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Alex Bakker and transgender people

Alex Bakker is a Dutch historian and author who focuses on the history of the transgender community.

Background

Alex Bakker was born on December 26, 1968. Bakker made a gender transition under the care of the gender clinic in 
Amsterdam. Bakker was not out as trans for many years. Prior to coming out, Bakker wrote several works on The Netherlands during World War II.

Trans writing and media

Bakker came out to participate in the 2011 documentary I Am a Woman Now by Michiel van Erp. Bakker’s 2014 autobiography discussed being closeted.

Bakker is author of several books:

  • Mijn valse Verleden [My Untrue Past] (2014 [Dutch] and 2019 [English])
  • Transgender in the Netherlands (2018)
  • Others of My Kind: Transatlantic Transgender Histories (2020)
  • The Dutch Approach (2021)

According to a SPUI20 profile:

A fourth collaborator joins us for this phase of the project, Alex Bakker. Bakker is a Dutch historian and writer who also works as a researcher for documentaries and exhibitions. In 2014, he published an autobiographical novel about his transgender background, Mijn valse verleden (published in English in 2019 as My Untrue Past).10 He is committed to investigating the lives of trans pioneers – lives that risk being forgotten – and as an interviewer he makes frequent use of oral history. (As a reflection of the collaborative nature of this project, we will now switch to using first names in speaking about ourselves or referencing each other’s work.)

References

Roelofs, Mees; Kain, Alex (2020). Historian and transman Alex Bakker describes Dutch trans history. Trans Magazine https://transmagazine.nl/transgender-history-study-published/

Selected work by Bakker

Bakker, Alex (2014). Mijn valse verleden [My Untrue Past: The Coming of Age of a Trans Man].

Bakker, Alex (2018). Transgender in Nederland. Een buitengewone geschiedenis [Transgender in the Netherlands: an extraordinary history.]

Bakker, Alex (2020). Others of My Kind. University of Calgary Press [PDF]

Bakker, Alex (July 2021). The Dutch Approach: Fifty years of transgender health care at the VU Amsterdam gender clinic. Eleven ISBN 9789024444687 https://www.elevenpub.com/en/product/100-10330_The-Dutch-Approach

Bakker, Alex; Schoots, Tammie; Lakmaker, Tobi; Ranieri, Leo (). The Birth of the Gender Clinic: One Hundred Years of Gender-affirming Medicine. SPUI25 https://spui25.nl/programma/the-birth-of-the-gender-clinic-one-hundred-years-of-gender-affirming-medicine

Resources

Alex Bakker (bakkertxt.wordpress.com)

Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org)

IMDb (imdb.com)

Deutsche Biographie (deutsche-biographie.de)