Who Gets Remembered in Feminist History?

Feminist history is often presented as a clear procession of campaigns, leaders and landmark texts. In that version, trans women appear rarely, if at all. Their absence is then treated as evidence that they were peripheral to women’s movements, rather than as a result of hostile institutions, narrow archives and political decisions about who counted as a legitimate subject.

The erasure of trans women in historical feminist movements has taken several forms. Their names have been omitted from accounts of activism, their work has been classified as gay liberation or sex-worker organising, and conflicts over gender identity have been retold without acknowledging the power dynamics involved. Sometimes the problem is anachronism: people who lived before “transgender” became widely used are forced into categories that flatten their lives.

For readers in Australia, these questions are close to home. Feminist history is connected to local struggles around reproductive rights, lesbian organising, Indigenous sovereignty, equal pay, sex work and queer visibility. The national story is shaped by city-based archives in Sydney and Melbourne, community memory in Brisbane and Perth, and a media culture where a television panel or a newspaper column can still frame trans women as a recent controversy rather than part of a long political history.

History Was Never A Neutral Record

Archives are built through selection. Newspapers favour public figures, organisations preserve minutes that support their official story, and universities often catalogue activism through established political categories. Trans women whose work crossed movements—such as street-based outreach, anti-violence campaigns, performance, sex-worker rights or queer liberation—can disappear when researchers search only for “women’s movement” records.

The language of the past creates another barrier. A woman may have described herself as transsexual, gender-nonconforming, a drag queen or simply a woman, depending on the period and setting. Applying today’s terminology requires care, but refusing to recognise trans women because they used different words is equally distorting. Historical accuracy should preserve complexity rather than make trans lives invisible.

The Second Wave Had Internal Borders

Second-wave feminism transformed public debate about domestic labour, sexual violence, contraception and workplace discrimination. It also contained fierce arguments about who could participate in women-only spaces. In some groups, trans women were treated as threats to female solidarity or as symbols of male intrusion. These arguments were not abstract: they affected meetings, shelters, conferences, publications and access to community networks.

The record is often softened after the fact. A movement may be remembered for its collective achievements while its exclusions are described as unfortunate disagreements. This produces a misleading image of unity and leaves trans women carrying the burden of an unresolved dispute. Feminist politics becomes more honest when its victories are examined alongside the boundaries it enforced.

Trans Women Were Making Political History

Trans women were active in the broader liberation movements that shaped modern feminism. Sylvia Rivera helped organise the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries in New York, supporting homeless and rejected queer young people. Her activism complicates accounts that separate “women’s history” from “trans history,” because both were shaped by struggles over housing, policing, bodily autonomy and public space.

Other trans women built political knowledge through writing, community work and direct action. Sandy Stone’s critique of medical and academic control over trans representation challenged the idea that institutions should speak for trans people. Activists such as Angela Douglas and groups connected to trans liberation showed that debates about gender were also debates about labour, safety, class and authority.

Remembering these figures does not require pretending that every feminist organisation welcomed them. It requires recognising that trans women were participants, theorists and organisers, rather than merely subjects of later debate.

Australian Feminist Memory Has Its Own Gaps

Australian histories often centre the women’s liberation groups that formed in Sydney, Melbourne and other cities from the late 1960s onwards. Their campaigns changed public conversations about childcare, abortion, sexual harassment and unpaid work. Yet trans women’s contributions are frequently filed under gay liberation, queer history or sex-work activism, which separates them from the feminist struggles they also shaped.

Roberta Perkins is one important example. A trans woman and sex-worker rights activist, she helped establish the Prostitutes Collective NSW and advocated for the safety and dignity of people working in the sex industry. Her work sits at the intersection of feminism, labour rights, policing and trans politics. Treating it as a niche story erases how these issues overlap in real lives.

Australian public memory also tends to privilege large institutions and major festivals. Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is a powerful site of queer visibility, while smaller community archives and oral histories preserve experiences that official celebrations can overlook. In Melbourne, grassroots feminist and queer spaces have often carried knowledge through zines, benefit events and informal networks. That material deserves the same seriousness as a published manifesto.

Media Framing Repeats The Old Disappearance

Popular media often presents trans women as evidence in an argument rather than as historical actors. A news segment may invite commentators to debate access, sport or women’s spaces while ignoring decades of organising. This framing makes trans women appear suddenly visible, even when the institutions discussing them have long benefited from their work and cultural production.

Australian media has its own version of this pattern. Coverage can shift quickly between sensational headlines, “both sides” panels and carefully managed human-interest stories. Terms such as “culture war” make political conflict sound inevitable, while the specific history of anti-trans violence, healthcare barriers and community activism fades into the background. The result is a public conversation that treats memory as optional.

Feminist media criticism should track who receives narrative authority. Are trans women speaking in their own words? Are they credited for campaigns, publications and mutual aid? Are historical conflicts explained with enough context to show who had institutional power? These questions move representation beyond visibility towards accountability.

Building A More Complete Feminist Archive

Repair begins with research practices that take community knowledge seriously. Oral histories, personal papers, activist newsletters, recorded speeches and local collections can reveal people absent from mainstream accounts. Archivists should preserve chosen names, pronouns and self-descriptions while explaining historical terminology rather than using it as an excuse for omission.

Readers and editors can also challenge the habit of treating trans inclusion as a new policy issue. In Australia, that means connecting contemporary debates to the work of trans women in sex-worker organising, HIV advocacy, anti-violence campaigns, performance communities and queer publishing. It means making room for First Nations perspectives and recognising that gender, colonial power, race, disability and class have never operated separately.

A stronger feminist history will not be free of conflict. It will be more trustworthy because it records conflict without allowing the loudest institutions to define the whole past. Trans women belong in the archive as workers, writers, organisers, neighbours and political thinkers. Their presence changes the story, and that change is precisely the point.

Support community archives, read trans women’s own writing, and share historical work that places them at the centre of feminist memory rather than at its margins. In classrooms, editorial meetings, libraries and activist spaces, insist that feminist history account for everyone who helped make it.