if we spent the afternoon lazily making out, maybe sucked some hickeys into each other's neck, drawing out some soft moans and whimpers, biting hard enough to leave bruises that will last days then covering it with soft kisses, leaving marks all over each other in a soft but desperate way, just enjoying each other, well i think i'd like that a lot
[“In a 2019 tweet (since deleted), Twitter user Brooke wrote of ‘carving “trans” into every bone of my body so when they find my skeleton in two hundred years they don’t get too confused’. A reply parodied the response of an oblivious archaeologist: ‘We must be careful not to jump to conclusions about what these ancient carvings could have meant; This individual could have had a passion for mass transit, transcontinental travel, or a combination of poor spelling and a love of trance music’.
Every time I read jokes like this, I get a jolt of hurt and defensiveness: not all historians and academics are like that! I try so hard, every day, not to do the kind of history they’re talking about! And yet I can hardly blame these people for talking and writing the way they do. The fact is that the discipline of history is set up to erase queer lives, and particularly trans lives. We are expected to adhere to double standards of evidence, which encourage us to state with impunity that a historical figure was definitely cis, but to hedge with caveats the suggestion that they were maybe, possibly trans; to use phrases like ‘cross-dresser’ or ‘impersonator’ as if they’re neutral, and to write lengthy defences of ourselves if we decide to avoid them; to expect backlash from colleagues and reviewers if we choose to use any pronouns for a historical figure other than those associated with the gender they were assigned at birth; to say, like the caricatured archaeologist above, ‘We must be careful not to jump to conclusions’, even when the evidence for trans experience is actually abundantly conclusive. It hurts when people memeify the oblivious, transphobic ‘historian’, but it’s also not unfair of them to do it. History, while it may not perpetuate physical harm, still repeatedly enacts violence against trans lives in the past and the present. And it’s not the job of the communities we’ve hurt to give us the benefit of the doubt: it’s our job to convince them that historians can be different.
In this book, I’ve identified new ways, and new places, to look for trans history. I’ve argued for the presence of trans experience in histories of gender-nonconforming fashion; histories of gender-nonconforming performance; and histories of people taking on a social role that isn’t associated with the gender they were assigned at birth. I’ve shown that many trans histories are inextricable from histories of other experiences: the sexual, the intersex, the anti-patriarchal, the spiritual. I’ve argued both for acknowledging trans possibility in histories of widespread gender nonconformity that have previously been explained in other ways, and for understanding gendered histories on their own terms – including seeing them, where necessary, as both trans history and the history of other kinds of people and experiences.
In this last kind of history in particular, I’ve often been confronted by what writer and philosopher Hil Malatino (quoting fellow scholar Abram J. Lewis) calls the ‘irreducible alterity’ of people in the past: the fact that some histories of gender are not possible to map onto or relate to the way people experience gender today. Malatino characterises the acknowledgement of this ‘irreducible alterity’ as a form of care for those past people, an idea that speaks deeply to me. It struck me, when I first read it, how different this framing of ‘care’ was from the arguments historians more commonly make against describing people in the past as trans: that it is presentist, that it is anachronistic, that it inappropriately fixes past people in modern categories. These arguments have rarely seemed to me to come from a place of care for people in the past; instead their priority seems to be history or historiographical methodology as an abstract, faux-objective entity. Still more rarely do they seem to acknowledge the concurrent urgency of caring for people in the present: the people who are living now, experiencing and articulating their gender in manifold ways and drawing strength from the histories of people who have done the same. Might it not be possible to find ways of recognising the essential difference of people in the past – people who disrupted gender before we were trans – while simultaneously holding space for the feelings of identification with them held by people in the present, the people who are trans now?”]
kit heyam, from before we were trans: a new history of gender, 2022
Yeah i have no clue what y'all talking about with girl math or Lana del Rey or the female joker or female hysteria or female stimulator or however long the list is,when i say i'm a woman what i mean is this