My grandmother's neighbor's opthalmologist was Renée Richards, so I was aware of it as a child, in the 80s.

L O L how was I getting a PhD in Women’s and Gender Studies in 1994 then.

Also, uh. Anyone learning a language with masc/femme/neutral words...

high school so early 2000s though to be fair hanging out with theatre kids and going to the hometown gay coffeeshop is an unfair advantage over ignorant dweebs

i remember learning about sex and gender in like first grade in *kentucky* and i started kindergarten in 1999 lol like i didn't understand why there were two different words for what seemed like the same thing, but the word "gender" was definitely used

Part of the problem, other than people being jerks, is that it was in the late 80s and early 90s that trans people started to become distinct from the drag scene. If you watch Paris Is Burning, there's even a bit of a subplot about that, and somewhat later, a Dykes to Watch Out For story arc.

Yeah, I met a non-binary/agender kid when we both were in a summer calligraphy class in 1987. “Are you a boy or a girl, Alex?” “I’m a person.”

lol I literally majored in womens & GENDER studies in 1999

from my side: sportswriters have known about Christine Daniels since 2001, had that long to figure it out. We have no excuse for any hesitation before unqualified support.

On top of that, as a topic of coverage, Renée Richards is a pretty well-know sports story even outside of tennis circles and she transitioned in 1975.

and talked about through every sports retrospective in the 1980s and 1990s, nobody has any excuse

I'm 55 & the idea of a "sex change operation" was mainstream enough to be a subplot on a fucking Love Boat episode & not (for whatever other flaws it had) with the trans character as the butt of the joke

Southern Comfort (2001) was made by time-travelers cosplaying as proletarianized trans southerners living on the ragged edge for the lulz

this myth is the actual rewriting of history, it is maddening

redoing some posts because i misremembered the year. one of the first documented sex change surgeries was in 1906, not 1904. glad i googled to reaffirm because i love to forget exact numbers

that’s my great-grandparents’ generation, and i’m in my mid-40s. some countries had approved hrt programs about 10 years before i was born. even in terms of modern transgender medicine, we are over a century in

I'm pretty sure I learned the sex/gender distinction in high school, I graduated in 1996

I literally have fan mail from Nate for my minicomic circa ~1997 where he points out (rightfully, I as ever am a work in progress) one of the strips has a punchline that's a little transphobic.

I mean in your defense you were like 15? 16? at the time and it takes time and resources to think one's way out of the dominant oppressive culture!

(also I still think of those minicomics sometimes!!)

Oh yeah, for sure! It was also absolutely my first exposure to the word/concept (an important one!) AND my first real fan mail!

My teacher translated a poem by a Roman poet Ausonius called "About those, who changed their gender" Ausonius lived in the 4th century...