Trans 101

TRANS HISTORY 2 (examples of trans people from history)

Welcome to #TransTuesday! August is Trans History Month, and this week our topic TRANS HISTORY 2: EXAMPLES OF TRANS PEOPLE IN HISTORY.

You’ll first want to start with TRANS HISTORY 1 (how and why we name trans people in history), from last week. It’s especially important because it talks about how vital it is to name trans people in history when we see them, and how our transness has been so often erased. We’re going to talk about some key examples of that erasure in a moment.

Let’s first look at why there seems to be “so many more” trans people now than at any previous point in history. There are two main reasons.

One: as our knowledge and understanding of what it means to be transgender increases, more people will realize that they are trans. I’ve mentioned many times how I didn’t even really know trans was a thing you could BE until well into my adulthood.

How on earth could I have known I was transgender when I’d never so much as heard the word before? Or known there were people like me, trans people, who already existed? Yet that didn’t change the knowledge I had deep down that I was not a boy and was in fact a girl.

This is part of what abhorrent things like “Don’t Say Gay” bills and the banning of queer books  are trying to do. If fascists suppress knowledge of our existence, then fewer people know or learn about us, and fewer people can thus identify with us and understand they may be trans too.

But that won’t make trans kids any less trans. My own not knowing I could be transgender did not make me any less trans. It just forced me to live in a broken world, saddled with the pain and misery of dysphoria, thinking there was no way out.

See the trans tuesday on GENDER DYSPHORIA if you missed it, and learn how horrible it was for me to live with it.

And if you’re thinking what an oppressive, painful, impossible-to-live-through scenario that might be, you’re absolutely correct. That’s why accepting trans kids when they tell you who they really are is so vital when EIGHTY-TWO PERCENT of trans people have considered suicide, and forty percent have attempted it. The numbers are even more dire for trans kids, where EIGHTY-SIX percent of them have considered it, and fifty-six percent, OVER HALF, have attempted it.

And it’s not being trans that makes them suicidal, it’s being forced to live a lie and not being supported in being who they truly are that does it. It’s literal torture.

Two: as acceptance of transgender people being just another way for a person to be grows, more people feel like they can come out publicly as trans. And I feel like I need to put “acceptance” in quotes, especially given the current climate.

Again, if you’re wondering if part of the ONSLAUGHT of legislation trying to squash trans people out of existence plays into this, you’re absolutely right. 

If bigotry against us is accepted, and in many parts of society it is (even in “liberal” places!), more trans people will be scared to come out. Look at the trans tuesday on TRANS RAGE 2 – CIS APATHY.

Time and again we see evidence that trans people are a group it’s “okay” to discriminate against. Even in good ol’ “liberal Hollywood” you can be an active bigoted transphobe and get rewarded for it.

The fascists came for us and cis people, as a group, did not care. Still don’t! Bigotry against us is accepted. The collective cis population doesn’t show up for us, doesn’t care that our bodily autonomy is being taken away. 

Look at people like Dave Chapelle and Ricky Gervais and JK Rowling, making money off of punching down and adding to the oppression and bigotry against us, and THEY KEEP GETTING MORE WORK.

ALL of this adds to making some trans people feel like it’s too painful, too difficult, too risky to come out. And despite all of this, this is still (SOMEHOW??) the most accepting that our society has ever been to trans people.

Well, there might have been a time in the 2010s, when knowledge and acceptance was growing, and before we became fascist Republicans’ latest target, where it felt safer. And so our numbers seemed to rise, and now we see the target on our back growing.

My favorite example of this is this lovely chart of the percentage of the population, over time, that is left-handed.

Being left-handed is just like being trans or cis or gay or straight. We have no control over it, it’s just how we are. So what happened between 1910 and 1960 to make so many more people become left-handed?

As you know nothing makes people BECOME left-handed. But being left-handed was discriminated against and thought to be “evil” (ring any bells?) for a long time in history.

Once the general population realized how utterly wrong that was, MORE PEOPLE CAME OUT AS LEFT-HANDED ONCE IT WAS SAFE TO DO SO. 

WHO’D HAVE THUNK???

But being trans, due to our society or personal reasons, is also something that can take some people a long time to figure out. Coupled with both of the instances above is why estimates of how much of the population is trans are likely SEVERELY undercounted.

Present US census data puts us at 1-2% of the population. But that’s only the people out as trans or who know they’re trans, and also feel safe reporting that information on census data. When you account for all the above barriers to our existence and coming out, it’s going to be much higher (which seems to be happening with Gen Z, and how many of them say they are not cisgender). If I had to guess, I’d probably put the total trans and nonbinary part of the population at around 10%, but we’re never going to truly know that number without a fully trans-accepting society.

So due to lack of knowledge/terminology, and lack of acceptance (both societal and self-acceptance), spotting trans people in history isn’t always cut and dry. Sometimes we have to infer things from context clues. 

Did you know that one of the reasons we don’t have a lot of knowledge of trans people in the past, or the reason people in the past didn’t have the terminology, is because information about us was routinely destroyed, suppressed, or outright intentionally misinterpreted?

Magnus Hirschfeld had one of the largest and most extensive collections of books and information and research on trans people. He ran a clinic and helped trans women transition. In Germany pre-WWII! 

And guess (oh can you guess?) what one of the nazis’ earliest targets was? Do you UNDERSTAND that the rising transphobia and violence in the US from fascists is history repeating itself?

Queer and trans people were targeted and forced into concentration camps by the nazis and are often forgotten about (or intentionally left out of the discussion) entirely.

Good thing the Allies freed everyone who was still alive in the camps! Except did you know THEY DIDN’T? THEY LEFT LGBTQIA PEOPLE IN THE CAMPS AND FREED EVERYONE ELSE. How horrified does that make you?

At the end of the war, when the concentration camps were finally liberated, virtually all of the prisoners were released except those who wore the pink triangle. Many of those with a pink triangle on their pocket were put back in prison and their nightmare continued.

And there’s been active erasure of trans people in the camps, with them being reported falsely as members of their gender assigned at birth. “Earlier histories tended to misgender trans women, labeling them as men. This is odd given that when you read the records of their police interrogations, they are often remarkably clear about their gender identity, even though they were not helping their cases at all by doing so.”

Did you know that? Are you appalled that even the “good guys” aren’t on our side? Are you starting to get the truth of the situation? Welcome to the club. Here’s a good thread for you about the willful ignoring or hiding of trans people in history.

In spite of all that’s stacked against us, trans people have still always existed. Always persisted. So let’s look at some examples of trans people in history. Again, for many we have to use context clues, but you’ll see it’s pretty clear when you pay attention.

Further touching on the topic of the erasure of trans people from history, which I talked about extensively last week as an issue that plagues historians, here’s a prime example with one of my favorite trans people in history, Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d’Éon de Beaumont. She’s a trans woman who used brilliance and trickery to get transphobic society to declare her legally a woman by making everyone think she was AFAB and a trans man! GENIUS. A hero. We stan a queen.

And if you want another example of how despite all of that evidence people will go out of their way to say she wasn’t actually a trans woman, look at this excerpt from a book about her, “Monsieur d’Eon Is a Woman” by Gary Kates, from the preface to the Johns Hopkins Paperback Edition. (Alina Boyden gets credit for introducing me to this prime example of shit gone wrong).

The Chevalier d’Eon changed my own ideas about gender. I never thought it possible for an eighteenth-century person to alter the fundamental ways that I view gender roles and gender theory. But he did. I don’t mean that I cross-dress today or live as a woman, but I certainly admire those who do, such as the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey. Before d’Eon, I was a feminist in the sense that I hoped the avenues to power, wealth, and independence once monopolized by men could be extended to women. I married a physician and applauded myself that I was liberal enough to allow her to act like a man. But d’Eon was not a feminist in this sense. He did not simply think that the opportunities accorded to men should be extended to women. He believed that men should live as women.

At first, I thought that d’Eon must have been Europe’s first transsexual, the victim of a disorder that certain psychiatrists label gender dysphoria. I assumed that today he would have been a prime candidate for sex reassignment surgery. Indeed, since the 1920s communities of transsexuals and transvestites have thought of d’Eon as their patron saint. However, several conversations with a psychiatrist who had worked in a gender identity clinic convinced me that d’Eon was not sick. He did not hate himself. He did not hate his body. He did not think that he was trapped in the wrong body. But if d’Eon was not a transsexual, then, well, what was he? Of course, my book argues that d’Eon came to a cognitive decision that it was best for him to live life as a woman. And obviously, as a historian, I became convinced of this argument through reading the archival records that remain today in Paris, London, Tonnerre, and especially at the University of Leeds. 

Who says you get to decide??? She didn’t seem “sick enough?” What the fuck! That’s SUCH a transmedicalist view. You don’t have to have gender dysphoria to be trans!! Read up on TRANSMEDICALISM (and WPATH version 1) for more on that.

Check out this passage, still from the preface:

As I grew up in the same 1950s Los Angeles as Virginia Prince, l was aware that I could become Catholic, or even French, that I could take on various roles, identities, sexual orientations, and occupations, but it was clear that I must never seem like a woman. Gay was fine, but woman was THE OTHER. That which I was not. I figured that folks who moved across gender boundaries were sick.

D’Eon’s autobiographical memoirs and essays, filtered through experiences such as the interview with Virginia Prince, taught me that my own upbringing had been narrow and prejudiced insofar as it never gave me the opportunity to express myself as a woman. That such a statement feels bizarre and comical to express makes it no less true. The Chevalier taught me—a late-twentieth-century man—that my refusal to consider womanhood is a bigotry, my hangup. However liberal I think I am, whatever kind of 1970s feminist I think I have become, the story of this man’s chutzpah makes me aware of what is possible for all men.

One of the most important decisions I made writing my book was using the pronoun he for d’Eon, which continually reminds readers of d’Eon’s anatomy, ignoring linguistically his self-fashioning. I would never refer to Virginia Prince as a “he,” and indeed, neither would anyone else who respects members of the transgendered community. But writing about d’Eon is different. Here I felt that I was speaking as a man to other imagined male readers about the choices that were in front of all of us.

Look at this cis dude, patting himself on the back for being so open-minded while ignoring what trans people tell him, so sure that he knows better! Look at him choosing to ignore d’Eon’s pronouns because HE felt that d’Eon had a penis and thus had to be a man, and he wanted to CLAIM WHAT D’EON DID FOR CIS MEN! Claim being trans for cis men? Without calling yourself trans? Like, just… what the actual hell! 

Whether through ignorance or malicious intent, Gary Kates chose to erase d’Eon’s transness from history. This is what we’re up against. What we have to work to undo. And so let’s get to work undoing.

If we’re talking about trans people in history, we absolutely have to mention Marsha P. Johnson (1945-1992), an activist who was at Stonewall and was forever leading the charge for queer rights. I hope you’re already familiar with her. She’s an icon, and utterly vital.

One famous example you’ve heard of and probably had no idea was trans… the author of Little Women, Lou Alcott (1832-1888). Despite not having the terminology to identify as transgender at the time, look at this evidence and try and tell me Lou was not transgender.

Here’s Mark and David Ferrow, two trans brothers in the 1930s who had the support of their parents (it seems like a miracle when this happens TODAY, that it happened in the 30s? Extraordinary!) and transitioned in their teens.

There’s the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray (1910-1985), a priest, an activist, a non-binary/gender fluid/potentially intersex icon. Again, as they did not have the terminology, we cannot be exactly sure how they would identify today, or what pronouns they would use, but it’s very clear they weren’t cisgender.

Here’s Lucy Hicks Anderson (1886-1954), a trans woman who was a philanthropist and activist and ran a bordello! She was cooler than I’ll ever be.

Here’s Roberta Cowell (1918-2011), a trans woman race car driver and fighter pilot! Also so much cooler than I will ever be.

Here’s Wendy Carlos (b. 1939), the film composer who did the scores to A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Tron! She also worked with Weird Al! (okay, every trans person in history is cooler than I’ll ever be, I gotta step up my game).

Here’s a paper called, The Trans Middle Ages: Incorporating Transgender and Intersex Studies into the History of Medieval Sexuality.

Did you know there’s compelling evidence that Kurt Cobain was trans? Check out this article about it.

Here’s an article, with a lot of lovely photos, about Casa Susanna, a secret house of trans women in the 1960s. There’s also a documentary about it!

How about an article about Dr. Alan L. Hart (1890-1962), a trans man who saved so many lives because he pioneered detecting tuberculosis with x-rays, all while the world was repeatedly unkind to him.

Even Buzzfeed, of all places, has done an article on trans people in history.

Okay, these are all still fairly recent, I hear you (annoyingly) saying. Can you go back further? Sure! Here’s a lovely article about trans people in the old west!

You may have even heard the big news about Roman emperor Elagabalus (204-222) being a trans woman!

Here’s a thread about Anastasios, a trans man monk in the sixth century, whose gender was affirmed after his death.

Here’s a video about Scythian transgender priestesses from thousands of years ago who may have used urine from pregnant mares, which is high in estrogen, for hormone replacement therapy for trans women! This is what old estrogen pills for HRT were also made from, and why it was called Premarin… PREgnant MARe urINe.

You can read about Sumerian goddess Inanna, who regularly had transgender priestesses back in at least 4000 BC, if not even earlier (Inanna was also known for turning men into women, we love a transgender-affirming goddess).

Here’s a book all about nonbinary folks in history! The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance.

I want to close with another of my favorites, medieval French philosopher Kalonymus ben Kalonymus (1286-1328).

Credit to Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg for first bringing Kalonymus to my attention (this is the second time I’ve mentioned the Rabbi in a trans tuesday, and she’s cis! This is peak allyship.).

This translation of her poem touched me so deeply. It moved me. I can feel that pain. I KNOW that pain. I hope you’ve read everything I’ve linked to, but absolutely you MUST read this.

That is the agony, the despair, the longing of gender dysphoria. How can ANYONE read that and not say Kalonymus ben Kalonymus, living IN THE TWELVE HUNDREDS, was anything other than a transgender woman?

The only way is if you’re actively trying to suppress the knowledge that we have indeed always existed, and being trans is just a normal part of life and the way some people happen to be.

This list is not exhaustive! There’s so, so many more. But hopefully this gets you started on looking for more examples on your own, and when you find them, share them with the world. We need to know, trans and cis alike.

All you have to do is pay attention. 

WE’VE ALWAYS BEEN HERE AND ALWAYS WILL BE.

This is who we are.

Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com

ADDENDUM 12/4/24

Look at this excerpt from Glossographia, or, A dictionary interpreting all such hard words of whatsoever language now used in our refined English tongue with etymologies, definitions and historical observations on the same. It was published in SIXTEEN SIXTY-ONE. You can read a digitized version of it here.

ADDENDUM 12/11/24

Here’s a lengthy examination of the life of a trans woman under nazi rule in Germany.

TRANS BODY HACKING

Welcome to #TransTuesday! Today’s topic can be described many different ways, but there’s one term I love a lot, because it’s the most inclusive and lets you know just how normal being trans is. So break out the science textbooks, we’re talking: TRANS BODY HACKING.

So what the heck is body hacking? It’s using science and medicine to change our bodies, in ways we need or desire. Pretty simple concept, right? And I bet you’re like HEY WAIT A SEC, CIS PEOPLE DO THAT TOO.

Uh… YEP!

Our bodies are OUR bodies, and until our present cyberpunk dystopia makes the leap to consciousness-transference, we’re stuck in them for life. But we can and SHOULD do what we need to in order to make our stay in these meat sacks as pleasant an experience as possible.

Literally ALL of you reading this have hacked your bodies before. Do you take medication to treat a disease or condition? Body hacking. Had a knee replaced? Body hacking. Taken ibuprofen for a headache? Had a drink to relax? BODY HACKING.

We use the tools at our disposal, via science and medicine, to make our bodies and minds function better or feel better. It’s amazing to think about! We change our bodies (or the way they work) to make ourselves happier and healthier! It saves lives!

It is, to me, immensely cool. And humans have always done it, going back forever to herbal remedies passed down from generation to generation, probably predating written history. It’s part of being human, it’s what all of medicine is founded on. It’s part of us.

All of which is to say the things trans people do to make ourselves at home in our own bodies is the exact same thing. And there are various ways this is done, but the most common and well known is probably HRT (hormone replacement therapy).

If you need more information on that, please see the past thread on HORMONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY (spoiler: it’s also about Patience, a key factor in transitioning).

As the super briefest of summations: HRT usually involves lowering or blocking one hormone (estrogen or testosterone), and adding or replacing it with the other. It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of it.

And a quick reminder: not all trans people are on HRT, or even want it. And some might not be able to be on it for medical reasons. And not everyone who is on HRT does ALL the HRT someone else might. That makes them no less trans. Okay? Okay.

I mention all of this now so you have something of a base to work from. But today the body hacking I’m talking about is EXERCISE.

“Hold up, Tills!” I hear you yell, “Double-you tee eff?”

Stick with me.

If you’re exercising simply to get in better shape, or for medical, emotional, or mental health reasons? If you’re exercising to feel better, or to change the way your body looks? You’re using science to HACK your BODY.

This is why I like BODY HACKING as a term, because it’s a big umbrella that covers a lot of things. TO BE EXTRA CLEAR: not all trans people need or want to or are able to exercise. And that’s fine! I’m not at all saying that anyone else has to do what I did.

Okay so why the hell am I talking about exercise? I strongly suspected I was transgender in 2015. It was a slow realization, and @susanlbridges was aware of it the entire time. But I was 99.5% sure.

For a reason I won’t get into here (if we’re friends and you really want to know, DM me and I’ll tell you), I knew that even if I WAS trans, I wouldn’t do anything about it until, very specifically, May of 2020. I know, right? What the hell? So weird.

But that meant I could really explore things at my own pace. In high school, I was on the track and cross country teams, talked into it by my best friend at the time who loved to run. WHAT A FOOL I WAS. Oh, the pain. I really hate running.

Around the same time I began to suspect my true identity, my doctor ordered a routine blood test. She looked at the results and was like “You should maybe do something about this, huh?” It wasn’t like I was in the danger zone or anything, but I was trending that way. Noticeably.

I’d done Couch to 5k like three times before, but never stuck with it after. I’d be too busy, it would fall by the wayside, and I’d have to start all over again. And I HATE running! But I didn’t want to actually GET into the danger zone, because Susan and our son need me.

And also I really like being alive. 🤷‍♀️

So I decided to make a very concerted effort to get back into exercising, and stick with it. But how to motivate myself to keep at it? Well, every week, if I went for all my runs, I allowed myself to go out to lunch and eat like I did in high school.

For all of those lunches, I stuck to places I knew, everything that was familiar. Imagine my surprise how that changed once my dysphoria lessened and dissipated years later, and I was suddenly not just open to entirely new experiences, but was CRAVING them.

For more on that, see the Trans Tuesday on FREEING UP MY BRAIN aka LUNCH WITH TILLY.

Anyway, those lunches helped. I also changed like half my diet, and found a way to do it without ever feeling deprived, but that’s ancillary. The point is that, being so very sure I was trans but knowing I couldn’t do anything about it for years…

I realized that part of my dysphoria at the time was that I had what I’d call the very definition of a dad bod. And if I was the lady I suspected I was (spoiler: I am!), THAT body was going to cause problems for me.

I want to clarify, again, that I do not think every trans person needs to change their body in ANY way. They can change as much or as little as they like or are able. It’s all about whatever is right for YOU. Same goes for every human!

But for ME, it meant getting as far away from dad bod as I could. And suddenly, running (which I still kinda hated) became not as awful. Because I was HACKING MY BODY, and that realization is where I consider my transition to have started… back in 2015.

It’s weird to be so happy to exercise, but to also hate so much of it. But it pushed me. It KEPT me going. I’ve run four 5ks a week for the past eight years. I’ve had to drop to two a week for present schedule reasons, but I crave getting back to four.

Over time I added in push-ups, and I’m doing hundreds of those multiple times a week. Not too far back I added in crunches and bicep curls. I’m more driven than I’ve ever been. And it’s made me kind of buff, and I DIG IT.

And it doesn’t make me feel more masculine at all, because I was never muscular when I pretended to be a man. Does that make sense? In this instance, it’s not about getting away from what society says a man is, but from the man society thought I was.

Besides, I’ve always found buff ladies AMAZING and now I get to BE ONE.

Me in a dress with a print of Superman S-shields (but the S is replaced with hearts) and a matching red hair band with a bow, flexing my left bicep).

Me flexing my left tricep.

My right bicep being flexed and looking the best it ever has, tbh.

A shadow of me cast on the ground, with a red arrow pointing to my left bicep’s shadow looking nice and big.

A shot of me from behind in a tank top with a lace back, which exposes my shoulders. I’m flexing to show my biceps and shoulder/back muscles.

Also a friend found a person selling pins on Etsy that seemed MADE for me and I had to get one. Like… I love my biceps, and it’s PINK and I LOVE pink, and I DO curls and also HAVE curls and I am a girl! 💜

White text that reads “Curls for girls” over a flexing bicep outlined in pink.

I know that I’m incredibly privileged that exercise worked that well for me, and that I was even able to do it. Everyone’s body is different and responds in different ways.

People can exercise as much as I do and not see any visual difference, and that sucks. But all I can do is tell you about my own experience.

Anyway, I then took it a step further. The first women’s clothes I EVER owned were my running clothes. I went to Target early one morning when nobody was there, went to the women’s activewear section, and bought a running hoodie for the winter.

I was SO nervous. I kept looking over my shoulder. There was literally nobody around, not even any employees, but I was sure there were ten thousand eyes and all store cameras pointed at me, wondering what that MAN was doing in the WOMEN’S section. Oh the anxiety.

They had a pink one! But I didn’t have the courage to get it. It felt like if I touched it, the ground would open up and swallow me whole. But there was a powder blue one, and the false dichotomy of our society usually associates that with men…

For more on THE FALSE DICHOTOMY and how it harms all of us, cis and trans alike, see its trans tuesday.

Okay so, listen, you can’t TELL it’s a women’s hoodie. But *I* knew. And when I wore it, I felt like I was FLYING. I couldn’t explain it at all at the time, but I can now. It was gender euphoria, and it was the first time I’d EVER experienced it in my entire life.

There’s a whole Trans Tuesday on GENDER EUPHORIA, if you’d like more information (especially because cis people can experience it too!).

As I’ve said so so many times, my go-to metaphor for GENDER DYSPHORIA is being held underwater and drowning, and nobody can see. It’s constant pain and pressure and agony for your entire life. There’s a whole Trans Tuesday on it.

So when even the tiniest amount of that got better, the pressure decreased and a weight lifted. Like I was rising to the surface, into the sky. FLYING. So much so I started thinking of this hoodie as my CAPE, it let me fly like a superhero and helped me become my true self.

Flying is also used to represent gender euphoria throughout the entire Matrix film franchise. I’m again gonna plug that I wrote twenty-four threads about the intentional trans allegories of those movies, and they got me a book deal. It’s out now! BEGIN TRANSMISSION: THE TRANS ALLEGORIES OF THE MATRIX.

So back in 2015, when spring rolled around I went back to Target and got a pair of women’s running shorts. I went back again the next winter and got a pair of women’s running tights, and then I found women’s running shoes that worked great for my feet and that actually fit me.

I was running in almost all women’s clothing and nobody knew but me (and Susan). And though it would be years before I could medically and socially begin my transition, running and exercise SAVED me.

Because they allowed me to start my transition without anyone in public knowing before I was ready to tell them. I HACKED my BODY, and got it closer to what I wanted it to be… closer to the true me.

All of us humans do it, in many different ways. Trans folks are just like cis folks in that way. We may do different things to hack our bodies, but we’re all still doing the same basic thing for the same basic reason: to feel better, to help ourselves live better lives.

Hack those bodies when you need to, friends.

Do what you need to live.

To be better.

To be YOU.

Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com

Me in my powder blue running hoodie, the first piece of women’s clothing I ever owned, bought back in 2015: my “cape” that let me fly.

TRANS HISTORY 1 (how and why we name trans people in history)

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.”

–

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. 

–

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

PART 2 is here!

SEXUALITY IS NOT GENDER

Welcome to #TransTuesday! Let’s dive into a complicated topic that a lot of trans people struggle with, myself included. We’re talking SEXUALITY IS NOT GENDER. Also – bows Bows BOWS! (they’re related, trust me)

me in a light blue unicorn and rainbow dress with a white iridescent bow in my hair

me in a sporty pink and gray top with a pink bow in my hair

me in a low cut black top with a large white bow in my hair

Many times I’ve said that understanding my own transness was like untying a giant knot, because it touched and affected so many areas of my life that making sense of it all involved trying to see all the ways in which aspects of my life intertwined.

And a BIG part of that knot was disentangling my sexuality from my gender, in ways that people who are cisgender and heterosexual probably never have to think about. Not that I’m saying coming to terms with being anything other than straight is always easy for cis people.

But the difficulty can be compounded when you’re trans, especially when you’re trans and are attracted to your own gender. In terms of my own sexuality, I’ve always been attracted to women (and nonbinary people). I’m a disaster lesbian through and through.

Guys have never done much for me (though Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge could always Get It). But I’ve always been able to say HEY that’s a good lookin’ guy. I can find men attractive and good looking, but I’m not attracted TO them, know what I mean?

And yes, I do feel toxic masculinity too often prohibits men from admitting things like that, which is pretty sad. This is one of the sad parts of “losing” the false cis straight man version of myself, because we need more men willing to break the cycle.

So if you’re a dude, hey, subvert and deny toxic masculinity every chance you get willya? Society needs a lot more of that. You deserve better! And the more of you that break out of that mindset, the more cis guys around you will be inspired to do the same.

This is how you change the world. Be vulnerable, be open, feel things. Be HUMAN.

In any case, here’s where my sexuality contributed to making things difficult. How can I see a woman and be attracted to her… but also just as badly want to BE her? I don’t know, but it certainly happened! And it’s something unique to trans people pre-transition.

For the longest time I thought that was just part of being attracted to someone (ahahaha PHEW). You mean not every guy who sees a pretty lady also wants to BE her? WHAT? ARE YOU SURE? No that can’t be right, because that would mean- well, here I am.

But which one was it? Was it just that I was attracted to them, or just wanted to be them? Well obviously the answer was both.

But I had no frame of reference for this. I grew up believing I was a boy, and I was “supposed” to be attracted to girls (ugh). Once I got older and thought about it more, I wasn’t sure if I was attracted to guys or not. For a while I thought maybe I was.

Turns out what I’m attracted to is “femininity” (I don’t think that’s the right word to use here, but words fail us a lot in these discussions). But that doesn’t mean only “high femme” or anything, because I can also be attracted to butch and androgynous ladies.

And it’s not that I don’t find it enjoyable to look at certain parts of a woman’s anatomy, but it’s not the parts you think. For me it’s always, always, ALWAYS been about faces. It’s what I love about all people most, and what I find most attractive about the people I’m attracted to.

In fact it’s what I most needed to change from transition, as my pre-transition face was a HUGE source of dysphoria for me. You can learn more about that in the trans tuesday on GENDER DYSPHORIA.

And in the trans tuesday on PHOTOS AND REFLECTIONS, and why they can be so tough for many trans people.

And so I find that I can be attracted to some men in drag, for example. Not all of them, but sometimes it happens. But never once does what’s between their legs or their secondary sex characteristics come into the equation whatsoever. I don’t really know how to parse that.

Is there a word for that? I’m not sure there is, I’m not sure I care, and I’m not sure if it matters. I’m attracted to faces and to people as a whole, and I could care less what body parts they have or don’t have. That’s not what makes a woman a woman or a man a man, is it? Nope.

You only believe that if you’re a reductive bigot. And for more on where that line of thinking came from, see the trans tuesday on TRANSMEDICALISM (and WPATH version 1).

And I’ll note here that in order to transition, you used to HAVE to be gay prior to transition and straight after, aka for me as a trans woman, I’d have had to been attracted to men, so that by transitioning I’d be a straight trans woman (who had to pass as cis!) so that I’d be upholding the compulsory cisgender heterosexuality of society. There was NO path for we transbians (or gay trans men) to medically transition just a few decades ago.

Now listen, it’s FINE if you’re attracted to or not attracted to certain body features. We like what we like. But the entire goal of feminism and gender equality is decoupling the idea of gender as being defined by genitalia. If you’re not willing to do that, that’s absolutely where you have to start.

But ohhhh goodness did it confuse me, a little kid who was told they were a boy and raised to be a boy and to believe nothing other than being straight existed.

Bee tee dubs, my mom kept teasing me about having a girlfriend any time I tried to make friends with a girl, or would ask if they were my girlfriend, even when I was little. And all I was trying to do at the time was learn about girls that I felt a deep connection to but didn’t know why.

The cishetero compulsory push is STRONG in our society, even as little little kids. “She’s gonna break a lot of boys’ hearts!” and “he’s going to make such a good husband someday” and on and on and like… what the actual heck. And it’s treated as normal!

For more on just how compulsory cisgender heterosexuality is in our society, and how it’s forced upon kids and reinforced at every turn, see the trans tuesday on GENDERED CHILDHOODS.

But if you said that about two little girls or two little boys, or if you actually WAITED for your kid to figure out their gender on their own first, people accuse you of “grooming.”. They can’t see that’s WHAT THEY ARE ALREADY DOING BY FORCING CISGENDER HETEROSEXUALITY ON KIDS. The cis binary matrix is insidious.

Anyway, here’s a pretty good example of how difficult this made things for me. For the entire time we’ve been married and knew each other before that, I’ve tried to get my wife Susan to wear bows in her hair.

Bows bows bows. I love ‘em. I think she looks great in them. I think most ladies do. Are you wearing a bow of any kind? I am over here admiring you and cheering you on forever.

You can see where this is going, right? Too bad I couldn’t.

*I* wanted to be the one wearing bows. But I couldn’t identify that for a long time. Susan humored me because she’s a saint, but they were never really her thing. Which is fine!

But my own desire to be on the outside who I was on the inside got mixed up with the things I like to see in people I’m attracted to. And after I began transition Susan… just gave me all of her bows, which honestly I suppose she’d just been holding for me all this time (in fact you can see one of them in the last photo posted above, the big white one).

Which is not to say I get attracted to myself (ew) when I have makeup on and a bow in my hair or anything. I like to wear bows, but I also still dig seeing them on ladies I’m attracted to and even ladies I’m not attracted to, so… good luck analyzing that, I guess.

For more on how THE SIGNS WERE ALWAYS THERE (that we’re trans), see the trans tuesday on the topic wherein I completely embarrass myself to the entire world.

And for more on how discovering my own childhood red bow (seen in the first photo in this essay) is perhaps my most treasured possession, see the trans tuesday on THE PAST (and why it haunts us).

How much of my desire to wear bows and enjoyment of seeing other ladies with them was wrapped up in being told for my entire life that I could not wear them because they were not For Me? Was it just rebellion against sexist societal standards?

If so, how’d that get wrapped up into who I’m attracted to, and who I am, and wanted to be? I don’t have any good answers here. Sexuality and gender are complicated, and this definitely doesn’t make them any less so.

The bottom line here is so much of discovering I’m transgender was wrestling with things like this for YEARS and trying to make sense of it.

When you compound even this one difficult issue with every other aspect that’s just as difficult to untangle (if not even more so) maybe you can see why it took me so long to figure it out. You have to try to undo all the damage society has done to you leading up to that point.

I’m envious of the trans people who figure it out as kids, or earlier than I did. Not just because they get to live more of their lives as themselves (if they have a supportive family or environment), but I think it’s likely easier to figure out without as many years of societal programming to undo.

For more on the insidious ways that societal programming affects all of us (yes, ALL of us), see the trans tuesday on IMPLICIT QUEERPHOBIA.

And then see its even more evil sister, INTERNALIZED TRANSPHOBIA.

What I do know is that you can be cis and straight or gay or bi or pan or ace or more. And you can be trans and straight or gay or bi or pan or ace or more. Or you can be agender or nonbinary or anything else and straight or gay or bi or pan or ace or more.

Sexuality and gender are connected, but entirely different. They’re in the same general neighborhood, but have different addresses. Separate and distinct, but just a short walk away.

And the distance between is filled with the width and breadth of every beautiful thing humans can be. I finally found my spot as a lady who’s attracted to ladies. I hope you’re able to find your spot too, wherever that may be.

Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com