Have We Always Been Here?

Doing Trans History in the Distant Past

A common rallying cry of the contemporary movement for transgender rights states that “we have always been here.” The desire to claim a long trans past is an understandable one: many political and legal arguments against trans rights rest on the premise that trans people are somehow new and unprecedented. As an example, in Justice Samuel Alito’s dissenting opinion to Bostock v. Clayton County—a 2020 Supreme Court case which extended Title VII employment protections to cover gender identity and sexual orientation—he argued that “it defies belief” that the discrimination protections of the Civil Rights Act would have been thought to extend to “a concept that was essentially unknown to the public at that time,” that concept being trans identity.¹ It is clear that the question of whether or not there were trans people in the distant past is not merely one of historical curiosity, but of political importance.

It should not come as a surprise, then, that this question was first asked and answered outside of the profession of history, and in fact the academy as a whole. Early work in queer and trans history was undertaken by activists, and in large part followed this desire to find and recuperate queer and trans subjects in the distant past.² This style is epitomized in the work of transgender activist and butch communist Leslie Feinberg, whose attempts at historicizing trans identity claim anyone from transsexual celebrity Christine Jorgensen to Joan of Arc to Native American Two-Spirit peoples under the transgender umbrella.³

However, as queer and trans studies became increasingly institutionalized within academia, approaches like Feinberg’s have fallen out of favor. It has become unfashionable to claim historical subjects existing before the development of trans terminology⁴ as trans, in large part due to the force within queer studies of Michel Foucault’s argument that the homosexual did not exist until the very idea of him was constructed by medicine and the emerging sexological science around the turn of the twentieth century.⁵ While scholars have since taken issue with elements of Foucault’s argument—an early and significant example being George Chauncey’s demonstration of the fact that many queer understandings of identity in the early twentieth century were developed by the gay community, largely ignoring the favored scientific terminology of the period⁶—the notion that it is inaccurate to project period-specific conceptions of identity into periods with different conceptions of identity has remained strong.

With that said, how can we reconcile the political task of legitimizing trans identity and arguments for trans rights with this scholarly imperative against anachronism? Are the political stakes so high that we should set aside historiographical squabbles, or is the danger of mislabeling historical subjects so pressing that we dampen our political commitments? Do we have to choose one side or the other? In what follows, I will look at the various ways that scholars have approached these questions up until the present.⁷

Past and Present(ism)

Queer theorist Jack Halberstam offers an approach to the study of cross-sex gender expression in nineteenth-century America within his 1998 book Female Masculinity. Halberstam notes the tension I described above between activist and professional historians, whereby historical queer identities are “either universal or completely bound by and to their historical moment,” and proposes that “the challenge for new queer history has been, and remains, to produce methodologies sensitive to historical change but influenced by current theoretical preoccupations.” Unlike earlier approaches, he is less interested here in affirming a long history of trans identity than he is with theorizing “female masculinity,” and this difference in approach is reflected in the method he proposes, which he calls perverse presentism.⁸ Taking as his subject “masculine women” who were attracted to women before the twentieth century, Halberstam challenges the ways that earlier queer histories had read these figures unproblematically as lesbians, or at least their identities as “proto-lesbianism awaiting a coming community,” a reading that he claims is so preoccupied with present-day conceptions of lesbianism that it overlooks various distinctive features of these figures' identities—crucially, their masculinity.⁹ His proposed intervention is a “perversely presentist model of historical analysis,” a model that “avoids the trap of simply projecting contemporary understandings back in time, but one that can apply insights from the present to conundrums of the past.” While he is arguing for a form of presentism, this presentism does not mean seeing same-sex-attracted women in all periods as lesbians, but interpreting their gender expressions with a “present-day intuition about the construction of masculinity.”¹⁰ Using this framework to analyze “female husbands,” or individuals sexed as female who nonetheless played the social role of husband, he takes to task scholars who collapsed these husbands’ “masculine identification as merely a stand-in for a properly female desire for women,” demonstrating how certain presentist approaches fail to see and take seriously these individuals’ masculinity.¹¹ It is notable that Halberstam refers to female husbands as women and addresses them using she pronouns, which stands in stark contrast to the ways later historians would interpret these figures.

Halberstam’s cautious optimism about retaining a form of presentism was not unique, but it was far from universal, especially among historians. The range of historians’ viewpoints on this subject can be seen in a 2014 issue of the journal Early American Studies titled “Beyond the Binaries in Early America.” In Rachel Hope Cleves’ introduction, she points out that recent transgender histories and historiographies—in particular Joanne Meyerowitz’s How Sex Changed, Susan Stryker’s Transgender History, and Genny Beemyn’s “A Presence in the Past”—presented an “abbreviated heritage” of sex and gender diversity, as each of the authors were “responsibly constrained” by the recency of trans terminology which prevented them from “reaching too far backward.” To circumvent these limitations for a study of gender diversity in Early America, Cleves proposes a “beyond the binary” approach. While she notes that the phrase “beyond the binary,” with its connotations of non-binary identity, can seem even more recent than the development of trans terminology, it benefits from being “descriptive rather than nominal.” In other words, its lack of fixity to a specific historical identity makes it a useful analytic for probing identities beyond the sex and gender binaries in the distant past.¹² A similar approach would be employed by Clare Sears in their 2015 book Arresting Dress, which used the verb “trans-ing” rather than the noun “trans” as doing so “brings together a range of cross-gender phenomena that are rarely considered alongside one another.”¹³

The contributors to this issue explore what is revealed by a “beyond the binary” approach in a number of different contexts, and in doing so they come to a variety of conclusions about the relationship between the past and present. In Greta LaFleur’s “Sex and ‘Unsex’,” they consider the possibility of historical similarities between past and present ways of understanding gender while being careful to see “similarities as distinct from continuities.”¹⁴ This essay does not proffer its own argument about the nature of gender in the past, but rather it highlights that for about a decade prior to the article’s publication, numerous scholars have argued that “gender, in eighteenth-century England and North America, was probably understood very similarly to the way that we understand it now: as flexible, contingent, and non-self-identical.”¹⁵ It may be the case that people in the past conceptualized gender in ways that were not entirely dissimilar from our present conceptualizations. However, this does not necessarily mean that those understandings had a shared etiology or were otherwise related in some way. While LaFleur does not foreclose the possibility of continuity, they also do not assume it.

In another article, Kathryn Wichelns makes an argument for stylistic caution. In reading three decades of scholarly interpretations of the 1629 court case deciding the gender of Thomas(ine) Hall, she identifies two trends: in the earlier two decades, scholarship tended to impose the categories popular at the time onto Hall; since the 1990s, however, scholars’ readings of this case have been rigorously historicized at the level of argument, but veer towards anachronism on the sentence level. Wichelns writes that “this recent work is marked by a consistent tendency toward unnecessarily suggestive diction and leading phrasing.”¹⁶ As a corrective, she suggests the use of Halberstam’s perversely presentist approach not just at the level of argument, but “even to our sentence-level depictions.”¹⁷

Elizabeth Reis, on the other hand, is far quicker to apply modern terminology to a historical case study. In her article “Transgender Identity at a Crossroads,” she recounts a short story printed in the literary magazine Knickerbocker in 1857 and argues that it presents a sympathetic tale of someone expressing a clear transgender identity. According to Reis, the story “does not reveal the only way that transgender behavior was perceived in midcentury America,” though it still “suggests that sympathetic views of nonnormative gender performance existed.”¹⁸ While each author exhibits some degree of caution, they differ in their understandings of the relationship between the past and present, as well as the scholarly restraint that is necessitated by this relationship.

A Field Coalesces

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, the first journal for transgender studies, was formed in the same year that Early American Studies published its “Beyond the Binaries” issue. In 2018, TSQ ran an issue titled “Trans*historicities,” which touched on similar themes to “Beyond the Binaries” though with more of an interdisciplinary focus and explicitly for an audience of trans studies scholars. Additionally, this issue brought into the fold the last four years of trans scholarship and the insights this body of work brought to bear on “questions of time and chronology” in trans studies.¹⁹ In their introduction, Leah DeVun and Zeb Tortorici are keenly aware of “the possibility of writing trans history that precedes the relatively recent coinage of the terms transsexual and transgender,” an admission which speaks both to the importance of “Beyond the Binaries” and the work in the intervening years. Instead of importing Cleves’ “beyond the binary” analytic, however, they highlight that “we do not abbreviate all histories of gender simply because past categories accord imprecisely with present ones; we write about women in the distant past even as we acknowledge that premodern subjects dovetail imperfectly with the modern term woman.”²⁰ In doing so, DeVun and Tortorici move the conversation away from the historicity of trans terminology by pointing out the historicity of all gendered language, a move which anticipates the future directions this conversation would take.

According to DeVun and Tortorici, the contributors to this issue seek to “move beyond the question of ‘Is a particular historical figure or community trans, and how do we know?’ to the further questions of ‘What does such a history do? How does it trouble our certainty about the past, present, or future?’”²¹ This movement follows in the footsteps of two monographs published just prior to the issue, the first being C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017), which many contributors expressed excitement about. Instead of focusing on locating Black trans subjects in history, this book illustrates how the concept of gender’s mutability that eventually becomes trans identity was born from enslavement and the racialization of gender. Published that same year was Emily Skidmore’s True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the 20th Century, which does focus on finding rural trans men in history, while also not devoting much time or energy to establishing these individuals as trans before turning to questions about the meaning of rural trans lives for American and queer history. For Skidmore, these men are proper subjects of trans history “as they provide clear examples of the ways gender has been made, remade, and transgressed in the past,” and they are trans men as “they chose to live their lives as male even though they had been assigned female at birth.”²²

Female Husbands

It is necessary to stay with Skidmore’s book for a bit longer, as it is a key moment in an ongoing conversation that begins with Halberstam’s treatment of female husbands. Many of the people featured in True Sex fell under the rubric of female husbands at the end of the nineteenth century, a group which Halberstam identifies as “masculine women” and refers to with she pronouns, and which earlier queer scholars identified as lesbians. Skidmore instead settles on he pronouns for the subjects of her book, justifying this decision by pointing out that “each of the subjects herein chose to live as a man for many years prior to his appearance within the public record, and many continued to live as men even after their queer embodiment resulted in arrest, incarceration, or other hardship.” To refer to them as women or with female pronouns would erase the fact, as Skidmore argues, that “they all expressed the sentiment that they were men despite their anatomy.”²³

In their 2020 book Female Husbands: A Trans History, Jen Manion takes a different approach still. While Manion agrees that female husbands “chose to trans gender and live fully as men,”²⁴ they propose a more complex reading whereby “female husbands belonged to a category that was never simply woman or man.”²⁵ Drawing explicitly from Clare Sears’ use of trans-as-verb, Manion seeks to view their subjects as “traveling through life, establishing an ongoing and ever-unfolding relationship with gender, rather than viewing them as simply shifting between two unchanging binaries.”²⁶ It is for this reason that they choose to refer to each female husband with they pronouns, so as to “avoid a false sense of stability when writing about a person over a long period of time, marked by varied gender expressions.”²⁷ Their emphasis on movement and change sits comfortably within trans studies, which from its formal inception has been interested in notions of crossing and becoming. It is noteworthy that despite this stated approach, Greta LaFleur has criticized Manion for their fixed use of names, particularly in the case of Massachusetts resident Deborah Sampson/Robert Shurtliff, who, LaFleur writes, went back and forth between names over the course of their life, but who Manion simply refers to as Robert Shurtliff.²⁸

Trans historian Jamey Jesperson has also expressed concerns about Manion’s use of pronouns in the book. Jesperson fears that, with the ascendance of singular they pronouns that has accompanied the rise of nonbinary identity in recent years, “this supposed ‘gender neutral’ pronoun may soon lose its ability to mark a truly nongendered space,” as “nonbinary” has experienced a “limited representation of white people assigned female at birth.”²⁹ She also notes that Manion’s continued use of they in their epilogue on Alan Hart, who they recognize as “the first female-to-male transsexual,”³⁰ risks erasing Hart’s perhaps less ambiguous manhood and “results in a historical misgendering of a canonically transsexual figure.” Even with a figure as long-discussed in queer and trans studies as the female husband, there remains disagreement and uncertainty on the proper use of names, pronouns, and terminology.³¹

Of Processes and People

Another field-shaping exploration of trans identity throughout history came in 2021 with the publication of Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern, edited by Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Klosowska. Curiously, at no point do the editors define their titular concept of “gender plurality,” nor do they explain the choice of that particular term as opposed to, say, “gender diversity.” This volume brings together the two dominant currents of thought on this issue, as represented by C. Riley Snorton’s process-focused historicization of trans identity and Emily Skidmore’s people-focused argument for the existence of trans people before such terminology had come into being. As stated by the editors,

while this volume is concerned with the knowability of individual, gendered, and especially gender-nonconforming experience in the presexological period, it also builds on recent work in transgender studies by scholars . . . who argue for the importance of extending the purview of trans studies and trans histories beyond individual experience.³²

As for the former project, rather than claiming historical subjects uncritically as transgender, the volume concerns itself with people “who might have had something in common with that designation.”³³ Ultimately, the editors propose that “transgender experience” might not be anachronistic to the early modern period so much as “early modern scholarship needs its own trans studies, one responsive to the historical particularities and methodological challenges” of this era.³⁴

Scott Larson’s contribution, “Laid Open: Examining Genders in Early America,” begins with the provocation that “while trans histories have been understudied, gender-variant subjects have been overexamined.” This chapter moves from the historiographical to the ethical, noting that it is not only difficult to extract the “truth” about a historical figure’s gender from highly surveilled, overexamined, and even medicalized settings, it is potentially ethically irresponsible. Larson argues that trans historians often find ourselves joining a chorus of “doctors, legislators, priests, judges, anthropologists, and photographers in demanding that gender-variant subjects disrobe and disclose” as we look for proof “that will clearly identify individuals as properly belonging to trans, gay, lesbian, or other identitarian pasts.”³⁵ Recognizing that histories of gender which deal with these figures are still of great importance, he proposes a three-pronged method of “critical trans-attendance” to grapple with this ethical problem. First, he encourages a move away from a singular focus on “conclusively identifying or categorizing individuals as transgender,” noting that the certainty of a figure’s trans status is not a necessary condition for their inclusion in trans history. Second, he advocates against rendering the specifics of historical gender-variant bodies as open for inspection, “particularly if those details were taken from a person by force or duress.”³⁶ Third, he is in concurrence with Jen Manion in his insistence that “trans-attendance treats gender-variant people as having full, and thus changeable lives,” and issuing a warning against “overvaluing one point in a figure’s life as the moment of true identity,” especially as the moments in which their identities are most visible are often the moments of their subjection to intense and invasive scrutiny.”³⁷

Greta LaFleur’s epilogue continues along similar lines as Larson’s piece. Returning to the figure of Deborah Sampson/Robert Shurtliff, they ask, “must past trans people announce that their gender presentation bears some sort of relationship to inner truth in order for us to identify or recognize them as part of trans history? Must transness be permanent, or forever, in order for it to be real?” If trans people in the present are allowed to transition multiple times, in multiple ways, why should the same luxury not be extended toward past subjects of trans history, including Sampson/Shurtliff? LaFleur encourages a practice not just of close reading, but of close listening to the past, as they write that “trans people have always been ingenious and, furthermore, often very stylish authors of vocabularies for their own experiences.”³⁸ This is what is lost when we impose our contemporary frameworks on the past. LaFleur pointedly asks why we “assume that our current ways of understanding trans experience are better” than those of the past, especially as scholars writing in a field that claims to be skeptical of “so-called Enlightenment logic.”³⁹

One of the book’s most powerful arguments is made by Gabrielle Bychowski in her chapter “The Transgender Turn.” According to Bychowski, “most scholarship is, effectively, cisgender scholarship,” as it “assumes the cisgender status of any character or historical figure who is presented to readers.”⁴⁰ That the cisness of this scholarship goes unmarked is a testament to its power:

Comparable to how trans people are typically assumed to be cisgender at birth and raised to be cisgender by parents, so too do scholars of history compulsively assign cisgender assumptions to people and texts in the past without stopping to seriously consider trans portrayals.⁴¹

By giving a name to the compulsory cisness of most historical scholarship—which she calls “cistory”—Bychowski turns the notion of trans-as-anachronism on its head. If it is inappropriate to assume that historical figures were trans, why is it not inappropriate to assume that they were cis? Bychowski demonstrates a counter-history to this “cistory” through a re-reading of the story of trans sex worker Eleanor Rykener. She insists on a reclamation of Rykener’s body, her story, and her name, Eleanor. Through her demand that historians move away “from the practice of repeatedly deadnaming her,”⁴² Bychowski risks imposing an anachronistic conception of “deadnaming” on a past that might view it as foreign. However, through her unseating of cisness as the neutral historical position, her methodology suggests that it is just as, if not more likely, that Eleanor’s reaction to being repeatedly called by her birth name would have something in common with our understanding of this practice today. Bychowski’s deft formulation of “compulsory cisness” would become part of the foundation to Jamey Jesperson’s groundbreaking 2014 article, “Trans Misogyny in the Colonial Archive.” To understand what is novel about Jesperson’s approach, however, it is necessary to trace back the decades-long conversation she is entering, a conversation about colonial violence, Two-Spirit identities, and trans femininity.

Two-Spirits, Third-Genders

A brief discussion of terminology is warranted here. The term Two-Spirit comes from the Ojibwe term niizh manitoag and originally refers to the presence of both masculine and feminine qualities in a person, though it has taken on a broader meaning in the years since its formal adoption at the 1990 Native American/First Nations Gay and Lesbian Conference in Winnipeg.⁴³ Two-Spirit also serves as a replacement for the term berdache, which has been used by anthropologists but has been rejected by the Two-Spirit community for its etymological roots in an Arabic term for “a male sexual slave.”⁴⁴ It is generally considered good practice to use nation-specific terms whenever possible, but in pan-Indigenous contexts or in instances where this language has not been recovered, Two-Spirit stands in as an overarching term for “Indigenous people who fall outside accepted boundaries of modern white or ‘Western’ gender and sexuality, both past and present,” as Kai Pyle (Métis, Nishnaabe) puts it.⁴⁵

The “Beyond the Binaries” issue of Early American Studies featured an article by Gregory Smithers titled “Cherokee ‘Two-Spirits’: Gender, Ritual, and Spirituality in the Native South.” Smithers looks at a white traveler’s 1825 report of encountering a group of Cherokee people, “among them . . . men who assumed the dress and performed all the duties of women and who lived their whole life in this manner.”⁴⁶ Throughout the article, he probes the ways that historians can make sense of this single piece of evidence, and what light it can shed on Cherokee and Two-Spirit history. He notes that much of the scholarly work on Two-Spirit peoples at time of writing had been done by feminist and queer scholars, who were not held to the same evidentiary standards as historians and thus were quicker to interpret something like this 1825 fragment as concrete evidence of Two-Spirit identity in Early America. By considering the singularity of this document and the possibility that it is anomalous, Smithers does not give up hope, but urges historians to “recognize [written archives’] inherent biases and limitations and more vigorously incorporate Native ways of interpreting the past.”⁴⁷ Rather than driving a wedge between historians and queer scholars, he encourages the critical incorporation of queer scholars’ analyses into historical scholarship, and advocates learning from “our colleagues in Native American studies and the ways in which they skillfully use oral traditions.”⁴⁸ Not doing so, he argues, risks “reifying colonial power dynamics and forever silencing the voiceless.”⁴⁹

Smithers takes up these proposals in his eventual monograph, Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal, and Sovereignty in Native America, the first book-length treatment of the history of Two-Spirit peoples in North America. To understand the violence inflicted against Two-Spirit peoples, he mobilizes Two-Spirit scholar Deborah A. Miranda’s (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation, Chumash) concept of gendercide, which she introduces in her 2010 article “Extermination of the Joyas.” In this article, she recounts the history of Spanish colonists’ attempt to exterminate California’s joyas—the Spanish term for people they saw as existing outside of the gender binary. The majority of scholarship on the subject has understood the joyas’ identities and Spanish colonists’ violent reactions as sexual in nature, and so Miranda, followed by Smithers, makes an important intervention by understanding this violence to be aimed at their feminine gender expression.⁵⁰ She borrows the term gendercide from genocide studies scholars, and slightly redefines it as “an act of violence committed against a victim’s primary gender identity.”⁵¹

It is these histories that Jamey Jesperson is responding to. While she praises Miranda’s elaboration of gendercide for its centering of gender, she argues that it still does not fully explain Spanish violence towards the joyas, which she considers to be “an assertion of eliminatory violence against trans feminine people for their trans femininity.” She critiques analyses of colonial violence against Two-Spirit peoples, including Miranda’s, which treat the Indigenous people being targeted as comprising a “third gender,” as this concept fails to highlight that it was specifically these individuals’ femininity that was targeted. “Third-gendering” approaches fail to highlight this crucial aspect of these violences, while simultaneously partaking in the “common elision of trans masculine historical possibilities.”⁵² A similar critique was made as early as 2002 by Evan B. Towle and Lynn M. Morgan, who argued that “the ‘third gender’ concept lumps all nonnormative gender variations into one category, limiting our understandings of the range and diversity of gender ideologies and practices,” and as Jesperson would likely add, the violence toward these gender ideologies and practices.⁵³ As a corrective to these approaches, Jesperson theorizes this violence as “colonial trans misogyny,” an “overarching colonial power structure” that targets trans feminine subjects, seeing their existence as a severe threat to Spanish colonial ambitions, and their elimination as a potent justification for the colonization of North America.⁵⁴

Jesperson’s use of the term “trans feminine” does not denote a fixed identity, but a “floating signifier” that refers to “feminine individuals who ‘cross over’ (trans-) the gendered boundaries of their culture or, importantly, the culture imposed upon them.”⁵⁵ This definition, which has its basis more in colonists’ perceptions than in any sense of a fixed inner identity, reads well alongside Jules Gill-Peterson’s use of “trans feminine” in her recent A Short History of Trans Misogyny (2024) to refer to people who are “trans-feminized” through their violent treatment by a colonial state that ignores their self-understanding and sees in them a threatening “male” femininity.⁵⁶ Jesperson cites Bychowski’s “The Transgender Turn” to call out a “centuries-old cistoriography warped by non-trans worldviews” that remembers the subjects of her paper as men dressed as women, rather than as trans women. She goes beyond simple descriptions of these women as performing feminine labor and wearing feminine clothing to highlight their

uniquely trans feminine behaviors; for example, tucking, plucking, stuffing their shirts, adjusting their voices, changing their names, conceiving of different ways to refer to their genitals, learning to breastfeed, and, in some cases, participating in cultural ceremonies of menstruation, pregnancy or childbirth.⁵⁷

The intent of such a description is not to pave over the ways these individuals would have understood themselves, but to “[weave] together an overlooked, historical thread of transcultural lifeway” and to remember their lives in a fullness that the “cistoriography” has not only failed to bring to light, but actively occluded.⁵⁸

Against Cistoriography

The combined result of the scholarship I have discussed so far—the ability to say, in some way resembling the truth, that trans people have been around for some time—is the starting point of trans historian Beans Velocci’s chapter, titled “Denaturing Cisness,” in the edited volume Feminism against Cisness (2024). Velocci immediately counters, however, that “this is no longer a politically useful way to talk about the past.”⁵⁹

Recall my earlier claim that there are two general tendencies in conversations about trans history in the distant past: process-focused histories, which look at systems of gender, and people-focused histories, which attempt to recuperate historical trans subjects. While process-focused histories seek to uncover the production and internal workings of systems of gender, people-focused histories are somewhat more limited: they can demonstrate that maybe there have been trans people in the past, but that they “have always existed as a small minority, few and far between, while most people’s sex and gender just happen to coincide.” Velocci quotes theorists of classification Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star who write that each classification system “valorizes some point of view and silences another.”⁶⁰ It is worth remembering that besides academic history, the primary other institution that has sought to sort between cis people and trans people with this high a degree of precision, this rigorous an evidentiary basis, is the gender clinic—hardly an ally to the trans historian.⁶¹ With this in mind, it becomes clear that looking for people we can classify as trans in the past results in a skewed sample of individuals who are in some way distinctive, anomalous, or exceptional—in other words, what we find over and over again is Scott Larson’s hypervisible and overscrutinized gender-variant subject. The brightness with which these subjects shine in the archive, Velocci argues, obscures the fact that “most people don’t just happen to fit the category they were assigned,” that the appearance of a stable cis majority is just that—an appearance, and one that takes work to maintain.⁶² Velocci, and myself for that matter, do not believe that this project is without utility, but that it necessitates a broader “complementary approach to trans history: dismantling cisness as a natural, majority category, with trans history deployed as method, rather than as subject.”⁶³ It is true that trans is a historically specific category that cannot be perfectly applied outside of the context it was produced in, but the same can be said about cis, and any understanding of gender, for that matter. “Every sex and gender is a historically contingent, invented category,” Velocci writes, “it’s time to start treating them all that way.”⁶⁴

Greta LaFleur’s chapter in the same volume, titled “Trans Feminine Histories, Piece by Piece,” builds from Velocci’s historicization of the cis/trans binary to put forth a “trans feminist historiographic method.” Such a method, for LaFleur, does not start with the trans or cis person, but the conditions that produced the understanding of gender that conditioned their existence. Such a method “demands that we take into account histories of active efforts to discipline, invisibilize, and eradicate forms of gender experience and expression that transgressed social norms.”⁶⁵ And such a method recognizes that these erasures necessitate “an analytic approach that deploys and trusts speculation,” if we are to not reproduce the violences that created these archival silences in the first place.⁶⁶

By way of conclusion, I want to recount part of a recent conversation I had with a colleague, who could barely contain her excitement in saying to me, “Trans history is there. It’s possible. You just have to know where to look.” By training our focus on not just the historical specificities and productions but also erasures of countless understandings of gender, it is eminently possible to do trans history everywhere, and at all times.

1. I borrow this example and quotation from Beans Velocci, “Denaturing Cisness, or, Toward Trans History as Method,” in Feminism against Cisness (Duke University Press, 2024), 108–9.

2. Regina Kunzel, “The Power of Queer History,” The American Historical Review 123, no. 5 (2018): 1560–82.

3. Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come (1992), Digital Transgender Archive. Feinberg uses the term “berdache” rather than Two-Spirit, even while denoting it as “a European colonialist term” (5).

4. To simplify a complicated history, the term transsexual rose to popularity in the 1960s with the publication of Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966) and the concomitant opening of sex change clinics across the United States. The term transgender was first used around this time, but did not gain traction until its use by activists in the 1990s as an umbrella term for all cross-sex gender expression. Our understanding of people as trans, then, is quite intimately connected with the culture of the post-World War II United States.

5. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1978). Before the emergence of the term homosexual, Foucault argues, men with same-sex desires were understood not as having a distinct and fixed sexual identity, but as engaging in a form of sexual deviancy more tied to notions of abnormal and immoral behavior than of identity.

6. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (Hachette UK, 2008).

7. My focus is on scholars researching North America between the start of European colonization and the end of the 19th century, as this essay began as a paper written for an Early American History course. Additionally, the turn of the twentieth century marks the moment where sexology, or the science of sexuality, becomes a dominant force in modern conceptions of sexuality, and ways of referring to sexuality become more—though not wholly—fixed, systematized, and specific.

8. “Presentism” as used by historians refers, sometimes derisively, to historical work that interprets the past through the lens of the present, rather than attempting to understand the past on its own terms.

9. Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Duke University Press, 1998), 46.

10. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 52–53.

11. Halberstam, 72.

12. Rachel Hope Cleves, “Beyond the Binaries in Early America: Special Issue Introduction,” Early American Studies 12, no. 3 (2014): 460–61.

13. Clare Sears, Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Duke University Press, 2015), 9.

14. Greta LaFleur, “Sex and ‘Unsex’: Histories of Gender Trouble in Eighteenth-Century North America,” Early American Studies 12, no. 3 (2014): 473.

15. LaFleur, “Sex and ‘Unsex,’” 495.

16. Kathryn Wichelns, “From ‘The Scarlet Letter’ to Stonewall: Reading the 1629 Thomas(ine) Hall Case, 1978–2009,” Early American Studies 12, no. 3 (2014): 501.

17. Wichelns, “From ‘The Scarlet Letter’ to Stonewall,” 502.

18. Elizabeth Reis, “Transgender Identity at a Crossroads: A Close Reading of a ‘Queer’ Story from 1857,” Early American Studies 12, no. 3 (2014): 653.

19. Leah DeVun and Zeb Tortorici, “Trans, Time, and History,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 5, no. 4 (2018): 518.

20. DeVun and Tortorici, “Trans, Time, and History,” 523.

21. DeVun and Tortorici, 531.

22. Emily Skidmore, True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (NYU Press, 2017), 10.

23. Skidmore, True Sex, 10.

24. Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 2.

25. Manion, Female Husbands, 10.

26. Manion, 11.

27. Manion, 14.

28. Greta LaFleur, “Epilogue: Against Consensus,” in Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern, ed. Greta LaFleur et al. (Cornell University Press, 2021), 373.

29. Jamey Jesperson, “Female Husbands: A Trans History, Jen Manion,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 17, no. 2 (2023): 423. I agree with Jesperson, and I wonder if it may have been more useful to attempt an approach similar to one adopted by Simon D. Elin Fisher, whose article on Pauli Murray uses his/her and s/he when discussing Murray’s period of clear transmasculine identification and she/her for the later period of Murray’s life. Such an approach abandons the notion of a fixed identity across one’s life altogether.

30. Manion, Female Husbands, 267.

31. Jesperson, “Female Husbands,” 423–24.

32. Greta LaFleur et al., “Introduction: The Benefits of Being Trans Historical,” in Trans Historical, 2.

33. LaFleur et al., “Introduction,” 3. Emphasis my own.

34. LaFleur et al., 5–6.

35. Scott Larson, “Laid Open: Examining Genders in Early America,” in Trans Historical, 351–52.

36. Larson, “Laid Open,” 361.

37. Larson, 362.

38. LaFleur, “Epilogue,” 368.

39. LaFleur, 369. I want to include the full quote here, because I like it so much:

“At a moment when so-called feminist philosophers refuse to acknowledge the womanhood of trans women; when for four years a presidential administration seemed hell-bent on refusing trans people access to basic medical care (not that medicine has ever been an advocate of trans lives and bodies); and when conservative pundits of all stripes seem to understand trans experience as something to be debated—yea or nay!—why would we assume that our current ways of understanding trans experience are better, or that the many present social, cultural, and political contexts that forge the conditions for trans life have been an improvement on those of the distant past? For a field that loves a takedown of so-called Enlightenment logic, this might be a moment when it behooves us to take a hard look inward.”

40. M. W. Bychowski, “The Transgender Turn: Eleanor Rykener Speaks Back,” in Trans Historical, 95.

41. Bychowski, “The Transgender Turn,” 96.

42. Bychowski, 107.

43. Gregory Smithers, Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America (Beacon Press, 2022).

44. Kai Pyle, “Naming and Claiming: Recovering Ojibwe and Plains Cree Two-Spirit Language,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 5, no. 4 (2018): 577.

45. Pyle, “Naming and Claiming,” 576.

46. Gregory Smithers, “Cherokee ‘Two Spirits’: Gender, Ritual, and Spirituality in the Native South,” Early American Studies 12, no. 3 (2014): 626–27.

47. Smithers, “Cherokee ‘Two Spirits,’” 636.

48. Smithers, 650.

49. Smithers, 651.

50. Jamey Jesperson, “Trans Misogyny in the Colonial Archive: Re-Membering Trans Feminine Life and Death in New Spain, 1604–1821,” Gender & History 36, no. 1 (2024): 91–111.

51. Deborah A. Miranda, “Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, nos. 1–2 (2010): 259.

52. Jesperson, “Trans Misogyny in the Colonial Archive,” 94.

53. Evan B. Towle and Lynn M. Morgan, “Romancing the Transgender Native: Rethinking the Use of the ‘Third Gender’ Concept,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8, no. 4 (2002): 477.

54. Jesperson, “Trans Misogyny in the Colonial Archive,” 93. For a broader elaboration of this point, see Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Indigenous Queer Normativity,” in As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (U of Minnesota Press), 2017: 119–144.

55. Jesperson, “Trans Misogyny in the Colonial Archive,” 94.

56. Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny (Verso Books, 2024), 31.

57. Jesperson, “Trans Misogyny in the Colonial Archive,” 95. She then writes, interestingly,

“In the various cultures where one was brought up trans feminine from a young age, European colonisers document being unable to discern them from other women, suggesting to me that physiological transition — whether brought about by intersex variations, gonadal atrophy or castration, or traditional medicine — could have been an important aspect of their lives as well.”

58. Jesperson, “Trans Misogyny in the Colonial Archive,” 94. The notion of a “transcultural lifeway” resembles Bychowski’s theorization of “genres of embodiment,” as she elaborates in M. W. Bychowski et al., “‘Trans*historicities’: A Roundtable Discussion,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 5, no. 4 (2018): 658–685.

59. Velocci, “Denaturing Cisness,” 108.

60. Velocci, 115.

61. For more on gender clinics as an oppositional force, see my 2023 essay Claiming Sex, Reclaiming Gender. I have in mind a future piece on the clinic that is more critical and up-to-date, but this one will do for now.

62. Velocci, “Denaturing Cisness,” 116.

63. Velocci, 111.

64. Velocci, 114.

65. Greta LaFleur, “Trans Feminine Histories, Piece by Piece, or, Vernacular Print and the Histories of Gender,” in Feminism against Cisness, 97.

66. LaFleur, “Trans Feminine Histories, Piece by Piece,” 89.