xvii With all of the current media attention on gender-diverse peo- ple, it would be easy to be fooled into thinking that trans, non- binary, and Two-Spirit people just came on the scene in the past few years. After all, it is almost impossible to look at any kind of media today and not see stories about trans and non- binary lives. Ex-Olympian Caitlyn Jenner was interviewed in, and appeared on, the front cover of Vanity Fair magazine in 2015 trans actress Laverne Cox was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 2014 and on the cover of many other major magazines since then trans celebrity Chaz Bono appeared on Dancing with the Stars in 2011. The news has also been full of stories about people like Texas trans high school wrestler Mack Beggs, who went all the way through high school asking to be able to wrestle on the boys’ wrestling team rather than being forced to wrestle on the girls’ team. Twenty-first-century news has also been full of stories about controversies over bathrooms. Canada and Sweden both have been on the cutting edge of providing “bathrooms for all gen- ders.” In the United States, however, bathroom laws vary radi- cally from state to state, and range from a 2017 California law that requires all single-use bathrooms in public buildings to be both fully accessible and gender inclusive, to a Texas bathroom bill that would deny trans people access to bathrooms aligning with their gender identity and would force them to use facili- ties according to their sex assigned at birth. Trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit people are not new to the twenty-first, or even the twentieth century. In Chapter 1, Preface
Previous Page Next Page