Jaelyn reviewed Before We Were Trans by Kit Heyam
Review of 'Before We Were Trans' on 'Storygraph'
5 stars
This is an interesting new trans history which treads carefully but boldly into the topic of how we even begin to talk about what trans history is without erasing the unique experiences of intersex people and non-western cultures such as Two Spirit and Hijra peoples by conflating them with our own dominant narrative. They look at how so much of trans history we do see is forced into the traditional binary and Eurocentric notions of gender which acts to erase the unique and detailed stories in our ancient and recent pasts across many cultures. It tells as much about the concept of how we identify our history as it does about corners of our history we easily forget or dismiss. In that, this feels an extremely valuable text that I do wish was about twice the length for the extra detail that could have been gone into!
