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>> 195 Notes Notes to the Introduction 1. As John Howard details, Piedmont Park has long been a popular destination for all sorts of sexual activities, and this wave of sex panic is not first of its kind. “The Library, the Park, and the Pervert: Public Space and Homosexual Encounter in Post–World War II Atlanta,” Radical History Review 62 (1995): 166–87. 2. Given the subject matter of this book, I considered rearranging the acronym “LGBT” to place the “T” at the front of it, but I ultimately decided to use “LGBT” for two reasons. First, I wanted to decenter gay men as the primary consideration of this identity category—hence “LGBT” over “GLBT.” With that said, I understand that switching the order of gay men and lesbians could be read as my tacit agreement with the assumption that the order of the letters indicates a descending order of importance wherein sexual orientation trumps gender identity. To be clear, then, the second reason for using “LGBT” is to highlight not my own investment in prioritizing who counts more or less; rather, it is an indication of how trans people are often the last consideration of the general populace, LGBs included, when they lump together these related but potentially disparate subjectivities. The issues in play here are addressed more fully in the chapter on “GENDA Trouble.” 3. Qtd. in Eric Ervin, “Atlanta Police, Trans Activists Try to ‘Build Bridges,’” Southern Voice, October 13, 2006, 7. 4. Qtd. in Ervin, “Atlanta Police,” 7. 5. Ryan Lee, “Gay Group Hopes to Counter Midtown Security Tactics,” Southern Voice, August 17, 2007, 8. 6. After the negative press, Gower later claimed that some of the text in the newsletter had been copied from an email from the president of the Piedmont Park Conservancy. However, in its original form, the text is attributed to Gower, and the quotations I cull from the newsletter appear to have been written by Gower. See Ryan Lee, “Conservancy Raised Concerns First About Park’s Sunday Night Crowd,” Southern Voice, August 3, 2007, 5. 7. Qtd in Ryan Lee, “Midtown Security Tactics Questioned,” Southern Voice, July 20, 2007, 1. All of the quotations attributed to Gower come from a reprinted version of the original text associated with this article. 196 > 197 21. Sally Hines’s critique of the tendency of queer studies scholarship to describe trans identities and trans people as if they are homogenous experiences informs my cautious deference to the particular over the universal. “What’s the Difference ? Bringing Particularity to Queer Studies of Transgender,” Journal of Gender Studies 15 (2006): 49–66. 22. Cressida Hayes’s admonition against the careless and callous use of trans people in academic arguments to extrapolate larger principles beyond trans concerns deserves further consideration: “Whether appropriated to bolster queer theoretical claims, represented as the acid test of constructionism, or attacked for suspect political commitments,” she observes, “transgender has been colonized as a feminist theoretical testing ground” (“Feminist Solidarity after Queer Theory: The Case of Transgender,” Signs 28 [2003]: 1098). 23. Vivian Namaste, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 15. 24. Genny Beemyn and Susan Rankin’s cataloguing of the identity markers used by gender-variant and gender non-conforming individuals, compiled from an extensive survey of more than three thousand participants responding to a call for transgender volunteers, provides rich qualitative data to substantiate this claim. The Lives of Transgender People (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 15–36. 25. Academic references to the use of transgender as an “umbrella term” are too numerous to list fully. Some of the more influential texts to use adopt this frame include: Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” GLQ 1 (1994): 251n2; Leslie Feinberg , Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), x; and, Henry S. Rubin, Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment among Transsexual Men (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003), 19. Megan Davidson’s ethnographic study of the conditions of possibility created by the umbrella metaphor, including its limitations, captures wonderfully the complicated discursive terrain of transgender identity politics (“Seeking Refuge Under the Umbrella: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Organizing Within the Category Transgender,” Sexuality Research & Social Policy 4, no. 4 [2007]: 60–80). Here, Adrienne Rich’s “compulsory heterosexuality” is another critical concept, and one that deserves further explanation for readers unfamiliar with her work. Rich first proposed “compulsory heterosexuality...

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