by Shay Ryan Olmstead
Abstract
This Article examines employment discrimination suits brought in federal court between 1971 and 1995 by twenty-one diagnosed transsexual workers. These petitioners made traditional statutory and Constitutional arguments, but also supplemented their arguments with disproportionately detailed descriptions of their ascription to capitalism and values, alignment with sexual and gender normativity, and explicit condemnation of other, queerer figures. While the story of how diagnosed transsexual workers mobilized their class, race, and gender-normativity might be familiar, this Article diverges from other queer legal histories in two major ways. First, this Article emphasizes the way diagnosed transsexual petitioners understood “respectability” as excluding homosexuality, transvestism, and other forms of gender and sexual difference. This diverges from more recent cases, which tend to frame lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and other minoritized groups as facing interconnected struggles. This Article thus demonstrates the way that “respectability” as a concept is itself historically contingent rather than universal. Second, this Article argues that respectability was, for these petitioners, more than just a legal strategy: it was also a medical imperative. The diagnosed transsexual workers in this study were often fired in the middle of their medical transition and consequently found themselves doubly bound—by both medical and legal authorities—to respectable embodiment.