Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender

Kit Heyam

Today's narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people's lives. 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.

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Gustave Baumann

Hi speaking of medical literacy for trans people, transfems pls check out the website Transfeminine Science, especially their introductory article on feminizing HRT

Non-transfems can reblog this as well btw

original url http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Pagoda/2799/

last modified 2007-12-23 12:05:22

1970 Springbok “Cheshire Charmer” Cat Crewel Embroidery Pattern (via: etsy)

I really deeply hate how the correct statement "using man-hating as a cover for transmisogyny is awful and you need to be able to recognize when that's being used as a dogwhistle" has somehow evolved into "misandry is real and that's why terfs are wrong" like no I don't think it is. Can we please retire Not All Men I can't do this

Bioessentialism (which is transphobic and also racist) is when you claim people are innately Biologically Determined to be either Good or Evil. That's nazi shit. Operating on that logic is why you'll see terfs doing straight up phrenology. It's also not the same thing as women venting about the very real ways men treat them in our society. Which, I might remind you, trans women aren't men, and it's weird to assume every time someone says men they're including trans women. Especially when you remember trans women experience misogyny, on account of being women. Sometimes trans women are even feminists, and not in a liberal girlboss way. Can we all just use our brains a little

Audre Lorde at The Center's Second Tuesday Lecture Series, The Center – The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, New York, NY, 1986

hey guys, I could use your help with something! Sue is a Black disabled mother, migrant, and PhD student at Newcastle University who urgently needs solidarity. Newcastle University is reporting her to the Home Office in retaliation for her complaint about her abusive supervisor, in full awareness of her Stage 5 kidney disease. this is a life-and-death situation.

here's how you can help:

Sue's story from the #WeAreAllSue toolkit:

In 2022, Sue Agazie, high-achieving in her field, was promised financial support for her tuition fees through scholarships and paid opportunities and enrolled into the PhD programme at Newcastle University Business School with this understanding. When Sue arrived in the UK in 2023, however, she learned that all of this financial promise was a lie; the scholarships that she had been promised never materialised. Instead, she has gone into horrific debt and is having trouble surviving.

For almost a year, Sue sought financial support for herself and her family, including grants and opportunities that would burnish the reputation of her supervisor and university as a whole. However, in that year, her supervisor not only prevented her from applying to scholarships and paid opportunities, but further controlled her research and day-to-day quality of life, with a high-level of surveillance, inappropriate supervisory practices, and escalating harassment of both her and her family.

These practices include this supervisor repeatedly preventing Sue from taking part in important professional development activities, such as research presentations, within the Business School. He also isolated her from her senior colleagues, forbidding her from attending particular activities they were facilitating, or spreading malicious rumours about them. Further, the primary supervisor repeatedly ignored Sue's pleas for support on funding applications and other opportunities that would alleviate the precarious financial situation into which she had been placed, telling her to “stop sending me links to scholarships”.

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can anyone match my £30?

Also train stops at the town to go into the city if you nees be

Yeah this and if the small town is too small for trains, use a bus

The problem with car-dependency is not that cars exist, it's that we design places and infrastructure so that you pretty much have to own and use one for the majority of your transportation needs.

Small towns are usually fairly walkable, in my experience; you can get around town just fine. The problem is getting from one town to the next ... or to the next city. Most rural areas, in my experience, will have a bus that comes through twice a day at most. And you take it to the city, and the city is also car-dependent, so you're stuck there all day with no way to get to the things you actually want or need to do.

The first step towards reducing car-dependency is doing it where it's easiest: in cities and the close-in suburbs. Once you can get around the city easily without a car, then you increase the frequency of public transit to the outlying suburbs and towns. So that people can take the bus or train into the city and be able to do the things they need to do once they get there, and they don't need a car for it.

I've lived in rural areas; the last place I lived had fewer than 1,000 people in town, and we were an hour away from the closest city with more than 1,500 people. Everyone drove everywhere ... and a lot of people would have taken other options if they were available. The people who commuted every day, some of them would have chosen to drive even if there was practical public transportation, but others would have taken the bus if it worked with their schedule. And there were plenty of elderly people who shouldn't have been driving but needed to get to the city regularly for doctor's appointments and the like, and when there was a ride available they'd take it, but the bus simply didn't work because it was too infrequent and didn't take them where they needed to go.

The lower the population density, the less practical public transit becomes and the more you need your own transportation, and this is always going to be the case. Rural areas are probably always going to be more car-dependent than cities.

But that's not a "gotcha" that proves car-dependency is the best and only way for the entire world to live. It's just an acknowledgement that different areas need different transportation solutions. And even rural areas would benefit from having more transit options than just "if you can't drive, you're screwed."

I was at a courthouse once, and saw an indigenous australian woman in a dressing gown very carefully and gingerly making her way down the steps outside the courthouse, surrounded by family who were helping her down the stairs. We asked if she was OK, because she looked awful. She looked like she should have been wrapped up in bed with blankets and hot soup, not on the steps of a courthouse.

One of her family told us that she had given birth yesterday evening, but that Child Protection services had taken her baby away with no warning, claiming that she wasnt prepared to look after him. What had happened, is that she'd literally only just given birth -- hadn't even passed the afterbirth yet, is holding her blood-coated, crying, newborn baby to her chest -- and a nurse asked what her feeding plan was. She was tired from the birth and distracted by the brand new baby in her arms and thrown off by the timing of the question, but still, she managed to answer, and said she planned to breastfeed him whenever he was hungry.

Well apparently that wasn't enough of a plan for the hospital staff, who reported her and claimed that she was unprepared to look after the child, and claimed that had no social supports, and that the baby was at risk if left with her. All because a brand new mother, 30 seconds after giving birth, didn't have a PowerPoint presentation ready to go that cited the timing cycle she would feed her kid on, and instead simply said that she would feed him when he was hungry.

Child Protection services showed up, took her kid, and she was told to show up to court the next day to contest custody if she wanted her baby back.

So a woman who had given birth less than 24 hours prior was forced to rally her family and show up to court to prove that she a) had a feeding plan for the child, and b) had enough social supports to justify reclaiming her baby.

It was one of the most appalling things I'd ever seen. I don't even know if she won her case. They didn't know at the time we saw them, and after that brief interaction on the stairs, i never saw them again. I sincerely hope she got her newborn baby back.

That was about 5 years ago. And the exact same kind of thing is still happening today.

News broke today from a South Australian whistle-blower of the appalling treatment new mothers frequently receive, including hospital staff taking the baby away from the mother "for medical tests," only for the mother to then be told, with absolutely no prior warning, that the baby was not going to be returned to her.

Here's the article, and here are some excerpts:

also a problem in Canada: https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/from-the-60s-scoop-to-now-canada-still-separating-indigenous-children-from-families-1.5606935

This is genocide! It is an effort to destroy culture by stealing children away from their parents.

this is the best album release of all time because where else are you going to get unironic takes like this and then even get a few hundred people to agree with it

Min Zhen (Chinese, 1730 - 1788) - Black Cat