Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender

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One of History Today's Best Books of 2022

'I felt exquisitely anchored reading this wonderful book' Juno Roche

'A thoughtful, fun, and refreshingly readable romp through the history of gender variance' Susan Stryker

'A searing, reflexive read . . . that needs to be in everyone's hands expeditiously' Paula Akpan

Across the world today, people of all ages are doing fascinating, creative, messy things with gender. These people have a rich history - but one that is often left behind by narratives of trans lives that focus on people with stable, binary, uncomplicated gender identities. As a result, these stories tend to be recent, binary, stereotyped, medicalised and white.

Before We Were Trans is a new and different story of gender, that seeks not to be comprehensive or definitive, but - by blending culture, feminism and politics - to widen the scope of what we think of as trans history by telling the stories of people across the globe whose experience of gender has been transgressive, or not characterised by stability or binary categories.

Transporting us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to North America, the stories this book tells leave questions and resist conclusions. They are fraught with ambiguity, and defy modern Western terminology and categories - not least the category of 'trans' itself. But telling them provides a history that reflects the richness of modern trans reality more closely than any previously written.

Before We Were Trans is a history and celebration of gender in all its fluidity, ambiguity and complexity.