“Wear Your Most Daring Clothes, Honey”: The Transvestite/Transsexual Legal Committee and the Emergence of Trans-feminine Feminist Movements

in the midwest in 1971, a community of black transvestites and transsexuals in Chicago created the Transvestite/Transsexual Legal Committee (tlc), one of the city’s first formal trans political organizations. tlc was founded following the 1970 police murder of James Clay Jr., a Black transvestite or street fairy.¹ tlc was a radical group that called for the liberation of feminine trans people of color. During an era that saw the emergence of radical movements advocating for cisgender gay men and lesbians, people of color, and women, tlc found allies in other Chicago organizations, including the lesbian separatist organization the Flippies. Over the next decade, tlc grew into a multiracial, multigender group focused on the needs of Midwestern transvestites and transsexuals, an emerging coalition. In order to describe its membership to a contemporary audience while respecting the group’s complexity, I describe tlc’s community as “trans feminine” and “trans femmes.” “Trans femmes” refers to people designated as male at birth who adopt a feminine gender expression and/or gender identity.² The category of trans femmes included both trans women, regardless of surgery status, and feminine individuals who may or may not have considered themselves women— transvestites, cross-dressers, drag queens, street fairies, female impersonators, genderfucks, and more.³ tlc emphasized the needs of trans-feminine street queens, whose identity and embodiment were distinct from those of gay men. tlc advocated for a trans-feminine feminist analysis and anti-racist politic and fostered coalitions with gay liberation, lesbian separatist, and queer Third World liberation organizations.⁴ tlc expands understandings of trans coalition-building between cisgender and trans women and among Black cisgender and trans communities, while also revealing the category “trans” to be more coalitional in nature than often appreciated.

tlc’s activism demonstrates the power of intersectional trans resistance during a time when trans people were criminalized under local laws and subjected to unrelenting oppression. tlc organized against an interlocking, multilayered system of state, cultural, and interpersonal violence that targeted trans people of color who lacked the privacy and safety afforded by white, middle-class status. tlc activists focused their efforts on challenging anti-trans dress restrictions, which combined with racist policing practices to threaten the safety of their community. They also organized against administrative and police violence, including employment and housing discrimination, restrictive medical policies, and the homophobic, cissexist procedures of the prison system. The activists accomplished this work through a mixture of community building, mutual aid, education campaigns, legal interventions, and electoral engagement. tlc aimed to change the immediate material conditions of trans femmes of color, while pursuing long-term revolutionary change, a strategy similar to the critical trans studies approaches⁵ employed by other Midwestern trans organizations today, such as the Transformative Justice Law Project and the Brave Space Alliance.⁶

The history of tlc and its allies unsettles assumptions about the dynamics of trans history and coalition-building by challenging the assumed antagonism between cisgender lesbian feminists and trans femmes and by highlighting how trans feminists were part of a larger feminist community. Examining tlc’s work helps us understand more about trans-feminine of color activism in the postwar United States. Gay and lesbian organizing in this era has been extensively studied, but there are only a few historical studies of trans organizing in the period.⁷ tlc’s alliances with Black queer and Third World liberation organizations provide important additional information about connections between Black trans femmes and the larger Black community. While previous work has suggested that the Midwest was a vital part of trans history, work on the 1970s has focused overwhelmingly on the coastal metropoles. Metronormativity distorts understandings of lgbt history by treating as prototypical the lives of trans people living in cities. This emphasis on metropoles also renders trans ways of being in rural areas and outside of the coasts as regressive.⁸ As a regional network stretching from Chicago to Columbus, tlc is an example of connection across the boundaries of the rural, urban, and...