Trans-forming history

A global trans history stands as testimony to the gender nonconformity of our past

In response to the West-prophesised understanding of gender, in conferences, on the streets, and in the pride parades, queer people can be found yelling that the “future is nonbinary”. No matter how true, this expression assumes that queer futures never borrowed from histories, as if the past was strictly binary.

Queer trans writer, academic, trainer, and heritage practitioner, Kit Heyam’s latest book Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender enlightens us with a global trans history that stands as testimony to the gender nonconformity of our past instead of the binary rigidity that the world has come to increasingly accept.

In this engaging, accessible, and neatly structured book, Heyam breaks away from the all-knowing approach several academics, historiographers, and ethnographers tend to take in strictly going by the material evidence, ignoring the scope for any other possibility. But Heyam is also mindful of their position as a white person documenting trans erasure — particularly of the Native, Black, Aboriginals, Indigenous, and non-white people.

The book consists of six chapters and an elaborate introduction, author’s note, and epilogue. All chapters are uniquely titled: They quote verbatim from the testimony of queer people (when tried either by society or the law) and/or commentary that summarises the chapter; the theme that the chapter explores appears as a subtitle.

Beginning with the story of a 22-year-old John Sullivan who was wearing “a bonnet, a gown, a silk apron, a pair of trousers and a pair of women’s boots” and was tried in 1847 on the grounds of theft, Heyam poses a question to readers: “Is this story part of trans history” At this point, your curiosity is heightened, and bias is exposed when the writer concludes that most of us wouldn’t think of it as that because “we look for histories that can fit into contemporary Western ideas of what it means to be trans.”

This argument is plausible because if one notices clarion calls such as “trans women are real women” and “non-binary people are valid”, it wouldn’t take much to understand that queer people are using language to “fight our opponents on the terms they’ve set.” Through this, Heyam, I believe, first wants us to employ an expansive understanding of the usage of the word “trans”. The book takes “one flawed step towards making these histories resonate more loudly — along with the anti-racist politics they demand” because only “a trans gaze is what allows us to look at a case of historical gender nonconformity and remain open to the full spectrum of possibilities it represents” without begging for validation.

With each story or historical account, Heyam is offering a nuanced understanding of the past. For example, in the first chapter on Njinga Mbande, whose “gender became an issue” after seizing the throne of the Kingdom of Ndongo (present-day Angola), Heyam concludes how “throughout history and across the world, people like Njinga have occupied social roles coded or associated with genders different from the ones they were assigned at birth” and that “it’s impossible to tell with any certainty where the social roles ends and the gender begins” in such accounts. It’s particularly interesting that Njinga is celebrated as “Queen” in the region, while the evidence of gender-nonconformity is abundant, if not irrefutable.

Heyam also explains the legal case that, according to Zoë Playdon, author of The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes: The Transgender Trial that Threatened to Upend the British Establishment (Bloomsbury, 2021), could have easily changed the direction of trans rights movements across the world. Heyam treats stories of Ṭuways (Islamic singers), who “presented themselves in a feminine way: painting their hands with henna, styling their hair, wearing jewellery and feminine clothes” and shudõ literature with as much empathy and academic rigour as other accounts that would be more culturally accessible to the writer.

Heyam’s exquisite research helps unravel several findings. For example, in the chapter on the “all-male environment” in prisoner-of-war (PoW) camps, Heyam informs us that the German sexual reformer Magnus Hirschfeld wanted to establish “that relationships between men could lead to greater feats of military bravery”, evidencing the findings in the diary of the British PoW officer Dr Arthur Munk. In another chapter, several theatre performers discovered their newfound gender identities by playing “impersonators”. Not all the impersonators were seen that way, though. Heyman notes how “Leonard Sillman described ‘female impersonator’ T.C. Jones as not an ‘impersonator’ at all, but ‘simply an extraordinarily talented woman’,” concluding that the plays of the time allowed “opportunities for trans actors to express themselves”.

Though I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, I feel that Heyam’s chapter on understanding and exploring the spiritual side of sex and gender, evoking hijras of India, is weak. Granted Heyam’s understanding of South Asian literature and politics is sound, but in using mythology as an entry point to discuss trans-ness in India, the writer largely succumbs to the West’s fetishisation of Indian concepts of spirituality. The country is far more complex. For instance, a Kashmiri trans person will be seen as a matchmaker and a north Indian hijra may be dispense badhai, (blessings)  which Heyam incorrectly translates as “alms”.

What Heyam gets right is the celebration of trans histories. The biggest takeaway of the book is that histories must be approached with a contextual understanding of the “cultural specificity of gender”. This is something researchers must bear in mind because a “lot of the evidence we have for gender-nonconforming lives comes from legal and medical contexts”. So much is lost, not because of untranslatability but because of the languages and contexts embedded in the western school of gender.

The reviewer is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. Instagram/Twitter: @writerly_life.

Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender

Author: Kit Heyam

Publisher: Basic Books (Hachette)

Pages: 343

Price: 999