#kit heyam

[forislynx]

[…] if we write about histories where the categories of trans and intersex overlap, but just treat them as trans history without explicitly mentioning the word "intersex", we not only erase intersex history: we appropriate it.

Kit Heyam, Before We Were Trans : A New History of Gender

[albertserra]

Before We Were Trans by Kit Heyam

[queereads-bracket]

Queer Nonfiction Books Bracket: Round 1A

Choose a book:

Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Kit Heyam

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, edited by Helena Whitbread

Voting ended onMay 30

Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:

Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Kit Heyam

Endorsement from submitter: "A very fascinating book about historical examples of gender nonconformity and trans identities that reframes how we think about and discuss the idea of “transness” throughout time and space. This book speaks about queer history while addressing the complexities of cultural, social, economic, spiritual, and political context. It tells specific stories of individuals who fall under the category of trans history while also delving into groups or trends of gender identities beyond the binary."

Today’s narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people’s lives.

Before We Were Trans  illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance. Before We Were Trans  transports us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century  Angola, from Edo Japan to early America, and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures. 

Nonfiction, history

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, edited by Helena Whitbread

Endorsement from submitter: "inspiration for the show 'gentleman jack', the real diaries of a 19th century lesbian who lived her life radically!"

Anne Lister defied the role of womanhood seen in the novels of Jane Austen: she was bold, fiercely independent, a landowner, industrialist, traveler, and a lesbian. She kept extensive diaries of her life and loves, written partly in code. Made up of Greek letters mingled with other symbols of her own devising, Anne referred to the code as her "crypthand," and the use of it allowed her the freedom to describe her intimate life in great detail. Her diaries have been edited by Helena Whitbread, who spent years decoding and transcribing them.

Nonfiction, diary, memoir

[transbookoftheday]

Before We Were Trans by Kit Heyam

Across the world today, people of all ages are doing fascinating, creative, messy things with gender. These people have a rich history - but one that is often left behind by narratives of trans lives that focus on people with stable, binary, uncomplicated gender identities. As a result, these stories tend to be recent, binary, stereotyped, medicalised and white.

Before We Were Trans is a new and different story of gender, that seeks not to be comprehensive or definitive, but - by blending culture, feminism and politics - to widen the scope of what we think of as trans history by telling the stories of people across the globe whose experience of gender has been transgressive, or not characterised by stability or binary categories.

Transporting us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to North America, the stories this book tells leave questions and resist conclusions. They are fraught with ambiguity, and defy modern Western terminology and categories - not least the category of ‘trans’ itself. But telling them provides a history that reflects the richness of modern trans reality more closely than any previously written.

[wrenthedevil]

My commonplace book notes for Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Kit Heyam

[gatheringbones]

[“In a 2019 tweet (since deleted), Twitter user Brooke wrote of ‘carving “trans” into every bone of my body so when they find my skeleton in two hundred years they don’t get too confused’. A reply parodied the response of an oblivious archaeologist: ‘We must be careful not to jump to conclusions about what these ancient carvings could have meant; This individual could have had a passion for mass transit, transcontinental travel, or a combination of poor spelling and a love of trance music’.

Every time I read jokes like this, I get a jolt of hurt and defensiveness: not all historians and academics are like that! I try so hard, every day, not to do the kind of history they’re talking about! And yet I can hardly blame these people for talking and writing the way they do. The fact is that the discipline of history is set up to erase queer lives, and particularly trans lives. We are expected to adhere to double standards of evidence, which encourage us to state with impunity that a historical figure was definitely cis, but to hedge with caveats the suggestion that they were maybe, possibly trans; to use phrases like ‘cross-dresser’ or ‘impersonator’ as if they’re neutral, and to write lengthy defences of ourselves if we decide to avoid them; to expect backlash from colleagues and reviewers if we choose to use any pronouns for a historical figure other than those associated with the gender they were assigned at birth; to say, like the caricatured archaeologist above, ‘We must be careful not to jump to conclusions’, even when the evidence for trans experience is actually abundantly conclusive. It hurts when people memeify the oblivious, transphobic ‘historian’, but it’s also not unfair of them to do it. History, while it may not perpetuate physical harm, still repeatedly enacts violence against trans lives in the past and the present. And it’s not the job of the communities we’ve hurt to give us the benefit of the doubt: it’s our job to convince them that historians can be different.

In this book, I’ve identified new ways, and new places, to look for trans history. I’ve argued for the presence of trans experience in histories of gender-nonconforming fashion; histories of gender-nonconforming performance; and histories of people taking on a social role that isn’t associated with the gender they were assigned at birth. I’ve shown that many trans histories are inextricable from histories of other experiences: the sexual, the intersex, the anti-patriarchal, the spiritual. I’ve argued both for acknowledging trans possibility in histories of widespread gender nonconformity that have previously been explained in other ways, and for understanding gendered histories on their own terms – including seeing them, where necessary, as both trans history and the history of other kinds of people and experiences.

In this last kind of history in particular, I’ve often been confronted by what writer and philosopher Hil Malatino (quoting fellow scholar Abram J. Lewis) calls the ‘irreducible alterity’ of people in the past: the fact that some histories of gender are not possible to map onto or relate to the way people experience gender today. Malatino characterises the acknowledgement of this ‘irreducible alterity’ as a form of care for those past people, an idea that speaks deeply to me. It struck me, when I first read it, how different this framing of ‘care’ was from the arguments historians more commonly make against describing people in the past as trans: that it is presentist, that it is anachronistic, that it inappropriately fixes past people in modern categories. These arguments have rarely seemed to me to come from a place of care for people in the past; instead their priority seems to be history or historiographical methodology as an abstract, faux-objective entity. Still more rarely do they seem to acknowledge the concurrent urgency of caring for people in the present: the people who are living now, experiencing and articulating their gender in manifold ways and drawing strength from the histories of people who have done the same. Might it not be possible to find ways of recognising the essential difference of people in the past – people who disrupted gender before we were trans – while simultaneously holding space for the feelings of identification with them held by people in the present, the people who are trans now?”]

kit heyam, from before we were trans: a new history of gender, 2022

[snapbookreviews]

I did @makingqueerhistory 's 2025 queer book bingo and came damn close to a full board clear, with one unfilled and one partially filled.

The Making Queer History 2025 Book Bingo

[creepingmonsterism]

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.'

Kit Heyam, Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender

Let's get transfeminated