https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/09/23/fighting-the-new-culture-wars-mills-college-hires-pioneering-transgender-historian-and-activist/

When Susan Stryker came out as a transgender woman in the early 1990s, mainstream America viewed trans people as jokes or worse. The newly hired Mills College professor recalls they might also be seen as “sad, marginalized” street prostitutes or predators in movies like “Psycho” and “Dressed to Kill.”

Stryker, 59, is gratified to see the social and political gains she and other transgender people have won, especially in the past 10 years. Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner were celebrated on magazine covers, anti-discrimination laws have been passed in some states, and Stryker and others have felt free to express their “deepest sense of self to others.” But Stryker warns that those gains now face “a profound backlash.”