Herstory Revisited

 “LGBTQ+” stands for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer/questioning” and the “plus” refers to many other gender and sexual identities. For a long time however, the acronym was “GLBT”, and the change to “LGBT” is significant. In the early gay rights movement, gay men dominated the discourse – perhaps for obvious reasons given that men had more political voice and greater access to public spheres. However, this meant that, while generally being a much safer and more inclusive community, the movement also had undercurrents of the same patriarchal and sexist thinking which plagues all other communities. Most early gay right campaigns ignored women and those of other genders. There was a lack of spaces curated for lesbians compared to those created for gay men, and lesbians often experienced harassment if they tried to enter these spaces. Even as gay men began to slowly gain some (albeit limited and problematic) recognition in the media and public life, lesbians (and of course tran...

Dr Sara Josephine Baker (1873-1945) This LGBTQ+ History Month’s theme is #UnderTheScope celebrating LGBTQ+ in medicine, so in honour of that, lets learn about the lesbian woman who not was not only “instrumental” in identifying Typhoid Mary as the source of the 1907 typhoid outbreak which infected almost 3000 people in New York, but who also broke many other barriers to make the world a healthier and safer place, Dr Sara Josephine Baker, aka Dr Joe. Dr Baker was already remarkable in the very fact that she was a woman doctor. In 1900, only 6% of doctors were women. In 1894, Baker had enrolled from a medical school founded by Elizabeth Blackwell who just a generation earlier had become the first American woman to earn a medical degree. When Baker graduated in 1898, female doctors were still prohibited from working in hospitals, so she instead found work as a medical inspector in NYC. She was horrified to learn that over 1500 babies died each week of preventable diseases and thus took on...