“We Had Some Gender Chaos”
Activist Anne Ogborn on rebooting the trans rights movement
Anne Ogborn is a software engineer in Elgin, OR. Ogborn started a support group for trans women in Kansas City in 1987. A few years later Ogborn decamped for the Bay Area, where she was instrumental in starting the activist group Transgender Nation. She edited the Transsexual News Telegraph, a widely distributed newsletter that covered everything from politics to art.
In 1991 the organizers of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival turned away Nancy Burkholder, a transgender woman, on the grounds that the festival didn’t admit trans women. Ogborn and friends organized a protest the following year.
As told to Andy Wright:
Then there was an article about Nancy and Nancy’s situation in Michigan in The Bay Area Reporter, which set off a firestorm. And we started getting organized for a protest the next year. During this year, the article set off a series of pretty hateful letters — mostly from lesbians — in The Bay Area Reporter and started something called the Letter Wars. So every issue there would be a continuation in dialogue from trans people and the larger gay community. And those letters were, I think, really critical, in changing perception.
Meanwhile, there was movement afoot to reboot the largely dissolved San Francisco chapter of Queer Nation. Ogborn and other activists decided that this time there would be a trans presence.
I didn’t actually think much would come of it, but it seemed like a good thing to do, so I called a bunch of trans people and we showed up. It was kind of funny; we ended up with like a dozen of us and most of the gay people in the room had never seen that — they’d probably never seen a transsexual before, and here were a dozen of us.
And so I kind of got a sense of the room and said, “Look, we want to form a transgender focus group but we’ve got some demands. We don’t want to spend all our time working on your issues; we want to work on ours, as well. And we want you to work on ours, as well. Two, we understand your issues a lot better than you understand ours. We expect you to educate yourselves. And three, we want you to agree to not support anything that’s not trans-inclusive.”
The group would soon become known as Transgender Nation. Their first task was the March on Washington, a massive political rally for gay rights set to take place in 1993. Ogborn pointed out that organizers had “made it clear they didn’t want any trans presence.” Rather than endorse the march, Queer Nation decided to disrupt the local planning meeting.
Almost every day we went out and we either went to some gay rights meeting in San Francisco or we went out and protested something. We just did this every day. In the really intense period, I was driving an old white van. At one point we painted the van up with Transgender Nation symbols and “It’s a Transgender Nation” on the side, and that became a common sight around the Bay Area.
As the anniversary of Nancy Burkholder’s ejection from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival approached, Ogborn and others began planning a protest. Ogborn put up posters in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood declaring the festival unsafe for trans women. She did not go to the festival herself; instead, she organized a delegation of activists to attend.
We passed out buttons that said ‘I might be transsexual’ to anybody who would wear them. There was some gender chaos, like…we’re not going to tell you who’s cis and who’s trans — and we’re going to let you cope with that and the fact that you’re driving people into the closet.
We also printed up a whole bunch of myths about trans women on the fluorescent sticker paper and stuck on the inside of the porta-potties. By the end of the festival, people were asking if they could get a set! The whole idea was: “Is this really how we want to run our lives: driving drag-trans people into the shadows and persecuting them? Is that what we’re going to build a lesbian movement around?”
That action was the beginnings of Camp Trans; an alternative event thrown by protesters outside the festival grounds that existed in varying incarnations off and on for several years. The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival staged its last-ever festival this August.
In 1993, Transgender Nation was “kind of winding down.” Ogborn says one of their last “big hurrahs” was to protest the medical colonization of transgender lives and the labeling of transgender people as mentally ill by the American Psychiatric Association. When the APA held their annual meeting at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, they were met by Transgender Nation activists.
The American Psychiatric Association was having its annual convention there, and we decorated the outside of the building with spray paint so it said “Transsexual Rights” and “Richard Green tortures children” in my handwriting across the front of the Moscone Center.
Actually, for years you could faintly read it, because they removed it with a sandblaster but they didn’t sandblast the area around it. They just sandblasted the paint off, so they effectively sandblasted it into the surface. For years you could read “Transsexual Rights” down the side of Moscone.
Read more personal accounts of the trans activism movement.
Interview by Andy Wright. Parts were omitted for clarity and brevity.
