#queerhistoria

[…] if we write about histories where the categories of trans and intersex overlap, but just treat them as trans history without explicitly mentioning the word "intersex", we not only erase intersex history: we appropriate it.

The legacy of the idea of inversion meant that homosexuality and trans identity remained entangled for many years: sometimes it provided an excuse to deny trans people medical care on the basis that they were ‘really just gay’, other times it threw up barriers in the way of trans people whose transition wouldn’t ‘make them straight’ in the eyes of society. But ultimately, it equipped scientists, medics and politicians with the conceptual tools they needed to recognise that some people identified as […] a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth, and this could be seen as legitimate medical need rather than a moral failing. The history of inversion, then, is trans history as well as gay history – both because it framed sexuality as a form of gender identity, and because it was in some ways the precursor to the political rights and medical care that some trans people now have access to.

The fact is that the discipline of history is set up to erase queer lives, and particularly trans lives.

If historians start investigations of gender-nonconforming people by referring to them as "women dressed as men", this immediately closes off any possibility of trans history. Words and phrases like "transvestism" or "cross-dressing", which suggest disguise […] have the same effect. […] Consequently, if we’re not reminded that transness is a possible interpretation of a particular historical narrative, it’s unlikely that it will simply occur to us.

To anyone who accuses me of rereading the past from a perspective that’s biased toward finding trans history, I would say: you’re absolutely right! But I would also say that I’m no less objective than any other historian. Because we live in a society that sees cis people as the default, the majority of histories are biased against finding trans history even when they try not to be. But funnily enough, it tends to only be marginalised groups who are accused of lacking objectivity. While I’m keen not to constrain the possibilities of the past by fixing historical people in modern categories, I’m equally keen for us to remember that "cis man" and "cis woman" are modern categories as well. Making space for trans possibility, then, is no less objective than any other kinds of history: in fact, in many cases it might be more so.

Doing justice to these historical people means resisting the temptations to explain gender-nonconforming dress as motivated by factors unrelated to gender. It’s so easy, and so common, to rationalise gender-nonconforming dress as "just" something else: just fashion, just sex appeal, just something people did to gain economic opportunities. Thinking about the role of dress in trans history doesn’t mean doing away with those motivations – but it does mean embracing the multiple simultaneous motivations, meanings and possibilities that gender-nonconforming dress carried.

Expanding the scope of trans history doesn’t mean erasing the history of others: with any story, but especially with stories this messy, emotional connection to the past isn’t a zero-sum game.

More than 2,000 years later, in 1818, young British architect George Ledwell Taylor and his friends were summering in Greece when they stumbled upon the remains of what seemed to be the Lion of Chaeronea, a huge marble monument thought to have been erected to commemorate the fall of the Sacred Band [of Thebes]. In its pedestal were buried spears and shields with the men's names engraved; later still, the skeletons of 254 men were uncovered by archaeologists. In 1902, a secret British gay society, the Order of Chaeronea, helped fund the Lion's restoration. It stands there still, 20 feet tall, overlooking the now empty graves of the Sacred Band of Thebes, men who gave their lives for one another, bonded by love.