American writer, academic and filmmaker Susan Stryker was BOTD in 1961. Born in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, she was assigned male at birth. She studied literature at the University of Oklahoma, earning a doctorate in history at the University of California Berkeley. She came out as transgender in the 1980s, becoming one of the first openly trans academics in the United States. Her first book Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, co-authored with Jim Van Buskirk, was published in 1996. Her 2001 book Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback surveyed the history of gay and lesbian pulp fiction from the pre-Stonewall era. She is best known for her 2008 book Transgender History, a comprehensive study of trans identity in the United States from World War Two to the 2000s. She has written extensively about the marginalisation of trans people within the LGBTQ community (notably in her 2008 article “Why the T in LGBT is Here to Stay”, written in response to John Aravosis’ transphobic missive “How did the T get in LGBT?”) and has been instrumental in raising the profiles of historical trans figures, notably Christine Jorgensen, Lou Sullivan and Vicki Marlane. Stryker has also written and produced Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, a documentary account of the Gene Compton’s Cafeteria riot of 1966, and Christine in the Cutting Room, an experimental documentary about Jorgensen. Stryker is a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, where she established the Transgender Studies Initiative. Stryker identifies as lesbian, and is in a relationship with political ecologist Lily House-Peters.