In 1973, homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, and the Supreme court legalized abortion with Roe v. Wade. That same year witnessed efforts in New York to prevent Sylvia Rivera of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries from speaking at the Christopher Street Liberation Day commemoration, and to expel lesbian feminist transsexual musician Beth Elliot from the Lesbian Conference in Los Angeles. How might the entangled histories of gay liberation, the women's movement, and transgender activism have played out more amicably in the decades ahead if feminist arguments for appropriate health care and sexual liberationist arguments for depathologization had addressed the problem of transsexuality differently?

Susan Stryker is director of the Institute for LGBT Studies and associate professor of gender and women's studies at the University of Arizona. Her numerous contributions to trans studies as a writer, editor, and filmmaker include the two-volume Transgender Studies Reader, the introductory text Transgender History, the documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria, and the new academic journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.