PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anita Rao
This is Embodied, from PRX and WUNC. I’m Anita Rao.
Writer Kit Heyam has spent time deep in historical archives... re-examining stories that challenge our beliefs about gender.
Kit Heyam
Iif people are saying transness is new, but we can point to someone in the early 20th century who is thinking in what's very, very clearly a trans-affirming way, then that undermines that narrative.
Anita Rao
Today, we’ll hear about Kit’s mission to share untold stories of trans history... and how that work has evoked some big emotions, in Kit... and in those who interact with his work.
Kit Heyam
People view history as a kind of scarce resource or like a zero sum game. And that has made me think a lot more about how we can Reframe the way we see history, not as something that' s limited, but as something that has limitless potential to offer solidarity to people from multiple identities.
Anita Rao
A New History of Gender... Just ahead on Embodied.
How does history inform how we understand ourselves today? It's an intellectual question, but also a really personal one for writer Kit Ham. When Kit was first trying to understand their own gender identity as an adolescent, they looked to history and what they found was a very narrow picture of what it meant to be trans.
The stories were about people who transitioned medically and then identified firmly with a new gender that did not match their own more ambiguous trans experience. But when Kit started studying history professionally. A different picture emerged, one that suggests that there are more diverse examples of transness in the past, but we must reexamine history to find them.
This is Embodied our show about sex, relationships, and your health. I'm Anita Rao.
In this effort to share untold stories of trans history, kit scoured the archives. They combed through literature and legal records and found stories of transness everywhere from 1600 Southwestern Africa to World War I Britain. He documents all of this in the new book. Before we were trans, a new history of gender.
This project has always been both professional and personal. The fact that Kit does not shy away from, so we're gonna start our conversation back in 1990s. Bolton, a former Milltown in Northern England where Kit grew up, they were a kid struggling to find people they could relate to.
Kit Heyam
So I think part of that disconnect was not really being able to understand what was going on with my own queer identity. Um, it's not that I didn't know queer people, but I certainly wasn't taught about transness at school and I didn't have any kind of references for that. Um, the other side of that, I suppose, was that I went to a school where it was definitely very unfashionable to be interested in stuff, to care about studying, to care about history, um, and all of that. Yeah. Made for a fairly isolating set of teenage years, I guess.
Anita Rao
So even though it wasn't cool to study history, you did kind of do it on the side. You did have that genuine interest. When do you first remember kind of turning to history to look for that community or, or companionship that you maybe weren't finding in other parts of your life?
Kit Heyam
So the first, um, time that I really felt community with history was definitely when at the age of 14 we started doing, um, first World War poetry in English class. And I was really, you know, at an age where I was definitely open to being kind of emotionally smashed open, um, by poetry. And as a result of that, I started looking into Wil Alfred Owen, and quickly discovered that he was gay and that. Really spoke to something that had been a thread of emotional connection. For as long as I could remember. I had felt connected to great history, especially gay men's history in a way that didn't really make any sense to me. Um, and I didn't have a word for in it or an explanation for, but the fact that. It also applied to Wil Fido and made him a really important historical figure to me. Like he became the person who my diary entries were addressed to and stuff. Um, it, yeah, it was a big deal.
Anita Rao
Well, tell, tell me about that. 'cause it wasn't just like an intellectual interest, but it was like he really entered your imagination. Yeah. So how and when were you turning to him to process things or, or confiding in him?
Kit Heyam
I mean all the time. Um, this is a fun and vulnerable thing to talk about. I don't think I've really spoken about it in public before, but like I had a little photo of him mm-hmm. That I printed out. Um, secretly I felt very, very, you know, when this is a experience I think familiar to a. A lot of people who grow up queer but not out, um, you feel like everything you do that is tangentially related to queerness is gonna be really obvious to people. And you need to be really secretive about it. And actually, I don't think anyone would've thought it was weird that I was researching a poet who I was studying in English class. I think people would've thought I was completely normal. But anyway, a very secretively. Printed out this little photo of him, um, very secretively tried to research the place where he was buried, and this was like the early internet. I was like trying to find out if I could like go and see where he was buried in France. Um, and it was really, really hard. I think that would probably be really easy now, but this was like 2004 and there wasn't a Wikipedia article on it. My computer in my room didn't have internet because we didn't have wifi. You know, it was a hard time.
Anita Rao
So you were, you were kind of deeply, deeply curious. You mentioned kind of writing in your diary. What kind of questions were you asking these historical figures?
Kit Heyam
A lot of it was, why are gay men so important to me? I remember writing in my diary, age 14, life would be so much easier if I'd been born a gay man. But then I kind of just stopped there because I was like, well, I didn't know that that was a thing. So guess that's a shame. Guess I wasn't what we're gonna do about that. And periodically, and particularly as I got older and as I went to uni, I would ask friends, you know, do you have like. A weird thing that you can't explain about your life. Like, I have this weird thing, and they'd all be like, no, I dunno what you're talking about. This is crazy. But okay. Um, and it really, it wasn't until I met my first trans person when I was 21, that I started to think, oh ha, is this actually a real thing?
Anita Rao
So you had this affinity for historical queer characters. As a young person, you were drawn to this history of sexuality in school. Did you identify personally at that point as part of the L-G-B-T-Q community?
Kit Heyam
No, I didn't. And it was because I had plenty of friends who were like cis gay people or cis bi people, but I couldn't see myself among them because I didn't like women and I thought I was a girl. So I, the only context in which I'd heard of transness, where I remember one kind of article in a teen magazine about a trans man, which I was obsessed with. Mm-hmm. But not in a. I explicitly relate to this way. I just kept reading it over and over again, but I didn't like know why. And then also, um, one, there was a woman, trans woman who were on Big Brother in the UK when I was a teenager. Um, they were the only two images of trans that they had, and none of them were anything to do with. The kind of transness that I experienced, um, they weren't queer in their sexuality. They were very binary in their genders. Um, and they also didn't really talk about the reasons that you might transition because of how you felt. It was all about like, I did this surgically to my body, not, I did this because I felt things. So it was really hard to kind of understand that that might relate to anything that was going on for me. Yeah.
Anita Rao
So you mentioned going to University Uni, you say, and uh, I know that you had a particular professor who really piqued your interest in history as an academic discipline. I'd love to hear about how they helped you think about history in a new and surprising way.
Kit Heyam
In my first year, I had a module on Shakespeare and Shakespeare's contemporaries. And we were asked, um, by this one academic, um, whose name was hi charmers to read Christopher Marlowe's play Edward ii. For anyone who doesn't know Edward ii, it is the most surprisingly explicitly gay thing to come out of the 16th century theater. It's a really sympathetic be portrayal of a relationship between two men as a tragic love story, and I was blown away by reading that. I hadn't expected to find anything like that in the 16th century. And so when the time came to. Pick what I was going to write on for coursework for that module. Of course, I really, really wanted to write about it of the second. Um, and so I asked Hiro for recommendations and what to read, and she sent me to some really seminal reading on queer sexuality in the early modern period. And what struck me about. Those works was how they emphasized that. To be able to understand the history of sexuality properly, you have to completely let go of all of the ways in which you think about sexuality and get yourself in a totally different headspace. It's like history as a kind of cultural relativism, I guess. Um, that way of thinking about history as being able to have empathy for people who are so different from you really unlock something for me, I think.
Anita Rao
So you did continue in academia, you decided to get a PhD, and about halfway through the program you did come out as non-binary and trans. What was the turning point for you in claiming those identities?
Kit Heyam
After a year or so of working on my PhD, which was about Edward ii, um, and how he got his queer reputation, um. I decided I wanted to do something to engage with the public and then got involved with this charity in York where I was living at the time, York, LGBT History Month, and they were never anything but welcoming, but I felt like I stood out as someone who was presenting as a cis straight woman. I felt like I needed to explain to them why I was there, and really that effort of trying to work out well, how would I explain it to them? That's what finally pushed me into actually explaining it to myself.
Anita Rao
What kind of response did you get from friends and family when you started sharing that more publicly outside of just that space of the committee and, and the space that you had kind of entered into?
Kit Heyam
Yeah. The interesting thing about coming out as trans in 2014 is I was like slightly ahead of the curve of people knowing what non-binary was. And so a lot of the work of coming out was not only telling people I am non-binary, but explaining. This is a way of being trans and this is a thing that you have to take seriously. This is a real thing. It's a thing where, yes, it does require you to change the pronouns you use and the way that you think about me. It was a lot more labor of explanation, um, than I'd expect, and a lot more kind of battling against the ideas of what counted as a really trans person in my culture than I'd expect it to be.
Anita Rao
What impact did that personal excavation and and personal work have on what you wanted to do with your career? How were those two things intersecting?
Kit Heyam
Oh, it's huge. Um, I think the impact of butting up repeatedly personally against these very restrictive ideas of what it meant to be a really trans person and to have a valid trans identity, um, that spilled over really quickly into how I looked at history. It was also 20 14, 20 15 was also a, um. Interesting time to come out as trans in the kind of academic, historical community. 'cause there weren't at that time that many people working on it, especially in the uk. The US has always been a bit ahead of the curve on that. But that meant that when, you know, when I went to queer conferences, everyone wanted to talk to me about gender. 'cause I was like one of the very few visibly trans people there and they'd tell me these stories of trans history. And then I find myself working through how those stories of trans history related to or were constrained by like contemporary ideas of transness. Um, and inevitably my personal experience of. Restrictive. Those ideas were, would come into how I interpreted their history.
Anita Rao
Just ahead. Kit tells us some of their favorite stories of gender non-conformity from the past and why they consider them part of Trans history. You're listening to Embodied from North Carolina Public Radio. A broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can also hear Embodied as a podcast. Follow and subscribe on your platform of choice. We'll be right back.
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao. In January of this year, president Donald Trump issued an executive order about sex and gender critiquing gender identity as a recent and growing threat to the quote, ordinary and longstanding use of biological terms like male and female. This claim that transness is a new phenomenon has been echoed in many policy conversations about trans rights, both in the US and around the world. Writer Kit Heyam studies, the history of gender and sexuality. And when he hears those policy discussions, he offers a rebuttal. He argues that stories of transness and gender non-conformity have existed for thousands of years, and that even historians have overlooked many of those examples. Kit explores this idea in their book before we were trans, a new history of gender.
Kit Heyam
If you boil down all of the anti-trans discursive and legislative measures that we've seen over the past few years, they boil down to the idea that this is something new with no history, and therefore, either it's so new we don't take it seriously, or it's a new threat that we need to make laws against. Um, what I wanted to do in before we were trans was. Say, when we look at for trans history, if we look for only people who tick the boxes of a contemporary idea of what it means to be really trans, we will miss the vast majority of trans history and the vast majority of histories that prove to us that people have always been able to think about gender as something that you can decouple from the body.
Anita Rao
I mean, and what you're saying in that, that I think is. Is really interesting to underscore is that you are making a distinction between trans people and trans history. Can you talk more about that distinction?
Kit Heyam
Yeah. I think this distinction is really important. Something I'm really committed to as a historian and a trans person is seeing people on their own historical and cultural terms, rather than imposing my own labels on them. Um, so what that means is if someone doesn't say they're trans. I don't wanna call them trans. And I think that is as much a kind of historical choice, like not assuming that, um. I in the present day know better who people in the past were than they knew themselves, but also an ethical choice. You know, as a trans person, I know what it's like to be referred to in terms that I, um, don't want to be referred to in, I don't wanna do that to other people. So I don't think I'm looking for trans people in the past. And I think drawing that line for me feels like a really good way to. Be ethically responsible to people in the past by not imposing my own labels on them, but also be ethically responsible to people in the present for whom it's really, really politically and emotionally important that we prove that there is trans history and there are people in the past whose experiences we can feel solidarity and community with.
Anita Rao
So one of the big challenges of doing this work that you encountered really early on is that a lot of the evidence that we have for gender non-conforming lives comes from legal and medical contexts. What are the limitations of relying on those sources to understand a full picture of gender and history?
Kit Heyam
I think the simple answer to that is that in legal and medical context, people don't always tell the full truth. Uhhuh, if you're in a court of law and someone is accusing you of gender nonconformity, whether that's illegal or whether it's just that. It's associated with sexuality that's illegal. You are not necessarily gonna say, oh yeah, I do this all the time. And the same with medical context. You know, I know firsthand that if you are in a context where someone is gatekeeping the healthcare that you need, you are gonna say whatever they want to hear in order to jump through the hoops you need to jump through to get that healthcare.
Anita Rao
It's interesting. Yeah. You point out that, you know, if your story were only looked at in the future through medical and legal records, it, it would be really an incomplete representation of your identity and experience of identity.
Kit Heyam
Yeah, exactly. I definitely, when I went to the gender identity clinics to get access to, um, the healthcare that I wanted, I presented a really stereotyped narrative of my own. Trans masculinity. I didn't talk about being non-binary. I also didn't tell 'em that I ever wanted to be pregnant in the future. Um, and in fact had to discharge myself to get them to stop pressuring me into a hysterectomy. So yeah, a hugely incomplete picture of the. Complicatedness of my transness, which I would say is probably true for the vast majority of trans people. Honestly.
Anita Rao
There is a really interesting story in the book that illuminates how relying only on these interpretations can limit our understanding. It's a story of John Sullivan. Will you tell that story to us?
Kit Heyam
Yes. So John Sullivan is caught walking down the street in East London, um, in the 19th century wearing. Address a mixture of male and female clothing, but conspicuously address and Johnny's court and taken to the police station. And when asked, where did he get these clothes? Says they're my clothes, but is then put on trial. And it's found out that the clothes were stolen. Um, they belonged to a local woman and John's defense in court is. I had the gown on in a lark, but I had my trousers on and that the clothes have been given to them to carry to the market. And then the person who gave them ran away and that they were drunk when they put those clothes on. And the reason I start the book with that story and the reason I think it's a really interesting and important story to tell. Is not because we know anything about who John Sullivan is, but because it's such an easy story to dismiss from trans history. You know, this is a person who we have their own words saying, this was just a joke, I was drunk. Um, this is a person who we don't know if they ever wore women women's clothes at any other time, but that actually, when you think about it, no matter how you interpret that story, it tells you something interesting about the history of gender. You know, either John is a man wearing a dress in the 19th century feeling totally masculine. Quite interesting, or John is feeling kind of a bit more feminine through putting on a dress. And that shows you that a man can feel feminine, that femininity and masculinity can be different from bodies, or John feels a bit more like a woman when wearing the dress, or John feels a bit more like a woman before putting on the dress, and that's the reason they put it on. And all of those histories, all of those possibilities. Are equally possible and all of them tell us a story of how gender can be. Played with in the past can be different from bodies in the past. All of them tell us, I think, different forms of trans history, no matter how we interpret it.
Anita Rao
I wanna ask you about the way that you understand the word trans and use the word trans in this book. 'cause you mentioned, you know, John Sullivan tells us something really interesting about gender. So why call this an examination of trans history versus an examination of. The history of gender or the examination of queer history. Talk to me about why you are choosing transness as the the frame that you want to look at these stories through.
Kit Heyam
I think there are a couple of reasons. One of them is political. We mentioned that the movement against trans rights is founded on the idea that transness is new, and so it is really important to point to the existence of specifically trans history. And the other I think is about what the. Value of a trans gaze on history is it can show us that the meanings we attach to bodies don't have to be the meanings that we attach to bodies in the future and don't have to be the meanings we attach to bodies in the past. And I think that by calling John Sullivan's history, trans history, we draw attention to all of the potential that it has. To unsettle how we think about the relationship between gender or bodies.
Anita Rao
So you're very intentionally, as you said before, you know, you're not labeling John Sullivan as trans. You don't think that that is an ethical thing for a historian to do, but I'm curious about the other kind of moral and ethical considerations you way as you think about kind of who you want to write about and reexamine as part of this history of transness.
Kit Heyam
Yeah, there was a lot of consideration that went into that. I think a couple of things, um, probably the biggest one is that before we were trans is a global history and I wrestled for quite a long time with whether a global history, including histories of people of color and histories of, um, cultures that I don't share was my story to tell. I guess the way I navigated that in the end was first of all by thinking, okay, but if I don't tell this as a global history, I miss out a lot of histories of gender nonconformity, which already get erased and already don't have enough attention drawn to them. But also thinking about how can I use this history to advance the cause of anti-racism as much as possible. And so part of that was about. Using the book to show how the gender binary and the sex binary are colonialist and racist constructs, and part of it was about making the case for seeing gender experience from cultures that aren't my own on their own cultural terms, even if that doesn't really make kind of intuitive sense. To me with my own cultural gaze and trying to challenge the way that a lot of white trans people, especially white, non-binary people, tend to write about gender non-conformity from other cultures, which is often a kind of tokenizing and romanticizing and almost kind of instrumentalizing way of thinking. And so I was trying to write against all those things as a way of working against the. Racist way that I think a lot of histories of gender have been done in the past.
Anita Rao
I want to continue to unpack those things you mentioned there, which is how colonialism and racism affect how we think about gender and how we think about transness and, and maybe we can do that as we move through another story. You talk in your book about 17th century Southwestern Africa and the story of Monarch. Injinga Ume. Tell us a little bit about Injinga and um, what their story kind of represents about these dynamics that you were just speaking of.
Kit Heyam
So Injinga is the monarch of the kingdom of, of Dono and Muamba in what's now Angola in West Africa. And NGA is assigned female at birth, but when they become mon, they become king, not queen. And I wanted to tell their story. Because it exemplifies how often today when we're judging whether someone counts as really trans or not, we are judging them by whether their motivations are internal or external. Mm-hmm. So are they doing it, are they transitioning just because that's how they feel? Or is it because of an external motivator? Like the social role of Monarch is a male role, and so I kind of have to be male to be a Monarch, but in. Historical context that separation between external and internal doesn't really work. And also, you know, even if it did work, um, the history of in Jinga changing from female to male as a result of taking on that royal social role is still a history that shows us that gender is flexible and that gender is not defined by the body. And I think what is also. Interesting and challenging about in J's story is the way that you can't really separate their decision to be crowned as king from their own culture, but also from the fact that. During their reign, they were doing a lot of negotiation with and fighting against Portuguese colonizers, and obviously it was very advantageous to be seen as a king, not a queen, in relation to a patriarchal culture. So their maleness was a product of their own culture, but also a product of colonization.
Anita Rao
How have historians traditionally talked about an interpreted in J'S gender?
Kit Heyam
Jingga has pretty much been seen as a trailblazing woman only, and while I don't want to take away the community that any women particularly Ang and women might feel with in Jingga story, I also think it's important to say that their history shows us the flexibility of gender and can be read as trans history as well.
Anita Rao
I wanna get back to that thread of motivation that you mentioned, because there are so many examples of stories in your book, John Sullivan and Jingga, where we don't have a lot of access to people's internal thought processes of why they chose to dress in certain clothing or take on particular roles. We can't ever fully understand the motivations, so talk to me more about. How much you think motivation matters in how we interpret examples of gender nonconformity in history?
Kit Heyam
I think one of the things I wanted to do with before we were trans is take the focus of motivation a bit. Mm-hmm. I think that's traditionally been the way that people have looked for trans history. They've tried to look for people who are motivated in. Quote unquote, the same way as trans people today. So, you know, we only transition because of how we feel, but I think that's a standard that cis people's genders are never held to. So it was always an artificial standard to hold trans people to even in the present. Mm-hmm. Um, and I also think that, like I said before, if what we are looking for is histories that show us gender can be separate from the body, then we don't need to know anything about how someone saw their own gender. To say there were people across this society who had the capacity to think about gender and the body flexibly, interchangeably.
Anita Rao
So I wanna come up a little bit more into the present. There is a historical moment for which you did have access to a few more primary sources. This is such a fascinating story set against the backdrop of World War I Internment camps in Britain. So first, just kind of set, set the scene for us Who got sent to these camps and, and what were the dynamics that began to emerge?
Kit Heyam
So in the First World War Britain interned. Any members of quote unquote enemy countries who were present in Britain at the outbreak of the war were assigned male at birth and were of military age. And that included anyone from people who were just here on holiday and happened to get stuck with a war breakout to people who'd been here for centuries, actually. But their families had just kind of never got citizenship. So it's a group of. Thousands and thousands of people. It's really important to say these are not prisoners of war. These are just civilians who happen to be here. And it's a really untold aspect of British history, I think. So the camp I tell the story of in the book is the largest camp in the British Isles, and it's called Nolo. Um, on the Ale of Man, which is between Great Britain and Ireland. Tens of thousands of people were interned there and in that camp. A significant proportion of people lived full-time as women. And when I say that, I mean she, her pronouns, female names, female dress treated socially as women. People like to find stuff to do because like I said, they're not prisoners of war. They're not doing forced labor, but they are bored out of their trees 'cause they're not allowed to work. Um, and suffering from mental health problems that, you know, as a result of. That kind of complete purposelessness and incarceration. And so there are camp theaters and some historians have said, okay, the people who lived as women in the camps were just doing that to make their female roles on the stage really, really convincing. But what I think undermines that interpretation is that we do have, we frustratingly, we don't have very many perspectives of these people who. Lived as women, but we do have perspectives of actors who played female roles saying, I'm not a woman. Don't call me a woman. So the fact that you didn't have to be called a woman if you played a female role on the stage, I think demonstrates to us that those who were called women. We're choosing to be called women and choosing to live in that way.
Anita Rao
So you found, you looked at camp newspapers, you tried to find some of these letters, and you did find a memoir of one writer and artist who was interned at the camps who wrote about. Their experience kind of watching these plays and, and watching the dynamics unfold. Tell me more about what he revealed and, and how this experience changed his own thinking about gender.
Kit Heyam
Yeah, so we, there's a fascinating document from two of the camps, Nolo and Wakefield, which is actually very close to where I live now, written by a German born writer and artist, Paul Cohen, port Heim, and he documents the way that. These people who lived as women were completely accepted as women by the society around them. He sort of says, you know, maybe if I'd been in a different environment, I would've seen their genders differently. But in this context, they were the women. And he also reflects really interestingly, on. What gender means as a result of this? You know, he comes to the conclusion actually no male is simply male. No female is simply female. It's had a really profound kind of lasting impact on him, and we have this tantalizing little glimpse where he tells this anecdote of meeting a, one of the people who used to live as a woman in the camps. After the war is over and this person is living as a man and marital woman, and he says he didn't seem to care to be reminded. Hmm. And that's a really interesting. Kind of frustrating little tidbit that makes you think, was it that this person was kind of embarrassed by that memory, or was it that this person has really enjoyed it and it was a kind of painful memory of something they couldn't have anymore, and we'll never know. But that's one of the only glimpses we have into the perspective of those people.
Anita Rao
It's interesting because as part of the, the kind of broader mission of your book, it seems like you're trying to argue that we don't need to know how long people did this. It's not, you know, you have to do this for a certain amount of time to count as part of trans history. This is an example of looking at why this happened for a short time and still considering it as part of the trans historical record.
Kit Heyam
Yeah, exactly. In a way, I suppose I'm saying that trans history exists in the minds of people who are thinking about others' genders.
Anita Rao
Mm.
Kit Heyam
As much as it exists in the minds of people who are actually gender nonconforming themselves.
Anita Rao
That's interesting. Like the writer who was observing this and his own thinking was changing.
Kit Heyam
Exactly. Yeah. And that he was embodying the capacity to see people assign male at birth as women. He was embodying a trans way of thinking in the past, and that's really what we're trying to get to. You know, if people are saying transness is new, but we can point to someone in the early 20th century. Who is thinking in what's very, very clearly a trans way and a trans affirming way, then that undermines that narrative
Anita Rao
Just ahead. We'll talk about the big feelings that can emerge when you're writing history and hear about an emotional moment that shaped kit's own approach to the process. Please stay with us.
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao. Today we're talking about the untold stories of trans history and how they can expand our modern understanding of gender. For writer and historian, kit Ham. Researching trans history is all about reinterpretation. They've looked at historical moments through an expansive lens. They don't aim to label people from the past as trans, but instead to identify moments when people push the boundaries of gender. They've also acknowledged that history is influenced by the people who tell it, which means that history is often emotional and not always objective.
Kit Heyam
So the ideal that I think. A lot of non historians and some historians have of history is that we are totally dispassionate, totally objective, just looking at facts and then reporting the facts. The reality is that that's not possible because the moment you choose where to look, which questions to ask, which facts to look at, how to weave them into a story you are bringing your own perspective in. And I think queer historians have a. Longer tradition of just being honest about the fact that our positions inform our historical gaze than non marginalized historians do. And that has meant that there's this perspective that. The non marginalized historians are the totally objective ones, but that's only because theirs is the majority view that never gets questioned that they, that they never have to explain or apologize for. Actually, we all bring our own perspectives and biases to history and doing history is not about getting rid of those because that's impossible. It's just about acknowledging that they're there.
Anita Rao
So as you were going through this research process, you. Had an emotional experience because you are a human being and you, you say that's, it's okay to openly acknowledge that there is an emotional connection that you have to. History. Talk to me about the emotional side of this journey for you and how acknowledging that emotion shaped how you did the research.
Kit Heyam
Yeah, so again, I think this is a case of being honest about something that all historians are actually experiencing. You know, even the people who are. Shouting really loudly that we need to do history the way that we've always done otherwise, it risks being bias. Those people are having really, really big feelings about history, you know? So yeah, I wanted to be upfront about that. Partly to kind of set the tone for the way that I think history should be done. I think we should be honest about the fact that emotion always comes into it, but also I think emotion is an under acknowledged asset in history. Um, I think that. Ethical relation to the past that I talked about, thinking about people on their own historical and cultural terms, trying to do history in an anti-racist way. Um, that comes from, in part emotional identification with those people I'm writing about, you know, seeing them as people in the past. And also when we talked about John Sullivan. I talk through, you know, well, maybe John was feeling this, maybe they were feeling this, maybe they were feeling this. All of that comes from trying to have a kind of empathy with people in the past. Um, that's what brings us to that sort of diversity of possible conclusions. So I think, you know, I wanted to make the case for, let's be honest, about the fact we all have feelings about the past, but also make the case for, let's be honest, about the fact that these feelings could be useful for us, could actually be assets in some ways.
Anita Rao
Was there a particular historical figure that you encountered in your research who did have a more personal effect on you in terms of understanding your own transness?
Kit Heyam
Sometimes people ask me about my favorite historical figure in the book, and. In answer to that question, I usually say it's this brilliant 17th century figure, Thomas or Thomasine Hall who says in a court of law in 1629, I am both man and woman. And that's really inspiring and really cool. Um, but I think in terms of having an impact on how I understand myself, I only mention this person very, very briefly in before we were trans, but. The person who had the biggest impact there was Lou Sullivan, the American gay trans man's rights activist. It was when I encountered Lou and the fact that he fought specifically to be understood as a gay trans man and to get healthcare, despite the fact that when he transitioned, he would be gay because the criteria for medical transition included being straight at that time. I felt both really seen and really, and a great sense of community with him, but also it helped me to understand why I'd always felt like maybe my transness wasn't as real and wasn't as valid because I wasn't attracted to women and helped me to realize that actually. This was a set of ideas that had been built up by medical practice in the mid 20th century and people had had to fight to bring down. It helped contextualize why I found it so difficult to come to terms with and to come to realize my own transness, um, because of the ideas that Sullivan fought against.
Anita Rao
So this process of retelling historical moments through a new lens is not without its tensions. You mentioned there's, there's emotion in historians no matter kind of what they're arguing about how we should read history. But there's a really interesting example that you talk about in your book of a time when this kind of really. I guess came home to roost. You did some work during your PhD with a nonprofit in York that invited people to mark spaces that they felt were significant to LGBTQ history, and you were part of that effort. Tell me about that and, and how it led to the story of, or documenting the story of Ann Lister.
Kit Heyam
Yeah, so I started working on this project called Rainbow Plaques with a brilliant historian Helen Graham. And the idea initially was to get people to make cardboard plaques, um, to mark spaces that they felt were significant to queer history in the city. And we have. You might have seen them in the UK kind of round blue plaques that mark sights of historical significance. Yes. And so, yes. And so we made a rainbow version of that. It was blue but it had rainbow border and people were able to hand write things on those plaques, which could be anything from like, this is where I came out to my mum to this is something that I feel is of kind of national significance and we stuck them up. Temporarily around the city, and they were really popular to the extent that people started saying, oh, well, some of these deserve kind of real plaques. And we've managed to get some organizations on board to pursue a more permanent. Plaque, which everyone agreed should be to mark the site where Anne Lister and Walker got married. And if people have seen Gentleman Jack, I know it was on HBO in the us so you might have had access to it. That's the drama that follows, um, Anne and Anne's relationship. But Anne Lister was a late 18th, early 19th century landowner in West York, near where I live now, who dressed in a masculine way, um, was called. Fred, by some lovers, was known as gentleman Jack, kind of disparagingly in the community, wrote about not wanting to be seen as a woman by lovers. Wrote about being really, um, self-conscious and deliberate in attraction to women, and had what counted for them as a marriage ceremony with a local woman, Anne Walker in York. And so. We did some research into what we, what people thought were the most significant aspects of enlister to commemorate. And lots of people were really keen on the gender nonconformity aspects in the research that we did. And so the text we ended up with for the permanent plaque described enlister as gender non-conforming and didn't use the word lesbian partly. 'cause I think we thought everyone already knew and Lista was a lesbian and. Also because we intended gender non-conforming. Not to describe like an identity, not to say this person was trans, but just to describe behavior. Mm. And anyway, the plaque was not well received and I think it was partly not well received because we haven't reached the right people in our consultation. And as a result of that, there was an enormous backlash. There was a lot of abuse, a lot of transphobia. Um, a lot also of really reasonable. Responses have hurt from lesbians who felt like Alister was very important to them and that hadn't been recognized. And the plaque ended up being remade and it now says lesbian and doesn't say anything about gender. And yeah, it feels like a real missed opportunity to me to honor both of those aspects of Ann Lister. Um, you know, I think the original plaque was wrong not to honor sexuality, but I think the new plaque is wrong not to honor gender as well.
Anita Rao
Yeah. It's so interesting because, I mean, history is so emotional and personal and, and when people have these figures who, you know, they have really seen themselves in or have relied on to kind of affirm parts of themselves, they might not want them to be read in a different way. Like, I guess, what does this experience reveal to you about the challenges of rereading history and. Expanding our understandings of people as part of more than one history at once.
Kit Heyam
I think this is really an episode that shaped the way that I think about that, to be honest. Um, I think if I was having those conversations now, I'd be able to make a lot more articulate arguments about how different groups of people can find solidarity and community with the same figure from the past. And that that doesn't take that identification away. That saying someone's gender nonconforming is not saying they're not also lesbian history. I think I'd also have been way more keen to. Try and only use words that unused. 'cause lesbian also isn't the word that unused. Mm. But yeah, I think the immediate response of a lot of lesbians was that their history was being taken. And it tells us quite a lot about the way people view history as a kind of scarce resource or like a zero sum game. And the experience of going through that has made me think a lot more about how we can. Reframe the way we see history, not as something that's limited, but as something that has limitless potential to offer comfort and solidarity to people from multiple identities.
Anita Rao
We have been reexamining gender non-conforming narratives from the past, but I wanna hear more about what insights all of this work has given you about how we talk about gender in the present. Day. You have such a deep context to our thinking of you. You have such a deep knowledge of our thinking about gender over time. Why do you think that the pushback to trans rights is so heightened in this particular moment?
Kit Heyam
There's a lot of factors at play. Um, I think one thing that's going on is that for a lot of reasons, people are feeling profoundly. Unstable economically and culturally, there's been a lot of change that has left a lot of people behind. What that leads to is people looking backwards to times that they perceive were better, and including in that backward looking a sense of fixed gender roles and, um, biology as a source of truth. I think the whole idea that there is a kind of clear and reassuring and factual, um, truth in biology feels. Incredibly stabilizing in an unstable moment. I don't think everyone who's feeling that can necessarily articulate it, but I do think that that's what's at the root of it. You know? It doesn't feel necessarily very comforting to say, actually, we can label our bodies however we want. There's not one right way to do it. It is liberating, but it's not comforting, and I don't think we've quite got that balance between liberation and stability and reassurance. Right. Yeah.
Anita Rao
It also seems like it's about power, and I'm curious about how you think about what kind of power is being wielded when we are so fixated on kind of policing other people's gender.
Kit Heyam
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right that male and female are not just identity categories, there never have been just identity categories. They're power categories and power relations, and again, it feels very reassuring. To those in power to say, um, that keeping people in those fixed power relations is the right way to go. When people talk about transness as a threat, you know, in increasingly overblown ways, they talk about it as a threat to the family, as a threat to children. And what they mean there, I think, is that it's also a threat to their vision of the future. Mm-hmm. That. What the family does to them is raise children in line with their assigned genders and in line with their gender roles and to perpetuate their vision of society even further. And again, you know, saying the future could be different, is more liberating than comforting, but I think that's an important part of it.
Anita Rao
One thread from throughout your book that I really enjoyed is that, you know, you obviously are putting this conversation in, in the context of the political moment, talking about, you know, what's at stake if we don't understand the longer, deeper history of gender non-conformity. But you also emphasize that play is a big part of gender and, and having the knowledge of history can help us. Lower the stakes and, and drama of how we're thinking about this, that it is okay to play. It's okay to play with gender for a time and then change your mind. It's okay to kind of, yeah, not, not have this fixed, such fixed notion of, of what it means to play with gender. Talk to me about that piece of it and the role you think play plays in this conversation.
Kit Heyam
I think part of the reason people find transness so threatening is that it sounds like people are making, you know, permanent high stakes decisions at a very young age, and that. We have to be really, really sure before we do anything with our agendas. I remember all the way back in about 2016, the UK when a report came out about trans equality, um, produced by a select committee of the government. And the Ministry of Justice responded by saying, and a person's gender has important legal and social consequences. And my response was just like, but why though? Like you're saying, that's, that's how it is. But why, and this is what gets lost in a lot of the conversations, particularly about trans kids, is that there's no reason we have to make gender have important legal and social consequences. There's no reason we can't just play around with it. And actually the, um, a lot of the anxieties people have about trans kids can be allayed by thinking about. Childhood gender nonconformity, not as a harbinger of something permanent and deep, but just as the kind of experimentation that literally every young person goes through. And I do think that gender is joyful. You know, it's silly and it is fun and it's deeply emotional and also frivolously emotional, and I want everyone to have access to that without attaching, as you say, so much drama to it.
Anita Rao
Has historical knowledge helped you be more playful with your gender?
Kit Heyam
Yeah, that's a lovely question and I think, so it is one thing to, you know, commit yourself philosophically to taking gender lightly and to labeling your body in the way that you want. It's another to realize that actually we have always been labeling bodies in the way that we want, um, to some extent. And the. The labels that I was taught my body should have were forged in a particular historical moment for particular political reasons. I feel a real deep certainty about my own autonomy over my body and expression that comes from knowing so many people have done it before me.
Anita Rao
Kit, thank you so much for having this conversation and sharing so much of this history with us. I so appreciate it.
Kit Heyam
Thank you so much for having me. It's been really nice to talk to you.
Anita Rao
You can find out more about Kit Heyam and his book before we were trans at our website, embodiedwunc.org. You can find all episodes of Embodied the Radio show there and subscribe to our weekly podcast. Today's episode was produced by Kaia Findlay and edited by Amanda Magnus. Wilson Sayre also provided editorial assistance. Nina Scott is our intern in Jenni Lawson, our technical director. Quilla wrote our theme music. This program is recorded at the American Tobacco Historic District, North Carolina Public Radio is a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I'm Anita Rao.