Before We Were Trans

The title Before We Were Trans does not suggest that trans people appeared only recently. It reminds readers that “transgender” is a word with a particular modern history, and that people in the past did not necessarily understand themselves through stable, binary, medicalized identity. Kit Heyam rejects two simplifications: the claim that gender diversity is a contemporary invention, and the urge to posthumously declare every person who crossed a gender boundary transgender in today’s sense. Historical care means preserving complex possibility when evidence cannot settle a life.

The book travels from Renaissance Venice and early modern Europe to West Africa, Edo Japan, First World War internment camps, North America, and South Asia. Njinga Mbande ruled seventeenth-century Ndongo as king; Ahebi Ugbabe acquired masculinized political authority in colonial Nigeria; Hatshepsut’s pharaonic representation also moved through gendered signs of rule. These figures cannot responsibly be compressed into one identity. Together they show that male and female have never been bodily facts alone, but are made through sovereignty, inheritance, clothing, colonial government, and social recognition.

Heyam shifts attention from lifelong stable identity toward fashion, performance, and temporary spaces. In early modern Europe, clothing could be treated as evidence that a person had changed social gender or even “sex,” creating panic around gowns, coats, and public movement. Theatrical performance in First World War internment camps enabled some people classified as men to form relationships and experience sustained lives as women; some continued to live as women after release. A history that searches only for diagnosis, surgery, or explicit declaration will miss possibilities opened through situation and practice.

Another strand concerns the entangled histories of homosexuality, trans experience, and intersex bodies. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century medicine and law did not first distinguish body, desire, and identity clearly and then regulate each one. They produced those boundaries while classifying “abnormality.” A person’s desire could be used as evidence of another gender, while bodily variation was mobilized to prove racial and sexual hierarchy. Heyam therefore resists projecting today’s LGBTQIA+ taxonomy backward, but also resists splitting connected histories as if they never shared institutions or language.

The method has a decolonial implication. European colonizers carried binary gender, Christian sexual morality, and administrative classification as standards of civilization, misreading or suppressing local arrangements of political role, spirituality, kinship, and body. In discussing West Africa, North America, and South Asia, the book does not collect gender diversity as exotic precedents for Western readers. It asks readers first to understand community vocabulary and power. Proving that “trans people existed elsewhere too” can remain colonial if a Western category retains final interpretive authority.

Heyam is candid about difficult evidence. Many records were created by courts, police, doctors, missionaries, and colonial officials; they preserve why an authority found someone dangerous, not necessarily how that person felt. A letter, outfit, or third-person pronoun cannot automatically resolve identity. The author’s use of “perhaps,” multiple pronouns, and open alternatives is not an evasion of judgment but an ethics of care: it acknowledges a contemporary longing for ancestors without making present political need erase what remains irreducible in the dead.

This is not a comprehensive global history, and the author explicitly selects cases to widen imagination rather than build an encyclopedia. Geographic scale creates uneven depth; some people appear only through colonial records or secondary translation. Scholars and Indigenous communities can reasonably contest the political value of placing such different lives within “trans history.” Inclusiveness can itself become a new total category, suggesting that all gender-nonconforming people shared an internal identity. The book’s uncertainty should remain a method, not be converted into another confident taxonomy.

For every case, note four things: the terms available in its community, the social roles a person changed, who created the surviving evidence, and what today’s trans framework reveals or hides. Then pair the overview with a history of modern trans movements and a gender history written from the community under discussion. Reading beside Reclaiming Two-Spirits is particularly useful: Heyam teaches caution about retroactive labels; Smithers shows how naming must also be tied to Indigenous language and sovereignty. The goal is not a larger cabinet of identities, but a history spacious enough to let unfamiliar lives remain unfamiliar.