A History Today Book of the Year Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award

A beautiful, brilliant, and vibrant book that combines fascinating and moving examples with careful analysis. The work "Before We Were Trans" invites us to expand our sense of our communities - past and present - in a loving way, rather than limiting and policing their boundaries.

It celebrates trans history while recognizing the reality of life within our community with joy and kindness. In-depth research and personal stories make "Before We Were Trans" a genuine delight for the spirit.

Today, people of all ages across the world are doing exciting, creative, and playful things with gender. These people have a rich history - but it often remains behind the narratives of trans lives that focus on individuals with fixed, binary, and uncomplicated genders. These stories tend to be recent, binary, stereotypical, medicalized, and white.

"Before We Were Trans" is a new and different story of gender, not aiming to be comprehensive or definitive, but - by combining culture, feminism, and politics - it broadens our understanding of the history of trans by telling the stories of people from all over the world whose experience of gender has been transgressive or not characterized by stability or binary categories. From Renaissance Venice to 17th-century Angola, from Edo Japan to North America, the stories told by this book leave questions and resist conclusions. They are charged with uncertainty and defy modern Western terminology and categories - not least the category of "trans" itself.

It includes a story that reflects the rich contemporary reality of trans people more faithfully than any other written so far. "Before We Were Trans" is a story and celebration of gender in all its fluidity, uncertainty, and complexity.

Pages: 352, Year of Publication: 0525, Dimensions: 12.8x12.8cm