Before Gender
Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Explore the trailblazing lives of 30 trans people who radically change everything you’ve been told about transgender history
Highlighting influential individuals from 1850-1950 who are all but unknown today, Eli Erlick shares 30 remarkable stories from romance to rebellion and mystery to murder. These narratives chronicle the grit, joy, and survival of trans people long before gender became an everyday term.
Organized into 4 parts paralleling today’s controversies over gender identity (kids, activists, workers, and athletes), Before Gender introduces figures whose forgotten stories transform the discussion
Mark and David Ferrow, two of the first trans teens to access gender-affirming medical treatment following overwhelming support from their friends, family, and neighbors.Gerda von Zobeltitz, a trans countess who instigated an LGBTQ+ riot 40 years before Stonewall.Frank Williams, a young trans man who was fired from over a dozen jobs for his gender.Frances Anderson, the world’s greatest female billiards player of the 1910s.
Bold and visionary, Erlick’s debut uncovers these lost stories from the depths of the archives to narrate trans lives in a way that has never been attempted before.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Transgender people are nothing new," according to this brilliant survey of "forgotten" trans lives. Historian Erlick makes a persuasive case that the anxiety surrounding trans identities today has not always been present in popular culture—that trans people have "existed... everywhere from the largest cities to the most remote villages" and been generally accepted by their communities. Rather, Erlick shows, it has been institutions—governments, schools, athletic associations—that have historically put up resistance to trans identity, enacting deliberate "interventions" to erase trans people. Examples include a "mass queer and trans uprising" against police in early 1930s Berlin, led by the now nearly forgotten trans countess Gerda von Zobeltitz, "that was later erased from history by Nazis"; and "one of Europe's greatest athletes," the Czech javelineer Stefan Pekar, who transitioned in 1936, "only for conservative bureaucrats to remove him from the record books." Other lives that Erlick uncovers show evidence of unhindered acceptance while also substantially revising to earlier dates trans history's supposed "firsts." These include a Black formerly enslaved trans woman whose Freedmen's Bureau–approved transition in the 1860s is earlier than any previously discovered. The fascinating conclusion Erlick draws is that there's no such thing as a "trans first"—only instances of first official acceptance. It's an essential and eye-opening paradigm shift.
