This book is accessible and interesting. A deep dive without feeling overwhelming. Beneficial for scholars or interested laypersons alike. A look into trans history with a new perspective. ( )

Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance. Before We Were Trans transports us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to early America, and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures. 

An eye-opening study of the history of gender nonconformity.

In this highly informative text, Heyam, a U.K.–based queer history activist and trans awareness trainer, tells a wide variety of pertinent stories that are often left out of the trans narrative. Many of the ideas that the author explores don’t fit cleanly inside our contemporary notions of trans identity, which is usually able to be verbally confirmed and often includes medical, social, and cultural transitions. Heyam makes the compelling argument that just because people in the past may not have had access to medical transition procedures or modern vocabulary to adequately discuss gender doesn’t mean their experiences outside the gender binary should be ignored. “To say sex and gender are both socially constructed,” writes the author, “isn’t to say they’re not real—like other social constructs, including race, money and crime, they have material and life-changing consequences for all of us—but it is to say there’s no innate reason we have to think about them in the way we do.” The author draws from a remarkable array of historical examples, expanding the definition of what we should consider trans history along the way. Among other eras and locales, Heyam takes us to ancient Egypt, the Edo period in Japan, and a World War II prisoner camp on the British Isles. With great sensitivity and care, they discuss the deleterious effects of European colonization over hundreds of years, the modern Western desire to separate gender and sexuality, and the intersex community. While clearly the work of a diligent historian, the text avoids feeling too dry and is a relatively accessible read. The author’s historical and topical range is impressive, and only a few of the sections are disjointed. Overall, the book will fascinate anyone interested in a subject that many readers likely misunderstand.

A capable, worthy demonstration of how the history of disrupting the gender binary is as long as human history itself.

-Kirkus Review

Interesting. While calling itself 'a new history of gender', it seems to me that the point is not to be a history of gender, but to use historical stories to illustrate the liquidity of gender and the impossibility of fitting it into a limited number of categories.

If you find the many disclaimers difficult, I suggest skipping to the epilogue, which is where they are bought together and discussed at greater length. ( )

Returned my overdue copy to the library yesterday evening, bought myself a copy this afternoon, and finished it over lunch. Highly, highly, highly recommend. Very accessible and yet very broad and deep history. Does that fabulous thing where we as westerners think we understand what the European morals around gender roles are from studying our history in school but wait! the past is a different country, and it's actually way more strange and different than you assumed. ( )