1979: Medical The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association was formed out of the Janus Information Facility, itself reorganized from the Erickson Education Foundation. It developed the Standards of Care for the medical treatment of transgender people, publishing it on 2/13/1979, and their first two revisions came out in 1980 and 1981. These standards defined who should be eligible for hormone therapy and surgery, when, and through what practices. While they established medical procedural care and proper dosages and such, they also outlined a gatekeeping framework. This framework tended to limit medical interventions to those trans people whom the physicians believed would pass for straight cisgender people, engaged in traditional, stereotypical gender roles following initial treatments, which in turn led trans folks seeking interventions to roleplay to their physicians in order to be treated, to be discouraged from seeking medical interventions entirely, or to seek them on the black or gray markets. This organization was later (2006) renamed as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).
1979: Medical Harry Benjamin retired and Jeanne Hoff, a psychiatrist and trans woman, took over his practice, possibly the first out trans person to oversee so large a patient body of trans people
1979 Medical Dr. Paul McHugh, the psychiatrist at leading Johns Hopkins’ Gender Identity Clinic shut down the surgical aspects of the clinic under the belief that they led to no improvement for trans women.
1979: Culture Wendy Carlos, a musician famous for her electronic music such as “Switched On Bach” and the soundtrack for The Clockwork Orange, comes out as a transsexual woman. She had privately transitioned years previously and prior to coming out, presented herself in male drag for public appearances. She generally considers discussion of her gender identity to be prurient and invasive.
1979: Justice Janice Raymond, a second wave radical feminist, wrote The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, which proclaimed that not only are transsexual women actually men, but also that they are appropriating female bodies reinforcing the patriarchy and stereotypes and colonizing women’s feminist spaces. The idea that trans people are really their birth assigned gender did not originate with Raymond, but her work was perhaps the rallying cry to that point of view, which is transphobic and harmful. Raymond is the most prominent early example of a TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist).
Medical It should be noted that stereotyped behavior was encouraged and in many cases, still is, by the medical community, as for many doctors, the only way they would prescribe hormones or authorize surgeries would be if the trans person conformed to their idea of what a woman or man should be - in many cases of trans women, they made judgements on whether they met their standards of beauty pre-transition and whether the physicians thought they would be able to pass as cisgender.
1974-1978 Justice Sandy Stone, a trans woman audio engineer (and science fiction author) was hired by Olivia Records, a women’s only recording studio run by The Collective, a women’s organization. Stone's trans status is known and accepted prior to her hiring. Over the next several years she and Olivia get protests including death threats by radical feminists who see her as a male invading women’s spaces. Stone is directly attacked in Raymond’s book and in response wrote her own book in 1987 called The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto
http://radfem.transadvocate.com/sex-essentialist-violence-and-radical-inclusion-an-interview-with-sandy-stone/
Sandy Stone interviewed by Zachary Drucker
1980: Medical The DSM III (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual adds Gender Identity Disorder (GID) as a diagnosis with two broad types of transsexualism (adult and child) and with a focus on further classifying by what gender (generally ignoring bisexuality) the person is attracted to and with a lack of clarity as to whether those homosexual and heterosexual terms are gendering a trans woman as male or as female (or gendering a trans man as male or as female). (Evolution of the DSM’s GID diagnosis between the DSM III and DSM IV)
“Transsexualism” is considered “very rare” with contemporary studies suggesting on the order of 0.01% to 0.003% of people desiring medical transition.
Transvestism is a separate diagnosis (Evolution of the DSM's Transvestism diagnosis in the DSM III to Transvestic Fetishism in the DSM IV to Transvestic Disorder in the DSM IV)
1980 Legal The Social Security Administration adopts a policy that to change one’s gender marker the citizen must provide, “...clinical or medical records, or other combination of documents showing the sex change, or any medical record showing the sex-change surgery has been started.” Previously the person needed only to assert their gender.
1980 Culture Virginia Prince retires from editing Transvestia and sells it to Carol Beecroft, who continued publishing it until 1986.
1980 Legal Phyllis Frye, now a law student, successfully lobbied the city of Houston, Texas to drop their anti-crossdressing law.
1981 Culture The Tiffany Club holds its first “First Event”,
1981 Culture “Bond girl”, Caroline “Tula” Cossey is outed by British tabloids as transgender and intersex.
1983:Medical HIV is discovered to be the cause of AIDS
1984 Legal Karen Ulane, a trans woman, is denied Title VII sex discrimination protections by the US Seventh Circuit Court, on the grounds that she isn’t a woman.
1985 Culture JoAnn Roberts, who considered herself a crossdresser as well as transgender, founded Creative Design Services (CDS) which published LadyLike Magazine
1986 Culture Lou Sullivan, in San Francisco, forms what would later be named FTM International, the first support organization for trans men.
1986:Justice The International Foundation for Gender Education (IFGE) is founded by Merissa Sherill Lynn from the older Tiffany Club - which, the following year continues as an independent body under the name “The Tiffany Club of New England”.
1987 March Justice The AIDS activist group ACT UP was founded
1987 Medical The DSM III-R was published, updating the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnoses of transsexualism, gender identity disorder, and reclassifying transvestism as transvestic fetishism.
1987 Justice IFGE holds its first conference, in Chicago, and Tapestry magazine, now published by the IFGE, becomes the first international journal on transgender issues.
1987 Culture JoAnn Roberts, Angela Gardner, Alison Laing, Trudy Henry and Melanie Bryan, formed the Renaissance Transgender Association - later known as Renaissance Education Association, a support and education organization.
1987 Medical Dr. Richard Green published The Sissy Boy Syndrome, summarizing his interpretations of the results of the “Feminine Boy Project” - a research study which sought to make conversion therapy away from homosexuality and transexuality for children assigned male at birth to be viable. It failed.
1988: Medical Gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogs (GnRHa), used to treat precocious puberty since the late 1970s, began to be used in Denmark as puberty blockers for transgender youth. The effects of this treatment were published a decade later in 1998.
1988:Culture The e-mail list CDforum was established connecting crossdressers over the internet.
1988: Justice “T” began to be added to the initialism GLBT
1988 Medical: Dr. Richard F. Docter, a psychologist and sexologist, wrote Transvestites and Transsexuals: Toward a Theory of Cross-Gender Behavior
1988 Medical Therapists involved in implementing the Standards of Care version 3 (1981), and screening trans people for hormone therapy were encouraged to deny hormone treatment to trans women who were married, even if they had spousal support, until such marriages “were resolved” due to the effects that hormones would have upon fertility, sexual performance, and appearance.
1989: Medical Ray Blanchard “The concept of autogynephilia and the typology of male gender dysphoria. (1989)” Blanchard’s theory is widely discredited and is considered transphobic and hurtful. Still it is often referenced by those opposing trans rights and those who deny trans people’s gender identities. See: The Case Against Autogynophilia, by Julia Serano (2010)
1989 May Legal SCOTUS case Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins established that gender presentation was a protected class for employment purposes under title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and became the basis for later interpretation of the legal basis of those rights extending to gender identity of trans people.
1989 November Culture Gender Trouble by Judith Butler - introduced the idea of gender performance as a learned set of behaviors, often misinterpreted as the notion that all gender is performance, which is at odds with Butler’s philosophy. The notion that “gender is a construct” does not make gender any less real or any less important to one’s sense of self.