Transgender Politics: The Civil Rights of Transgender Persons

In 2014, Time magazine featured Laverne Cox, an out transgender actress, in a seemingly provocative cover story, "The Transgender Tipping Point: America's next civil rights frontier." Cox's cover marked the first time an out transgender person was featured on the cover of a high-circulation print magazine in the United States. For the casual observer, Time's cover story foreshadowed the birth of the transgender rights movement in the United States. In the months that followed, we witnessed trans military personnel win the right to serve openly, the federal government file suit demanding full integration of restrooms in our schools and workplaces in North Carolina, a cascade of celebrities come out, a bespectacled high school student named Gavin Grimm ask the U.S. Supreme Court to order his high school to let him use the boy's restroom, and a quiet but determined English professor named Rachel Tudor file a federal suit challenging a discriminatory tenure denial at a rural public university in Oklahoma. But Cox's cover did not so much launch the transgender rights movement as it signaled wider consciousness of transgender demands for equal rights that have brewed for decades. In this chapter, we situate high-profile legal battles and cultural touchstones of the last few years into the complex, multifaceted, and every-evolving transgender civil rights movement in the United States.