Dr. Joshua Allen Gilbert listened to his patient describe their sexual encounters with women. Gilbert thought highly of this patient, whom he characterized as having a “high degree of intellectuality,” as well as numerous “positive attractions” with women. Gilbert’s patient was assigned female at birth but had been known to act more like a boy than a girl for as long as anyone could remember, wearing men’s clothes, acting assertively, and dating girls. Having graduated medical school at the top of their class, the patient was ready to undergo a transformation. In Gilbert’s words, “Hysterectomy was performed, her hair was cut, a complete male outfit was secured.”
Thus Dr. Alan L. Hart in 1917 became one of the first people in the United States to undergo gender affirming surgery in 1917. Hart’s surgery helped him become more of a man. This process was a private matter, between a doctor and his patient.
Albert Guelph and Miss Lewis of Syracuse, New York, married in the Episcopal Church after a brief courtship. The bride’s father went to the local authorities and reported that he suspected Guelph was not a man. Guelph was detained; Miss Lewis professed her love, despite both her father’s disapproval and the public controversy swirling around them. While Guelph was initially sentenced to 90 days in prison on questionable charges of vagrancy, his lawyer appealed, and the judge acknowledged the overreach: There was in fact no law prohibiting “a person to dress in the attire of the opposite sex.” This was in 1856, before cross-dressing was designated a specific offense in New York. Gender expression was a matter between a person and their lover.
After nearly dying from a fever that swept through their Rhode Island town in 1776, a devout Quaker had a radical religious experience, leading them to change their name and reject gender distinctions. Wearing both men’s and women’s clothing, they refused categorization as either male or female and announced their name as the “Publick Universal Friend.” Though expelled from their Quaker Meeting, they set out on horseback, spreading their teachings as a “resurrected spirit” whose genderlessness heightened their sense of in betweenness and otherworldliness. The Friend attracted followers and was the subject of popular debate. While outsiders and skeptics usually invoked the Friend’s legal birth name and assigned sex, members demonstrated their devotion and understanding by avoiding gendered language and only referring to them as “the Friend.” Gender identity was informed by a radical religious experience, between a person and their God.
The past is a messy place. Trump 2.0 wants to clean it up by banning anything critical of the United States, including references to racism, sexism, and oppression. The executive order for “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” critiques recent developments in historic scholarship, stating, “Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” It is an audacious attack on the most basic tenant of historical practice: revision. Revision challenges historians to ask bigger questions, to find more sources. Sometimes we find sources that evolve into whole new fields of inquiry about the human experience—such as the accounts cited above.
This order is not without precedent. Since 2021, the group Moms for Liberty launched an ignorant, aggressive campaign that included banning books, words (Don’t Say Gay), and LGBTQ teachers. They falsely label LGBTQ people “groomers” and advocate for new laws that target and harass LGBTQ people and their families. They work to erase, censor, and deny the existence of LGBTQ people in the past, not because they naïvely think they will keep this information from everyone but rather to send a message that we are not normal and do not belong.
The Heritage Foundation also plays a crucial role. Project 2025 refers to the “noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country,” and “children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.” The agenda is clear and catchy.
But let’s also not pretend that LGBTQ history is something that most people are introduced to in K-12 education or while on a school field trip to a local historic site. LGBTQ history has been invited to America’s birthday party only very recently. Most mainstream advances in LGBTQ inclusion in archives, museums, historic sites, and public education occurred during the Obama era, made possible by dedicated educators who persisted in their advocacy for many years in the face of hostility and/or indifference. I have been surveying college students on their prior exposure to LGBTQ history for the past 20 years, and they still largely report limited mention of LGBTQ issues in high school history courses, other than the AIDS epidemic and occasionally the Stonewall Riots.
In 2011, California became the first state to require LGBTQ inclusion in statewide curriculum. This effort didn’t exactly take off. Eight years would pass before a few more states—Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, and Oregon—joined California. Not long after, the tide had turned, and a far-reaching, well-coordinated movement emerged to entirely ban or restrict any mention of LGBTQ experience in schools (such rules were adopted by 12 states between 2022 and 2025) and/or to require parental notification and the freedom to opt out if such content is addressed (nine states adopted rules like the latter between 2021 and 2025). A near majority of states (23) have nothing to say on the matter.
Given this legacy of erasing, overlooking, and ignoring LGBTQ history in public education, I have sometimes wondered whether banning books that are seldom taught really matters. But this movement is about more than access to a few books. It’s about children—and it’s about the future. The conservative movement has mastered the strategy of using children as a weapon in the fight over LGBTQ rights. In 1977, Dade County, Florida, passed an ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation. The right wing named its repeal campaign “Save Our Children,” with singer and anti-gay activist Anita Bryant as the face. By arguing that children would not be safe from predation if gay men and lesbians were allowed to work as teachers in the schools, right-wingers succeeded in generating a backlash. An overwhelming 69 percent voted in favor of repealing the measure.
Roughly 40 years after the Florida episode, with acceptance of LGBTQ rights at a near all-time high, the radical right realized it needed to work harder to identify an issue that would galvanize the base and divide the left. It focused on the threat of transgender people in public bathrooms, launching a bathroom bill in North Carolina. It passed but triggered tremendous public backlash. After extensive research and polling, the right settled on transgender minors playing sports. In February 2025, Trump signed an executive order banning trans women from women’s sports. The NCAA followed suit the next day. Just two months earlier, NCAA president Charlie Baker stated that, out of more than 500,000 student-athletes, fewer than 10 were transgender. This is not a reactive policy to address a problem; it is a proactive policy to define an agenda.
When the Publick Universal Friend was alive, there were no laws against cross-dressing or expressing trans or nonbinary genders. Gradually, starting in the 1840s and 1850s, a few cities introduced laws against cross-dressing, beginning with St. Louis in 1843, followed by Columbus, Nashville, Chicago, New Orleans, and smaller cities. These laws did not react to a sudden surge of people transing gender; rather, they were part of a conservative movement outlining in excruciating detail what constituted ideal, normative behavior in the nation’s growing cities by restricting sex work, gambling, entertainment, illicit sexual intimacies, and cross-class and interracial encounters.
The radical right’s attempt to ignore, bury, and deny the transgender past is not surprising; it serves the agenda rather well to position “gender ideology” and “transgenderism” as modern creations of a DEI-crazed America that has lost its way. In June 2016, the Stonewall National Monument became the first national monument dedicated to the LGBTQ community. In February 2025, the Trump administration took steps to literally erase transgender people from LGBTQ history, starting with the official Stonewall National Park Service website. The greatly edited site notes that “the events at the Stonewall Inn sparked fresh momentum for the LGB civil rights movement!” Trans erasure is just the beginning.
The transgender rights movement, however, is also disavowing its own past, to our peril. Perhaps it’s not surprising that a movement that has achieved major gains in a short period of time does not want to dwell on the bad old days. A generation of young people has grown up with supportive parents, accepting schools, affirming doctors, like-minded friends, and pop culture role models. Since 2016, more Americans have had access to gender affirming medical care than ever before, largely because Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act prohibited discrimination based on sex, guaranteeing coverage for care that was long out of reach for most. Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” aims to undo protections like this.
Why, then, do we need the past when we have come so far so fast? Two reasons. First, our collective ignorance about the transgender past is being used against us. During oral arguments for the Skrmetti case before the Supreme Court in December 2024, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked if there was a legacy of discrimination against transgender people. One lawyer hesitated. He might not have known what to say, like most of us who didn’t learn about this in school. He mentioned anti-cross-dressing laws and military ban as two examples, but there is a substantial historic legacy of discrimination. If the leading voices for transgender rights in this country don’t know our history, we are in real trouble. The radical right is counting on this.
Second, we are not so different from the trans people who have come before us—and this fact may well sustain us in the years to come. Most trans people throughout history have lived, loved, struggled, resisted, and persisted without any of the legal protections, family support, social networks, or medical care that are widely available today. On Transgender Day of Visibility in March, pioneer trans theorist Sandy Stone offered a hopeful message: “We’ve taken 10 steps forward. Now we’re about to be beaten five steps back. But at the end of the day, we’re still five steps ahead. That’s how culture works. That’s how progress works…. We’re not going back from that.”
Ten steps forward. Five steps back. We face a mean-spirited, lie-fueled campaign that aims to make our lives as rights-bearing citizens who exist in public spaces untenable. They actively and aggressively make fun of us and deny us any claim to a role in American history. Learning our history is a radical and righteous form of resistance, and any one of us can do it.