CLASS DESCRIPTION

Today, the word “transgender” is used more or less synonymously with “transsexual,” but to trans feminist author and historian Leslie Feinberg, it was a broad, inclusive umbrella term that simply meant “transgressively gendered,” which could include transsexual people, intersex people, butch lesbians, femme gay men, crossdressers, drag queens, and virtually anyone else with an unconventional gender expression. This class tracks the ways in which our cultural conception of transness has been changed, erased, and reconstructed over time, and how the ways we define gender can be used to strengthen and unify queer liberation movements or co-opt and defang them. We will discuss the rise and fall of Hirschfield Institute, the Stonewall Uprising, the schisms that fractured the original Gay Rights Movement, the rise of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism, and modern trans activism in the age of Trumpism. Students will learn about trans history as told by trans historians whose work is rarely taught in schools and leave with new context and strategies for understanding how transgender liberation is inherently connected to queer liberation and women’s liberation and how we can organize across movements in our collective struggle against cis-heteropatriachy and racial capitalism.

ABOUT OUR LECTURER

Ripley Ashke Mandanis (she/her) is a transgender lesbian writer, educator, and labor organizer, based in Queens, NY. She is an Adjunct Lecturer and MFA Candidate at the City College of New York, where she was awarded the Bernard Malamud Scholarship for Creative Writing and the Jerome Lowell DeJur Prize for Fiction. Her writing is featured in New Words Press, No Dear Magazine, Left Voice, WMN Zine, Exquisites, Promethean Literary Magazine, Lilac Peril, and Bloodletter Magazine. She has read at The LGBT Center, Unnameable Books, Village Works, and Dear Friend Books, among other venues. She also teaches and develops workshops on trans history and culture at SUNY Westchester.

INSTAGRAM: @ripleyam

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This is a recording of a live session hosted by The Feminist Lecture Program in July 2026. The reading list for the class can be found alongside this rental.

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