Before We Were Trans

A New History of Gender

By: Dr Kit Heyam

Narrated by: Dr Kit Heyam

A globe-spanning, different and vital new history of gender.

Across the world today, people of all ages are doing fascinating, creative, messy things with gender. These people have a rich history—but one that is often left behind by narratives of trans lives that focus on people with stable, binary, uncomplicated gender identities. As a result, these stories tend to be recent, binary, stereotyped, medicalised and white.

Before We Were Trans is a new and different story of gender, that seeks not to be comprehensive or definitive but—by blending culture, feminism and politics—to widen the scope of what we think of as trans history by telling the stories of people across the globe whose experience of gender has been transgressive, or not characterised by stability or binary categories.

Transporting us from Renaissance Venice to 17th-century Angola, from Edo Japan to North America, the stories this audiobook tells leave questions and resist conclusions. They are fraught with ambiguity, and defy modern Western terminology and categories—not least the category of 'trans' itself. But telling them provides a history that reflects the richness of modern trans reality more closely than any previously written.

Before We Were Trans is a history and celebration of gender in all its fluidity, ambiguity and complexity.

©2022 Kit Heyam (P)2022 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Queer to the front!

Beautiful, relevant, kind and forceful. I needed this book. I felt deeply seen and included, as a transwoman myself, but I would warmly encourage cispeople to gibe it a go too.