Imagining transgender is an ethnography of the emergence and institutionalization of transgender as a category of collective identity and political activism embraced by activists in the early 1990s to advocate for gender variant people the category quickly gained momentum in public health social service scholarly and legislative contexts. Imagining transgender is an ethnography of the emergence and institutionalization of transgender as a category of collective identity and political activism embraced by activists in the early 1990s to advocate for gender variant people the category quickly gained momentum in public health social service scholarly and legislative contexts working as a safer sex activist in manhattan during the late 1990s david valentine conducted ethnographic research among mostly male to female . Imagining transgender is an ethnography of the emergence and institutionalization of transgender as a category of collective identity and political activism embraced by activists in the early 1990s to advocate for gender variant people the category quickly gained momentum in public health social service scholarly and legislative contexts. Imagining transgender is an ethnography of the emergence and institutionalization of transgender as a category of collective identity and political activism embraced by activists in the early 1990s to advocate for gender variant people the category quickly gained momentum in public health social service scholarly and legislative contexts working as a safer sex activi