Timeline is a regular feature in each issue looking back to events and milestones that have helped us evolve into the community we are today.

Late September, 1994

Victoria A. Brownworth’s cover story, “Gender Outlaw,” profiled the life and work of Kate Bornstein, writer and performance artist, man and woman, heterosexual and lesbian. Bornstein’s book, Gender Outlaw, On Men, Women and the Rest of Us, detailed some of her struggles with transgenderism.  

Surprisingly, Bornstein got as much resistance from the queer community as from the religious right. Bornstein’s support of excluding transexuals from lesbian-only functions and women-only spaces, engendered a controversy causing endless debate in the lesbian community and enraging other transexuals.

Born a biological man, Bornstein was always aware of her difference from other males, but it took a few decades, two marriages and a child to to realize exactly what the problem was. But when Bornstein questioned the sexual reassignment process, she was turned down for the operation.  When she said she didn’t want to be a “happy straight girl,” but was in fact attracted to other women, she no longer fit the profile of surgery. “They told me lesbianism wasn’t a choice I could make,” she explains.

Bornstein persevered and eventually had the surgery, believing that each of us has our own perpective of what gender is. “I always knew I wasn’t a man, but now I’m not just a woman either. I’m something else. I’m in that third space between the two,” Bornstein argued.

Statements like this again riled up everyone, transgendered or not, as Bornstein insisted her 30 years as a man were essential to who she became as a woman. “When your are given therapy prior to surgery, you are instructed to behave as if you have always been a biological female which is a lie. So when we come into a community of women (and here Bornstein notes that most transsexuals don’t choose same sex partners after surgery), as we lie – as we’ve been instructed – is it any wonder lesbians get angry and feel betrayed?” Bornstein added.