Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender

Before We Were Trans is an excellent investigation of non-cis identities throughout history and across different cultures. Kit Heyam takes incredible care with such a complex topic, situating the stories and observations within the context of their time and place. It's been a minute since I've delved into academic texts, and I feel that Heyam's writing balances the needs of academic thoroughness while maintaining accessible language for the professional and casual reader alike. The areas where the academic density are most noticeable, unfortunately, are due to the extreme and exclusionary tactics of historians and academics who would prefer that non-cis studies remain unexamined and uncelebrated. In today's fraught age of attacks on non-cis identities, it's vital for works such as these to declare loudly and firmly that we have always been a people of amazing variety across the spectrums of gender and sexual identity. I hope readers can engage with this text and feel a confident echo that they've always been relevant and important. My optimistic dream is that skeptics and critics can see this work and understand more and more that their opinions are rooted in ignorance.

A tremendous social and LGBTQ history documenting the myriad and fascinating ways that one institution shaped the social fabric of Greenwich village AND impacted the lives (empowering, radicalizing, harmful, tragic…) of the specific individual women and transfolk who cycled in and out of its clutches. Also an eye-opening social history of incarceration and the complex web of courts, policing, and psychiatric and institutional control that ensures the institution reproduces itself, keeps itself full (overcrowded), and works as intended — to creates a constant and never ending cylcle of institutionalized subjects, Foucault-style. Except these subjects have names, voices, agency, and are brought alive. A lively, memorable, nuanced archival project driven a “history from below” perspective, written by a community historian stepped in NYC lore, shaped by his activist eye. I also appreciate that, while not published by an academic press, the monograph is really extensively and accurately documented with endnotes, precise archival source citations, and an extensive bibliography. Thank you for reading the boxes and boxes of files that other scholars who claimed to write about queer life and lesbian life have ignored for decades! Deserves every book award it gets!

This is a very technical book and brings up different views of people in different cultures that I knew about but didn't think of them as trans. Worth the read.

I am really enjoying how other cultures view the transgender experiences around the world, and in history. I feel that I have truly learned more of my predecessors and it has given me even MORE respect towards those that have walked the path before me. Definitely happy to add this to my personal library! 10/10

very insightful, gives a great history and shows the intersectionality of different cultures, identities, and orientations

My teenage daughter has been in hormone replacement therapy for 18mos. I have the expansive joy of supporting her M-to-F transition. I’m a cis-gender dad with no background in theory-literature, reading books by transgender writers to enrich my understanding of something new to me about identity & love. To my inexpert eye, this book seems to follow a disappointing trend spotted in the last two trans books I’ve read: kids who “merely swap one binary gender for the other” are not particularly interesting. These relatively unambitious persons are, like, kinda white-bread, kinda vanilla, kind stolid—they accept the narrow gender-limiting conventions of old-timey patriarchies etc. & they are not on the leading edge of genderqueer explorations…ergo, one sorta yawns at their less ambiguity-embracing struggle. The fascinating future is clearly for non-binary peeps who call into question the whole concept of gender-definition—they are the truly transgressive radical warriors etc. I am of course griping because a book does not happen to meet my personal reading-agenda, which is certainly not fair to the author/publisher. This is a terrifically energetic narrative full of intriguing information. But I cannot wholeheartedly recommend it to my fellow noob-parents with kids for whom the (yawn) binary transition is sufficient & quite challenging in itself. (The revised-updated edition of Gender Outlaw! by K.Bornstein strikes me the same way.) It feels as if we might be heading toward a time when there’s socially COOL TRANS versus KINDA HALF-ASSED TRANS. I will be happy if I am completely mistaken.

This book is such an accomplishment. Very readable for an academic book, and it covers a lot of ground for a truly global history. This is the first book I recommend to people asking me for LGBTQ+ history. Dr Heyam is a brilliant historian, and I look forward to reading more of their work in the future.

Transgender is a catch all term adopted by the IFGE. It implies that a person changes their gender. The individual seeking sex reassignment surgery changes their sex to match their gender. Overall it is an excellent book, but transexual or transsexual is a more accurate term.

This is well written and complex. I am now reading the introduction for the third time.

This book is a must read. Thoughtful, balanced and considered, it's a book that is so needed and I'm sure it will become a mainstay, an instant classic. The introduction is the best introduction I have ever read, and I'm an avid reader. Congratulations to the author for bringing such an intelligent and careful work to fruition.

It's excellent as a history, but most powerful in its analysis of how that history informs our current cultural politics & understanding. It is persuasive in its argument for a broader understanding of 'trans', that questions & queers white Western preconceptions. I would have enjoyed a bit more history from below, but you can't have everything.

A thoughtful and loving portrayal of historical figures that encourages the reader to interrogate their own pre-conceptions and explained many of difficult issues encountered in modern day conversations in easy to understand, compassionate terms. Thank you for a wonderful exploration of history which honours the past as well as making sense of how it intersects with the present. A tremendous feat of care and love.

This excellent thought provoking book is definitely for those who are interested in the history of the trans community. Equally this book also gives people who thought they knew about trans history an alternative view.