it, but I want to use an example from a different country, but it’s just one that is so elegant. It’s something I’ve written about in one of my books.

But in 2014, in the Philippines, a transsexual woman, Jennifer Laude, was killed by a US Marine who was stationed at a naval base. And met her at a bar, went back to a hotel with her and then killed her. The Marine, Joseph Scott Pemberton, was basically protected by the United States. But one of the things that was so remarkable to me in researching that case, which was very famous, was the reaction of activists in the Philippines, who were galvanized around Jennifer’s death. None of whom had any experience with transgender issues and who were themselves generally not LGBT at all.

They did not turn around and try to create a transgender political solution to the violence. They said very simply, “What’s the root cause of what got Jennifer killed?” The US military presence in the Philippines. So their demand was that the Philippines end its long-term military relationship with the United States. Which has its origins in the period when the Philippines was a US colony. They didn’t even create a transgender politics, they didn’t even need to know a single thing about transgender women. All they needed to say was, “Here’s the root problem.” This unequal relationship between these two countries that’s manifest in this military presence, which endangers women who do sex work in the city. Great. Well, the only solution to that at the end of the day is to get the military out.

I think coming back here, let’s use the example of the many, many different ways that states, and now the executive branch of the federal government, are trying to restrict people’s ability to medically transition. Which is a really horrifying thing to take away. It’s not a privilege that some people get. It’s like, imagine if your own bodily autonomy was taken away from you. Well, a lot of people can’t imagine that actually. So it’s a really important place, I think, to talk about a broader issue everyone faces. It’s why restrictions on medical transition actually follow the exact same playbook as restrictions on women’s reproductive health and on abortion. It’s the same politics.

Do we think it’s legitimate for government to exercise that kind of incredible power over individual freedom? I mean, I think most people probably in this country would say no. As a matter of principle, no, that’s arguably pretty anti-American. And then at the same time, it’s a chance to sit down and talk about, what is wrong with the healthcare system? Why is it just so awful in this country? And it’s really an opportunity to sit down and build a commonality of interest with the most people possible.

What’s notable to me about that framing of it is it just doesn’t really matter what you think about transgender people or gender, this or that. It’s not a problem of philosophy. It’s not a problem of terminology. It’s not a problem of acceptance. It’s just bread and butter calculations. Do we think it’s fair the way people have to deal with the American healthcare system? If the answer is no, yeah, you’re probably pretty much already on the pro transgender side.

Do you think it’s legitimate for the government to criminalize people’s use of restrooms? Which opens the door to people inspecting genitals in public bathrooms. If the answer is no, it doesn’t matter what you think about transgender people.

And so I have no crystal ball, I couldn’t say whether it would be successful or not. It’s up to people to make it happen. But I do think I sense a bit of a way out of some of the fatigue and cynicism of this moment where it does feel like, why are anti-transgender politics so successful?

And one of the reasons why is that right wing conservatism announces itself as fighting for the people against entrenched elites. And if identity politics, including some forms of transgender inclusion or LGBT inclusion, have been framed as elite, then you can understand why they just don’t resonate as popular with people.

Whereas I think talking about bread and butter issues, about what is legitimate and illegitimate for government to do, and why it’s so hard for people to get healthcare in this country or why they have to pick up and move because a state passed a law that made their lives so much harder, those are kinds of issues I think that just have broad appeal because they genuinely resonate. They could be a little more populist. So that’s just one of the things that’s emerged to me as how history flows into what’s going on right now.

Alex Lovit:  Yeah, that’s inspiring. And you might have a career as a political consultant yet.

Jules Gill-Peterson:  No, no, don’t curse me with that. No, I could never.

Alex Lovit:  Well, so let me ask one last question, which is, as a historian, if you were to pick up a history book written a hundred years from now about the current moment and what’s happening now, what do you hope the story will look like?

Jules Gill-Peterson:  Wow. That’s so interesting. I hope it’s okay to give a very historical answer. Because a lot of the political struggles that we’re facing in this country, a lot of them are battles over reconstruction, the unfinished project of reconstruction. That’s very literal in the case of a number of the Supreme Court cases that involve transgender rights. We’re talking about the Equal Protection Clause, the clause brought into the Constitution by the 14th Amendment, the most wonderfully transformative amendment to the Constitution.

But reconstruction faced bitter, reactionary opposition in the South, which eventually resulted in Jim Crow. And so reconstruction has always been this unfinished business. And the possibility of a genuine, multiracial, multi-class democracy lives on not just in the Constitution, but in our political inheritance.

But I think in terms of imagining a progressive tradition up to the task of building something genuine and affirmative and transformative in American democracy, I think we already have, the seeds were already sewn for that.

Alex Lovit:  Well, that’s beautiful. And you’re also helping make some continuity for our history series. So the previous episode with Sherrilyn Ifill is really a deep dive into the 14th Amendment.

Jules Gill-Peterson:  Oh, oh my gosh. Okay.

Alex Lovit:  So listeners, go back and listen to that if you want a little bit more context for what Jules was talking about there. But I think that’s a great place for us to end. Jules Gill-Peterson, thank you for joining me on The Context.

Jules Gill-Peterson:  Thank you so much, Alex.

Alex Lovit:  The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake Jr. and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our director of communications. The rest of our team includes Jamal Bell, Teo Clyburn, Jasmine O’Lari, and Darla Minich.

We’ll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy. In the meantime, visit our website, kettering.org, to learn more about the foundation or to sign up for our newsletter. If you have comments for the show, you can reach us at thecontext@kettering.org. If you like the show, leave us a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts or just tell a friend about us.

I’m Alex Lovit, I’m a senior program officer and historian here at Kettering. Thanks for listening.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests. They’re not the views and opinions of the Kettering Foundation. The foundation’s support of this podcast is not an endorsement of its content.

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