Black on Both Sides

Black on Both Sides refuses a trans history that moves along a white progressive line from nineteenth-century sexology through twentieth-century medicine to contemporary identity. C. Riley Snorton does more than add Black trans people to an established chronology. His more fundamental claim is that U.S. ideas about mutable gender, classifiable bodies, and recognizable personhood were formed through slavery and racialization. Blackness and transness are not independent categories that later intersect; they are historically co-constituted relations.

The book begins with flesh under slavery. Working through Black feminist thought including Hortense Spillers, Snorton examines how enslaved people were denied stable kinship, gender, and legal personhood while treated as property that could be sold, reproduced, punished, and substituted. The history of J. Marion Sims’s gynecological experiments on enslaved Black women shows that modern medical knowledge about sexual difference and treatable bodies did not develop outside race. Medicine placed Black flesh beyond normative gender while using it to establish the standards of white femininity and medical authority.

Fungibility carries a violent meaning, but Snorton also tracks its relation to fugitivity. Slavery treated Black people as exchangeable things; fugitives could nevertheless use the variability of dress, name, work, and gender presentation to escape surveillance. Reading runaway advertisements, narratives, and records of antebellum Northern life, he does not rush to assign contemporary transgender labels to historical people. He attends instead to movement across categories as a technology of survival. “Trans” names a later identity but also transit, transversality, and transformation: acts of crossing and altering classification.

This method recasts Black literature and modern transition narratives. Mainstream trans history often centers diagnosis, surgery, and public visibility as routes into modern identity, but those routes privilege a subject recognized by medicine and the state and frequently presumed white. Black subjects are overexposed to police, medicine, and news while disappearing from the image of the exemplary trans person. Transnormativity does not only exclude people who fail gender conventions; through the negation of blackness, it helps decide whose transition can appear authentic, respectable, and successful.

The final chapter intervenes in public memory of the 1993 murders associated with Brandon Teena. Phillip DeVine, a Black disabled man killed in the same violence, largely disappeared from later journalism and the film Boys Don’t Cry. Snorton names this absence “DeVine’s cut”: a life edited out so that white trans martyrdom can hold a singular narrative focus. The point is not merely to add a missing name to commemoration. It is that stories of anti-trans violence reproduce hierarchies of grievability when they do not also analyze antiblackness.

This is not a conventional chronological history offering complete biographies. It is a dense series of archival readings, political propositions, and experiments in historical method—its originality and its difficulty. Archives created through violence often preserve only medical observations, runaway notices, crime reporting, and images. They cannot be read as transparent Black trans testimony. Expanding “trans” to name crossing and change also requires care not to relabel every fugitive or cross-dressed person with a present identity. Its U.S. archive cannot replace local histories and first-person records made by diverse Black trans communities.

For FemRes readers, the book changes the ordinary use of intersectionality. Race and gender do not first exist separately and then accumulate in an individual. Institutions define gender while producing blackness and produce race while defining normal gender. Ask who is permitted a stable identity, whose flesh becomes substitutable material, who must become illegible to survive, and who is cut from public mourning. Read with Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Black trans writers, and anti-violence organizing. Trans feminism must place Black history at the beginning of theory, not in an appendix on diversity.