Before We Were Trans

'A beautiful, brilliant, lively book that weaves together fascinating and
moving examples with thoughtful analysis. Both heartfelt and rigorous,
entertaining and scholarly, Before We Were Trans invites us to expand our
sense of communities - past and present - in welcoming ways, rather than
contracting them and policing their borders' MEG-JOHN BARKER, author of
Gender: A Graphic Guide

'Celebrates trans history, whilst acknowledging the reality of what it means
to live within our community with joy and kindness. In-depth research and
personal stories tie Before We Were Trans up into a true treat for the mind'
JAMIE WINDUST, author of In Their Shoes

Across the world today, people of all ages are doing fascinating, creative,
messy things with gender. These people have a rich history - but one that is
often left behind by narratives of trans lives that focus on people with
stable, binary, uncomplicated gender identities. As a result, these stories
tend to be recent, binary, stereotyped, medicalised and white.

Before We Were Trans is a new and different story of gender, that seeks not to
be comprehensive or definitive, but - by blending culture, feminism and
politics - to widen the scope of what we think of as trans history by telling
the stories of people across the globe whose experience of gender has been
transgressive, or not characterised by stability or binary categories.

Transporting us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from
Edo Japan to North America, the stories this book tells leave questions and
resist conclusions. They are fraught with ambiguity, and defy modern Western
terminology and categories - not least the category of 'trans' itself. But
telling them provides a history that reflects the richness of modern trans
reality more closely than any previously written.

Before We Were Trans is a history and celebration of gender in all its
fluidity, ambiguity and complexity.