Lesbian/Trans Feminism of the 70s

Posted: Mon, Feb 9, 2026

Today

  • The flute-girl’s “flutes” [play in the background]
  • A quick reminder about grades: Please ignore “percentage” + we value improvement
  • Warm-up activity: Erotic love vs. political love
  • Ding’s history story hour (interjections welcome!): Second-wave feminism, lavender menace, WCLC, and time permitting, Topside

Warm-up activity

  1. Marilyn Frye’s question: Have you ever been called lesbian/dyke/gay/fag or been accused of being lesbian/gay?
  2. In a world that socializes us to internalize misogyny, is it at all possible to love women? If so, how come; if not, what now?

The women’s liberation movement

A chronology in progress

  • 1967: National Conference for New Politics incident => Westside group in Chicago & New York Radical Women (NYRW)
  • 1968: more local groups emerged across the U.S.; NYRW Notes from the First Year & “No More Miss America” protest in Atlantic City
  • 1969: Stonewall riots
  • 1970: “Lavender menace” incident & Radicalesbian takeover

Some characteristically lesbian feminist critiques

  • Firestone: Patriarchy is a rigged role-playing game: Sex roles include not just woman and man but also wife, cook, caretaker of my children, housekeeper, etc.
  • Shelly: Straight sex roles are just as artificial/natural as queer sex roles.
    • Koedt: Myth of the vaginal orgasm.
  • Radicalesbians: Heterosexual sex roles are “male-identified”—they require women to identify with men and serve men’s interests.
  • Firestone interpreting Beauvoir: But if love requires equality, then genuine heterosexual love is socially impossible. Potential responses:
    1. The man relinquishes masculine sex roles (no longer heterosexual).
    2. The woman plays the traditional heterosexual dating game to secure a man (no longer genuine love).
    3. The woman refuses to participate in heterosexual dating (no longer heterosexual).
  • Frye: Refusing to play one’s assigned heterosexual roles/being feminist => being nonheterosexual if not lesbian.
  • Radicalesbians: Lesbian = “woman-identified woman.”
    • Reappropriates “lesbians are not [real] women.”
    • Lesbians are not male-/patriarchy-identified women: Wholesale rejection of men in one’s life, refusal to be objectified, to be “fucked by men.”
    • Lesbians love women politically and let their “energies . . . flow toward our sisters, not backward toward our oppressors.”
    • “Women’s liberation is a lesbian plot.”

Political lesbianism: Being lesbian is a deliberate feminist political commitment; “feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice.”

  • Would there be lesbians “after the revolution”? Millet: We would all be nonbinary and bisexual.
  • Public litigation of Millet’s own sexuality.
  • Frye: Rejecting heterosexuality ≠ being lesbian.

Lesbian separatism: Women “cut ties” from men and male-identified relationships, institutions, and cultures.

  • 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference & SF Gutter Dykes & Beth Elliott
  • Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival & “womyn-born womyn” & Camp Trans
  • Olivia Records & Sandy Stone

The Brooklyn trans lit scene of the early 10s

A “renaissance” of trans stories written by trans authors for a trans audience [Amelie, Sophia, Sitian]

  • Attempt to break out of the “trans memoir” genre.
  • Attempt to challenge cis-written trans characters and narratives.

Epicenter: Topside Press in Brooklyn

  • No mainstream publisher would publish t4t lit.
  • The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard (2012)
  • Is There a Transgender Text in This Class? (2013), Topside’s Bechdel test:
    • Does the book include more than one trans character?
    • Do they know each other?
    • Do they talk to each other about something besides a transition-related medical procedure?
  • Imogen Binnie’s Nevada (2013)
  • Became a gatekeeper of trans lit
  • Whiteness problem [Solomon], failure to publish trans writers of color
  • 2016 Trans Women’s Writing Workshop at Brooklyn College
    • “[T]he workshop had mostly white attendees, did not adequately accommodate attendees with disabilities, and separated the two group subdivisions based on decisions about class and prestige” (Amy Marvin, “Short-Circuited Trans Care, t4t, and Trans Scenes,” p. 20).

Torrey Peters’ novella project

  • DIY self-publishing movement, bypassing Topside and commercial publishers.
  • Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones (2016): Dystopian sci-fi.
  • The Masker (2016): Gender horror.
  • Glamour Boutique (2017): Grown into the long-form Detransition, Baby (2021).

Infect and Masker have recently been republished by Penguin Random House as part of the collection Stag Dance (2025).

Is there any distance between trans literature and literature of trans stories? Reductive/flattening? [Sierra]