Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a number of trans people in the U.S became involved in the formulation, standardization, and provision of gender-affirming care—from funders of academic research (the Erickson Educational Foundation) to workers in referral and social service organizations (such as the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, based in San Francisco), to unofficial organizers and advocates for low-income and trans people of color barred from accessing care through official channels (such as members of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, based in New York.)

In this talk, I consider how some of these individuals conceptualized and discussed their roles within the then-burgeoning field of gender-affirming care given the complexity of their position. Specifically, I’m interested in how trans facilitators of gender-affirming care during this time period simultaneously experienced themselves as subject, object, and agent/critic of transsexual medicine discourse, as well as how this experience differed along axes of race, class, and gender.

Cam Cannon (they/them) is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at George Washington University and a 2024-2025 ACLS/Melon Dissertation Innovation Fellow. Their dissertation, "Standard: Trans Activism and the History of Gender-Affirming Care in the U.S.," is a cultural, institutional, and political history of diagnostic criteria and treatment protocols around gender-affirming care in the U.S., with a particular emphasis on how trans people have worked to variously support, resist, and influence medical guidelines.