I’m not a historian. I’m not an expert in trans history, though I find it fascinating. I myself have a lot to learn on the topic, but one thing I DO know is that there have always been trans people. Trans is just something you are, like gay or bi or cis, or blonde or brown-eyed or left-handed.
And there’s nothing in the world now that could suddenly make people transgender that didn’t exist before, same as with gay people. Nothing MAKES you gay or straight or trans or bi or cis, it’s just how you are and who you are.
But I’ve encountered cis people who just don’t know that, or have never thought about it, and if I’m here to help people understand (and I absolutely am), then this is something I’ve got to talk about because it’s information a lot of people are lacking.
As I am not an expert historian, this means I am going to quote and link you to a lot of other people who’ve done the work in uncovering and talking about trans people in history. I’ve done the work in collecting their evidence and articles, and now you must do the work of reading to understand. But it’s good work! I wouldn’t lie to you. 😌
So how do we spot trans people in history? Especially when the rules for understanding history were written by cis people, who didn’t know how to spot transness, or didn’t want to spot transness, or actively hid transness? I’m so glad you asked!
Because do I ever have the answers for you.
I actually got into an argument with a cis historian about this very topic, and how trans people have been so erased from history that it’s vital for us to look back and find examples that we’ve always existed. And she was ADAMANT that you could not do so, because it would be disrespectful to the person in question since they couldn’t call themselves “trans”.
But that doesn’t make them any less trans! The earliest humans didn’t have the word to call themselves “humans,” but that doesn’t mean they weren’t… humans.
Looking back to find trans people in history is about RESPECTING them in the ways their cultures and societies of the time perhaps refused to do.
Let’s hear what some trans and nonbinary history experts have to say on the topic, who I’ve quoted with permission.
I had this exchange with history teacher Loukas Christodoulou:
Me: would you say there’s a divide among cis historians over this? because I’ve spoken with some cis historians who told me unequivocally they could NEVER say someone from the past would be described as transgender today, even while then saying they would describe them as someone whose gender didn’t align with that assigned at birth (which is the literal definition of transgender).
and of course the methodology and whatnot historians use was established by cishet white men (in the US and Europe, anyway), who often didn’t know how to spot transness, weren’t looking for it, were actively hiding it, or thought it was a mental illness and likened it to not diagnosing people from history with mental illnesses because we can’t talk to them to be sure. but trans is an identity, not an illness, and it seems to be we have a duty to try to find our legacy
Loukas: Yes, that attitude you describe is very familiar to me. Partly it stems from historical methodology, but even more it comes from how the establishment of what is ‘real’ is political and under debate. For example, 100 years ago military historians debated whether battle trauma was ‘real’ or whether it would be wrong to read the ‘modern’ phenomenon of shell shock into Roman times. Nowadays all historians accept trauma as a universal human experience and it’s no longer controversial.
also the local political environment will influence what is acceptable to research and to say. I can imagine that school and other public historians in Florida and Hungary would have a hard time publishing material on trans experiences in history, even if that research is based on prestigious journals in England or Massachusetts, because they would face hate and even prosecution.
I had this exchange with historian Sandra Bosley (who has a history blog at https://reliconthelethe.blogspot.com/)
Sandra: We would generally try not to “put words into someone’s mouth” without a lot of really careful research. It’s much harder to verify the internal feelings and longings of past figures, especially if they left no documented proof of their inner life. It’s much the same caution good psychologists have about diagnosing past historic figures with mental illnesses – you can draw conclusions from actions and statements, but you can’t do any diagnostic tests on them now.
Me: But transness is different, as it’s an identity and not an illness. And given so much of our society, including the methodology of how we look back and interpret history, was established by cishet white men… many of whom didn’t care about transness, wouldn’t have known how to spot it, or actively worked to cover it up, and who might also have seen transness as a mental illness (as that’s how the medical community errantly treated it for so long)… do you feel that plays a part in some cis historian’s complete inability or disinterest in naming clear signs of transness in history?
Sandra: I do think that may be part of it. Any time I’ve seen older accounts by our white male historian predecessors, it’s almost always lacking any kind of nuance or interpretation of statements that may have been made by the subject. It’s usually treated as a medical/social curiosity (and the older the source, the worse the dismissiveness). Some of it is also prudishness of the times. I do mostly Victorian era research these days, and while it was almost expected for two spinster ladies to live together, any hint of lesbianism was purged. The number of times I’ve come across “they were just good friends” [emphasis is mine] and the like is amusingly high. It’s usually only more recent researchers who can get to letters and whatnot that were essentially censored and show they had much more affection for each other. I would not be surprised if much supporting evidence there may have been for anything scandalous about a person was deliberately destroyed or obfuscated.
There is, in fact, a complete reticence in cis historians to call trans people trans.
There’s a fairly big project I’m working on about a figure from history not previously thought of as trans, and if you follow my social media you know exactly who I’m talking about. But the research ended up going so much deeper than I thought, so I’m still in the middle of that and will be for a while.
But as part of it, I read up a little on queer people in Victorian times, and I found a book all about that! LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives by Simon Joyce.
And then I read this… in the INTRODUCTION, on PAGE FIVE:
“In describing historical figures in this book, I have used my best judgment about which terms are most suited to which person, in part to sidestep what are often political or interpretive arguments that masquerade as being simply about historical realities. I discuss some of these arguments in the chapters that follow, particularly about when and in what circumstances it is appropriate to apply a label such as “lesbian” to nineteenth-century people and about whether the existence of transgender individuals pre-existed twentieth-century technologies enabling gender-confirmation surgery.”
I then hurled the book into the sun.
Because this is just perpetuating TRANSMEDICALISM. And like, how many times do I have to yell this:
IT IS NOT MEDICAL PROCEDURES OR INTERVENTIONS THAT MAKE YOU TRANS!
Those are just things to address being trans and make life better for you!
To even debate if trans people EXISTED before the advent of gender confirmation surgeries?!
What the country-fried fuck.
See the trans tuesday on TRANSMEDICALISM (and WPATH version 1) to learn how everything about that could not BE more wrong.
YES, it’s fine, nay, in fact REQUIRED, to label trans people in history as trans.
From the book Others of My Kind: Transatlantic Transgender Histories, and the chapter Historicizing Transgender Terminology, its trans historian authors have this to say about labeling transness in history:
…from the beginning, the category “transgender” represented a resistance to medicalization, to pathologization, and to the many mechanisms whereby the administrative state and its associated medico-legal-psychiatric institutions sought to contain and delimit the socially disruptive potentials of sex/gender atypicality, incongruence, and nonnormativity.- For precisely these reasons, we chose to use the words “transgender” or “trans” (fairly interchangeably) whenever we are discussing the experiences of transgender people from a point of historical remove. These are our words to describe their experience, though we believe that they are respectful and appropriate.
RESPECTFUL and APPROPRIATE. Look what happens when trans people are talked to and involved with OUR history. Imagine cis historians thinking that wasn’t something they needed to do. My rage could power the sun.
Here’s some excerpts from an article from The American Historical Association about this very topic:
In Transgender History, Stryker uses transgender to “refer to people who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth.” Even though the term only emerged in the mid-20th century, many scholars find this definition useful and methodologically liberating. Emily Skidmore (Texas Tech Univ.), author of the recently published True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (2017), says, “Even though the term transgender is modern, people have moved from one gender to another for a very long time. And transgender history looks at that movement.”
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Historians must grapple with the so-called medical model, which assumes that transgender expression requires bodily intervention, through surgery or hormones, for example. Bayker encourages historians to push trans history back into the more distant past, especially before the development of modern medical technology. This, he says, can help us think about “what it was like for people to change their identities without changing their bodies.” “The transgender experience isn’t only about medical intervention,” he emphasizes.
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Some scholars acknowledge that trans history and trans studies have met with some backlash. The AHA’s 2015 LGBTQ Task Force report includes the experience of a historian who said they faced rejection from a blind reviewer of a US history journal who called their “work in applying trans studies to US history a ‘manifesto’ rather than scholarship.” In another, more public instance, in 2017 several trans scholars called for a boycott of WMST-L, a popular women’s studies online discussion group, after moderators failed to intervene in discussions that insisted on biological reproduction as an essential marker of what it means to be a woman.
Are you getting what we’re up against? Why are trans people looking for those like us in history treated as a “manifesto” with a secret agenda and not simply seeking the truth that was overlooked?
In Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern, a chapter written by Dr. Gabrielle Bychowski specifically about naming a trans woman from history whose transness was erased, includes this excerpt:
Most scholarship is, effectively, cisgender scholarship, not only because it is mostly cisgender scholars who have claimed the education and tools to publish it but also because most scholarship assumes the cisgender status of any character or historical figure who is presented to readers. Some have called this prejudice cissexism because it represents the privileging of cisgender perspectives and identities; institutional cissexism, in turn, has made it easier for cisgender scholars to claim and maintain greater academic authority than trans scholars. As a result, the arrival of transgender scholars—especially in fields such as medieval studies—marks a late-arriving turn in the field.
Simultaneously, because of the compulsory cisgender assignment of history and historical figures… historical people… have already been coded by cisgender norms. As a result, trans readings do not immediately spring to mind as the primary readings, which—if you look critically…—is nothing short of astonishing. Nonetheless, cisgender readings of texts and histories have been dominant for so long they are treated as neutral. This can make it difficult for trans readings to enter academic discourse, because transgender studies can be seen as offering modern additions to long-established traditions within cisgender histories and studies. Trans studies is seen as an act of remaking or rewriting history. Neither the text nor the person was necessarily cisgender until cisgender scribes, scholars, and readers marked them as such.
For the final word on spotting and naming trans people in history, I’m going to share with you some excerpts from Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Dr. Kit Heyam, which is a wonderful book you should absolutely check out.
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?
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…
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 firsthand testimony, saying that they wanted to be recognised as the gender they lived in.
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.
It has no space for the histories of people who can’t articulate their gender clearly, or resist the imperative to do.
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… – positioned as objective truth. This means historians tend to interpret people from the past
as, effectively, cis until proven otherwise.
Given everything I’ve collected and laid out for you above, hopefully you see the urgent, vital need for trans people to look through history and find ourselves, to respect those who came before in ways the world didn’t, and still doesn’t. To sing the song of their truth that they never got to sing.
Next week, we’re going to do just that, and look at a whole bunch of examples of trans people in history. Don’t miss it.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com