https://www.autostraddle.com/gender-nonconformity-has-always-existed/
"Being a young trans person is a weird experience. It’s wrought with pain and
sadness too, sure. But it’s also just incredibly bizarre. In the late 90s and
early 00s, we obviously didn’t have Twitter or Instagram or TikTok to find
resources to help us explain to ourselves and other people who we were. Trans
activist and historian Kit Heyam notes in their new book
Before We Were Trans:
A New History of Gender that the terms “trans,” “transexual,” and
“transgender” have been in use since the early and mid-twentieth century, but
when I was 12, all I had were the “ladies” of
Too Wong Foo, Thanks For
Everything, Julie Newmar, and that scene where Roberta binds her chest in
Now
& Then. These weren’t and aren’t representations of trans people, but they
were the first people I saw do something different with gender than I had ever
seen before. If you were curious enough or maybe lucky enough, you might be
able to find some information on queer people’s lives beyond some of the
authors you might encounter in your high school English classes, but it was
much, much more difficult to find information on people whose assigned sex and
their gender identity didn’t match.
While it has certainly gotten easier to find information on trans lives
throughout history now, as Heyam points out in their book, gender nonconforming
people are often still left out of the story: “The narrow trans narrative we
see emphasized in contemporary media…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.”
In an attempt to help begin solving this problem, Heyam’s book does, in fact,
present us with a new history of gender nonconformity and show us the ways in
which gender disruption is often written out of history both purposely and
through the academy’s myopic understanding of the ways people interact with
gender and sexuality. In addition to that, Heyam also presents a new way of
thinking about trans history in general, where even people whose gender
disruption was not simply an act of how they felt inside but an act that was
necessary for their social positions are included."
Via Janet Logan.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
