Dr. Kit Heyam - Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender

On the night of Monday 8 June 1847, John Sullivan was drunk. Strolling unsteadily down the street in Aldgate, East London, the 22-year-old was wearing a bonnet, a gown, a silk apron, a pair of trousers and a pair of womens boots. Police Constable Henry Pyes attention was caught both by this attire and by the bundle John was carrying under one arm. Steering John to the local police station, he opened the bundle to find more items of womens clothing. Where, he asked John, had these come from?

John said, Theyre mine.

Six days later, on 14 June, John Sullivan was tried for the theft of a cape, a handkerchief, an apron, two gowns, two petticoats and a pair of stays. The clothes belonged to local woman Frances Norton, and had a total value of thirteen shillings and sixpence. Under oath, John denied stealing the clothes, and dismissed the choice to wear them as a drunken joke, swearing, I had them given to me to carry to the market; the policeman caught me, and the person who gave me the things ran away; I had a gown on in a lark, but I had my trousers on; I was very much intoxicated. The court, mindful that this was Johns second offence (following a six-month prison sentence the previous year for a crime whose records dont appear to survive), was unsympathetic. John Sullivan was sentenced to be transported to Australia for ten years.

Is this story part of trans history? Its unlikely that many people would treat it as such. John Sullivan lived before the word transgender, as we use it now, was widely available for individuals to describe their actions or identities. Theres no evidence that John presented as female outside of the specific circumstances outlined in the trial records. Perhaps most conclusively, those trial records give us Johns own testimony, framing the choice to wear womens clothes not as a matter of identity but as a drunken lark. Surely theres no better metric by which to judge a historical persons gender than their own voice?

These are the criteria that usually determine whether trans people feel able to talk about someone as belonging to trans history. We look for evidence that their motivation for gender nonconformity was not external, but internal ideally in the form of personal testimony. We look for continuous presentation as the gender opposite to the one they were assigned at birth. And we look for histories that we can fit into contemporary Western ideas of what it means to be trans. Even if those criteria are met, we get anxious if the person were dealing with lived before the advent of the terminology that we use to talk about trans identities today: often, this in itself is enough to dismiss their trans possibility altogether.

These criteria often make it difficult for us to talk about trans history at all. What makes this conversation even more difficult to have are the concepts that underpin it: gender and sex, internal and external motivations, personal testimony, stability of identity. If we poke at any one of these concepts, the whole edifice starts to crumble. When we talk about trans history, what are we even talking about?

This book is about the answer to that question.

Ask a trans person today what the adjective trans refers to and, while the nuances will differ, the most common definition youll get is anyone who doesnt identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. Its important to us to put it in these terms. Talking about being trans as an identity, rather than an action, helps us to understand transness as relating to who you are , not what you do a crucial step in undermining the argument that transitioning means adhering to gender stereotypes. It makes space for people who cant, or dont want to, transition socially or medically. And talking about moving away from the gender we were assigned at birth, rather than from male to female or vice versa, helps our definition to be clearly inclusive of non-binary people: people like me, who dont identify as male or female all of the time.

This modern understanding of trans is usually dated back to early-twentieth-century sexology: an intellectual movement that attempted to examine sexuality and gender identity as scientific phenomena. The German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld coined the term transvestite in 1910, and although this word sounds to modern ears like a sensationalist term for cross-dressing something that relates to external gender expression rather than in-ternal gender identity, and is probably sexualised in the vein of The Rocky Horror Picture Show Hirschfeld intended it to cover a much broader range of trans identities, including people who transitioned medically, people who transitioned socially, and people who changed their gender expression some but not all of the time.

The word transsexual then came, by the mid-twentieth century, to primarily indicate trans people who accessed medical transition: who used hormones and/or surgery to change their body so that it aligned with the physical characteristics associated with the gender they identified as. By the late 1960s, American trans activist Virginia Prince was helping to popularise the word transgender to refer to trans people who transitioned socially, but not medically: living as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth, without changing their body.

Even in the past hundred years, then a period in which the category of trans has been relatively coherent thinking about trans history is a difficult and messy business. Look back further in time, and the difficulty and messiness increases dramatically. Its not as simple as saying that while the terminology is new, the experiences are not; the advent of new terminology can genuinely shift how we think about gender, as well as what names we give to our experiences.

Yet this doesnt mean any of us can easily map our category of trans people, as Ive defined it here, back onto the past. If we try to think about that contemporary definition anyone who doesnt identify with the gender they were assigned at birth in historical terms, it immediately starts to break down. In England and Wales, civil birth registrations (as opposed to the noting of births and baptisms in parish records) didnt begin until 1837, and they didnt become compulsory until 1875 (twenty years later than in Scotland) meaning that birth records are unlikely to include a gender marker before the nineteenth century. So what does it mean to be assigned a particular gender at birth before that point? And what, for that matter, do we mean by gender or sex when were thinking about the past?