
Before We Were Trans
A New History of Gender
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Narrated by:
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Dr. Kit Heyam Ph.D
A groundbreaking global history of gender nonconformity
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.
©2022 Dr. Kit Heyam, PhD (P)2022 Seal PressListeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
"Before We Were Trans is a thoughtful, fun, and refreshingly readable romp through the history of gender variance before the invention of contemporary ‘transgender’ categories and concepts.—Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History
"Before We Were Trans provides much needed context, nuance, and breadth to our understanding of human gender diversity throughout history and in different cultures. While people who we might now call transgender or LGBTQIA+ have always existed, Kit Heyam shows how both individuals' and societies' understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality are situational, multifaceted, and constantly evolving.—Julia Serano, author of Whipping Girl and Sexed Up
"Before We Were Trans enlarges our understanding of trans histories and highlights the beauty, complexity, and contradictions of doing historical work - all in a voice that invites the reader in, and not only teaches us what to think about trans lives in the past, but how to think about them.—Hugh Ryan, author of The Women’s House of Detention
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A fascinating and important work
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FANTASTIC
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My introduction to Queer History
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Research, history, transgender rights; it’s a masterclass of what we do when we become ourselves.
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kinda surface level, but it was a good look at history
what i liked about it more than the actual historical analysis was the methods she described and the reasoning for why we should look at things from a certain lense
and it complemented my knowledge well as i read other books about queer feminist history
a bit disapointed tbh but i think that speaks more to the quality of the other books ive read so far and not to the lack of quality of this one. worth the buy imo
forgot to review this 09-13-25
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Written with care
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The history we need right now
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a meaningful yet flawed view on chronological relativism
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I have learned SO much!
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Lovely Broad Overview of Trans History
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