Skip content
Get a free audiobook AND support bookstores Make the switch
Before We Were Trans by Dr. Kit Heyam
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Libro.fm app

Get a free audiobook when you make the switch!

When you start a new membership in support of local bookstores with the promo code SWITCH, you’ll get a bonus audiobook credit at sign-up.

Make the switch

Gift audiobook credit bundles

You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.

Start gifting

Before We Were Trans

A New History of Gender

$26.24

Get for $14.99 with membership
Narrator Dr. Kit Heyam
Length 8 hours 2 minutes
Language English
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

Summary

A groundbreaking global history of gender nonconformity  

Today’s narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people’s lives.  
 
Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance. Before We Were Trans transports us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to early America, and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures.  

Libro.fm app

Get a free audiobook when you make the switch!

When you start a new membership in support of local bookstores with the promo code SWITCH, you’ll get a bonus audiobook credit at sign-up.

Make the switch

Gift audiobook credit bundles

You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.

Start gifting

Reviews

Before We Were Trans provides much needed context, nuance, and breadth to our understanding of human gender diversity throughout history and in different cultures. While people who we might now call transgender or LGBTQIA+ have always existed, Kit Heyam shows how both individuals' and societies' understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality are situational, multifaceted, and constantly evolving.—Julia Serano, author of Whipping Girl and Sexed Up Before We Were Trans enlarges our understanding of trans histories and highlights the beauty, complexity, and contradictions of doing historical work - all in a voice that invites the reader in, and not only teaches us what to think about trans lives in the past, but how to think about them.—Hugh Ryan, author of The Women’s House of Detention Before We Were Trans is a thoughtful, fun, and refreshingly readable romp through the history of gender variance before the invention of contemporary ‘transgender’ categories and concepts.—Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History This is such a searing, reflexive read - in conversation with the likes of Shon Faye, Akwaeke Emezi and Leslie Feinberg - that needs to be in everyone's hands expeditiously.—Paula Akpan, journalist and co-founding director of Black Girl Festival Expand reviews
Get a free audiobook AND support bookstores Make the switch