Reckoning: Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender with Dr. Kit Heyam

This week Dr. Kit Heyem visits from across the Pond to talk about their new book, Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender. This was an awesome conversation to talk nonbinary histories through time and why that is relevant today.

About our guest:
Dr Kit Heyam (they/them or he/him) is a Leeds-based freelance writer, heritage practitioner, trans awareness trainer and academic. 

You can find them on Blue Sky at: https://bsky.app/profile/krheyam.bsky.social

Transcript

Jason Herbert (00:01.665)
This is Jason Herbert and this is a reckoning. And I'm here with my new friend, Kit Hayum. Kit is a writer, academic, and activist specializing in queer history and heritage, as well as trans awareness trainer. You're in Leeds, right?

Kit Heyam (00:17.359)
I'm in Leeds, yeah, north of England. It's just got dark where I am, which is bizarre. Thank you so much for having me. It's really lovely to be here.

Jason Herbert (00:24.749)
Kit, I am so happy that you made the time. I'm also really sad that it's already dark at 4 PM. We have the same thing here in Colorado. You know, I did my graduate school at the University of Minnesota, which is far north up here in the U S and I had the exact same problem where it would get dark early and you would have this. Do you have the seasonal depression hit there in the UK as well? Is that like a thing?

Kit Heyam (00:44.325)
Yeah, it's absolutely a thing. Yeah, you have to force yourself to get out while it's daylight. Otherwise, your mood is really low.

Jason Herbert (00:52.607)
Yeah, and you get like three hours of daylight and it's cold. So, you know, it's just lovely. you and I were just talking beforehand, sharing our love of tea. What is it you're drinking? What's the brand there?

Kit Heyam (01:06.129)
So I've got Clipper tea here, but also if I run out, I have orange and lemon tea in a different flask. I've actually got a bit of a cold, so I needed to make sure that my voice was good throughout this.

Jason Herbert (01:09.559)
Okay.

Yes. I love it.

Jason Herbert (01:19.927)
Thank you. I am drinking, what am I drinking? I'm drinking peppermint, peppermint tea, which is, and the reason why I do so is because I, being from the South, I will drink Coca-Cola and sugar all day long, which is, I have the metabolism that is not very fast anymore at all. So I have to do something to, and I found that tea is, tea makes me feel like I'm a grownup now. I feel like I'm just sitting here drinking tea like a fully actualized adult.

Kit Heyam (01:24.921)
Uh-huh.

Jason Herbert (01:49.655)
that makes any sense. That's what you're supposed to do when you get older,

Kit Heyam (01:49.755)
Yes.

Kit Heyam (01:53.925)
Absolutely, I remember my grandparents holding me to drink tea for my entire teenage years and eventually now I do, now I'm grown up.

Jason Herbert (02:00.725)
Right? There's that moment when you go, I like this now. Like, and you're sitting there all proud of yourself. Like, look at me. I'm cheeky. I ordered on the plane when I fly now. I'm like, I'll have tea please. I feel so adult. And that's a complete lie. so we're here to talk about, talk to you about your, your, book. at first I'll have to tell you, thank you so much for writing it. I went to your website and I was looking around and you're like,

Kit Heyam (02:06.747)
Yes.

Kit Heyam (02:11.313)
haha

Jason Herbert (02:28.789)
I'm here for people with really stupid questions. I'm like, my gosh, I found my person to talk to. So thank you for this. And thank you for writing this book, Before We Were Trans, A New History of Gender. I found that this was the kind of book I've been looking for to help me understand so many things that I either had questions on or had thoughts on and didn't quite know how to express what I would be in other conversations. This is a beautiful book, Kit. Thank you.

Like, really, really loved reading it. So I have a billion questions for you. No.

Kit Heyam (02:58.843)
Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. I've been totally blown away by people being lovely about it. I really appreciate it.

Jason Herbert (03:08.489)
can I tell you, I was just telling, I'm in a group chat with three archeologists, friends of mine. And I was like, I'm going to talk to Kit Hamm. And they were like, my gosh, this book is so great. I was like, you've read it. Like, yes. So apparently this has gotten around already. And now I feel bad because I was late to the party. But we are here now to talk about this. If we can, let's introduce first of all, yourself and the work that you do, because I think what you're doing is really fascinating.

Kit Heyam (03:20.118)
nice.

Kit Heyam (03:37.873)
So I work on queer and trans history specifically through a lens of thinking about the stories that we don't normally tell. I wrote before we were trans because I was kind of sick of the same people being wheeled out as examples of trans history over and over and over again. And of what that did not only in terms of making people think there were only a really small number of

trans people in the past and those people all lived in the 20th century. But also what it did in terms of just perpetuating a really narrow idea of what it means to be really trans. To be really trans, have to have a binary identity and you have to have known you were trans since you were three years old and you have to conform to all these stereotypes. And that was limiting for history, but it was also limiting for people in the present day, not least myself. And so I really wanted to think about how we could tell

Jason Herbert (04:09.952)
Mm-hmm.

Kit Heyam (04:35.321)
new stories about our history and so the work I do now is writing that but also working with the museums to find ways of telling those stories to the public as well.

Jason Herbert (04:46.743)
So I have to tell you, this is the first book I've ever read dedicated exclusively to trans history. But of course, as I'm reading this, and this is a thing I already know, but you do such a beautiful job of illustrating this, is that look, there are a whole bunches of books you've been reading that have trans history in them. You just might not have known where to look for said histories. I'm wondering, you were talking a little bit just now about the idea of people kind of carting out the same old people, same old examples and things like that.

Was that the big push for writing this? Where did the idea of this book come from?

Kit Heyam (05:25.807)
I really wanted to write a book that...

dealt with the people who make people say, that's not trans history. It's just dot dot dot. It's just gay history. It's just the history of drag. It's just the history of people taking on non-normative social roles in their society. It's just intersex history, et cetera, et cetera. And I wanted to think about how history can be multiple things at once. Right. And it's really interesting that you said,

there is trans history in other books, you just might not have known where to look. And often that's because it's being presented as the history of someone with queer sexuality and their gender nonconformity is not being brought to the forefront, or it's being presented as the history of drag performance. And no one's thinking about how did those people who were doing that drag performance actually think about their gender or anything like that. And so I really wanted to think about how do we understand

that history can be multiple things at once, that it's not mutually exclusive to say this is trans history and also gay history. This is trans history and also the history of women making their way in a patriarchal society. It can be all of those things. And I wanted to get away from this narrative that says we have to claim history as one thing or another. We have to fight over how we interpret a particular person in history. And that was really my impetus for writing it.

Jason Herbert (06:56.545)
Yeah, and I love this. This feels like so many case studies kind of put together as I was reading, which for me meant it was really engaging as I was reading about two or three different kind of people with say the same chapter and seeing how you were connecting these dots and say, look, okay, here's the case of this person, right? But trans history is all of these things, right? And like, this is the story of trans people being X, Y, and Z and experiencing X, Y, and Z all at the same time.

There's some lovely bits in here I'm hoping that we'll at least be able to share today. I had some personal parts as I was reading through the book that I just really was like, ooh, this is cool. Especially because I have friends of mine in Africa at this very moment that I was telling you about the book this morning. Can we talk a little bit first and foremost about terminology, Kit? And I know this is a thing that you talk about in the book. I'm very sensitive to talking to people, not just

not just trans folks, but anybody, right? I want to make sure that I'm using the right words that's respective to whoever I'm talking to. And this is a really important thing for me, but I often feel ignorant. I often worry that I'm going to make a mistake and refer to someone as he or she when I shouldn't have, lapse into old patterns and things like that. Can we talk a little bit about what's the right, right? Are there right terms here?

Where does the term trans come from? What's the terminology that we should really be embracing at the

Kit Heyam (08:30.565)
Yeah, that's a really great question about terminology because what you say about wanting to make sure you use the right words for a particular individual becomes a really difficult line to walk when you're talking about people in the present and people in the past, right? So when we're talking about people in the present, the word trans now gets used to mean anyone who doesn't identify with the gender they were assigned at birth and the way that that's developed from words like transsexual and transvestite, which were the

Jason Herbert (08:43.852)
Yeah.

Kit Heyam (09:01.067)
20th century terms into the transgender umbrella, which doesn't make as fine a distinction between are you going through a medical transition or are you not, which is a really useful thing to be able to do. That means that we have a nice umbrella term in the present. But if we think about the definition that I just gave, anyone who doesn't identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, first of all, the word gender is a relatively recent one to refer to male or female.

Jason Herbert (09:09.837)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Herbert (09:29.911)
Mm-hmm.

Kit Heyam (09:30.789)
go back to even the early 20th century, people are primarily using the word sex instead to mean not just bodies, but also that totality of how you live and how you present and all of that. Assigned at birth, what does assigned at birth mean if you're in a society that doesn't register gender on birth certificates? What does identify mean? That suggests you have like a really stable sense of a core self, which is again, a relatively recent and Western construct. So,

The whole thing just falls to bits, basically, when you start looking at history. And then you also have the additional factor of, just as you said, wanting to refer to people in the way that they want to be referred to. And a lot of the time, we don't have the actual voice of someone in history to rely on to say this is how they want it to be referred to. Or if we do, they're of course not using 20th century terms, if they lived before that. They're going to use their own terminology, which might be a cultural term.

or it might simply be a version of man or woman or some combination of those things. What I decided to do in the book was to try and walk this line between, I didn't want to say there are no trans people in the past, because that felt like a really politically dangerous thing to say, as I'm sure is something we might get into a lot bit more. And also a denial of the kind of point of connection that trans people today might feel to people in the past. Again, that's something that's really important to me.

But they also, know, every trans person knows what it's like to be called by a term that we don't want to be called by and how painful that is. And I really didn't want to extend that disrespect and that lack of care to people in the past. So the line I walk in the book is to talk not about trans people in the past, but about trans history. I think we could say there is trans history in the past without saying these people in the past were trans people. And trans history is anything that shows us that gender

can be unstable, can be disrupted, can be decoupled from the body. That is evidence that we haven't always thought about gender and its relationship to what we might call sex in the way that we do today in the Western world. And that's really, important. But we can talk about it as trans without saying those individual people were trans. So that's a kind of, it's a tricky line to walk, but I think an important one.

Jason Herbert (11:52.801)
Yeah, know, the thing that, you I had known and that your book spells out so beautifully is the, you know, is the, the existence of trans folks throughout time, right? As long as there have been people, I have to imagine there have been trans people here in the United States. And I don't know about in the UK, but in the United States, we're really, we are really caught in the throes of this. We, we, we finally, amazingly just had our first trans

congressperson elected and now we are they're not now we've got people in the republican party trying to ban them from using restrooms and i am just so angry about this and at how could we be so stupid i don't know i don't and and hateful and corrupted by whatever i in this work i just feel like does so much work to say look if you just understand that this is part of the human

condition that's no different than anything. I get upset.

Kit Heyam (12:55.121)
And I think it's really reasonable to be upset. I think it's actually quite important that we realize how harmful and how scary and how high stakes some of the anti-trans measures that are going on in the US and in the UK are right now. I think hold on to that upset because it's going to be one of the important things that motivates us to make change.

Jason Herbert (13:17.375)
So right. you know, I see recently I saw the Congress person who is responsible for trying to put this legislation forward as a Nancy Mace, if I recall correctly. And I saw a picture of her showing a sign with a restroom. It's just like male or female or something like this. And a comparison of the white or black, the white or colored signs from the 1950s and 60s. Like these are the same signs, right? These are the same hate-filled signs that are just trying, you know,

Kit Heyam (13:47.153)
And not just that, it's the same root of the problem. The reason we have gendered toilets is originally as a way of protecting white women in toilets specifically. It's all about the vulnerability of the white woman and the idea that people of color are inherently dangerous. That is why we have separate gendered toilets at all. It's not just a comparison, you know, it's the same problem. When you scratch the surface of transphobia, you find racism very, very quickly.

Jason Herbert (14:18.049)
Yeah, and I think that's just one of the beautiful things about your book is that you really dive into these connections between transphobia and race and talk about and colonialism, which is what I was not expecting was this real deep discourse on this. And I was like, bring it on, as I'm reading it, like, whoa, where are we going here? You tell us early in the introduction about other narratives in trans history and how they're often used use these terms here specifically, recent binary.

Stereotyped and medicalized. Can you talk a little bit more about like what you mean by the other narratives that are going on and how these four terms recent and binary, stereotyped and medicalized kind of affect other stories about trans people?

Kit Heyam (15:03.889)
Absolutely. the idea that we have in our contemporary Western minds about what makes someone really trans requires that someone has a binary gender, so is male or female, conforms to the stereotypes of that binary gender. So Israeli masculine, Israeli feminine, and goes through all of the medical transition options available to them. And the reason we have that idea is essentially those are the diagnostic criteria from mid 20th century gender clinics.

Jason Herbert (15:28.183)
Mm-hmm.

Kit Heyam (15:33.841)
those are the criteria that were laid out essentially because the people who were working in those clinics were really afraid of diagnosing someone as trans and letting them go through medical transition and then that person turning around and regretting it and suing them or as their notes show, and the historian Beans Velocchia does good work on this, as their notes show, they're afraid of being shot basically. They're afraid someone would regret transitioning and come back and shoot them.

they wrote incredibly narrow, stringent diagnostic criteria. And then they published them. And then every trans person read them and thought, OK, in order to get access to the health care I need, I'm going to go in the Dendiclinic and repeat this narrative. And so it became self-perpetuating. So what that means is we've got that idea in our heads of what counts as being a really trans person. And we look back in history to try and find people exactly like that.

That's why they're recent because of course people have only very recently been able to access medical transition in terms of the grand sweep of history. You know, it's only a really an early 20th century phenomenon. So what that means is we end up with a scenario where we're saying there have only been a very, very small number of trans people in the past and they have all conformed to this very narrow idea of what it means to be trans.

We're missing so many stories which might not fit into that modern Western idea of what it means to be trans, but they still show us the way we think about gender today and the way we think about the relationship between gender and bodies today is not the way we've always thought about it. It's not the way we have to think about it. And that's such a crucial insight for making political change and for reminding people that there are so many options for the way we can live. I think it's profoundly liberating to remind us that we can think about

how our gender relates to our bodies in whatever way we want, and that we can think about the fluidity or playfulness of our gender in whichever way we want. I think it's really important, politically and personally and historically, that we tell stories that remind us of that.

Jason Herbert (17:44.171)
Yeah, I love the spectrum of the stories that you tell in this. you just talked about this word, this playfulness. I absolutely love that, Kit. And I'm wondering, you talk a lot, know, this book goes deep into history because you're going into Egypt, you're going all over the place. Open up the book and we're in West Africa. I'm like, Can we talk, and you talked about this in the book itself. And you know, as a scholar,

I'm looking for different things. know, my background is in writing indigenous history, where oftentimes there's no written record or the written records are not by the people themselves, right? They're by outsiders and things like that. They have their own challenges. And you talk about the challenges in the archives. So I guess my question is like, how do you when you were looking through here and trying to figure out how to tell these stories and looking back through the past, how are you identifying trans history? What are you looking for?

as you comb through the archives.

Kit Heyam (18:42.609)
When I'm looking for trans history, I'm looking for anything where the relationship between the gender someone lives as and the body they have is not quite straightforward. And if that sounds like that could apply to a whole load of people, that's exactly what I want. So in the cases of the African stories, the North and West African stories that I tell, that's often about someone occupying a social role.

which means they are gendered in society in a way that makes their body irrelevant. So if, for example, to be the leader of a particular country, and I talk one of the examples I talk about in the book is Njingat Mbandi, who was the monarch of the kingdom of Ndongo, part of Angola now. If what it means to be the ruler of that country is to be a man, if you become the ruler of that country, you become a man, regardless of what your body is like. And

There are lots and lots of examples of different ways in which you can become a man, a woman, or something that's not a man or a woman in different cultural and historical contexts. So in early modern England, it might be that by putting on clothes that are associated with men, you become more male. In early modern Japan, it might be that by taking on a sexual position that's associated with

not being male or female, you become not male or female. And so all the time, I basically in the run up to writing this book, which was probably, you know, a good sort of six or seven years in the making before it went down on paper, there was a lot of collecting all these little stories I heard of where I thought this tells us something really interesting about how gender can be in the past, and therefore how gender can be in the present. And so the process of writing the book was a process of

finally being able to pull on all those threads and contextualize them and think about what was the life of this person like? This little snippet that I've heard people mention, what was that life like and what was their experience like and how might they have understood their gender? And so in that sense, it was really rewarding being able to finally bring all these tiny little anecdotes together and something.

Jason Herbert (21:01.165)
Yeah, you know, I think that one of the interesting things about the work is really the, the travel you're doing into the head space of the people that you're writing about. And by this, I'm talking about, and you've talked about this about wrestling between trying to understand the differences between say internal motives and external motives. can you talk a little bit about that, about trying to, trying to figure out like, Hey, these things aren't always apparent and you're trying to suss this out.

Kit Heyam (21:27.493)
Yeah, that distinction between internal and external motives, that's another really crucial element of what we think makes a really trans person now. Right. So you've got to, if you want to live as a man, for example, it's got to be because you feel male on the inside and not because you just like think that being a man is easier in a patriarchal society or like you want to sleep with women or whatever. And it is that is a standard that trans people get held to that cis people are never asked

to account for. No one interrogates someone who's not trans about whether their gender is really completely separate from their sexuality or the way they want to present on any given day. actually, these things are messy and entangled for all of us. It's just that trans people are held to much higher standard. But in the past, obviously, very rarely, particularly when you're dealing with working class people, you very, rarely have access to what was going on in their heads.

And so what was really important for me was to look at not so much did this person see themselves as a man or a woman or something else, but what does the way this person lived and the way that they were gendered in society tell us about the history of gender? So let's take those early modern English people who were assigned female at birth and put on male clothing and became

seen as more male as a result. I don't know if they saw themselves as more male, but I do know that the fact someone could be seen as more male just by wearing different clothing, regardless of what their body was like, shows us that we haven't always thought someone's body was the most important way of determining what their gender was. That's really important historical insight, I think, and really important for remembering that the way we think about gender now isn't the only way it has to be.

It was often about saying, I don't know how someone saw themselves. And this of course reflects back on how to refer to them. I mostly use they then pronouns for people in the book as a way of refusing to gender them one way or another, and also capturing the multiple possibilities of how they saw themselves. But I can know how society saw them and what that tells us about gender.

Jason Herbert (23:49.025)
Yeah. I want to ask you about another super complicated term here. Race, because race is all over this book and you're talking about how these ideas are complicated. how does race factor into how we understand trans history or how does trans history affect how we understand race? mean, ultimately we're trying to get down with the human condition, which is super easy. so how, how are these two, two, two concepts links? Because as I started to read,

more and more into the book is like, wow, there's a real racial story at play here. And you really unfold this about three quarters of the way in. Can you talk a little bit about these linkages between race and trans history?

Kit Heyam (24:30.593)
Yeah, it was really important to me that this was a book that dealt with race head on. And that was partly because you can't tell a full history of gender nonconformity if you just tell it about white people. But it was mainly because I really wanted to move beyond the ways in which white trans people often talk about trans and gender nonconforming people of colour, where we sort of...

use them as examples to prove that their own identities are valid? Like obviously, you know, gender isn't binary because have you heard of the hijra in India? And you know, no hijra ever asked to be kind of instrumentalized for my cause. I've not taken, you know, if I'm saying that I've not taken very much time to understand what life is like for hijra. So I really want you to get beyond that. And

Race is really tangled up with trans history in, I think, a couple of key ways. One of them is that our binary understandings of gender and sex are racist and colonial constructs. They come from people in the late 18th, early 19th century theorizing that white people's bodies were the most perfectly divided into male and female, and everyone else was like slightly less sexually dimorphic. And we still have the legacy of that today, like when we think...

Jason Herbert (25:47.957)
Mm.

Kit Heyam (25:51.929)
of black women as being stereotyped in a racist way as more masculine or Asian men being stereotyped in a racist way as more feminine. We still actually have the legacy of that in racist attitudes today. So the very idea that gender and sex are binary is tangled up with race. And then when you're looking at the history of gender nonconformity, you have to confront the fact that a lot of gender nonconforming experience was changed

Jason Herbert (26:01.355)
Mm-hmm.

Kit Heyam (26:21.763)
or suppressed or violently eradicated by colonialism. But when Europeans started to colonize parts of the world, they brought with them European gender binaries and European gender hierarchies and European models of sexual morality that stigmatized anything that looked gender nonconforming because they assumed that would also be sexually immoral. And so that's what happens in North America.

Jason Herbert (26:27.501)
Thank

Kit Heyam (26:51.075)
It's what happens in India. It's what happens in West Africa. And so in order to show there have always been lots of ways of understanding the relationship between gender and the body and the fluidity of gender, I needed to also talk about why we don't know about some of those examples now. And the answer is usually colonialism.

Jason Herbert (27:15.361)
Yeah, and it's, as I'm thinking about who's doing the colonizing here, I'm also thinking there's gotta be a very religious aspect to this as well, right? These are either Protestant Christians or Catholics who are doing a big portion of this global colonization efforts. And I'm wondering, is that apparent as well in the research too, as far as like, what's the religious dynamic here? One of the reasons I grew up, or I grew up as a Southern Baptist in-

Kentucky, right? And one of the many reasons why I turned away from the religion as fast as I possibly could was the ways in which I heard them talking about gay people. I was like, this, this doesn't make any damn sense to me. are you, are you seeing that as well in the archives? Like what's, what's the role of religion here? Is it also the colonization force? Like what's going on with this?

Kit Heyam (28:09.529)
Religion is absolutely tangled up with it, you're completely right. It finds expression in those ideas of sexual morality that I talked about. if you are assuming that anyone gender nonconforming is going to be having what they would see as gay sex, then you're going to suppress that for those reasons. And I mean, the suppression of Native American religious practices and First Nations religious practices in North America

was in part carried out as a response to the role of gender nonconforming people, people who've now come under the kind of inter-tribal term two-spirit, the role of those people in religious practices. It was a Christianizing force, but it was also a suppressing gender nonconformity force. And I think in India as well, the role of religion in

forming ideas of what a man is supposed to look like in terms of sexual behaviour, in terms of kind of productivity and orderliness and that being used to suppress hydric communities. Religion is all over that. It's really impossible, I think, to separate religious motivations from colonial motivations for most of colonial history.

Jason Herbert (29:31.649)
I'm a cisgendered guy, right? Let's talk about the patriarchy. Because this is a thing that we got to, know, and this is a thing that I'm often talking about in terms of, I've got two young boys, 16 and 12. I'm like, my dudes, this hurts you too. So can we talk a little bit about, say, patriarchy, systemic misogyny? I specifically want to kind of talk about N'Jinga. I just want to...

I don't want to give the entire book away because there's so many wonderful stories here, but I thought maybe this one we could kind of flesh out a little bit and talk about gender social roles a little bit. You kind of, you kind of hinted at it little bit earlier. I found the NGINGA story absolutely captivating. I want to see a book or a Netflix story or something like this on NGINGA's life. It's so cool. mean, there's a lot of blood in this story too, but I mean, it's a really fascinating story. Can we talk a little bit about that?

Kit Heyam (30:24.529)
For sure. So I touched on N'Jingo a little bit before. They were the monarch of the kingdom of N'dongo in West Africa, now Angola, came to the throne in 1624. And I say monarch advisedly because N'Jingo was assigned female at birth. But when they became monarch of their kingdom, after quite a bloody process which involved their brother murdering their child and then they were having to seize the throne.

after their brother's grip on power collapsed, when they became monarch, they became specifically king. And I use that story to talk about the way in which in many contexts, if a social role is labeled as male or female, it can be and has been quite possible for someone of any body type to take on that social role and become male or female as a result. And N'Jinga becomes king. The reason that

Jason Herbert (31:14.573)
Hmm.

Kit Heyam (31:21.851)
patriarchy and misogyny are relevant here though, of course. First of all, because we need to reckon with the fact that saying, to rule you've got to be male is an uncomfortable thing from a feminist perspective. Perhaps it's less uncomfortable if you can be male regardless of your body type, so it is still accessible to anyone. But it still feels uncomfortable through a Western feminist lens for sure. And also because N'Jinga becoming king, yes, that was

the way that their society saw rulers. But it was also for them in that specific historical moment, a really useful strategic thing to do because what they spent the majority of their time as monarch doing was negotiating with the Portuguese who really wanted to take over their country. And they did a lot of kind of bargaining with them. The Portuguese held their sister hostage for a long time and Jenga gave them

Jason Herbert (32:08.044)
Mm-hmm.

Kit Heyam (32:19.535)
what they described as innumerable slaves in order to buy their sister's freedoms. There's a real, this is why the film will be interesting, I think, because there's a real moral dilemma that Njiga is going through. Now, how many people do you enslave to save your sister? That's really, yeah, that's really...

Jason Herbert (32:33.271)
Yeah, it shows the complexity of the human experience over time, This grappling with all this kind of stuff.

Kit Heyam (32:40.955)
Absolutely. And so being seen as a man was really advantageous for N'Jinga when dealing with patriarchal colonizers. They were going to take you more seriously if you're a man. And so you can't really separate those two motivations for being seen as king. It was to do with N'Jinga's own culture, but it was also to do with that patriarchal culture that they were having to negotiate with. It was a cultural decision, but also a strategic decision.

And one of the really important things about the relationship between colonialism and trans history is, I guess, the way that colonialism doesn't just squash gender nonconformity, it just transforms it. It just makes people adapt and change in interesting and sometimes unpredictable ways. And I think that story is a really good example of that.

Jason Herbert (33:31.241)
a lot of times what I see here on social media, especially cause I come from a small town in the South, right? still friends with a lot of people I went to high school with somehow. I think that I often see here in the United States, and I don't know if you see this as well, Kit, in the UK is, well, we only started hearing about trans history recently. We only started hearing about trans people recently. And I wonder how much of that is kind of due to maybe

know, the popularization of trans people through, say, know, RuPaul. I was certainly expecting to see, and I was also revering in MASH, one of the characters often dressed as a woman to fake their illness to get out of fighting in the war. And then I start to think about other films that we've done actually on like historians of the movies at night, things like that, know, Tu Wang Fu and some other things I know, so forth. Now I'm wondering,

What's the role here of performance as people become aware through popular media, through, of course, drag shows are very popular and things like that. think everybody knows of those, but what's the role here about performance and gender? How are these related? you know, certainly I was expecting to see RuPaul pop up in my book here as I was reading it. I was not expecting the wartime stories. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Kit Heyam (34:58.907)
Yeah, RuPaul pops up mainly as a way to talk about the kind of uncomfortable relationship that RuPaul has historically had with trans communities and has made some comments which Ru is apologised for, which haven't been received particularly well by trans people. you say, know, most people have seen a drag show and there are many films that kind of have the trope of someone dressing up.

in order to get out of particular situation. What that means is that we have this, often this sense that drag and transness are really, really separate. like drag is about dressing up, transness is about who you are. In some ways, that is really, really useful to people and bears repeating when people are framing, saying that trans women are just men in dresses, it is important to say.

Jason Herbert (35:28.384)
Yeah, sure.

Kit Heyam (35:55.343)
No, no, there are many dresses and then there are trans women and those are different things. On the other hand, it's really recent history that we've seen drag and trans communities as separate. You you only have to go back to like the 60s or 70s to find people, many, many people who would see themselves as trans and as drag queens. That's really the history of Stonewall, for example. And the...

Jason Herbert (36:20.578)
Mm-hmm.

Kit Heyam (36:24.837)
separation that we have between them is really a product of like mid to late 20th century gay rights organizations saying I think we'd be more palatable and I think we'd get more sympathy if we just kind of threw these drag queens under the bus because they are a bit kind of loud and rowdy and flamboyant and they don't look normative enough and they don't look just like everybody else.

And so if we say they're not like us, we can make more progress for a very limited version of queer rights. And like I said, you don't have to go back very far to find that drag and trans history are really, really entangled. And that's where the wartime stories come from, which I can talk a bit about if you want, or we can save it for people who want to reflect.

Jason Herbert (37:22.637)
No, yeah, let's end with at least one wartime story because I found this to be absolutely fascinating, know, opening things up. Do have one you want to share?

Kit Heyam (37:33.425)
Let's do it. So the wartime stories I talked about relate to a First World War internment camp on the Isle of Man off the coast of the UK and Ireland called Noceilo in which tens of thousands of people assigned male at birth were interned during the First World War. But among those hundreds, two thousands of them lived as women.

the camp. what I mean, they used female pronouns, they used women's names, they were treated as women by everyone around them. And the way historians have approached this has often been to say, they were dressing as women because it made when they played female roles on the stage in the internment camp, it made it really convincing. Or they were dressing as women so that everyone could, you know, in an all male environment, they could have some women, it felt less traumatizing, it felt a bit more like a home from home. And I'm sure those motivations existed.

But with hundreds to thousands of people doing this, you're not telling me for a minute that not one of those people was doing it because they wanted to do it. And this was a really great opportunity to just live as a woman because they wanted to live as a woman. And I was really struck by, don't have any diary entries from the people who lived as women, but what we do have

is a newspaper article that was written by one of these people who played female roles on the stage who said, I'm not a woman and I'm not beautiful. And the fact that he chose to do that and every other person didn't tells me a lot about what those other people were thinking. They had that option to say, I'm not a woman and they didn't take it up. And I think that's really significant.

Jason Herbert (39:23.627)
Yeah. And I'm wondering if the circumstances of this internment of being, you know, in this, in this prison camp, like you were saying, offered this opportunity for maybe an expression that prior to like maybe during active service simply was not available. And because is it possible, Kit, do you think that because there were people who were maybe masquerading, maybe that's the right, I don't know if this is the right term, offered some sort of like, well I can now, because of this, can kind of, kind of blend in here and kind of also.

be able to live this full expression of who I am?

Kit Heyam (39:54.895)
Absolutely, yeah, think the fact that people were, as you know, you say, masquerading people were dressing up on stage as women anyway, it's the perfect opportunity. And we know that people at that time were really thinking like this, you know, when sexologists, sex scientists interviewed trans people, a lot of them said, every time I've had the chance, I've...

played a woman on stage because it's the one opportunity I get to dress like this and to live like this. So we know that's how people were thinking at that time. And I think it's really, really likely that that's how some of those people in that internment camp were thinking.

Jason Herbert (40:34.251)
wondering if after the war, if we have any sense as far as what happened to these people after the war, they go back to say more conforming identity? don't know the right terms here, Kit. Do they continue on to be able to show or, you know, I'm thinking now about George Chauncey's book, Gay New York, where he said, you know, gay expression in New York actually got more constrictive over time.

I'm kind of wondering if people had to kind of go back to hiding this part of their identity or were they able to, were they liberated?

Kit Heyam (41:11.185)
So we know very little about what happened to any of the individuals from the internment camp. only know one of the diarists. We have kind of met one of the people who'd lived as a woman in the camp a few years later. And he was living as a man and married to a woman. And the diary just says, he didn't care to be reminded of his time in the camp. And that's a really kind of tantalizing thing. It makes you think, was it because he was embarrassed or he actually loved it and it was too painful to remember what was going on there?

And I think actually that question of what happened to people in the internment camps after the war was one of the things very early on that started the process of thinking about this book because the person who told me about it said something like, and we have this amazing story of what happened during the war, but we don't know what happened after the war. So it's a real shame because we can't tell whether any of them are really trans. And it just made me think like.

We might not know what happened to them after the war, but we know that for three or four years, these people lived as a gender different from when they were assigned at birth and everybody just accepted it. And that shows us a huge amount of trans history. Even if there are only temporarily women, that doesn't mean they weren't women.

Jason Herbert (42:28.255)
Yeah, no, no. It tells us a lot about the ability of human acceptance, just like the ability to live this way. We talked a little bit about drag queens earlier, and I need to share with you a story. When I first got to the University of Minnesota to do my graduate work,

up there. It's obviously from the south. I'm not I don't have the hard weather winter gear that you need. So the clothes that I got came from the most unlikely source. came from one of my best friend's sister who was getting ready to leave. She was a librarian. She actually lives in the UK. And she's like, Jason, I've got all the clothes for you because she's very butch lesbian. Right. So I actually have upstairs. I was actually chuckling the other day as I going through. I pulled out Alice's

big winter caps and the gloves that she gave to me in the jacket and all that. I'm laughing because I'm this big guy and a lot of clothes that I've got are actually given to me by a woman. And you talk about this, but how does butch lesbian history factor into our understandings of trans history?

Kit Heyam (43:38.641)
I first of all, I love that story and you should tell it. That's so great. Yeah, history was a really, you know, perhaps unexpectedly tricky thing to write about in the book, mainly because we have this narrative put about by, to be honest, mainly not butch lesbians, mainly people who are just like using butch lesbians for their own political cause. But

Jason Herbert (43:41.673)
it's so great. Alice, if you're listening, I love you so much. So, we're good.

Kit Heyam (44:07.483)
We have this narrative about that there are people now who, like in the past, they would have been perfectly happy living as butchers, lesbians, but now they're all being pushed into becoming trans men. And like, there are so many things that are simultaneously true about that. Like it's probably true that there are slightly more people who are transitioning now than there were in the past because it's more available and it's more talked about. It's also true that

There are plenty of people who are still butch lesbians who don't want to be men because they're women and they're butch. And it's also true that people understand butch as a gender in its own right. There's a whole load of complicated things going on. I think butch history is a really important example of what I was saying before about history being multiple things at once. A historical episode or a historical person can be butch history and trans history.

a lot of those quite toxic, divisive narratives that get put about about butch people being coerced into transition or trans people even kind of stealing butch communities. Those also get applied to history and people say, know, trans history is kind of stealing butch history. And they really want to be able to say,

there is nothing wrong with Butch people and trans people identifying closely and feeling community and feeling solidarity with the same history. So Butch history and trans history have a lot of overlap and that's really great because that's one of the things that can help us to build solidarity which you know heaven knows in this political context we really really need.

Jason Herbert (45:51.041)
Yeah. And that kind of brings me really to where I'm kind of going here now. You talk about the political context. It's no surprise. We're recording this on November 30th and here in the U.S. we have a new president coming into power in about a month and a half. And Kit, I'm terrified, openly terrified of what's going to happen. A major portion of Donald Trump as candidate most recently was Rayleigh.

Kit Heyam (46:11.334)
Me too.

Jason Herbert (46:19.577)
on the idea that at schools in the United States that kids were getting surgeries, they'd go to school, they'd go to school and get a surgery and then come home and people were buying in on this hate-filled ignorance, rhetoric.

Jason Herbert (46:38.285)
Where do we go from here? Because one of the things I love that you wrote, and you talked about how you register trans history in terms of comfort and desperation and love. I told you when I wrote to you how much I love that line, but like.

Where are going? Are you seeing these kinds of this rhetoric in the UK as well? Where do we go for here? Because I'm worried we're in for a real rough another rough four years, not that we weren't out of the out of the woods yet, but.

Kit Heyam (47:07.385)
Yeah, I'm not gonna lie, I'm scared for you, I'm scared for us and, you know, in the UK we have a more left-wing government than we used to have, but the rhetoric around trans people has actually not really shifted very much from the previous government, so I'm scared. I'm scared for us too and the way that that narrative, particularly around trans kids, is really shifting and really dangerous misinformation is being put about.

Jason Herbert (47:28.118)
Absolutely.

Kit Heyam (47:37.233)
to the existential threat of trans kids in particular. You say about what I wrote about comfort and desperation and love, and I wrote that to gesture towards the emotionally sustaining capacity that trans history has, the way that for trans people who can feel completely isolated, completely alone, history can provide a sense of community, a point of contact, a sense of solidarity.

I think that's going to continue to be really important. But there's something else as well, which is that I wrote before we were trans because I wanted to find a way of talking about trans history that was not just responding to the terms that our opponents had set. If people said to us, there are not trans people in the past for so long.

We'd been saying, yes, there are, look at this set of people who conform exactly to your idea of what a trans person looks like. And I found it much more important to say, we're going to change the whole terms of the debate and say, no, this is what trans history is actually. And I think that that remains incredibly important when we get misinformation like kids are going to school and having surgeries. Yes, we need to say that's complete rubbish. No one's getting a surgery overnight at school.

But we also need to say, rather than, no, it's OK, because there's lots of gatekeeping around kids transitioning, we also need to say, so what if someone experiments with their gender as a teenager? So what if someone wants to live as one gender for a year and then change their mind? Isn't it going to be a lot better for everyone?

if we just make gender low stakes and something that we can play with just in the same way as we play with our hairstyle. The only way to make someone genuinely, if we're so concerned about regret, you know, the only way to make someone genuinely not regret what they do as a teenager is to make it really low stakes and reversible, to make it okay for them to experiment and try something out. Because how can they know if it's right? If they don't try it out and then make it equally okay.

Kit Heyam (49:53.615)
them to turn around and say, no, that was cool for a little while, but it's not right for me now. We're not going to prevent regret by continuing to gatekeep. We're going to have a lot better chance of everyone living happily if we just allow people to play. so that's what I mean about the importance of not allowing our opponents to dictate the terms of the narrative. And that's why I this book. And that's what I think we need to be holding onto now as well.

Jason Herbert (50:22.657)
Well, Kit, I have to tell you, I am so, so very thankful to you for writing this book. Like I said, this is a, this is a thing that I, you know, I want to know more and I am happy to express my own ignorance in so many different things because let me tell you, am ignorant in so many different ways about so many things. And the only way you can free yourself of that is by reading and talking to folks and things like that. And then, you know, you, you write this just absolutely beautiful book.

that answers so many questions and frankly opens up other questions for me to ask as I'm doing my own research or thinking through things and so forth, right? As we're of getting here to an end, is there anything else that you've got that you want to share with our audience about trans history, about where you want to go next as far as as an activist, as a scholar, as human and so forth?

Kit Heyam (51:15.281)
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me on. It's been a total joy to talk to you. What I'm working on now actually relates to what we were just talking about, which is a look at family values rhetoric and the idea of protecting the family through a trans lens and through a historical lens. And one of the things that's most exciting to me, I became a parent last year. I gave birth to my baby in August last year. And thank you. One of the things

Jason Herbert (51:40.781)
Congratulations.

Kit Heyam (51:44.849)
that has most excited me is looking into the narratives that we often get around how radical and new it is to raise our children gender neutral and actually using history to say, you know, it's really radical and new to raise our children as having genders at all. And once again, race is part of that story, as you might expect. But I'm...

There's a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of showing that transness is compatible with family, and has always been compatible with family. One of the things that I can offer for that conversation is history, which shows us that actually the family we're talking about has never been one where gender and biology are simple. And so I've been really enjoying uncovering that and hopefully I'll have something to show for it in a couple of years time.

Jason Herbert (52:40.321)
Well, Ken, first of all, I can't wait to hear more about it. Secondly, I'm going to have to ask you to come back on when we do a Histories of the Movies pod at some point in time to have to come back on the mothership as well. I have been delighted to be able to get to read your book, get to know you as a person, to share actually a cup of tea with you. So thank you very, very much for being here. can't thank you enough.

Kit Heyam (53:04.081)
Thank you so, much for having me. It's been a delight to study.

Jason Herbert (53:07.603)
Awesome. Hey everybody. Listen, this has been me and Kent talking today about this amazing book, Before We Were Trans, A New History of Gender. I'll put a link to it on the YouTube and on Blue Sky and every, I don't know, Instagram, everywhere else. I'm at online all the places. So we will catch you guys a little later.