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Book Review: Imagining Transgender - by Ozy Brennan

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David Valentine’s Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category was written at a very lucky time. Published in 2007 about research Valentine conducted in the 1990s, it captures the very tail end of the heterogeneity of the people we now think of as ‘transgender.’ Valentine studied four very different groups of people. First: the ball scene, which was centered around dance/fashion contests called “balls.” You might know balls from the documentary Paris is Burning or the TV series Pose. Ball participants were mostly young, mostly black and Latino, and nearly all poor. Many of them were street sex workers, selling sex on the few blocks of New York City where clients knew to look for “chicks with dicks.” The ball scene had a complex and intensely policed gender system. People competed in particular categories based on their gender, and as we’ve all learned nothing gets people more intense about gender categories than the idea that someone might be cheating in a gendered competition.

Book Review: Imagining Transgender Trans people have always existed! ...Sort of. Ozy Brennan May 09, 2025 82 24 12 Share David Valentine’s Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category was written at a very lucky time. Published in 2007 about research Valentine conducted in the 1990s, it captures the very tail end of the heterogeneity of the people we now think of as ‘transgender.’ Valentine studied four very different groups of people. First : the ball scene, which was centered around dance/fashion contests called “balls.” You might know balls from the documentary Paris is Burning or th

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