Stryker had effectively helped establish an academic field she would finally get hired into.

In 2009, Stryker joined Indiana University Bloomington as a tenured professor in the Department of Gender Studies, and from that year till 2013 she sat on the LGBTQ Historians Task Force of the AHA. “Let’s just say that the employment prospects in the historical profession as an out transsexual person doing early 19th-century religious and cultural history were zero,” she says dryly.īy necessity, she turned to writing about transgender history: “I did it out of formal academic training, and I did it strategically and tactically out of conditions of employability as an out trans person a quarter century ago.” What followed was a 17-year career publishing articles in academic journals, producing exhibitions and public history programs, serving as executive director of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, and making an Emmy Award–winning documentary film- Screaming Queens-about the 1966 transgender riot at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco. Just as she was finishing up her PhD, she transitioned. While in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, history department in the 1980s, Susan Stryker wrote a dissertation on the development of Mormon identity and community.

Transgender History by Susan Stryker