From a piece that I assigned, edited, and published in the Stranger back in 1997:

Forty-five years ago, Christine Jorgensen quietly returned from Stockholm after undergoing one of the first successful sex reassignment surgeries. The Swedish doctors who performed the operation on her body were professional and discreet. The American passport officers who performed the operation on her identity papers were not. A nameless bureaucrat sold her story to the press, and soon, headlines like “GI Becomes Blonde Bombshell” were screaming across the tabloids.

Though she was not the first trans woman to undergo these procedures, she was the first who was outed to the world. Much to her dismay, she led us into a swamp of media titillation and popular confusion about transsexuality, transvestism, and crossdressing that we are still slogging through today. In cultural terms, 1952 is as long ago as the Mesozoic Age, but dinosaurs still roam the minds of most when it comes to trans issues. Even among card-carrying queers, I am often disappointed at the general lack of understanding. In my bluer moments, I feel like non-trans people will never get it. I have visions of spending the rest of my days giving people vocabulary lessons and correcting pronoun usage. I’ll be the life of every party. Whee.

I am impatient, this I know, for my gay friends tell me so. When I whine, they nod sympathetically and assure me that things will be so much different in ten years. They are probably right, but whether there will be less confusion, more confusion, or just different kinds of confusion is an open question. Trans people, like lesbians and gay men, have been around as long as people have been around. But, for some reason, gay people have been able to bust through cultural barriers more successfully.

I’m not going to use this space to try to educate you, Gentle Reader, about Trans 101. Library cards and Internet accounts are readily available. Please use them at your leisure. Instead, I’d like to elevate my private whining onto a higher, public plane. I propose to rant about some battles still being fought which should have been over long ago. I call them “Things We Shouldn’t Have to Deal With Because It’s 1997, Fer Chrissakes.”

Read Kaley Davis’s whole piece here.