this is not an original observation by any means, but it’s infuriating to see people casually throw around the argument that pre-colonial societies all had these expansive and accepting gender norms, and their evidence for this is from anthropologists who “discover” trans women existed throughout history and proclaim look! this culture has an ambiguous third gender of cross-dressing [slur that hasn’t been used in fifty years]. it’s so beautiful how primitive—uh, I mean pre-colonial societies had so many mysterious and diverse genders
it’s clear from some of the responses to this post that people genuinely believe in the ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ conception of transgenderism. It is foul to insist, on the one hand, that queer people have always existed, that queer people have a universal claim to history across time and space, and then on the other hand insist that “trans” is a purely modern western category, a label that can only be understood as a colonial imposition when making the exact same claim to a shared history. Asserting that trans women existed throughout many societies prior to European colonialism is somehow ahistorical and fraught, erasing the universal queer subject that “actually” exists beneath the fraudulent label of transgender. The same historical specificity demanded of the transgender label is for some reason not applied to the queer one. Why?
If trans people have not always existed, then queer people have not always existed, or at least not all of them. And which ones get to claim universality? Only some gay people? Only “gender diverse” (but not trans) people? For some reason, there is something unique, special, and particular about transgenderism that is different to a historically universal queerness. To assert this is to perform a mass historical misgendering of all trans women who existed prior to European colonialism (and the many who are alive today in colonised and post-colonial societies), under the guise of being decolonial and historically specific.
This is a god point, but I don’t think it’s true that historians universalize queerness but insist on provincializing transness. There’s plenty of books that use transness as a historically universal concept (Transgender Warriors by Leslie Fienberg and From Female To Male by Lou Sullivan come to mind). But those books were both written in late 80’s/early 90’s.
A few years after they were published, it became a big thing in queer studies to talk about the historical specificity of queerness (see Female Masculinity by Jack Halberstam and Getting Medieval by Carolyn Dinshaw). At the time, it was considered really radical to insist that terms like “lesbian,” “gay,” and “homosexual” were all historically specific terms. To insist on their specificity was not to claim that people in the best didn’t have sex with others of the same gender or have taboo/non-normative desires. It was to highlight the fragility of way we think about sexuality and the possibility of other ways of conceptualizing sexual desire. The study of “queer” pasts suddenly became a way to study those alternative ways of conceptualizing sexual desire.
These books have had a huge influence of both queer and trans history. More recent work in trans history that insists that “transness” is a historically specific category often times cites Halberstam and Dinshaw (see Trans Historical ed. by Masha Raskolnikov, Greta LaFleur, and Anna Klosowska, or The Shape of Sex by Leah DeVun). Of course, there are other trans historians who argue for using transness as a cross-historical category, against the influence of earlier (queer) historians: The New Woman by Emma Heaney and A Short History of Transmisogyny are both pretty persuasive.
I think there are pros and cons to both strategies. Obviously, making “trans womanhood” a very specific concept makes it harder to draw connections and build solidarity with gender non-conforming people who lived before ~1910 or aren’t white. But it is also enables us to insist that there have been radically different ways of treating gender non-conformity in the past and alternatives are possible for the future.
The danger of universalizing “trans womanhood” or “transness” is that it can obscure as much as it helps. Thalia Bhatt has argued really persuasively that Indian Hijra should be considered as trans woman. But if we do, it becomes really hard to talk about actually existing divides and conflicts between Indian “hijra” and “trans women.” It becomes harder to talk about the ways terms like “transgender” and “trans woman” have been used to prevent travestis, baklas, and kathoeys (and other colonized, “trans-feminine” populations) from accessing gender affirming care. But it also helps us make the connections between their struggles and our own!! The question is less like: “have trans people always existed or is ‘transness’ a historically recent arrival?” But more like “when is it helpful to explore the universality of transness/transfeminity/etc and when is it helpful to insist on their cultural and historical limitations?”
Sorry if this comes across as rude or blunt but I feel like I’m going insane from the responses to this post because they are all wildly off topic. I am not talking about historians. I am not talking about queer studies. I am not making a claim about academic research. I am talking about people on this website who cite anthropological work that imposes slurs onto trans women to delegitimise their womanhood as evidence that societies had “diverse” gender categories prior to colonisation. It is a specific process of third-sexing trans women as the premise to celebrate a generalised and universal queer diversity. I am also addressing the bad faith reading of this post where people take for granted that queer people exist everywhere, but asserting that trans people have also existed everywhere is somehow western or ahistorical. That’s all
