Book Review: Imagining Transgender

Trans people have always existed! ...Sort of.

David Valentine’s Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category was written at a very lucky time. Published in 2007 about research Valentine conducted in the 1990s, it captures the very tail end of the heterogeneity of the people we now think of as ‘transgender.’

Valentine studied four very different groups of people.

First: the ball scene, which was centered around dance/fashion contests called “balls.” You might know balls from the documentary Paris is Burning or the TV series Pose. Ball participants were mostly young, mostly black and Latino, and nearly all poor. Many of them were street sex workers, selling sex on the few blocks of New York City where clients knew to look for “chicks with dicks.”

The ball scene had a complex and intensely policed gender system. People competed in particular categories based on their gender, and as we’ve all learned nothing gets people more intense about gender categories than the idea that someone might be cheating in a gendered competition. Genders included:

• “Butch queen”: a person assigned male at birth (AMAB) who lived as a man.

• “Butch queen up in drags”: an AMAB person who lived as a man but wore feminine clothing at balls; a sort of liminal/nonbinary category.

• “Fem queen”: an AMAB person who wore feminine clothing, possibly lived as a woman in everyday life, possibly used a female name or pronouns, and possibly took hormones.

• “Butch”: a person assigned female at birth (AFAB) who wore masculine clothing, possibly lived as a man in everyday life, possibly used a male name or pronouns, and possibly took hormones.

• “Woman”: an AFAB person who lived as a woman in everyday life.

• It is actually much more complicated than this but I am leaving things out for space.

Few people could afford bottom surgery and the system wasn’t really sure how to handle them; Valentine chronicles discourse over a former fem queen who got bottom surgery and wanted to compete as a woman.

Fem queens valued being “soft”:

Hardness and softness—with their clearly gendered implications—have no easy correlate to any physical or sartorial appearance, though suppleness of skin, smoothness of features, and perceived femininity in facial and bodily contours count for a lot. The softer you are, the more ‘‘real’’ you are. ‘‘Softness’’ also applies to perceived femininity in style, body movement, and language use. And while the use of feminizing hormones is seen as essential for developing softness, girls often deny that they are using them, claiming that their softness is ‘‘natural.’’

Regardless of their gender, everyone at the balls identified as gay. Butch queens, butch queens up in drags, and fem queens were all kinds of gay man; butches and women were both kinds of lesbian. At the same time, butches were men and fem queens were girls. Fem queens would say “I’m gay, I’m a drag queen, I’m a girl” and not perceive any contradiction between these statements. “Woman” was more controversial: some of Valentine’s informants identified themselves as women and gay men; others corrected him when he called them “women,” but referred to themselves and each other as “girls.”

Although they all identified as gay, people in the ball scene sometimes got in heterosexual (and heterogenderual) relationships. Valentine mentions butches acting as bodyguards for their sex worker fem queen girlfriends.

Second: crossdressers. Crossdressers were all AMAB and were generally white and well-to-do: about two-fifths were either business or computer consultants (lol). Most were married, although many of them didn’t tell their wives about their crossdressing.

All the crossdressers Valentine studied lived as men. However, many took hormones. One even took hormones without telling his wife! This seems like a bad idea to me—you’re going to be naked around your wife! she’s going to see your new breasts!—but whatever. Maybe his wife was very unobservant.

Crossdressers generally identified as heterosexual, although many of them had sex with men or other crossdressers. Although they said they crossdressed erotically, most said that they also crossdressed as an expression of a feminine self. Characteristically, they identified as men when they were living as men and wearing men’s clothing, and as women when they were at crossdressers’ meetups and wearing women’s clothing.

Third: the Imperial Court System, the largest drag queen organization in the world. Most participants in the Imperial Court were rich and white: to serve as an Emperor or Empress, you basically had to be independently wealthy. Participants in the Imperial Court were gay men who identified as men and said that they had no dysphoria or dissonance. For them, drag was simply a performance and a hobby. It said nothing deep or interesting about their identities or selves.

Fourth: the nascent transgender rights movement, particularly GenderPAC. Most participants in the transgender rights movement were white and wealthy. The movement was disproportionately, but not exclusively, made up of trans women. As you might expect, all participants in the transgender rights movement lived openly as their identified gender and/or as transgender people, and most were taking hormones or had sought surgery.

The transgender rights movement has an obvious advantage over the other three groups in defining the terms of the debate, in that they were the only group that was both:

1. Rich, white, and educated enough to successfully lobby Congress.

2. Willing to publicly admit to being in some way genderweird.¹

And so the definition of “transgender” that everyone uses in 2025 is more-or-less the definition that the transgender rights movement was using in 1995. Transgender people have an (innate, inborn, unchangeable) gender identity that isn’t the same as their sex assigned at birth. Transgender people simply are the gender they identify as: they aren’t a third gender, and they don’t have a separate “feminine self” that sometimes comes out. Transness is completely different from and unrelated to sexual orientation. You can’t be a gay man and a woman at the same time; you can’t be a straight man who dresses up as a woman and has sex with men. Crossdressers are either fetishists or trans people in denial. No one is a butch queen up in drags.

The one exception is telling. GenderPAC wanted to include drag queen performers, butch women, and fem men as types of transgender person for basically coalition-building reasons: the more people who see themselves as transgender, the more powerful the transgender rights movement is. Right now, these groups aren’t considered transgender, and it’s actually considered offensive to trans people to say they are.

Well, which of Valentine’s other groups is rich, educated, and out? The drag queen performers. And they very strongly wanted not to be transgender.

The definition of “transgender” formed for basically political reasons. For example, GenderPAC focused heavily on violence against trans people. To advocate for stronger protections of trans people’s safety, they collected lists of murdered trans people.

But many of the “trans” people on GenderPAC’s lists wouldn’t have identified as transgender; many of them hadn’t even heard of the concept of “transgender.” They would have called themselves fem queens, or drag queens, or crossdressers. GenderPAC didn’t (and couldn’t) distinguish between people who presented as a different gender because of their deep-seated gender identity, and people who presented as a different gender for practical reasons—perhaps to escape homophobia or make more money selling sex.

And by describing these murders as “violence against transgender people”, GenderPAC simplified the complex lives of the victims. Was this woman murdered for being trans, or for being a sex worker or addict? What if she sold sex because she wasn’t employable in a normal profession, or was addicted to drugs to cope with dysphoria and transphobia? Does the murder of a nontransitioning fem queen sex worker by a client say anything about the safety of a middle-class transsexual female computer programmer, just because they’re both “transgender”?

Let me be clear: you shouldn’t be able to murder anyone with impunity, including trans sex workers. If the police aren’t investigating trans sex workers’ murders, it’s good to do activism that pressures them to investigate the murders. To the extent that GenderPAC made trans sex workers’ lives easier, it was a good thing. But epistemologically, if this process ends up saying anything accurate about the lives of gender-variant people, it’s more-or-less by coincidence.

It was in everyone’s best interest for “gay” and “transgender” to be different things. The gay rights movement won by emphasizing that the gay community was full of ordinary, gender-conforming men and women, who just wanted to serve in the military and get married and have children, who were Exactly Like You. For this to work, gay men needed to be masculine—not flamboyant fem queens in shoplifted lipstick, popping estrogen and selling sex and dressing up for parties like a Vegas showgirl. And certainly masculine gay men felt resentful about being assumed to be fem queens just because they liked men.

At the same time, the trans rights movement wanted to emphasize that trans people’s genders were real and valid. If a trans woman was ‘really’ a gay man, then why can’t you refer to her with he/him pronouns? And trans people are dependent on the medical system for hormones and surgery. Historically, doctors have been very reluctant to give hormones and surgery to trans people who had any sort of ‘deviant’ sexuality. As late as the 1990s, many gatekeepers expected trans women to be asexual before transition (so they weren’t icky gay men) and heterosexual afterward (so they weren’t icky lesbians). And certainly trans women who felt alienated from the gay community felt resentful about being seen as drag queens just because they want to change their gender.

Here we get into the basic problem of social construction. You might dispute the definition of “sandwich,” but that doesn’t change the substance of what you’re arguing about. Regardless of what you decide, the cheese stays between two slices of bread, the sausage inside the bun, and so on. Sandwiches can’t understand or participate in the conversation.

Humans aren’t nearly so convenient. We define ourselves based on the categories we have available to us: goth, geek, liberal, conservative, libertarian, Christian, Muslim, effective altruist. Gay, straight, bi, queer. Man, woman, other.

So the process of allocating a category of humans causes people to put themselves in that category. When it’s a category like ‘transgender’—a category that’s stigmatized, a category that’s about something as deep and important as gender—it can become an important part of someone’s self. However “transgender” began, transgender people are really transgender now.

If I were black and poor in 1990s New York City, I would have been a butch. And if I were white and college-educated in 1920s New York City, I would have been a Communist. If I were a wealthy woman in Early Modern Spain, I would be a mystic and a saint and die young of anorexia. In the world I am right now, I’m not a butch, for the same reason I’m not a Communist or a saint or dead of anorexia.

But—we are the weird ones, we who think that transness and gayness are totally unrelated.

You can go into various cultures’ third genders, Two-Spirits and travesti and fa'afafine and kathoey. But I think that tends towards exotification in a way that isn’t helpful. Let’s talk about fairies.

Gay New York and Queer London both talk about fairies (or queens, or flamers, whatever you want to call them). Fairies are working-class AMAB people. They dress fashionably and effeminately, with bright colors; in private situations where the law won’t object, they might crossdress. They might powder their face and wear makeup. They might use female names and pronouns. They almost certainly have feminine mannerisms and ways of speaking, word choice and body language. They exclusively bottom for anal and oral sex.

Three female impersonators at the Hamilton Lodge Ball in the early twentieth century. By NA - Original publication: Harlem World Magazine. Fair use.

Perfectly normal, heterosexual men had sex with fairies without anyone questioning their masculinity or thinking of the men as fairies themselves.² Men might prefer fairies because they can have sex with fairies without paying for it or getting married, or because they mistakenly believe that sex with fairies can’t transmit STIs.³ Sex with fairies was somewhat disreputable, but not any more so or differently than sex with heterosexual female sex workers.

Were fairies trans? Were fairies gay? Were the men who exclusively had sex with fairies gay? Were the men who had sex with both fairies and women bisexual, or perhaps heterosexual if they managed to choose only fairies who were reasonably passable or who counterfactually would have identified as women? I can’t help but feel that these are wrong questions.

True, the transgender model highlights certain facts about the world that the fairy model doesn’t. Non-conforming gender expression, attraction to people of the same gender, and gender dysphoria do not necessarily co-occur: you can have masculine gay cis men, feminine trans lesbians, and so on and so forth. Men who exclusively have sex with fairies are, in certain ways, more similar to fairies than to men who exclusively have sex with women. And whether someone has physical gender dysphoria is much more important if they can get medical treatment about it.

But the transgender model hides things as well. Any way you count it, transgender people are very disproportionately attracted to members of the same gender.⁴ Even if they’re cis, people who are attracted to members of the same gender are more likely to find it psychologically important to break gender norms in glaring, obvious ways that make sexist people mad at them. And there is no clear, unambiguous line where “it is psychologically important for me to obviously break gender norms” becomes “I experience gender dysphoria.” We gain a certain amount of precision by splitting, but we lose the observation that all of these groups are very similar and have tremendous overlap.

I keep returning to the butch queens (whether or not up in drags) and the fem queens. When I read that section, I suddenly understood what we Tumblr transes with our genderfluids and our nonbinaries sound like to everyone else. The ball scene was dividing up queer people into categories that made sense based on their needs and what they saw in the world. Modern queer and trans people do that too.

And once they’re named, the categories become things. People identify with a category; people identify as specifically not a category and get offended when you put them in it. Once you know what a transgender person is supposed to think and do and be, you shape yourself in accordance with or in rebellion against it. You buy hormones and laser and programmer socks, or you specifically choose not to, in a way different from the fairy who has no idea what any of those things are. You are either a gay man or a woman, either a crossdresser or a transgender woman, and because we have that binary choice people care a lot about which side they’re on.

There are no fem queens anymore. The poor black and Latina sex workers taking estrogen think of themselves as transgender now. The rich, white, educated activists imposed their understanding of gender variance—developed substantially for political reasons—on everyone. I don’t mean to say this is a bad thing, or an oppressive thing, or that we should all put “he/him, butch queen up in drags” in our X profiles. It just… is a thing.

1. This taxonomy implies a fourth category of poor/uneducated/black/Latino closeted people, but presumably they don’t have the slack to have secret meetups, so Valentine had no opportunity to meet them.

2. Gay New York actually has a hilarious passage in which an elderly fairy is interviewed post-Stonewall and complains that the gay rights movement has made everyone think sex with fairies is queer and you can’t get with hot masculine straight men these days.

3. A surprisingly common take in New York City because all of the anti-venereal-disease campaigns only mentioned sex with women.

4. 71% if you count straight trans people as attracted to members of the same gender, 70% if you count gay trans people as attracted to members of the same gender. Very tidy.