Celebrating Trans+ History Week with some articles from our archives

Trans+ History Week is  dedicated to recognizing and honoring the lives, struggles, and contributions of transgender people throughout history.

The week,  from May 5 to May 11,  is to:

• Educate about historical and contemporary figures in the trans community.
• Highlight milestones in trans rights movements.
• Celebrate the cultural impact of trans individuals.
• Reflect on past and ongoing struggles against discrimination and marginalization.

This site has several articles that cover often unknown parts of the history of gender variance. You might find the following ones interesting:

Were There Transgender Vikings? The Laxdæla Saga Says So.

Yes, Ernest Hemingway was Transgender

The Transmasculine Women of Ancient Baghdad

The Kama Sutra on Transgender People

Magnus Hirschfeld's Understanding of Transgender People

The Transgender Historian Zagria, Part 1: "A Gender Variance Who's Who"

What an old edition of Encyclopedia Britannica can tell us about the erasure of trans and queer people

A Short History of the Roots of Transphobic Science

How J.K. Rowling and transphobes are forcing men into women's bathrooms

Jaxon Feeley, trans man 

One of the clear signs of bigotry is how its proponents do not  understand the unintended consequences of their own irrational hatred. They need their "solutions" to their imaginary problems to be neat and easy to handle.

J. K. Rowling and the TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) celebrated their UK Supreme Court victory this week as a victory for women (i.e. cis women). 

They clearly believe that this means that trans women will  be excluded from women's spaces, including bathrooms, in the future.

What they have not considered is  the fact that they have now opened the doors of women's bathrooms to men. 

Indeed, if the British government follows up on this Supreme Court madness (gender reduced to "biological sex" at birth), trans men will be forced to either use the women's room or break the law.

A trans man in the restroom

Imagine this scenario: A trans man (indistinguishable from a cis man) walks into a woman's restroom to do their thing. Imagine one of the women in there alerting a male friend or the staff about this male incursion into female spaces. This may quickly escalate into something ugly.

You need to read TJ Klune's anti-JK Rowling books about love, diversity and magic

In a world full of evil fascists, transphobic TERFs and religious fanatics comes the anti-JK Rowling books you have been waiting for,  books about love, diversity and personal growth.

It is when you are living in dark times like these that you need art that can give you meaning and hope. This is why I will use this opportunity to tell you about two books that have given me a psychological and spiritual injection of  compassion and optimism.

TJ Klune

Travis John Klune (or TJ Klune as he is known) has written several romantic fantasy novels. 

He is a gay and neurodiverse author who has some really profound insights into why some people become bigots who do everything in their power to control others. But he is also very good at describing how diversity and allowing people to be themselves can lead to personal growth and happiness.

The House in the Cerulean Sea, and the follow up Somewhere Beyond the Sea, are clearly targeting a young adult audience, but – believe me – the books have something for everyone, including a kind of humor those who have lived for some time will appreciate. 

The House in the Cerulean Sea presents Linus Baker, a caseworker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He is the perfect by the book bureaucrat. 

He is often sent to orphanages for magical children to report on them, and even though he feels compassion for the kids, he does not really see how the system uses these orphanages to keep the magical children away from society at large.

The Weight of America: Transgender People Under Siege

American society is like the inside of this monstrous mall, where people move like “sentient corpses". Photo: estherpoon

America has truly lost its soul, Kai McKenzie argues. Trans people find themselves under siege.

Guest article by Kai McKenzie 

As I sit in my Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada rental home, looking out at the quiet and cold snow-covered porch and yard outside, the ice crystals on the window glowing magically in the morning sunlight, and the little flecks of snow drifting upward on the breeze outside and catching the light like fireflies, I feel the weight of America. 

It’s inescapable. It follows and haunts me. I feel a fierce anger at the country where I was born, at the citizens who have thrown me and my children away, who barely bat an eye as our fellow trans citizens are erased from monuments, histories, medical records, and public life. America has truly lost its soul. 

The faces of the US

Born in Boulder, Colorado in 1964, growing up in Berkeley, California during the tumultuous 1960s and 70s, living in Boulder again for three decades before moving to Saskatchewan, Canada in 2018 for school, I’ve seen the many faces of the US: the liberal college town of Berkeley with its diversity and pride, colourful protests and street performers, passionate desire to stand up for human rights and fairness; the sleepy town of 29 Palms, California in the Mojave Desert, near the 29 Palms Marine Corp Base, where being American means being faithful and proud, ready to invade and stand strong at the behest of a Commander in Chief; Nashville, Tennessee, where my parents moved for a distinguished professorship in mathematics, a mix of southern tradition and new immigrants. 

Were There Transgender Vikings? The Laxdæla Saga Says So.

One of the main transphobic arguments these days is that people become trans because of "gender ideology".  And "gender ideology" is apparently something new invented by post-modernists, Marxists and progressive leftists. So what if I told you there were transgender people in Scandinavia in the Middle Ages?

Transgender people in history

I have already documented transgender people in ancient and medieval India, ancient Phrygia and Rome,  the Roman Empire, ancient Baghdad and  late 19th century Berlin, and I have also written a popular article about William Shakespeare being in love with a transfeminine person.   

However, with the exception of the poem on gender dysphoria from Kalonymos ben Kalonymus (1322), none of the original sources I have found have been written by trans people. All of the texts, including the one I  present here,  will therefore have to be read with an open, but critical, mind. 

Getting behind the stereotypes

Reconstructed Viking women's clothing.
Photo: Battle-Merchant

Many of the historical texts are  written by transphobes or people who do not understand gender variance. Still, even a queer-phobic or transphobic text can be a witness to gender variance, because why would the author imagine cross-gender expressions if the culture had no concepts of gender variance?

Whether the author of the text I am going to present today, namely the 13th century Laxdæla  Saga (also written as Laksdøla, Laksdæla or Laxardale), is transphobic remains to be seen. 

It clearly refers to negative tropes about both transfeminine and transmasculine gender variance. The story in the saga takes place around 1000 CE, which  mean that this may also apply to the Viking age.

Note that I am using the word "transgender" as an umbrella term covering a wide variety of gender variance here. The references found in the saga do not tell us if the people referred to were gender dysphoric or gender incongruent as we use these medical terms today. 

The similarities with contemporary gender variance leads me to believe, however, that many of them probably were.

The rise of queer and transgender Bluesky

Bluesky has become a real alternative to X-twitter for LGBTQ people. Transgender World has experienced  more than a 50% increase in followers since the US election.

The increasing polarization of American politics have seriously damages some of the most valuable parts of the internet: commons for debate and information sharing. Twitter was, for a time, such a place,  used by millions of people across the political spectrum for debate and research.

Not anymore. Twitter was weakened even before Elon Musk took over, but since he became the owner and leader of what is now X, it has devolved  a cesspool of hatred and trolling. He intentionally dismissed most of the moderators.

Toxic environment

I gave up debating transgender issues on twitter/X years ago, as it became increasingly clear that nearly all threads regarding gender variance might be taken over by  trolls whose goal was not to learn but to win. If you debated on their terms, you soon found yourself lost in a toxic sea of "fake news" and lack of logic. 

People have been leaving X-twitter for a long time now. I noticed that serious journalists stopped using twitter in their research. Activists who do not belong to the MAGA-tribe are also much less likely to use twitter for hashtag campaigns intended to raise awareness. Most trans people have stopped using twitter as a place of identity exploration or for finding friends.

Elon Musk has effectively destroyed Twitter, and I’m convinced it was intentional, as his extremist politics do not flourish in open and tolerant arenas for learning.

Note that Musk is a transphobe who has actively been harassing his transgender daughter on twitter,  He is that bad.