00:08:05.660trans people have a real obligation not to just claim that history for ourselves and erase its
00:08:11.560intersex dimensions because there's a thing that trans people do when we're talking about intersex
00:08:17.340people where we kind of instrumentalize them to prove the validity of our own identities right
00:08:21.760like if sex isn't binary obviously gender isn't binary but that's not often something that
00:08:29.140actually involves giving back to intersex people or asking what we can do for intersex people
00:08:36.380instead we're just kind of taking from them um to be able to make a political point and sometimes
00:08:41.620using quite harmful language um if we use the language of kind of people not developing fully
00:08:47.760or people's um genders needing correcting through surgery that kind of rhetoric can be quite actively
00:08:52.880harmful to the causes that intersex people are fighting for so it was really important for me to
00:08:57.440not erase the intersex dimensions of trans history and um to tell stories of people who have are part
00:09:05.360of both intersex and trans history who for example my favorite story um and the one that i tell um
00:09:10.900at most length in the intersex history chapter of the book is a person who lived as sometimes
00:09:15.720thomas and sometimes thomasine hall in um the early 17th century colony of virginia um in north
00:09:23.400america and who is on legal record as saying in a court of law i am both man and woman which is
00:09:29.200an incredibly cool thing for the early 17th century but what they mean when they say that
00:09:33.200is both i sometimes live as a man and i sometimes live as a woman and i have an intersex body and
00:09:39.580it's really important to emphasize that they are meaning both of those things this is intersex
00:09:43.000history and trans history well and that's the thing too so just like in the the researching
00:09:47.660that I've been doing and I'm very much just like social history of like messy women that's that's0.93
00:09:54.440where I'm coming at this from but this season sorry my cat is like I warned you and like she's1.00
00:09:59.140here and she has got I can see her tail hello cat um anyway so like what I've been just this season
00:10:07.200I've happened upon several stories where I'm just like oh where I've just been learning for the
00:10:12.120first time about this trans history intersex history like just kind of this um what the
00:10:17.160intersection of all these things is and sometimes like you said it's like oh it's just this so you
00:10:22.180know sometimes it's like oh well it's just a woman who wore pants dressed like a man for her whole
00:10:26.440life and presented as a man but like but that's that's just a woman that's just how you make your
00:10:31.720way in the world and sometimes that's true and sometimes it's not what I love about your book
00:10:35.880and where I know I'm going to like return to it again for future episodes where I just need to
00:10:39.840get the language and just wrap my head around it it's so much of the history and this is what
00:10:44.940you're really looking at is like there's somebody who challenges gender norms and the people
00:10:49.880they're not using the vocabulary we use today and the people around them are understanding it in
00:10:55.180their own culture so it's kind of like is this a lesbian is this like the word they would use
00:11:01.000is hermaphrodite like is this you know so for me looking at the story I'm just like how do I even
00:11:06.740tell this story today like what was this person's identity yeah and that was something I was really
00:11:13.320i'm really really glad that you found that helpful because that was one of the most important
00:11:17.180things for me in writing this book was to find ways to talk about people on their own terms
00:11:22.440rather than on our modern and often western terms um because i think that's what showing respect
00:11:30.300to people in the past means right it means seeing them as they understood themselves
00:11:34.100i don't know have you seen the film framing agnes no what's that um it's a fantastic um
00:11:39.400trans history film um made by morgan m page and zachary drucker um which tells the story of a
00:11:45.840um bunch of trans people who were treated um at the um johns hopkins hospital in the mid um i think
00:11:54.840johns hopkins can't remember um in the mid 20th century and um one of one of the things that
00:11:59.480really many things stood out to me from that film but one of the things that really stood out to me
00:12:03.040was the amazing trans historian jules gil peterson says at one point in the film our job is not to
00:12:09.340act as if we know people in the past better than they knew themselves and i find that a really
00:12:14.260powerful principle for doing history right it's so easy to think oh you just didn't have the
00:12:19.540language for this but that's not what treating someone with respect and respecting their
00:12:25.500humanity and their autonomy and their agency means right yeah no and that's so like even for
00:12:31.880like again like to bring it back to this podcast like this season when i'm looking at some of these
00:12:35.560figures like Catalina de Arraso I was just like what pronouns do I use and so I was looking I was
00:12:40.360listening to other podcasts and other books and what I landed on was like her biography she says
00:12:45.180like I Donya Catalina de Arraso so I'm like okay she's saying like I'm just gonna go with she her
00:12:50.020because like I have to make a judgment call here but then it's like I was thinking about this today
00:12:54.680so figures like that who you're like okay well that's the the gender that they use themselves
00:12:59.420in their memoir but it's like but they're writing the memoir for public consumption and it's a lot
00:13:02.640easier to sell books when you're like oh I'm a nun who became this thing but really I'm a woman
00:13:07.520transgressing so it's like it's not her diary you know it's like this is how she's selling her story
00:13:13.380for public consumption yeah absolutely and that's one of the really it's kind of historically tricky
00:13:21.040things about doing trans history is that so much of the evidence we have for gender non-conforming
00:13:25.540lives is evidence that has been shaped for a particular audience so maybe it's legal testimony
00:13:31.280where there's a lot of stake depending on what you say um maybe it's medical testimony where
00:13:36.340you're shaping your narrative you know that's what that's where we got the dominance of the
00:13:39.620born in the wrong body narrative right is one trans person said it and then and they realized
00:13:44.180that was a great way to get medical treatment and every other trans person said it as well
00:13:47.660and then the doctors went huh they're all saying that this must be what it means to be really trans
00:13:51.860we're gonna put that on the diagnostic criteria and that's how it happens um and yes and people
00:13:57.040like Catalina writing memoirs for public consumption, the stakes are not the same as
00:14:02.900they would be if you were just writing for yourself, as you say. And so the decision I made
00:14:09.100around pronouns in the book was predominantly to use they, them pronouns for everyone. And that is
00:14:16.080not because I think the vast majority of those people use they, them pronouns during their lives,
00:14:20.920but it is because i you know as you know um we use they them both as a actively gender neutral
00:14:29.600pronoun like i use it myself because i'm not male or female and so that's the right pronoun for me
00:14:33.880but also as a passively gender neutral pronoun just to say you are a person whose gender i don't
00:14:39.980know who i walked past on the street and and and so i do think it's useful to use it for
00:14:44.900people in the past whose gender subjectivity I can't know but that is that is a really conscious
00:14:52.680choice and I think the other important thing about doing this history is owning our conscious choices
00:14:56.580and thinking them through right and not just not just thinking that pronouns are an uncontroversial
00:15:02.680or easy choice to make as people doing history yeah well and then that really intersects with
00:15:10.000another really important part of your book which is the anti-racist angle of it like trying to
00:15:15.300like you're very clear I think it's in the prologue just saying like I'm coming from this like
00:15:19.060western culture but I'm looking at like the book is really I want to emphasize too to the listeners
00:15:25.440like this book is we've been talking about figures you know from the podcast who are like largely
00:15:28.980European but like the book is like a global history so you're looking at different cultures
00:15:32.940not just European so how how did you approach that yeah so the book is a global history I write
00:15:39.560about um people from west africa people from east asia people from north american cultures that are
00:15:45.360not um white cultures and that decision to write a global history was something that i really
00:15:53.380wrestled with because it's very easy for white trans people to write badly and appropriatively
00:16:04.140about cultures that aren't our own something that we do a lot um especially white non-binary people
00:16:10.560do a lot is much like i was talking about with intersex people we took eyes and instrumentalize
00:16:17.060the idea of people from cultures that aren't our own who don't fit into western gender binaries
00:16:22.140in order to prove the validity of our agenda so like my gender is obviously valid because
00:16:26.700two-spirit people exist or hidden exist um that's a deck of exploitation that's just taking without0.99
00:16:34.500asking what we can give back and so I was really keen to avoid doing that to pay as much attention0.90
00:16:41.500as I could to understanding people from cultures that weren't my own on own cultural terms not
00:16:48.320imposing my own cultural lens um and I was also really keen to use the opportunity I had in the
00:16:53.540book to emphasize the impact of European colonialism on gender non-conformity in many
00:17:00.760many cultures the way that it has restricted and reshaped gender non-conformity in many places
00:17:09.100and also to emphasize the fact that both the gender binary and the sex binary which I think
00:17:15.340is less acknowledged um are colonialist and in the case of sex eugenicist construct right that
00:17:22.300the idea that we have um in our contemporary western culture that there are only two sexes
00:17:27.400comes directly out of racist thought which presented the idea that it was white people
00:17:33.740whose bodies were most perfectly divided into male and female and so using that platform that
00:17:40.280i had in the book to also make those points really clear was something that i also decided to do to
00:17:46.020try and make the case for how important it is to do anti-racist trans history in that respect
00:17:52.240Well, and I think that brings us also to another topic that I really wanted to just have you talk
00:17:56.720about, which is Njinga, who I did, I think, two hours worth of podcasts talking about
00:18:03.420Njinga. And so there's, and that was the first story on my podcast I've encountered where I was
00:18:09.160like, oh, there's like some like gender stuff happening here. There's some like queer stuff
00:18:12.920happening here. And so just trying to figure like, how am I going to approach it? And you talk about1.00
00:18:17.880about Njinga and that culture so can you just share a bit about what you say in the book about
00:18:21.760about them yeah absolutely and um you know I'm sure we could spend another two hours talking
00:18:26.980about Njinga's story which is um one of my favorites and really fascinating Njinga is in
00:18:31.760the first chapter of the book um in which I talk about the relationship between gender and social
00:18:36.500role and the way that people having a particular social role can in many social contexts actually
00:18:42.560change the way that their society genders them and understands their gender and sometimes the
00:18:46.860way that they understand their gender too and so I talk about Njinga's experience as an experience
00:18:54.000where their decision to um you know for those um who maybe haven't listened to earlier podcasts
00:18:59.000they're a monarch um of the kingdom of Ndongo in what's now Angola West Africa when they were
00:19:05.120assigned female at birth but when they became monarch they became king not queen and that
00:19:10.200decision to become king was shaped both by the dynamics of their own culture and also by the
00:19:17.480fact that at the point when they became monarch and dongo they were required to negotiate with
00:19:24.280portuguese colonizers which was a very patriarchal christian culture and so styling yourself as king
00:19:31.400was also a really kind of um advantageous thing to do in those very very high stakes negotiations
00:19:37.480negotiations about the integrity of their kingdom about the welfare of their people many of whom
00:19:43.020were being abducted and enslaved and about the welfare of their family as well you know two of
00:19:46.980their sisters were abducted and held hostage by the portuguese one of them was murdered
00:19:50.600um and so this is a decision about gender non-conformity which is made in response to
00:19:57.300both their own cultural context and a new cultural context and the threat of european colonialism
00:20:02.740and it was really important to me to make the point that the gendering of social roles
00:20:08.800um and the way that we gender people differently um depending on their social role
00:20:13.180is something that a lot of factors influence you make it in decision in relation to a very very
00:20:19.260specific social context and not just necessarily in relation to your own culture and in jingo's
00:20:25.120story i think really drives that home well and that reminds me too about just other people i've
00:20:30.820read about and we talked about in the podcast where i think christina of sweden was the same
00:20:34.560thing where it's like when a woman becomes monarch it's like well queen often means just like wife
00:20:39.960of king but if you're like well i am like christina is often is described sometimes as king
00:20:44.720and then you even have someone like elizabeth the first who is like you know i might have the body
00:20:48.800of a woman but actually deep down inside i am a man like yeah elizabeth referring to themselves as
00:20:55.080king and as prince in speeches and then in the next sentence referring to themselves as queen
00:21:00.200And I think, you know, people often say, and I think your podcast does a really good job of not doing this, to be honest, but people in the wider world often say, oh, if you're saying that people can be gendered differently because of their social role, are you saying that there can be no powerful women in history ever?
00:21:15.980you know are we saying that um the moment someone takes on a role that is coded as masculine they're
00:21:21.180not a woman anymore so we never get powerful women and that's not true but it is true that
00:21:26.320someone if you live in a society where power is gendered masculine it does change the way that
00:21:32.200people's genders are understood when they take on power and that's not something that we have to
00:21:36.260kind of like or agree with to acknowledge that it's true right and that that's definitely the
00:21:40.680case with elizabeth first i think no i just think it's so fascinating that like so much of western
00:21:46.680society now comes from like the british colonial era which like followed elizabeth's reign and the
00:21:50.980fact that she was in like in some ways like challenging these gender norms you know it's
00:21:55.480just like she was you know like i don't know yeah absolutely and then the colonial ideology that1.00
00:22:02.460yeah as you say got kick-started in elizabeth's reign absolutely enforced gender norms that
00:22:08.520elizabeth herself was not remotely following um you're totally right and with that said i mean
00:22:16.340there were a lot of gender norms that were also imposed on elizabeth like the idea of virginity
00:22:20.900being a great thing that elizabeth should aspire to kind of fashioned by men who didn't want her
00:22:25.940to marry the french king the french prince right so um not all not all decisions that elizabeth was
00:22:31.800um had perfect agency to make um but you're totally right that there's a paradox there
00:22:37.420um that something that came out of the reign of a quite gender non-conforming monarch ended up
00:22:42.740repressing so much gender non-conformity in other cultures well and then i'm just i'm just thinking
00:22:46.900this through like historically then she was followed by the court of james which had like
00:22:50.140all kinds of queer history stuff happening can you talk about the how men what is it it's like0.61
00:22:56.800how they um in that era the more feminine you appeared the more masculine you were like that
00:23:03.560thing yeah um so it was incredibly fashionable to have a very feminine um appearance which was
00:23:11.040genuinely outside of the court understood as very feminine so long luxuriant hair perfume um
00:23:17.680earrings in both ears lace and flowers and puffed sleeves beautiful beautiful dress coming out of
00:23:24.580France and Italy and becoming fashionable in um England and what's really interesting about that
00:23:30.320is that within the court setting, that was normative masculinity. That was the height of
00:23:34.960masculinity. Outside of the court setting, that was effeminacy. That was gender nonconformity.
00:23:40.800That was, once again, changing your sex. And so you see how contingent the idea of gender is,
00:23:46.260right? Masculinity means a totally different thing within the context of the court than it
00:23:51.220does if you're walking down the street. And that shows us again, I think, how messy the history of
00:23:56.980it can be. Right. Well, and that's so much of what I think is so valuable and so interesting
00:24:01.500about this book. Like you mentioned before, like there are these books that are like, here's the
00:24:04.480history of like queer people in history and here's the biographies. And then because those exist,
00:24:08.400like you're able to do your book, which delves deeper into less known things. But ultimately,
00:24:14.240like one of the main things I think that comes across from your book is like, this isn't new.
00:24:19.140This isn't like, like, what does masculine mean? What does feminine mean? It's like
00:24:24.480all these different countries all these different eras it's not like all of society has been
00:24:29.280binary until you know the year 2020 it's so frustrating when people make that claim um the
00:24:35.760idea that the redefinition of man and woman is something that has just emerged in the past few
00:24:40.720years you don't have to look very far back in history to see how complete rubbish that is and
00:24:46.340you know that was that was why writing this book was felt like a really politically important thing0.62
00:24:50.760to do though to underline that there is nothing new about playing with gender um that people have
00:25:00.940always experimented with gender changed their minds there's nothing catastrophic about trying
00:25:06.220something out and then stopping trying it out people have always also changed the way they
00:25:11.580lived on a permanent basis and that's not something that's new either and that people
00:25:17.920people who are gender non-conforming today and are feeling isolated in our own society
00:25:22.240are not alone. We have historical community, even if we don't always have present day community.
00:25:27.100And so it felt politically important to write it in that sense as well.
00:25:30.100I'm really glad you brought that up because you mentioned it in the prologue and it was
00:25:32.740about your connection you have felt to these figures in the past. And that just made me think
00:25:37.380of Alok, the activist. I've heard an interview with them where they said the same thing. And
00:25:43.080then I had um Maya Dean the trans author on this podcast as well and she said the same thing so I'm
00:25:48.200just like okay this is such a finding your people if you don't see them around you in your day-to-day
00:25:54.080life finding them in history is so like can you talk about what that's been like that means a huge
00:25:59.820amount to me yeah I mean I came to understanding of my own queer identity through identification
00:26:06.600with the queer past. It was when I was a teenager growing up in a community that didn't really
00:26:13.460understand me and knowing that something was complex about my gender, but not having the
00:26:19.260words to understand it, you know, until I was 13, it was illegal for my teachers to tell me
00:26:22.660anything about queer people. So it was never going to be the case that I was able to articulate
00:26:28.400it at a young age. But I did know that I felt an intense connection to and care for queer people
00:26:35.260in the past and that really sustained me in a time when I didn't have much else and it was then
00:26:41.700through becoming involved in raising awareness of queer history through the LGBT History Month
00:26:46.880movement that I finally was put in a position where I was able to explain to myself what was
00:26:52.100going on with my own gender and sexuality and it's really quite moving actually to hear you talking
00:26:57.940about Mayadeen saying the same thing um Mayadeen's work and queer retellings of the Iliad mean a huge
00:27:06.660amount to me and it's kind of beautiful that that has been exactly the same for um other trans people0.62
00:27:14.720who I've never met that's really moving to hear no when I read that I was like where have I heard
00:27:19.620that sentiment before I'm like oh here and here and I think also what your book also gets to is
00:27:26.160you mentioned earlier about kind of that uh being born in the wrong body and how that is
00:27:31.140the experience of some people but not all people and so your book is really expanding the um not
00:27:38.460the definition but like what is trans history it's not just like here are people like the
00:27:42.600chevalier day on for instance who was like was born one way and lived another way and like that's
00:27:47.640kind of uh the mad libs you talk about what is jacob tobia i think yeah can you talk about that
00:27:54.500yeah jacob toby has this brilliant way of explaining what the standard trans narrative
00:28:00.040um like how that functions in our culture um which is that you know you were born you realized
00:28:06.280very early on that you didn't um identify with the gender you were assigned at birth you then
00:28:10.280conformed perfectly to the stereotypes of the gender you identified as um you struggled with
00:28:16.460coming out you came out you were rejected by your family then you worked through it some more
00:28:22.000eventually you decided to come out fully your friends accepted you you um went through all of
00:28:27.900the medical transition options you possibly could um and then you lived happily ever after as a very
00:28:32.820conforming binary gendered person and your gender was completely stable and you never kind of
00:28:37.580experimented with anything or experienced any fluidity and that's exactly how it functions
00:28:42.860and that's kind of what works in our society it has the narrative of what it means to be really
00:28:48.120trans and anything that troubles that so anything where someone has experienced fluidity or their
00:28:53.920gender isn't binary or they've not always known or they don't conform to stereotypes all of those
00:28:59.180things are seen as not quite as real and one of the things i wanted to do in the book was show
00:29:04.520how pernicious it is that those ideas in our contemporary culture of what it means to be
00:29:09.960really trans are actually bleeding back into the way we interpret our history as well so we're
00:29:15.280looking for that very very narrow idea of what it means to be really trans in the past and often we
00:29:20.660don't find it in part because that is very unrepresentative of trans experience and in part
00:29:25.580because it relies on a lot of kinds of what are considered proof today like personal testimony
00:29:31.700um which you can't find in the past for a myriad of reasons so instead i really wanted to reframe
00:29:38.000things and say trans history is the history of gender not being fixed or uncontested or tied to
00:29:44.480the body it's the history of gender being movable and changeable and challengeable um and that
00:29:51.060applies whether someone has lived as a different gender for 50 years or for two hours right it
00:29:58.140applies just as much to people who go on the stage and perform as a different gender and come off
00:30:03.860saying i really felt like i was that person that still shows us that there is a possibility of
00:30:10.860experiencing a gender different from the one that you're assigned at birth and that shows us
00:30:14.820therefore that trans history is everywhere and that the way we think about gender today is so
00:30:20.460up for debate and always has been um and so yeah absolutely i wanted to expand what we think of as
00:30:25.940trans history if we're expanding the definition and we're kind of looking into the past as well
00:30:32.040then it's um we've been talking a lot about monarchs you know people are wealthy people who
00:30:38.240were able to do this. So there's a book called, I think it's Female Husbands by Jen Mannion,
00:30:44.580who talks about basically, and you say this in the book as well, it's like sex was not put on
00:30:50.560birth certificates for a long time. And that's why you don't use like AFAB, AMAB a lot in the book,
00:30:54.140but like somebody who is not wealthy, who just starts living in a certain way
00:30:58.960is not recorded in history necessarily if they didn't, if they weren't arrested,
00:31:02.900if it didn't challenge somebody. So it's like invisible as well.
00:31:06.600And now we're just going to take a break for a word from our sponsors.
00:31:11.080Welcome to the realms of peril and glory.
00:31:16.280Explore the mechanically magical vistas of Vale.
00:31:20.340The paranormal mysteries of liminal London.
00:33:48.920Yeah, and that's one of the points that Gemma Mannion's book makes so well, I think,
00:33:53.800is that the stories of female husbands that we have are the tip of the iceberg of what was actually going on.
00:34:00.580And yeah, well, I mean, one of the points I wanted to make in the book as well was that in in cases where we do know that there was kind of widespread gender nonconformity, like I talk, for example, about the sex workers of early modern Venice who wore breeches and skirts.
00:34:15.160so a mixture of male and female clothing um there is likely to have been a real diversity of
00:34:21.780feelings about that gender non-conformity within those groups right so if you've got 12 000
00:34:26.660courtesans in early modern Venice some of them are thinking okay I just put this on as a uniform
00:34:32.560to go to work it doesn't say anything about myself and that's kind of cool because that shows that
00:34:36.380women can wear trousers which is um a radical thing in that period some of them are thinking
00:34:42.160okay um this makes me feel temporarily a bit weird about my gender but then when i take it off it
00:34:49.960goes away some of them are thinking this is a really good opportunity to express something
00:34:54.760that actually feels comfortable for me and to wear the clothing that i would like to wear and
00:34:58.040that diversity exists but is not recorded but unquestionably is a diversity that we need to
00:35:07.800respect the possibility of um and especially among marginalized groups like poor people like sex
00:35:13.560workers people whose agency and individuality very often isn't respected um so yeah I think0.50
00:35:19.540you're totally right that that invisibility is something we really need to pay attention to
00:35:23.820yeah and so it's like so much of history like what I do in the podcast it's like when you hear
00:35:29.220about scandalous women because they do something so extreme that like it got written about but0.74
00:35:33.760there's so many other which is not to say every other woman living in all these societies was0.88
00:35:37.580just like docile and minding their own business it's just they were never caught or whatever
00:35:40.840so can you talk about the very very opening um the first example you have i think in chapter one
00:35:46.480about the the man who's wearing the women's clothes oh were they a man we don't even know
00:35:52.240yeah exactly so i start yes i start the book and with this story of a person called john sullivan
00:35:57.800who was um arrested um in the 19th century walking down the street in london wearing women's clothes
00:36:03.600and John is then sent to court and in court it turns out the clothes are stolen so that's what
00:36:11.280John is sent to court for not for gender non-conformity for theft and in court says
00:36:15.740I was wearing those clothes as a joke I was very drunk and I use this story to start the
00:36:22.640conversation about what we think of as trans history because many people would look at that
00:36:26.660case and they would say okay well we literally have this person's own voice saying this was a
00:36:30.500joke. So this is absolutely nothing to do with John's identity. This is just someone dressing
00:36:35.160up for fun. But if you think about it, first of all, we have a very unreliable context in which
00:36:42.000John is saying those things. It's not a neutral context. It's a court of law. It's a situation
00:36:48.240where if you say, I was wearing this because actually I really enjoy wearing dresses, that's
00:36:52.240not going to go down very well. And then it's also a good example for us to think about, okay,
00:37:00.220what are the possibilities that might be going on here so maybe we have a man wearing a dress
00:37:04.380well that's interesting because it tells us um that when so when john was caught john said
00:37:10.580this dress is mine so that tells us that um a man could consider a dress to be his clothes so
00:37:18.000that's interesting or maybe john was kind of thinking a dress can be men's clothes or maybe
00:37:24.720john was thinking um i am a man wearing women's clothes those are both interesting possibilities
00:37:28.480or maybe John felt female or neither male nor female for those minutes or maybe John always
00:37:33.740felt like that and those are all possibilities which tell us interesting stories about the
00:37:38.340history of gender and so I wanted to start with that story to say it doesn't matter if we don't
00:37:43.200know exactly how John felt because all of those possibilities show us that gender is not something
00:37:50.400that is simple and uncontested and so all of those possibilities show a different show us a
00:37:56.220different kind of trans history no and i love that and it really sets the scene for for the
00:38:01.360discussion in the book because it's really it's people like john who are so often not discussed
00:38:07.200in in a discussion of trans history it's like oh it was just he was just making a joke or whatever
00:38:10.880but like whether he would and that's what what i mean like with catalina de arraso being like i
00:38:15.540was born a woman it's like okay but like she's saying that for someone to someone for a reason
00:38:21.940john was saying this because he wanted to not go to jail so he can't just be like it's like saying
00:38:27.520not this it's not the same thing but similar to like if somebody says under torture yeah no i did
00:38:31.620that it's like well well they admitted it it's like but they said that for other reasons yeah
00:38:38.760yeah yeah um and you know um it's it's not the same but it is it is a it is on a continuum i
00:38:46.060think the you know that carceral context um is a context in which people say things that are not
00:38:52.700expressions of how they feel but because they're so um affected by the circumstances that they're
00:38:58.060in and likewise publication in a context where you're fearing a particular kind of censure like
00:39:02.460catalina was yeah it's a contingent context where you're not free to express yourself without
00:39:09.200constraints. And what I wanted to do with this book was to say, okay, well, given that we don't
00:39:18.820know exactly what was going on with these people, what can we do with that history? What
00:39:22.440does it tell us? And as I said, I think what it tells us is a promise that gender has never1.00
00:39:30.720been something simple or easy to define or categorize.
00:39:34.760so and I love that expansive understanding of it too like it really like I said like this book I
00:39:40.420know I'm going to turn to it again and again preparing when I've when I've got some sort of
00:39:45.760queer history to talk about just to get the language just wrap my head around like how am
00:39:48.560I going to approach this story you know how am I going to talk about it because yeah it's it's so
00:39:53.560complex and like for my podcast in the sense of being like it started off as a women's history
00:39:58.240podcast but I'm getting into like I've gotten some queer figures like I'm totally open to
00:40:02.440talking about other things as well and yeah it's it's so fascinating to me every time I come across
00:40:07.820especially Christina of Sweden for instance with someone where I was just like what
00:40:12.000the hell do I do with this person's gender presentation and no one in her era knew what
00:40:19.220to do about her either like it's kind of lovely that you're having the same experience as people
00:40:24.520who were reacting to Christina back in their lifetime right yeah it's like it's just like
00:40:29.300what is happening and because she was a queen like because she had this power she was able to
00:40:34.100really express who she was in a way that so many other people weren't and there was no there's no
00:40:39.100tidy answer to her and she never offered one so we're just kind of like well here's this person
00:40:43.940who was like maybe intersex and maybe trans and maybe non-binary and maybe a lesbian it's just
00:40:49.560like well and here's what she did like yeah and it so often is messy and there's so often aren't
00:40:55.260answers um and that status is also so often a kind of double-edged sword because yes you can
00:41:00.280do what you want but also it draws a heck of a lot of attention to you as well um and yeah sometimes
00:41:07.220when we're dealing with history what we're dealing with is messiness and that's kind of beautiful i
00:41:12.220think yeah exactly exactly and that's that's a great point to to maybe start wrapping things up
00:41:19.780as much as i would love to talk to you for hours and hours so your book before we were trans this
00:41:24.620is available all over the place like i got it in canada it's obviously been released like in north
00:41:29.080america for a while now um what what else has the response been like to like it just came out you
00:41:35.060researched it during covid it came out during covid like yeah so it came out in the uk in june
00:41:42.160and in um north america in um september and um it's been it's been lovely i mean i've had some
00:41:49.720really nice responses um particularly in north america and really kind reviewing the new york
00:41:54.720times but mostly i mean the responses that have meant the most have been from trans and queer
00:41:59.680people writing to me on twitter and instagram saying i felt really seen by this i love this
00:42:04.080this is articulated something that i really wanted someone to articulate that has been so lovely
00:42:08.660because i absolutely wrote it for those people really um to be the book that none of us had um
00:42:17.780there's a great cartoon by the trans cartoonist sophie labelle about being the person you needed
00:42:22.220when you were younger and i guess i was trying to do a bit of that with this book as well and so i'm
00:42:25.920really touched that you say that it's something you're going to come back to um that means a lot
00:42:31.220thank you so much well thank you so much for talking with me today i really hope everybody
00:42:36.700who listens to this goes out and reads this book because it's so valuable and so important
00:42:41.300yeah thank you so much for joining me thank you so much for having me that's gone so quickly it's
00:42:46.720been lovely to talk to you because it bears repeating the book we were talking about is
00:42:51.980before we were trans a new history of gender by kit ham which you can pick up wherever you get
00:42:57.160your books there's also an audiobook there's an ebook of it if you use the link in the show notes
00:43:01.780to purchase a copy using my bookshop.org link then a little bit of money will go to support
00:43:08.140this podcast so that's like a real win all around anyway i'm so grateful to kit for joining me for
00:43:13.100this conversation. I'm so grateful for them for writing this book. And yeah, I'm really happy I
00:43:18.240was able to talk to them and also to share this conversation with all of you. So changing subjects
00:43:25.160for a moment, I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the incredible bravery of the women
00:43:30.560and girls and other people of Iran who are currently in the midst of a revolution. So
00:43:38.780Since September 17th, 2022, demonstrations and protests have been happening throughout Iran
00:43:44.120following the death of 22-year-old Masa Amini.
00:43:48.160Masa was arrested by Iran's morality police, allegedly for not wearing her hijab properly.
00:43:54.140So three days after her arrest, Masa Amini died in the hospital after falling into a coma.
00:44:00.840Police denied mistreating her and claimed she died of a heart attack.
00:44:04.820Eyewitness say that she was beaten by the police.
00:44:07.800Protesters with young people, especially young women and including schoolgirls, are demanding an end to conservative laws, including the ones around dress codes, which require any girls over the age of nine to wear a hijab and loose-fitting robes.
00:44:22.900There are Vulgar History listeners, members of the Tits Out Brigade, who I've heard from in Iran.
00:44:29.400One of them told me that this is a feminist revolution.
00:44:32.640And as a feminist podcast, I wanted to acknowledge the incredible bravery and also just share information about what's going on.