A superb history of trans and non-binary lives

Before We Were Trans by Kit Heyam is a remarkable achievement. First published last year and now out in paperback, it is an attempt to map out a history of trans and non-binary people – not just within the white West, but taking in cultures around the world.

Heyam works scrupulously to avoid imposing contemporary, white Western values and ideas about gender onto people from different cultures and living in very different societies (and times), reminding readers that to do so is dangerous in terms of a meaningful understanding of history, but that it also risks colonising – or re-colonising – those lives.

 

It is full of revelatory information. For instance, I had no idea that in Swahili, “all pronouns are gender neutral”. Or that “The Daughters of Bilitis, an American lesbian activist group founded in 1955, described butch lesbians as ‘the worst publicity we can get’.”

 

Records from WWI internment camps on the Isle of Man provide a wealth of information from the German civilians imprisoned there for years with no ‘biological females’.

 

The author explains in detail how, in some cultures, from First Nation to South Asian ones, gender non-conformity is often intrinsically linked to spirituality. No matter how difficult some in the West might find it to understand this, we should not pretend it is not the reality for people who experience gender in such a way.

 

Heyam is also determined that we should not simply assume that in every – and there are plenty – historic example of gender non-conformity, we should assume that the person involved was trans or non-binary.

 

They point out that there could have been motives for being gender non-confirmative that could have involved coercion, the need to make a living and more. But as they point out, it’s also a major likelihood that at least *some* were what we would now describe as trans or non-binary.  

 

Initially, I found it a bit annoying to be reminded of these things quite frequently, but I came to understand the value of such reminders. I read history books on a reasonably regular basis, but have never read one like this, and ultimately it benefits from it. It has helped me think quite seriously about number of things I have not thought through before.

 

But Heyem also hits the proverbial nail right on the head in an understanding of why Western, non-binary people might be easily tempted to appropriate the experiences of non-Western, non-gender conforming people, given the assaults on trans and non-binary people currently being experienced – not least in the US and UK.

 

We need to construct a more nuanced dialogue in order not to appropriate, while still celebrating the range of non-gender conforming lives and understanding that in terms of our own relationship to the wider LGBT+ community.   

 

Heyam Is to be applauded for taking a complex subject and approaching it in such a way as to make it informative, challenging and, as they suggest at the end, ‘kind’, to those in the past as well as those living now and, indeed, those in the future.

 

A very different and valuable history – and one to be heartily recommended.