WindyCityMediaGroup.com – by Yasmin Nair
Recent historical work reveals that Stonewall was not a singular moment of queer insurgency and that the mid-to-late 1960s was an era of queer radical political potential. According to Susan Stryker, professor of women’s studies at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University, the 1966 police raid at San Francisco’s Compton’s Cafeteria, in the Tenderloin district, helped launch a national movement for transgender rights. For Stryker, the term “transgender” doesn’t name a kind of person but means “anything that breaks apart and makes visible” the ways in which people define their roles in society, such as through their gender or sexual identity and kinship structures. Events like the Compton’s raid reveal the radical potential of queer politics in general.