By Mabel Wellman.
From the 13th to the 19th of November Transgender Awareness Week is back for another year.
As an out and proud trans woman for all of my adult life, this is a time with many mixed emotions. On the one side, this is a fantastic opportunity for our allies, friends and family to all learn more about our small community, which has all too often been the victim of misinformation; however, as the nights grow longer, and the days stay colder, the end of Trans Awareness Week is always Trans Day Of Remembrance – the day where trans people across the world come together to read the (reported) names of those who have lost their lives due to violence and suicide.
In the spirit of learning, here is my small list of facts about transgender people you need to know for Transgender Awareness Week in 2025.
In 1953, a trans woman received a “Woman Of The Year Award”
This story begins with humiliation.
In 1951, Christine Jorgensen, a former member of the US Army, started their medical transition. Jorgensen had initially intended to live a quiet, humble, and (like all most trans people want) a peaceful life following her transition. This decision was ultimately stolen from her when she was outed in the news after a letter to her parents notifying them of her transition was leaked to the public; something that continues to happen even to this day by various news agencies.
Jorgensen, was the first person in the United States to be widely known for their transition, and instead of shying away after her unfair treatment; she took this in her stride:
Jorgensen spoke to many journalists after arriving back to New York where her shining personality helped her secure a successful career as a performer in radio, television, and theatre. In 1953, The Scandinavian Societies Of Greater New York awarded her the “Woman Of The Year” award, and in 1967 her autobiography was a huge success with almost 450,000 copies being sold. Jorgensen remained a public figure all her life until 1989 when she passed away.
You’ve probably been around a trans person before, even if you haven’t ‘met a trans person’ (Yet)
Whilst exact numbers are uncertain between regions, the proportion of transgender people across the world is approximately 1%.
This may seem like a tiny number of people, but it’s actually a massive number of individuals you may see or go past in your day to day life. If you commute by bus (assuming both buses are a full double decker of 85 person capacity), and maybe popped in the shops for a lunch or snack throughout the day, you could very easily have looked at and been around 300 people. This roughly equates to three trans people you may have walked past, had your change in the shop counted and handed to you by, or safely drove you on either bus journey. Of course, you may doubt this could possibly be true, but that’s really because we are just like you at the end of the day. So yes, you’ve probably been around a trans person multiple times, and you’ve lived to tell the tale!
‘Cisgender’ is not a slur
Cisgender (or just “cis” for short) may be a word you have seen a lot, but never been told what it means.
Cis and trans are both Latin prefixes. Trans means “across” or “opposite” and is used in a lot of words in English, such as transport, cis is the opposite of this (so meaning “the same side”) but is not used in English much at all in comparison.
For the sake of this point I actually had to Google examples of the cis- prefix being used in words other than cisgender, one such example you might have seen (perhaps if you chose geography in school instead of history like me) is “cisatlantic”, referring to somewhere on the same side of the Atlantic Ocean, so you could say Canada and the USA are cisatlantic to one another.
Ultimately, cisgender and transgender are just descriptions of two different types of people; where a cisgender person’s gender identity is the same as (hence the cis prefix) their gender assigned at birth, and a transgender person’s gender identity just so happens to be the opposite of what they were assigned at birth. Whilst no one is forcing you to describe yourself as cisgender, it definitely is not an insult if you are cisgender to be described that way.
You have a trans person to thank for your computer/phone you’re reading this on
Computers have come a long way since the 60s. They used to take up entire rooms to complete their work, but with the development of microchips, computers have been able to get more powerful, whilst becoming so small they can even fit in your pocket.
This technical innovation took the life’s work of many talented people, and a major person in this was engineer and computer scientist Lynn Conway.
Conway, like Christine Jorgensen was someone who came out as trans in a time when trans people were rarely heard about. In the 1960s, Conway worked for IBM where she helped develop “generalised dynamic instruction handling” – which allows computers to reorder functions to be better handled with how much data and other resources are available to the computer at any one time. Before then, computers would work through instructions in chronological order, which wasted a lot more time and resources. It was at this time, in 1968, she told her workplace of her intention to transition and change name, leading her to unfortunately lose her job (IBM later apologised for this in 2020).
After completing her transition, Conway continued her work on computers in the 70s, where with the company Xerox, she helped revolutionise microchip design with her and another scientist’s work on VLSI (Very Large Scale Integrated) design which help make smartphones and other types of devices possible to be developed. Conway also worked with scientists on many other innovations that helped develop internet infrastructure.
In her later years she began to tell her story more on just who she was and what she was doing as both a woman, and a transgender woman, in her career. At the time, in the 70s and 80s, her contributions gained very little attention, which Conway did talk about in the 2010s and 2020s where she finally received more recognition for her work.
Lynn Conway gave us the term “Conway Effect” where the contributions of those “othered” by society tend to not be celebrated as highly compared to those who are not part of minority groups.
Conway’s life and contributions help celebrate both the trans community and are something for all women to be proud of, where in a time rife in misogyny and transphobia, a trans woman had to endure and rise above losing her professional career and gained little notoriety for the huge advancements she helped society achieve with technology.
Transgender is not a phase!
If it wasn’t obvious from the people mentioned in this article, trans people haven’t only just started existing.
Christine Jorgensen and Lynn Conway are just two examples of trans people thriving in the 20th Century. With Jorgensen and many other trans people, such as April Ashley and “Bond Girl” Caroline Cossey, there are many trans people in this time who captured the hearts of many, who were then quickly forgotten about by the wider public.
You may have heard of trans people existing even as far back as the Ancient Egyptian and Roman periods. When going back so far in history to study any aspect of society, it is very hard to make any definitive statements, and much could well be forever under fierce debate. Some such examples in recent news include the alleged transgender Roman Emperor(-ess) Elagabalus, where some historic statements describe this individual as being very effeminate and wanting to change their sex. Elsewhere in Roman society, there were the Gali priests, who were said to worship the goddess Cybele and had rituals in becoming eunuchs and from that point only wearing women’s clothing. In a small number of Old English texts, there are descriptions of “bæddel and bæddeling”. These are two different terms which seem to refer to Anglo Saxons which were possibly intersex and gender non-conforming. Other societies, particularly in pre-colonial times, have examples of “third genders” where people we could attribute to being transgender in modern and Eurocentric terms would have fitted into their respective culture. One example is Hijras in South Asia which could have developed as an idea since Ancient Hinduism and still has some small communities across South Asian to this day!
So being transgender really is not a phase or a trend as believe or like to say. With examples of trans people who were accepted into society, it is really more true of a statement to say that the rising transphobia we see today is far more of a trend that hopefully passes soon.
These are just five things that have hopefully been new to you this Transgender Awareness Week. If you are interested please do continue to further your knowledge about the queer community if you are an ally. The best way to fight against misinformation is to make sure you are well informed in the first place!
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