Current Events > In the 20th century, were different LGBT people at each other's throats?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Gay men, lesbians, bisexual men, and so on. Did they live seperate lives, and dislike each other?

Sometimes. In any groups people sometimes do or dont get along. Most LGBTQ people see each other as allies but some people only feel comfortable with their own type of people or resent one another for various reasons.

Early on, the first organized groups were gay men, transvestites(access to transition care being virtually non-existent, though Christine Jorgensen is a prominent early example dating to the '50s, trans sexual/gender [even the terms have evolved over time!]) and the like weren't categories many ID'd with yet), and they were all faced with similar problems, so they were mostly cohesive. Trans men mostly preferred to just throw on some trousers and exist as men to the best of their abilities: it was relatively easy to disappear until recently. They were all considered mentally ill.

Gay rights activists succeeded in getting homosexuality removed from the DSM as a disorder in the '70s, and generally gays and lesbians were hostile to the medical establishment that discriminated against them and pathologized them, basically around the same time it began providing trans people with transition care (though they were still subject to the problems listed above) with major caveats.

Second-wave feminism had two strains which proved hostile to trans women in particular: it created the ideas that conceptualized woman as an oppressed class that "women" must escape (thus turning trans women into oppressors attempting to reinforce their prison or, at best, patriarchal dupes). The other was obsessed with purity: and trans women were necessarily deemed to be "impure" the latter is still an obsession in TERF circles.

Things didn't really start getting better until the early '90s. Read Susan Stryker's Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution I am: it's how I know any of this! if you're curious to learn more.

ElatedVenusaur posted...

Things didn't really start getting better until the early '90s. Read Susan Stryker's Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution I am: it's how I know any of this! if you're curious to learn more.

Nice, I'll have to check it. A few of the books I've read have touched on the history of transgender people, but it wasn't the central premise of any of them.