Copyright © 2022 by Kit Heyam

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Originally published in Great Britain in 2022 by John Murray (Publishers), Basic Books UK, An Hachette UK company

First US Edition: September 2022

First Trade Paperback Edition: September 2024

Published by Seal Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Seal Press name and logo is a registered trademark of the Hachette Book Group.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022933909

ISBNs: 9781541603080 (hardcover), 9781541603103 (ebook), 9781541605404 (paperback)

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Introduction
‘I had a gown on in a lark’: what is trans history?

On the night of Monday 8 June 1847, John Sullivan was drunk. Strolling unsteadily down the street in Aldgate, East London, the 22-year-old was wearing a bonnet, a gown, a silk apron, a pair of trousers and a pair of women’s boots. Police Constable Henry Pye’s attention was caught both by this attire and by the bundle John was carrying under one arm. Steering John to the local police station, he opened the bundle to find more items of women’s clothing. Where, he asked John, had these come from?

John said, ‘They’re mine.’

Six days later, on 14 June, John Sullivan was tried for the theft of a cape, a handkerchief, an apron, two gowns, two petticoats and a pair of stays. The clothes belonged to local woman Frances Norton, and had a total value of thirteen shillings and sixpence. Under oath, John denied stealing the clothes, and dismissed the choice to wear them as a drunken joke, swearing, ‘I had them given to me to carry to the market; the policeman caught me, and the person who gave me the things ran away; I had a gown on in a lark, but I had my trousers on; I was very much intoxicated.’ The court, mindful that this was John’s second offence (following a six-month prison sentence the previous year for a crime whose records don’t appear to survive), was unsympathetic. John Sullivan was sentenced to be transported to Australia for ten years.1

Is this story part of trans history? It’s unlikely that many people would treat it as such. John Sullivan lived before the word ‘transgender’, as we use it now, was widely available for individuals to describe their actions or identities. There’s no evidence that John presented as female outside of the specific circumstances outlined in the trial records. Perhaps most conclusively, those trial records give us John’s own testimony, framing the choice to wear women’s clothes not as a matter of identity but as a drunken ‘lark’. Surely there’s no better metric by which to judge a historical person’s gender than their own voice?

These are the criteria that usually determine whether trans people feel able to talk about someone as belonging to trans history. We look for evidence that their motivation for gender nonconformity was not external, but internal – ideally in the form of personal testimony. We look for continuous presentation as the gender ‘opposite to’ the one they were assigned at birth. And we look for histories that we can fit into contemporary Western ideas of what it means to be trans. Even if those criteria are met, we get anxious if the person we’re dealing with lived before the advent of the terminology that we use to talk about trans identities today: often, this in itself is enough to dismiss their trans possibility altogether.

These criteria often make it difficult for us to talk about trans history at all. What makes this conversation even more difficult to have are the concepts that underpin it: gender and sex, internal and external motivations, personal testimony, stability of identity. If we poke at any one of these concepts, the whole edifice starts to crumble. When we talk about trans history, what are we even talking about?

This book is about the answer to that question.

Ask a trans person today what the adjective ‘trans’ refers to and, while the nuances will differ, the most common definition you’ll get is ‘anyone who doesn’t identify with the gender they were assigned at birth’. It’s important to us to put it in these terms. Talking about being trans as an identity, rather than an action, helps us to understand transness as relating to who you are, not what you do – a crucial step in undermining the argument that transitioning means adhering to gender stereotypes. It makes space for people who can’t, or don’t want to, transition socially or medically. And talking about moving away from the gender we were assigned at birth, rather than from male to female or vice versa, helps our definition to be clearly inclusive of non-binary people: people like me, who don’t identify as male or female all of the time.

This modern understanding of ‘trans’ is usually dated back to early-twentieth-century sexology: an intellectual movement that attempted to examine sexuality and gender identity as scientific phenomena. The German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld coined the term ‘transvestite’ in 1910, and although this word sounds to modern ears like a sensationalist term for ‘cross-dressing’ – something that relates to external gender expression rather than internal gender identity, and is probably sexualised in the vein of The Rocky Horror Picture Show – Hirschfeld intended it to cover a much broader range of trans identities, including people who transitioned medically, people who transitioned socially, and people who changed their gender expression some but not all of the time.2

The word ‘transsexual’ then came, by the mid-twentieth century, to primarily indicate trans people who accessed medical transition: who used hormones and/or surgery to change their body so that it aligned with the physical characteristics associated with the gender they identified as. By the late 1960s, American trans activist Virginia Prince was helping to popularise the word ‘transgender’ to refer to trans people who transitioned socially, but not medically: living as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth, without changing their body.3 While this distinction persisted in common parlance for some decades, by the twenty-first century – and in particular, following the influence of Leslie Feinberg’s 1992 book Transgender Liberation – trans identities and practices of all kinds were becoming subsumed under the umbrella term ‘transgender’.4 The word ‘transsexual’, while still valued by some for its connection to the history of trans activism (and particularly to that of older trans women) – and while still persisting in some official quarters, like the UK Equality Act 2010, which uses it to refer to any trans person who transitions socially or medically – has become gradually replaced by ‘trans’, short for ‘transgender’, as the default word we use to describe ourselves.5 ‘Cisgender’ or ‘cis’, an adjective that refers to the opposite of trans – anyone who does identify with the gender they were assigned at birth – dates back to at least the 1990s.6 The word ‘cis’ is sometimes misunderstood as referring to stereotypes; much of the opposition to it rests on the idea that to call someone a ‘cis woman’ is to say she is comfortable with society’s narrow idea of femininity. In reality, though, the way most trans people use it is to refer not to stereotypes, but to self-identification. A cis woman is someone who was assigned female at birth, and is happy to describe herself as a woman – regardless of how much she defies society’s idea of what ‘woman’ should mean.7

Even in the past hundred years, then – a period in which the category of ‘trans’ has been relatively coherent – thinking about trans history is a difficult and messy business. Look back further in time, and the difficulty and messiness increases dramatically. It’s not as simple as saying that while the terminology is new, the experiences are not; the advent of new terminology can genuinely shift how we think about gender, as well as what names we give to our experiences.8 But it’s also not straightforwardly true to say that the use of the word ‘trans’ to talk about gender has no history before sexology: literary scholar Joseph Gamble has recently discovered that the seventeenth-century writer Thomas Browne used the prefix ‘trans-’ and the word ‘transition’ to refer to the spontaneous sex changes of hares as early as 1646, and even coined the adjective ‘transfeminated’ to refer to a body that has transformed from what we think of as ‘female’ to what we think of as ‘male’.i So the prefix ‘trans-’ was clearly relevant to thinking about ‘gender malleability’ long before Hirschfeld leveraged it to refer to the patients he saw at his Institute for Sexual Science.9

Yet this doesn’t mean any of us can easily map our category of ‘trans people’, as I’ve defined it here, back onto the past. If we try to think about that contemporary definition – ‘anyone who doesn’t identify with the gender they were assigned at birth’ – in historical terms, it immediately starts to break down. In England and Wales, civil birth registrations (as opposed to the noting of births and baptisms in parish records) didn’t begin until 1837, and they didn’t become compulsory until 1875 (twenty years later than in Scotland) – meaning that birth records are unlikely to include a gender marker before the nineteenth century. So what does it mean to be ‘assigned’ a particular gender at birth before that point? And what, for that matter, do we mean by ‘gender’ or ‘sex’ when we’re thinking about the past?10

These terms aren’t even stable in our own society. While popular discourse often defines gender as a social construct and sex as a biological reality – ‘sex is between your legs, gender is between your ears’ – this neat-sounding distinction belies the many socially determined aspects of how we think about bodies. The labels ‘male’ and ‘female’ are themselves socially determined: our society labels one configuration of body parts ‘female’ and one ‘male’, but what’s stopping us from calling those biological trends A and B, or orange and purple? Similarly, why do we think of some sexual characteristics (like genitals and chromosomes) as ‘fundamental’ parts of sex, which make a difference to how we categorise a person’s body, and others (like facial hair and fat distribution) as comparatively insignificant? Why do we think of sex as binary, dividing humans into two clear biological types, when in reality it’s a spectrum on which comparatively few people tick all of the boxes required to slot neatly into one of those two categories?11 Why do so many societies still carry out violent, non-consensual and medically unnecessary surgery on intersex children (children whose bodies don’t fit clearly into one of the categories we label ‘male’ and ‘female’)? The answer to all of those questions is that gender – that socially constructed idea which carries all of the social baggage we associate with ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’ – informs, even produces, our ideas about sex.12 In the words of trans writer and activist Shon Faye, ‘Our sexed bodies never exist outside social meanings: consequently, how we understand gender shapes how we understand sex… The way we perceive and understand sex differences and emphasise their significance is so deeply gendered that it can be impossible to completely divorce the two.’13 To say sex and gender are both socially constructed isn’t to say they’re not real – like other social constructs, including race, money and crime, they have material and life-changing consequences for all of us – but it is to say there’s no innate reason we have to think about them in the way we do.

Given that we don’t think about ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ in a coherent way today, it’s no surprise that these ideas were equally unstable in the past. The idea of ‘gender’ as socially constructed and distinct from sex didn’t become common parlance in English until the mid-twentieth century.14 That isn’t to say that before this, it was only bodies that mattered. ‘Gender’ and ‘sex’ were used interchangeably – with ‘sex’ far more common – and both referred to a combination of the social and biological: to adapt the words of trans theorist and historian Susan Stryker, both ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ referred to ‘the social organisation of different kinds of bodies into different categories of people’.15 When the clergyman Thomas Stoughton complained in 1622 that ‘men and women’ had ‘changed their sex (as much as they can) one with another’ by ‘Men wearing long hair like unto women, and women cutting off their hair like unto boys’, he was referring both to their bodies and to their social experience. This was complicated even further by the fact that Stoughton and his contemporaries understood the biological makeup of the body, and its relationship to personality and society, very differently from the way we do today. As a result, we can’t even straightforwardly apply our modern concepts of ‘men’ and ‘women’ to people in the past.16 The term ‘gender’, until it started to refer more exclusively to ‘men’ and ‘women’ in the mid-twentieth century, just meant ‘kind’ or ‘sort’: when Shakespeare referred to ‘one gender of herbs’ in his play Othello, this is what he meant.17 In this sense, ‘gender’ is related to the word ‘genre’, which we use to categorise different kinds of art (into many more groups than just two).

There’s also the problem that, in any society, what constitutes ‘male’, ‘female’ or any gender is different for different people. How we understand gender is shaped by so many factors – personal, cultural, historical – that every individual’s conceptualisation of gender is unique.18 For some people, being a man necessitates not wearing dresses, even as a joke – meaning John Sullivan, our nineteenth-century gender-nonconforming thief, wouldn’t qualify as male. In my own life, my wardrobe of floral shirts and dangly earrings means a visit to the shops can be a lottery in terms of whether I’ll be called ‘Sir’, ‘Madam’, or (on one memorable occasion, equal parts validating and amusing) ‘Young Person’. If I played professional sport, my testosterone levels would make me a ‘man’; if I got pregnant, my doctor’s computer system would force me to be labelled ‘woman’. If you asked me, I’d tell you neither category is accurate – instead, I use the term ‘non-binary’ to describe myself – and yet the way I understand that term is different from many of my non-binary friends. If what it means to be a man, a woman or a non-binary person is different for everyone and varies between contexts, how can we straightforwardly talk about ‘people who don’t identify as the gender they were assigned at birth’, in either the past or the present?

Despite these difficulties and complexities, trans people love to tell stories from our history. Feeling a sense of community with the past is profoundly important for many of us, and particularly for those of us who are isolated in our day-to-day lives. As a teenager, struggling to articulate my feelings around gender and sexuality, I confided far more in the queer historical figures who populated my mental landscape than I did in the friends I saw every day at school. Talking about our history is politically important, too, helping to undermine arguments that (as I’ll talk more about later) present trans people as newfangled inventions, simultaneously suggesting that we’re a trend that shouldn’t be taken seriously, and that we’re a potent new threat.

The tales of trans history that we tell often, for personal and political reasons, have a familiar cast. They feature people like Billy Tipton, the American jazz musician who lived as male and whose family and friends were shocked when he was outed as trans after his death in 1989; and his nineteenth-century antecedent James Barry, the Irish surgeon who similarly lived as male for all of his adult life, and was outed against his will after his death in 1865. We talk, too, about pioneers of medical transition like Lili Elbe, the Danish trans woman made famous by the disappointing 2015 film The Danish Girl, who was one of the earliest recipients of a modern Western form of gender reassignment surgery; and Christine Jorgensen, who travelled from her native New York to Denmark to access medical transition and was made famous by the sensational 1952 New York Daily News headline ‘EX-GI BECOMES BLONDE BEAUTY’.19

These stories, and their well-known characters, are profoundly valuable. There’s a powerful, electrifying force to the resonance we feel when we realise someone else has felt our feelings before us; the queer theorist Carolyn Dinshaw uses the image of a ‘touch across time’, an image that always reminds me of the line about literature in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys – ‘as if a hand has come out, and taken yours’.20 But when we look closely at these stories, we can see that they have a troubling amount in common. These well-known trans figures from the past aren’t reaching out their hands to everyone.

This is the problem: the trans histories that we point to most often are the easy stories. They are stories of people who lived stably in a gender distinct from the one they were assigned at birth; people who, even if they didn’t have access to the word ‘transgender’, lived recently enough to fit easily into modern Western understandings of sex and gender; people who pursued medical transition if they had access to it; people from whom we have first-hand testimony, saying that they wanted to be recognised as the gender they lived in. Even if we occasionally draw on long-ago stories – like that of the Roman Emperor Elagabalus, who, according to multiple contemporary accounts, presented as female and sought gender reassignment surgery – they tend to be those that are easily, uncomplicatedly recognisable according to these modern Western ideas of what it means to be trans.21 And if we mention trans people of colour, like Marsha P. Johnson, they’re often deployed tokenistically in an attempt to make sure our cast of trans historical figures isn’t entirely white – without really taking the time to understand the specificities of their experience.

If we try to slot John Sullivan into this cast of trans historical characters, we fail on every count. But John’s story is crucial. It’s crucial because it represents the tip of an iceberg: just one of a huge number of difficult, complicated stories from the history of gender that we don’t have a good way to talk about. And it’s crucial because it forces us to confront the fact that there are two big problems with how we decide whether a story ‘counts’ as trans history.

The first problem – and one that the 1847 story of John’s dress exemplifies – is that a lot of the evidence we have for gender-nonconforming lives comes from legal and medical contexts. These are the kinds of records in which gender-nonconforming people overwhelmingly become visible. But law and medicine aren’t neutral contexts in which people give objective narratives of their experience: they’re high-stakes environments in which we construct a narrative for an authority figure whose decisions have huge consequences for our lives. As a result, we might adopt a particular discourse or way of speaking suited to the environment; we might strategically edit the truth to give a more coherent or believable narrative; we might even simply lie, telling those authority figures what they want to hear. If, in a century’s time, a historian looked at the records of gender identity clinics in the UK, their estimate of how many non-binary people accessed medical transition would be much smaller than the true number: knowing that clinicians can still be suspicious of non-binary identities, we’ve been taught to edit our stories, to present ourselves as trans men or women in the hope of accessing medical treatment more quickly. So we can’t rely on the accuracy of legal or medical records to tell us about the truth of trans experience in the past.22 What’s more, even when trans people do tell the truth in these official contexts, we can’t always rely on official documents to record their voices or wishes accurately – as demonstrated by the many obituaries of trans people that misgender their subjects.23

For John Sullivan, then, it was expedient to present the gender nonconformity of 8 June 1847 as a drunken ‘lark’: to choose the legal censure of theft over the moral censure of cross-dressing, which was associated with sexual deviance and thereby carried legal risks too.ii Just because it was expedient doesn’t mean that John’s account wasn’t true, of course – but it does call into question how much we can rely on it, and whether we can use it as a reason to definitively exclude John from our narratives of trans history.

The second problem with our existing criteria for inclusion in ‘trans history’ is that they privilege an incredibly narrow version of what it means to be trans. The trans histories we tend to tell are those that conform to the trans narrative that’s centred and recapitulated in contemporary media. The non-binary writer and activist Jacob Tobia, in their memoir Sissy: A Coming-Of-Gender Story, has brilliantly likened this narrative to the game Mad Lib: a story with a pre-written skeleton format, where the teller fills in the specifics from a limited list of options.24 The ‘Mad Lib’ trans narrative begins in childhood, with the trans person articulating their early, stable sense that they were ‘in the wrong body’, and conforming to stereotypes ‘opposite’ to those of the gender they were assigned at birth. After a long and traumatic struggle with themselves, they come out, medically transition to male or female, and live a conventional, gender-conforming and heterosexual life. While this is an accurate depiction of many trans people’s lives – and nothing about its dominance makes these trans people’s experiences any less valid or radical – it’s inaccurate, indeed inadequate, for many more. And as Tobia suggests, the dominance of this narrative perpetuates and reinforces the idea that it’s ‘the only trans narrative that cisgender people want to hear; the only trans story that cisgender people can comprehend’.

As a result, this narrative shapes contemporary trans stories, and all trans lives appear fundamentally similar. In order to get what we need – whether that be medical treatment, legal gender recognition, or social validation of our identities – we fit our stories around contemporary standards of coherence and validity. In doing so, we continue the cycle, perpetuating the idea that this is the only way to be trans.

For people today who are struggling with their gender, trying to work out whether social or medical transition is right for them, these narrow ideas of what it means to be trans can be genuinely harmful. They’re certainly the reason it took me so long to figure out my own gender; the few piecemeal images of transness I had access to as a child were heavily medicalised, all suggesting that being trans was something you did to change your body, not something you felt. I didn’t know it was possible for trans people to be anything other than straight, for them not to conform to gender stereotypes, or for them not to have ‘always known’ – in a kind of static, essentialised way – that they weren’t the gender they were assigned at birth. When I tried to articulate my feelings about my gender to friends and therapists, none of them recognised them as transness either. It wasn’t until I started volunteering for the charity York LGBT History Month in the autumn of 2014 – ostensibly as an enthusiastic LGBTQ+ ally looking for a way to engage the public with my PhD research on King Edward II’s sexual reputation, but really (as I soon realised) as a way of forcing myself to finally confront the reasons why I cared so fiercely about queer history and rights – that I was able to truly get to grips with new ways of thinking about gender, and to realise where I fitted in. Nobody on the York LGBT History Month committee asked me to explain what I was doing there, but my involvement with them turned out to be the push I needed to explain it to myself.

But this difficult process – giving myself permission to finally take my feelings seriously, to present myself differently, and to ask for the name and pronouns that made me happy – turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. It was explaining it to everybody else that really revealed the perniciousness of the narrow trans narrative constructed by contemporary media. Friends and family alike contrasted being non-binary with being ‘properly trans’, some saying they were glad I wasn’t the latter. A member of the HR department where I worked asked derisively whether ‘genderqueer’, the word I used to describe myself, was ‘an official term’ (a question that, grimly hilarious in retrospect, suggests a belief in a literal ‘gender police’ who legislate over what trans people are and aren’t allowed to call ourselves). When I corrected one man I knew after he used my old name, he was surprised, asking, ‘Do you always correct people?’ – as if being non-binary meant my commitment to my gender was temporary or half-hearted. By the time I got to an NHS gender identity clinic, twelve months after my referral – a wait that was one of the worst times in my life, but which is far exceeded by most of today’s inhumane waiting lists – I was prepared: I was going to tell them a version of the truth that stuck to the ‘Mad Lib’ trans narrative as closely as possible. As a white middle-class person, it was going to be far easier for me to have my gender taken seriously than it would be for many others – but I still wasn’t going to risk them denying me the treatment I needed because my gender didn’t fit the mould.25

The narrow trans narrative we see emphasised in contemporary media, then, makes life harder for people who experience their transness in a way that’s not binary, stereotyped or stable. And this narrative also makes it difficult to tell histories that fully reflect the messy reality of trans life today.

Jacob Tobia describes the standard trans narrative as ‘classical’ – and the way it operates with regard to history is in fact comparable to the ‘classics’ of literature.26 It determines which stories constitute the ‘canon’ of trans history: which stories get retold and reread while others languish in the dusty corners of second-hand bookshops or are confined to specialist university courses. The canon has – like the literary canon more generally – no space for people of colour, especially not for those whose experience of gender is culturally specific. It has no space for the history of gender fluidity: for people whose genders change throughout their lives, or are different in different contexts.27 It has no space for the history of playful or creative approaches to gender: for people who experiment with different forms of gender expression or nonconformity. It has no space for the histories of people whose gender is ambiguous or messy. It has no space for people who feel like some or all of the factors that determine their gender come from outside themselves, rather than inside. It has no space for the histories of people who can’t articulate their gender clearly, or resist the imperative to do so.

Often, what this means is that our narratives of trans history are recent, avoiding challenges of terminology or evidence; binary, including only those trans people whose identities are male or female; stereotyped, limited to those who live and present in a way that conforms to contemporary social expectations about that gender identity; and medicalised, restricted to those who have accessed medical transition wherever possible. And perhaps most damagingly, it also often means that our trans histories are white. In fact, our contemporary idea of what it means to be trans has itself been shaped by those well-known trans people, like Christine Jorgensen, who were able to conform to ideals of white femininity or masculinity.28 More broadly, the impact of colonialist ideology on the way white historians write about history – and the impact of racism on whose history books get read – has led to a widespread failure to acknowledge the histories of people of colour whose experience of gender can’t be contained within a modern Western binary.

Thinking about gender critically and expansively is a central and necessary part of any anti-racist project. This point isn’t just relevant to history; challenging Western constructs of gender in the present day is essential to challenging racism. To deny the reality of any genders beyond male and female is also to deny the reality of many genders that white people in Western Europe and the USA aren’t socialised to recognise, many of whose histories I tell in this book. Importantly, while white non-binary people might feel a sense of kinship or recognition with these genders, they’re not the same as being non-binary or trans in a Western sense. White non-binary people often seize upon the existence of these genders to prove the validity of our own: tokenising, instrumentalising and romanticising them, often without really taking the time to understand them on their own terms.29 This is a problem: when white people use the genders of people of colour in this way, it recapitulates a colonialist dynamic of exploitation. The desire to name and categorise people according to Western metrics reflects and re-enacts a similar colonialist impulse.30 I’ve tried hard to avoid this dynamic when writing this book: it’s why (as you’ll see) I’ve continually emphasised the cultural specificity of gender, and the way we can’t separate it out from factors like sexuality, spirituality and fashion, which work together to make gender what it is. It’s also why I’ve continually emphasised the violent impact of Western colonialism on many of the people whose histories I’m telling here.

Black feminists like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, B Camminga, Emi Koyama and many others have long emphasised that the way we experience and understand gender is inextricable from race.31 In its simplest terms, this is one of the points that the anti-slavery activist Sojourner Truth made as long ago as 1851, emphasising that white women were treated as if they needed to ‘be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere’ – but ‘Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?’32 Relatedly, many trans people of colour whose genders aren’t binary have emphasised that their experience of gender is inextricable from their cultures: as Carrier First Nations two-spirited researcheriii Michelle Cameron has described, the inter-tribal term Two-Spirit (used by Native American/First Nations people to describe a variety of culturally specific gendered experiences that are neither male nor female) ‘is a reclaimed term designed by Aboriginals to define our unique cultural context, histories, and legacy’.33 And as I mentioned earlier, the trans people whose genders are taken most seriously – and those whose construction of their trans identities came to define the terms in which others could articulate their own – have tended to be those who can perform the norms of white femininity or white masculinity most effectively.34 This means that, even among trans people who do fit comfortably into the ‘classical’ narrative of male/female identity and medical transition, trans people of colour remain marginalised and must struggle harder to have their genders respected and validated. When combined with systemic racism and misogyny, this means that trans women of colour – especially Black trans women – are at devastatingly high risk of violence.

In 1977, the Combahee River Collective of Black lesbians issued a statement critiquing the way white feminism privileged gender – often understood as essentialised in a way that excluded trans women – as the most fundamental axis of oppression around which political organising should take place.35 ‘We know,’ they asserted, ‘that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual.’36 Similar ideas have been expressed by queer indigenous writers: as Cameron explains, the term Two-Spirit/Two-Spirited ‘was chosen to emphasize our difference in our experiences of multiple, interlocking oppressions as queer Aboriginal people’.37 The Collective’s work paved the way for Kimberlé Crenshaw’s later articulation of the concept of intersectionality, and it has also been a key driving force behind the opposition of Black feminists to the trans-exclusionary factions of white feminism. As Emi Koyama has put it succinctly, to argue that trans women should be excluded from women’s spaces ‘because their experiences are different would have to assume that all other women’s experiences are the same, and this is a racist assumption.’38 To fail to consider race as one factor that co-constitutes gender, then, is to homogenise people of all genders, erasing both the experiences of people of colour and their intellectual and activist contributions, most importantly those of Black feminism.

This has important implications for how we think about trans history. Many cultures throughout history (including those I mentioned above) have had genders that aren’t male or female because they’re inherently spiritual, because they’re linked to sexuality, or because they’re partly about a person’s social role. Contemporary Western ideas would tell us that these genders are less ‘real’ than others, or too complicated to fit under a trans umbrella. This book is full of genders like this: to ignore them is to prop up the racist idea that having genders that aren’t male or female, or approaching gender disruptively and creatively, is something only modern people and/or white people do.

Stories of trans history can also support our anti-racist work in the present day because they reveal the racist origins of our contemporary ideas about sex and gender. In particular, the idea that sex is dimorphic – that there are two types of sexed body, and that they’re clearly delineated – has a racist history.39 As nineteenth-century scientists developed racist taxonomies of human beings, grouping people into the racial categories we’ve inherited today, they also developed theories about sexual dimorphism. For these scientists, sexual dimorphism was one of the things that divided people into different races: white people’s bodies were the most ‘perfectly’ divided into male and female, while people of colour had fewer differences between the sexes.40 We can see the legacy of these racist ideas everywhere today: they’re behind the association of Black women with masculine-coded anger, and the feminisation of Asian men. Knowing the history of our contemporary ideas about sexual dimorphism can help us both to challenge these racist ideologies, and to dismantle transphobic arguments that there are ‘only two genders’ – or that our ideas about sex are based on neutral ‘biology’.41

In the process of researching this book, I’ve wrestled a lot with the question of what exactly makes me – a white writer using the stories of people of colour – different from the colonisers whose actions I’m condemning here. One way I’ve tried to address this is by making visible the many forms of racism that led to these stories being insufficiently known in the first place.42 Another is by emphasising that trans liberation and anti-racism are inextricable struggles, and commitment to the former must necessitate commitment to the latter; in the words of Leslie Feinberg, who showed that trans history can pave the way for the liberation of all marginalised people in a manifesto I can only hope to emulate here, ‘we should aspire… to be the best fighters against each other’s oppression, and in doing so, build links of solidarity and trust that will forge an invincible movement against all forms of injustice and inequality.’43 Another is by doing my best to platform the voices of trans people of colour working within and outside the discipline of history; I hope people will read the notes and take my reading recommendations seriously. Not everyone will think this is enough; I’m not sure I think it is myself. But right now, one flawed step towards making these histories resonate more loudly – along with the anti-racist politics they demand – feels, cautiously, like a step worth taking. This, right now, feels like the best way of using the platform I’ve been given. To paraphrase the non-binary storyteller Ivan Coyote, it’s still so rare for trans people to get the microphone that, when we do, it’s often difficult to shake the feeling that we’re being handed it on behalf of every trans person alive.44 I hope fervently that I won’t be the last trans person given the opportunity to talk about what our history can be, and I hope this book might play a part in creating the conditions where that’s more likely and more possible.

How did we end up with historical narratives that represent such a narrow slice of trans life? How did we reach a point where so many of our trans histories erase people whose experience of gender hasn’t been binary or stereotyped, who haven’t transitioned medically, and/or whose gender can’t be accurately described in modern Western terms?

One of the reasons is that historical methodology – the way we’re accustomed to doing and thinking about history academically – tends to demand a much higher standard of evidence to ‘prove’ that someone in the past can be called trans than it does to ‘prove’ that they can be called cis. Because trans people are a minority, we’re seen as an aberration from the norm: our society treats cisgender-ness as the default, or ‘unmarked’, state of all human beings. (This is compounded for anyone whose body is seen as non-normative: in white Western culture, this includes not only trans people but also intersex people, disabled people and people of colour.) This pervasive cisnormativity means that the cis perspective is – just like the male perspective, as Simone de Beauvoir argued – positioned as objective truth.45 This means historians tend to interpret people from the past as, effectively, cis until proven otherwise. Though we might not admit it (or even realise it consciously), this approach also enables historians to avoid the horror of (gasp) accidentally mislabelling a straight, cis person from the past as queer.46 And if, as a result, we mislabel a queer or trans person as straight or cis… well, funnily enough, that doesn’t cause as much anxiety. Our sense of what we need to be cautious about has been insidiously shaped by homophobia and transphobia.

Relatedly, trans people who write about our own history are – like many other marginalised groups – often accused of bias. To anyone who accuses me of rereading the past from a perspective that’s biased towards finding trans history, I would say: you’re absolutely right! But I would also say that I’m no less objective than any other historian. Because we live in a society that sees cis people as the default, the majority of histories are biased against finding trans history even when they try not to be. But funnily enough, it tends to only be marginalised groups who are accused of lacking objectivity.47 While I’m keen not to constrain the possibilities of the past by fixing historical people in modern categories, I’m equally keen for us to remember that ‘cis man’ and ‘cis woman’ are modern categories as well. Making space for trans possibility, then, is no less objective than any other kinds of history: in fact, in many cases it might be more so.

Objectivity aside, though, I also want to make the case for the value of a trans gaze in historical research. The curator Margaret Middleton and the literary scholar Lindsey Row-Heyveld have both argued that we should acknowledge and value the expertise of marginalised people in recognising people who are like us in the past: as Middleton brilliantly puts it, this means valuing ‘queer experience as expertise and gaydar as epistemology’.48 Simply put, trans people can pick up on hints and signals in the historical record that others might overlook. This community recognition also provides an ethical alternative to subjecting historical figures to the same kind of diagnostic process that both disabled people and trans people have to go through in the present day to prove our ‘realness’.49

This is a further problem in the way we currently do historical research: in the present day, our structures for validating trans experience are all built around testimony. Trans people access medical treatment through our testimony; and any attempt to convince the general public to support trans rights includes a personal narrative, a story of what it feels like to be trans that attempts to win sympathy by ‘humanising’ us. For the majority of trans writers, the most common genre in which we can get our voices heard is the memoir.50 The problem with this emphasis on testimony is not just that it demands trans people cede our right to privacy, exposing our vulnerabilities in order to prove that we deserve basic human rights: it’s that it creates an expectation of testimony. Without testimony, a trans narrative seems incomplete, inconclusive, invalid. And when we look at historical records and can’t find that testimony – often because we’re looking at periods when far fewer people had access to literacy and the means to publish, and many ordinary people’s private records of their experience have been lost – we conclude that we can’t find any trans people, because our standard of evidence hasn’t been reached.

The other reason that our contemporary narratives of trans history are so limited is that political debates over trans rights, and pervasive media transphobia, are actually shaping trans people’s very sense of our history.

On 27 November 2017, The Times published an article by Scottish writer and sociologist Stuart Waiton with the headline ‘Transgender fetish is a truly shameful modern invention’. Responding to a moral panic about access to healthcare and gender recognition for young trans people, set against the backdrop of misinformation about the UK government’s consultation on reforms to the Gender Recognition Act 2004, Waiton claimed that trans identities were ‘the endpoint of our culture of narcissism’: devoid of external sources of liberation and inspiration, twenty-first-century children and adults had turned to their own bodies as the last available site of experimentation.iv This was a product of modern society, he argued: the idea that anyone had felt like this in the past was a ‘total fantasy’. More than that, the idea of being trans was ‘profoundly conservative’: people were being encouraged to transition to fulfil gender stereotypes, to make sure that only girls liked ‘all things pink and frilly’, and only boys were into ‘football and fighting’.51

Many contemporary arguments, of which Waiton’s represents only the tip of the iceberg, focus on the supposed newness of trans identities. We’re described by columnists as a ‘fad’; commentators (and in some cases, psychiatrists) fret that young peoplev are coming out as trans ‘because it’s cool’.52 Some anti-trans campaigners have taken these connotations of newness to their logical extreme, denying all possibility of trans history on the basis of our supposed absence from ‘the historical record’ and arguing that to even suggest our historical existence is ‘anachronistic’.53 Underlying these claims is a sense that historicity provides legitimacy: that the newfangledness of trans identities means policymakers and the general public do not need to, indeed should not, take them seriously. Presenting trans identities as a ‘modern invention’ also enables transphobic campaigners to frame us as a new and growing threat: something that has come out of nowhere to threaten an existing way of life, and against which women and children – groups positioned, often without their say, as vulnerable victims in this hastily constructed fight – must be protected at all costs. Like other campaigns over LGBTQ+ rights – in which the nebulous but powerful concept of ‘tradition’ is frequently weaponised – the battle for trans rights today is being fought on the battlegrounds of history.

It might be expected that this would lead to a resurgence of trans histories: that trans campaigners would fight these arguments by highlighting as many stories from our past as we could, and using those stories to emphasise how diverse (and very often non-stereotypical) trans people have always been. But the problem – and the root cause, I think, of the narrow historical narratives I described earlier – is that anti-trans campaigners are not simply arguing, ‘Trans people are new’. Instead, they’re arguing, ‘Trans people are new, and that means they’re not real’. And by coupling our historicity with our realness, they’ve managed to tap into one of the most profound anxieties of trans communities today.

In January 2015, I screwed up enough courage to attend my local trans group for the first time. The people there were wonderful and welcoming, embracing my new name and pronouns with generosity and kindness – but I was convinced I didn’t fit. Every one of them seemed so effortlessly at ease with their trans identities: so secure in their knowledge that this was how they were supposed to be. I knew that not living as female made me happy in a way I hadn’t known was possible, but that didn’t feel like enough. ‘How do you know this is real?’ asked a persistent voice in my head. ‘What if you just think you’re trans because it makes you feel special? What if you’ve just been talking to too many trans people on the internet? What if you’ve convinced yourself this is right, but you’re wrong?’

Eventually, I managed to ask the question. ‘Did anyone else here… when you first came out, did you have problems believing yourself?’

Every single person in the room raised their hand.

As trans people, the ways we navigate the world and claim our rights are all oriented around proving our realness: demonstrating that our genders are real and should be treated as such. We have to prove we’re real enough to be referred to with the correct pronouns; to be given the medical care we want; to be given legal rights and access to gendered spaces. Our society asks us to reassert our validity again and again. Anti-trans campaigners claim we’re not real: that our genders are constructed and synthetic rather than ‘natural’, and that to acknowledge their validity – in particular, the femaleness of trans women – is to be asked to participate in a ‘post-truth’ world or engage in Orwellian doublethink.54 The experience of being misgendered chips away at our internal sense of security in the realness of our identities.55 Even our defenders speak in these terms, implying that asserting our realness is the most effective way to remind people that we deserve human rights: ‘Trans women are real women’; ‘Non-binary people are valid’.

In this context, it’s not surprising that we question ourselves. Nor is it surprising that we fight our opponents on the terms they’ve set. When we assert the realness of our identities, we’re not just trying to convince anti-trans campaigners that we deserve rights: in many cases, I think, we’re also trying to reassure ourselves that our genders are real, in the face of a world that continually tries to undermine them.

It’s never clear what ‘realness’ really means, but there’s a vague, unspoken community consensus over the things that might be considered to trouble it. They’re all the messy things that our ‘classical’ trans narrative prefers to leave out: fluidity, non-binary identities, play, external motivations, ambiguity. When you’re faced with a political landscape that says ‘you’re not real’ – and when you’re working in an exhausting, hostile political environment characterised by orchestrated online pile-ons and immediate Twitter amplification of out-of-context statements, which leaves no room for nuance – the overwhelming temptation is to avoid mentioning these messy aspects of trans experience altogether: to stay ‘on-message’, which, in Jacob Tobia’s words, ‘generally means catering to the least common denominator, watering down your community’s story’.56

Make no mistake: clearly, this emphasis on our realness has considerable political value. It helps us to target many of the most pernicious transphobic arguments. It supports the growing consensus that we were ‘born this way’, which handily means we can’t be morally blamed for being trans, or persuaded not to be.57 And it has personal value too: it feels reassuring, solid, stable. But if we take these contemporary standards of realness anywhere outside our immediate cultural and historical context, they start to crumble. This means that when we come to research history, if we bring those standards of realness along with us, we can’t get very far at all.

One key reason that these standards of realness aren’t useful for looking outside our immediate cultural and historical context is because of the way they rely on asserting our deep, internal sense of gender. In order to prove our realness, we emphasise how strongly we feel ourselves to be male, female or non-binary on the inside. We draw a clear distinction between this internal gender identity and external factors like gender expression or gender roles. This internal/external distinction is essential to representing how we understand ourselves, and it’s essential to combating arguments like those of Stuart Waiton, which see trans people as motivated by a desire to conform to gender stereotypes in our external appearance and behaviour. But the problem is that this internal/external distinction doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. For one thing, not everyone (in the past or in the present) understands themselves as having a core, stable internal self that remains the same at all times: there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that this understanding of selfhood is culturally specific and, in Western Europe and the USA, dates back only to the late eighteenth century.58 For another, people can have multiple motivations at once: a person in the past who was assigned female at birth and presented as male for a term in the army might well have been motivated both by a desire to overcome patriarchal assumptions about women’s roles and by the affirmation they drew from being seen as male, and might well have struggled to separate the two (I’d challenge anyone today to separate out the internal and external motivations for the way they present themselves). For another, external gender expression can impact or reshape the way we feel inside, whether temporarily or permanently. And for another, even if someone’s motivations for disrupting gender are completely external, their history still demonstrates the viability of moving – whether for an hour or a lifetime – away from the gender we were assigned at birth, providing a powerfully liberating precedent for all of us.

What can we, as trans people or as historians, do about this? Instead of continuing the exhausting fight to prove our realness in the past and the present, I think it’s time we changed the terms of the conversation. If we start to treat our standards of ‘realness’ critically, we can open up space for so many more new ways to relate to gender, in both the past and the present. We can both widen the scope of trans history and enable people of every gender to live more freely and expansively. Being ‘really’ a man, a woman, a non-binary person or any other gender isn’t incompatible with fluidity, situationality, ambiguity or creativity. And those of us who experience our genders in this way have a longer history than we might previously have thought possible.

Because of this, the way I use the word ‘trans’ in this book is deliberately expansive. Importantly, expanding trans history isn’t the same as rewriting it. While in a sense everybody who writes a history book is rewriting history, in another sense it’s not possible to rewrite the past: it happened, and nothing can change it. What is possible – and what I want to do here – is to reread the past.59 Unlike historians a few decades ago – or even a few years ago – we now live in a society that equips us with the tools to realise that gender isn’t simple, binary, stable, or inextricably linked to the body. These tools enable us to see things in the past that were always there, but which haven’t been apparent to us until now.

What this doesn’t mean is ‘reclaiming’ people from the past as part of trans history. That language of ‘reclaiming’ is used a lot, both by trans activists and by anti-trans activists – and every time I see it, I can’t help but feel like this capitalist language of ownership is part of the problem, part of the system we’re trying to dismantle.60 As trans historian and literary critic Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski pointed out to me when I brought this up during an online discussion, thinking in this capitalist way also leads us to see historical representation as a scarce resource we need to fight over, rather than as something we can expand, reshape and share.61 Instead, I want to propose that we use the language of community. In real life, we don’t own or claim the members of our communities; we certainly don’t forbid them to be members of multiple communities at once. Instead, we make space for them: we support, validate and celebrate their presence in our community. We open our arms and shift things around to make them feel welcome. We’re unlikely to share every aspect of our experience with every member of our community, but we have enough in common to create solidarity.62 We might find that we benefit from the support of different communities, even communities that might seem at odds to some: one person might feel at home among both trans men and lesbians, for example, or among both non-binary people and women. And if we keep our communities expansive and welcoming, and continue to insist that they’re not mutually exclusive, everybody’s communities are richer. This is how, I hope, the histories in this book will enrich multiple present-day communities too. Expanding the scope of trans history doesn’t mean erasing the history of others: with any story, but especially with stories this messy, emotional connection to the past isn’t a zero-sum game.

Like Susan Stryker – who points out that we can use ‘trans’ as a verb as well as an adjective – I want to take the word ‘trans’ back to its roots, which reflect a sense of movement between places.63 Many, if not most, of the individuals whose stories I tell in this book can’t be uncomplicatedly described as ‘trans people’ – whether that’s because they lived long before the term ‘trans’ was coined, or because their experience of their gender was specific to a culture that doesn’t (or didn’t) use it, in which case the imposition of a white, Western gendered paradigm would be an act of colonial violence.64 But the history in this book is trans history nonetheless. It’s history that shows us the moveability of gender. It’s history that shows us that – notwithstanding the outraged claims of anti-trans commentators today – what constitutes a man, a woman, or gender itself has continually been defined, contested and redefined. It’s the history of people who’ve troubled the relationship between our bodies and how we live; people who’ve taken creative, critical approaches to gender binaries; people who’ve approached gender disruptively or messily. Before our current moment, before we were trans, these people showed us that gender was ours to play with, ours to challenge, ours to change.

We don’t know whether John Sullivan ever wore a gown again, in England or Australia. We don’t know what John felt while walking down the street, drunk, on the night of Monday 8 June 1847; and we don’t know whether ‘These clothes are mine’ was an excuse for theft, or something John genuinely felt. Perhaps John was female, or neither male nor female, for those minutes; perhaps John was male, but expressing femininity; perhaps John redefined masculinity to include the wearing of dresses. Each one of those possibilities tells us a new story about the history of gender, and provides us with a new promise about the way gender can be. Each one of the stories in the pages that follow does the same.

¹

Footnotes

i This looks odd to modern eyes, as we’re used to using words like ‘transfeminine’ to describe people who have transitioned to living as female or feminine – but Browne used ‘transfeminated’ to mean the opposite.

ii I’ll talk more about this in Chapter 3.

iii Cameron uses ‘two-spirited’ instead of ‘Two-Spirit’ to describe herself and others. In general, though, I’ve chosen to use the latter, which is more common and is the term officially adopted at the 1990 Native American/First Nations Gay and Lesbian Conference in Winnipeg (see Chapter 6).

iv Waiton’s views may seem extreme, or a product of a specific political climate a few years ago – but sadly, they’re still not atypical in contemporary media. For more on how this situation developed, see Pearce et al., ‘TERF Wars’; Faye, The Transgender Issue.

v Relatedly, the UK’s most prominent campaign group positioned against the rights of trans children is called – tellingly – ‘Transgender Trend’.