We have always been here. Transgender people have always been here. We are as old as humanity itself. If you could somehow erase every last one of us, we would still be here, born anew to every generation. We are part of what it means to be human.
I'm going to take you back 4,500 years ago to
Enheduanna, the very first named human author in recorded history. And Enheduanna was writing about the priesthood of Inanna. This priesthood was made up of transgender third gender and gender nonconforming priests. So the very first time that symbols were placed onto clay tablets and somebody decided to sign their name as the person who wrote it, they were talking about transgender people. We have always been here.
2,500 years into the future, there was a Roman empress by the name of
Elagabalus. And you may not have heard about her in the history books, but she existed. Accounts from her life state that she wore makeup and wigs. She used feminine terms for herself. She once told one of her potential lovers, call me not a lord, for I am a lady. And very famously offered vast sums of wealth to any physician who could give her gender affirming care. And as a trans woman now, today, that is still the case sometimes. We have always been here.
We're going to go to 1300 AD and meet a poet, a Jewish poet by the name of
Kalonymus ben Kalonymus. Now, we don't know how Kalonymus then, Kalonymus would identify today if they were here, but we do have them to thank for the very first description of gender dysphoria. In beautiful poetry, Kalonymus Ben Kalonymus laments that they were not born a woman. And they ask God why? And they beg, and it's sad, it's beautiful, it's mournful. You can feel the realization of that loss of that potential.
And I wish that I could go back in time and give Kalonymus bin Kalonymus estrogen, but I can't. What I can do is thank them for letting us know that we have always been here.
In the 1890s, there was a black young trans girl by the name of
Lucy Hicks Anderson [G: aka Tobias Lawson;
a pimp]. And she transitioned as a child. She told her parents that she was a girl despite being assigned male at birth. And her parents didn't know what to do. This was the 1890s. So they brought her to the doctor and the doctor said, there's nothing wrong with her. Let her be. Let her be this. And so they did. They allowed her to grow up. And she grew up. She moved to a small California town where she opened up a big hotel. And she became known as the best cook and socialite of that town. She threw the biggest parties. Eventually, though, she was discovered and they arrested her and hauled her off to the jail cell. But that's not the end of Lucy Anderson's story, because the very next day, several townspeople and a wealthy banker from the town marched down to the jail cell to demand that she be released because they had a big party to throw that night and they needed their cook and socialite. She eventually moved to Los Angeles, where she retired, lived a long life with her husband, and passed away quietly in the 1950s. We've always been here.
I'm going to take you to Berlin. 1920s, Weimar, Germany. And there was a club called the El Dorado. It was a famous club because all of the trans women and trans men and gender non conforming people, they would go to this club to celebrate, to enjoy themselves, to enjoy other people's company and to be themselves. Many of these people that went to the El Dorado were patients of the
Magnus Hirschfeld Institute of Sexology. And this place was a place where Magnus Hirschfeld first researched transgender care. I look at pictures like this, and I see people who could be my friend. I see people who I recognize in a way, in many ways, they were more free to be themselves than ever before. But we know, sadly, that that was not to last. A few years later, many of you will remember in the history books the book burnings that happened during the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany. These black and white pictures you were taught in your history classes and likely told about the importance of not censoring books and freedom of speech. That is important, but what is often not told is what books they are burning. The books they're burning in these pictures are the first 30 years of research into transgender care. These are 20,000 books taken from Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sexology. They were among the first books burned, so much was lost. So whenever you hear that there's not enough research into trans care, they burned the first 30 years of it.
In the 1950s and the 1960s, drag bans plagued the United States. We saw these bans targeting LGBTQ people for mass arrest for not dressing in accordance to their assigned sex at birth. Eventually, trans people had enough. First, in Compton Cafeteria, a group of trans women were kicked out and threatened with arrest for violating female impersonation laws. And they fought back. And then in Stonewall, where similar raids were occurring, people collectively gathered and demanded their right to exist. In public. And that's how we got pride in the 1990s.
In the early 2000s, the ex gay movement stormed the scene. These were people that claimed that they were cured of being gay. The being gay was a choice that you could heal, and conversion therapy was all the rage. Now, mind you, many of these people have since reidentified as gay, and most of them have apologized for their role in this. But at the time they were brought from state legislature to state legislature to advocate against gay marriage, and 29 states passed constitutional amendments against gay marriage, things seemed bleak. And in many ways, they were. Gay people were routinely denied their right to see their loved one in the hospital, to adopt, or to get married. But then eventually we got a bergefell a decade and a half later, and they gained that right. And look at where we are now.
That brings us to today. And in many ways, today, people are more free to be themselves than ever before. LGBTQ identification is up across the board as more and more people feel free to come out and be themselves in public. And for transgender people, we finally have representation. We have transgender pop stars, we have transgender business leaders, politicians. And our medical care has advanced to such a degree that Magnus Hirschfeld could only have dreamt of and his patients could only have dreamt of. No longer is this care gatekept to only the extremely wealthy few who could go to one of a handful of therapists across the world that would allow them to transition. Now we have 700 clinics in the United States that can provide that care, many of which offer low income options.
But just as we are here today, we also face difficulties. As a journalist, I have reported on over 1,000 anti LGBTQ bills in the United States over the last three years. The vast majority of them target transgender people, I might add. These bills, for instance, target trans people in bathrooms. And in fact, if I use the same bathroom that I used today in this building in the state of Florida, I could be arrested and thrown in jail for up to a year. Some of these bills target transgender teenagers who have been stable in their gender identity for years and force them to medically detransition. Let me explain to you what that means. Suppose I'm a 17 year old transgender teenage girl. I might be forced to grow facial hair in front of all of my peers. It's horrifying.
Some of these laws target LGBTQ books and drag and performance by transgender people of any sort of these obscenity laws and drag bans, yes, they target drag, but they also target transgender public speakers. And in fact, the very first anti drag ban of the modern era, the first time that it was enforced was in the state of Montana against a transgender public speaker speaking in a library about transgender history. Just like I've done with all of you today. Some of these laws target sports. A contentious and loaded and nuanced topic, to be sure. But let me explain to you the ways in which these laws have actually been enforced. We have seen bans targeted at transgender women participating in darts, golf, disc golf, competitive Irish dancing, beauty pageants, and even the incredibly athletic engendered sport of chess. In the last three years, over 20 states have banned some level of gender affirming care for trans youth or adults, sports, bathrooms, LGBTQ books, and more.
And these laws have forced trans people to feel like they have to flee from their home states. And indeed, a recent Data for Progress poll has showed that 8% of people have already fled their home state who are transgender, with an additional 40% considering fleeing. That is 100,000 to 200,000 people have already fled. If this continues, if that 40% do leave their home states, this could be one of the largest political migrations in modern US History. And the situation is not just isolated to the United States.
We see this in Europe as well. There are well funded organizations that are lobbying to end medical care for trans people globally. In the United Kingdom, for instance, transgender rights have been drawn back heavily. And in fact, the wait list to access medical care can be up to 10 years in some places. There it is a functional ban. In Sweden and Finland, we see heavy gatekeeping so much that it has resulted in horrific abuses of transgender teens. And in places like Russia and Hungary, we have seen an end to all legal recognition of transgender people altogether. The same laws and texts that did that in Russia and Hungary are now being transplanted to Oklahoma and Kansas in the United States.
I know that I paint a bleak picture here, but I also want to be clear. There are some states and some places moving in a direction that makes transgender people more safe. There are places where trans people are free to be themselves in public, to use the bathroom in peace, to read books about our history, to perform, and, yes, to stand and speak. And in some places where things have gotten a lot more difficult, where they don't have those abilities, I have reported on people who are doing the work in those communities, forming those communities and helping one another and standing there for one another in the same way that they did in El Dorado. Whenever I think about 50 years from now, I imagine that somebody will be standing on a similar stage as this. Talking about this time now and this place in the same way that I spoke to all of you about El Dorado and the book burnings, Compton Cafeteria and Stonewall and the fight for gay marriage. When they do, I hope that they realize how resilient we were. How even in the face of all of this, we still came out and demanded to be seen. How we stepped out of the darkness and into the light for good. Thank you so much for having me.
