Sandy Stone: The Trans Woman Who Helped Create Transgender Studies

Añadido: 2026-06-06

[00:00:00]Beth Elliott wasn't the only casualty of second wave feminism.

[00:00:04]>> It's 39 days until my gender confirmation surgery in Thailand and I'm sharing one trans fact every single day until then.

[00:00:09]>> Today we're talking about Sandy Stone and she's arguably more impactful over time than Beth Elliott was in that single instance. Like Wendy Carlos, Sandy was a sound engineer. In the 1960s, Sandy worked in Record Plant Studios in New York, one of the major recording studios of the era. She worked with amazing artists including rock, folk, and experimental music. In '69, she moved to the West Coast and in the early 1970s, she began living openly as a woman. She faced workplace discrimination.

[00:00:36]>> Surprise.

[00:00:36]>> After being fired for being herself, she opened her own repair shop in Santa Cruz called The Wizard of Oz. But in the mid-70s, Olivia Records was looking for a talented sound engineer and they came knocking. Olivia Records was a lesbian feminist music collective and record label. They were the beating heart of women's music. Sandy Stone recorded and mixed music for that label during one of the most important periods in women's music. And everybody knew she was trans.

[00:01:01]That's important. The problem started when the fractured biological essentialist cultural feminists decided that her presence in the women's music industry was a political issue. By the late 1970s, anti-trans feminists pressure started building around Sandy Stone. Janice Raymond targeted her in a work that became The Transsexual Empire.

[00:01:17]Sandy was framed as all of the tropes: a threat, a predator, a misogynist.

[00:01:21]Nothing new. And of course, Sandy herself received threats, too.

[00:01:24]Eventually, in '78, she left Olivia Records. But if you've been following my story, you know that trans women don't just lie down and die. That is done. She went into academia. She studied the history of consciousness in the University of California, Santa Cruz.

[00:01:37]Then in '87, she wrote The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto. Listening to Sandy speak on YouTube, she's funny. The title was obviously a direct answer to Transsexual Empire. And in '88, she presented the essay at UC Santa Cruz. In '91, it was published in Bodyguards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity. Sandy basically founded transgender studies.

[00:01:59]>> In it, she argued that the idea that trans people should erase their own history in order to be accepted as preposterous.

[00:02:04]>> She challenged the systems of oppression built by the patriarchy and used to hold trans women and women down. She's a feminist at her core.

[00:02:11]>> And in '92, she became a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

[00:02:15]>> And in '93, she founded something called the ACT Lab, Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory.

[00:02:20]>> Her later work is connected to gender, technology, media, bodies, architecture, and identity.

[00:02:24]>> In '95, Sandy published something called The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Key professors describe it as challenging the established norms of gender identity.

[00:02:33]>> But I think it's more decoupling from the patriarchy.

[00:02:36]>> Sandy Stone was pushed out of one space and built an entire field for herself.

[00:02:40]>> As much as people try to make us a controversy, many times over and over and over, trans people have become the foundation of new movements. Sandy Stone has been inducted into the Women's Hall of Fame, and she is an icon.

[00:02:52]>> My name is Rayaan, a South African trans woman living in Asia, and I love >> to share your favorite trans fact with the world. Drop it in the comments below, give me a like and a follow, and I will see you tomorrow.