The House on Poof Corner: Microhistories of Trans Women’s Lives in 1970s Minneapolis

This paper examines the social lives, institutional entanglements, and political advocacy of a small group of trans women living in and around the Twin Cities in the 1970s, highlighting the considerable role of friendship and knowledge circulation in determining their commitments. Employing oral histories with the women in question and a microhistorical lens, it seeks to chart the changes in trans therapeutics, public assistance policy, and political imagination that marked the final years of the Long 1970s through their lives, highlighting their claims on the state and petitions for redress, relationships with university medical authorities, and sui generis political and community health organizing in the midst of economic immiseration, family rejection, psychiatric malpractice, and deep estrangement from mainstream life. Intervening on historiographies that have neglected trans presence, thought, and public life between the coasts and outside the clinic, this paper affirms the multipolarity of our histories.