'A High Degree Of Visibility And Also Divides Women': Sandy Stone, Founding Father of Gender Ideology

Examining the author of a foundational text

Sandy Stone at Olivia Records

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Allucquére Rosanne Stone, better known as Sandy Stone, is a highly important figure in the history of trans activism and the development of gender ideology. A lightning rod for controversy over the course of his life, Stone has cropped up time and again in my research and writing about this movement. In gender critical circles, he is perhaps best known for joining the lesbian music collective Olivia Records in the 1970s. Stone is also widely credited as the founder of the field of “transgender studies.”

Stone was born around the year 1936 in Jersey City. He described himself in a 2018 interview with VICE as “one of those very classic literature trans people. I realized there was something wrong when I was five years old.” In a 2000 piece in the Stanford Report, Stone describes how, starting in his adolescence, he would go through cycles of binging and purging women’s clothing typical of many trans-identified men:

By puberty she was in crisis as she tried to suppress expression of her gender. "If you're secretive about it and you're a male-to-female potentially, you buy women's clothing," she said. "You'll hide them in little compartments on the roof. You'll hide them in the car. If you're really daring you start wearing women's clothing under your male clothing. Not everyone can be so daring. And then all of a sudden you wake up one morning and say, 'Oh, my God! What am I doing?' You find it all . . . and you throw it away. Or you burn it. You do some act of excision. You get it out of your life. You close that off forever, rebuild that barrier. 'I'm never going back. Everything is OK now. I'm just another guy.' Oh, it feels so good! That lasts usually for about 90 days."

In the 1960s, Stone began working as a sound engineer and quickly developed an impressive portfolio, working with artists like Jimi Hendrix, Grateful Dead, Van Morrison, and Crosby, Stills, & Nash. “At some point,” Stone told VICE, “I said, I’ve got to do something about becoming who I am.”