10.000 years & you're still on your own

Nishimoto Ryota

while in theory i support the notion of nuance re. gender identifications of historical figures, this nuance moves in only one direction: everyone is presumed cis until they are proven trans. however, the presumption of automatic cis-ness is also very much an assumption, by which i mean that we are assuming that the historical figures understood themselves as men and women in the same way that cis people today understand themselves as men and women, which any serious study of historical sexgender will demonstrate is not really true at all.

what does it mean, for example, for an aristocratic historical "woman" to sign herself as male in order to access power and then to make use of that power, while referring to herself as female elsewhere? does this mean she has the same conceptualisation of her gender as, say, a working class woman in that same society? does this mean she even has the same conceptualisation of her gender as a fellow aristocratic woman who accepts her exclusion from the public terrains of power and accepts the limits of cisfemininity as it exists in that particular time period? why do we assume they share a similar conceptualisation? what happens if we break from the assumptions derived from the only 200 year old two-sex biological conceptualisation of gender in the back of our minds, or the assumption that "true" gender is always personal and private, and instead ask about the nuances of gender and self-concept that are going on here? do we in our biologically driven model of sexgender even have a concept of what this primarily sociopolitical gendered set of relations and identifications actually means? are we willing to begin destabilising that?

and here, mind you, i am presuming a willingness to even engage with transness and gender nonconformity in the more "modern" and "open" sense, but this is strictly not true, right? feminist readings of historical figures who dressed and spent their lives as men are riddled with modern assumptions about gender and indeed, many of the assumptions of r*dical f*minism specifically re. transness. other histories are riddled with blanchardian models of transness that conflate transness with sexual orientations - real trans people can only exist if the cross-dress to fuck people of their assigned sex, if they do this all the time. no possibility is left for the gay trans man, the lesbian trans woman, the nonbinary or gnc person, or trans people who only allow themselves to slip into transness in the interstices of otherwise cis lives, or even trans people with ambivalence or confusion or instability of their senses of selves. in other words there is no room for the nuances of gender nonconformity: either a figure is able to identify themselves legibly with a gender opposite to the one assigned at birth, or they are "cis" - and their cisness is largely assumed to be congruent with our modern understanding of cisness. these are histories that must be engaged and refuted before we can even proceed to the business of retrieving and salvaging transness from the historical record, even when they make - to the trans gaze - hilariously misguided and idiotic statements and obvious cissexual misreadings from the personal records left behind by these individuals. the trans gaze must prove its authority, its "objectivity", its capacity to read material this way before it can refute the cis gaze.

Black Silk Gauze Gown

c. 1866