Kit Heyam

“It’s 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. But it’s also not straightforwardly true to say that the word ‘trans’ has no history before sexology. Literary scholar Joseph Gamble has recently discovered that the 17th century writer Thomas Brown used the prefix ‘trans’ and the word ‘transition’ to refer to the spontaneous sex changes of hares as early as 1646 and even coined the adjective ‘transfeminated’ to refer to a body that has transformed from what we think of as ‘female’ to what we think of as ‘male.’ So the prefix ‘trans’ was clearly relevant to thinking about gender-malleability long before Hirschfeld leveraged it to refer to his patients he saw at his Institute for Sexual Science.”
― Kit Heyam, Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender

“It's important that we, as historians or as queer people, don't treat gender and sexuality as two things that use to be entangled but have now been teased apart. There can be a tendency in white queer circles to frame this as a narrative of 'progress' in which we've moved from and outdated past where all queer relationships had to have 'a man and a woman', to a liberated present in which sexuality has been unhooked from gender and queer relationships are characterized by sameness and mutuality. But that narrative doesn't represent everybody's experience. If we frame the entanglement of gender and sexuality as a relic of an unenlightened past, we erase the experiences of many people - often, disproportionately, working-class people and people of colour. There are plenty of examples of individuals, groups and cultures for whom it's no accurate to talk about 'gender' and 'sexuality' as separate concepts or experiences.

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Where do non-binary peole fit into our existing categories of sexuality? Is gender really the most helpful way to [categorize] the people we're attracted to, or is it time for a new model: one that reflects the fact that knowing someone's gender doesn't always tell you much at all about who they are?”
― Kit Heyam, Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender