Factually! with Adam Conover - The REAL History of Gender with Dr. Kit Heyam

Episode Date: December 27, 2023

In recent years, the number of young people identifying as trans has doubled. However, a common misinterpretation arises, suggesting that this surge implies a new phenomenon of being trans or gender non-conforming. Modern Western culture has strongly insisted on the conventional belief that the gender binary is natural, fostering the false assumption that human culture and history have always revolved around this binary. In reality, humans worldwide have expressed gender concepts outside that binary as far back as the 8th century BC. This week, Adam engages in conversation with Dr. Kit Heyam, author of "Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender," to explore gender expressions of the past and move beyond the limited modern view of gender. Find Kit's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, there's an alarming backlash against trans rights and frankly, the existence of trans people at all in America today. Turns out bathroom laws were only the beginning. Now there are laws banning gender affirming care for kids, requiring trans students to be misgendered, and even laws against drag shows in many places across this country. On top of that, there's a cottage industry of dumb ass articles stoking the flames of the anti-trans freakout. And I think some of it comes from this perception that suddenly trans people are everywhere, that this is something new in our society. And I understand that to a certain

extent. You know, 10 years ago, I had maybe met one or two trans people ever in my life. And now I have countless non-binary and trans friends who are living openly and who are thriving. And this is true across the country. The number of young people who identify as transgender has doubled in recent years. And today, 5% of people younger than 30 are trans. That is huge that so many people are out now. It is a generational shift. But the idea that being trans or gender nonconforming itself is something new that was just invented recently is false. See, we've been taught that the gender binary is natural. So we have this false idea that human culture and history has been based around that strict binary forever. But that is not the case at all. In so many places and times throughout history, humans have expressed gender concepts outside that binary. Take the Pacific island of

Samoa, where there are four genders, or in India, where the hijras are acknowledged as a third gender with specific cultural and religious roles. These people are not new. They have been acknowledged in the historical record since the eighth century BC. And these are just two of the many examples throughout history that challenge the gender binary, But it can be hard to see those examples or fully understand them from the limited historical perspective and notion of gender that we have today. So to walk us through this, to help us open our minds to the possibilities of gender throughout history, we have an incredible guest on the show.

I read their book a few months ago. It absolutely blew my mind. I know you're going to love this interview, but before we get to it, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gives you every episode of this podcast ad free. We also have a lot of other great community perks as well. You can check them out. And if you love standup comedy, please come see me on tour. I'm headed to Portland, Maine, New York city, uh, DC, Chicago, uh, Atlanta, Nashville, Philadelphia, a bunch of other places as well. Head to adam conover.net for tickets and tour dates. And now let's get to this week's guest. My guest today

is Kit Hayham. They're a researcher and writer based in Leeds and the author of the incredible book, Before We Were Trans, A New History of Gender. I cannot be more honored to welcome Kit Hayham to the show. Kit, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's a total pleasure to be here. I'm really thrilled to have you because, you know, we have a lot of authors on this show. Obviously, I hope people give me the grace to understand I don't have time to read every book. But in this case, this is a book that I read before having

you on the show. And then I was like, I have to have Kit on the show because I loved this book so much. It's called Before We Were Trans. And I think that, you know, our contemporary conversation about trans issues, about all gender nonconforming issues is so much wrapped up in, oh, this is new, this is new, what a new change in our society, et cetera. And you demolish that in three or four different ways. Like just what do you think the, where should we start? Where does, what does the contemporary conversation get wrong about the history of gender nonconformity worldwide? to it is weaponizing the idea that there is no trans history the idea that this is a new thing and therefore either we don't have to take it seriously because it's just a fad or a fashion or it's a new thing and that's bad and we need to make sure we make laws to protect people from it

because that's terrible and so actually yeah really really central to anti-trans arguments is this idea that it's new um and that therefore is incredibly damaging and so really one of the main reasons i wanted to write this book was to get the conversation started about how this is very very far from new but i suppose what i also wanted to do was to open up the conversation about what different kinds of gender non-conformity and trans experience we might find in the past um because i think you know there's a there's a few little trans history stories that get wheeled out over and over and over again and then they're the stories about people who have really clear binary gender identities who have really medicalized stories really kind of um classic

canonical trans narrative stories of having known since they were three years old and then they transition and then they conform perfectly to gender stereotypes um and that misses out so much interesting messy fascinating stuff that people have been doing with gender across the world throughout history um that it seemed a real shame not to tell those stories, partly because they're cool, but also partly because if we keep just telling a really, really narrow subset of trans histories, then we limit the ways in which people can imagine the possibilities of what we could do with gender now. We tell people, okay, well, the only thing that there's historical precedent for is this very, very narrow way of being trans. And actually, the truth is so,

so much more complicated than that. Yeah. I mean, you have some stories in your book that are the more, the story that we might imagine, you know, as our first thought idea of a trans historical, oh, here's a person who was, you know, assigned one gender at birth, and then they went to war as a man or whatever, that sort of story, and then lived that way the rest of their lives, etc, etc. Under a sort of gender ideology that we would recognize as similar to our own. But you also talk about people who are gender nonconforming in cultures that had very different ideas of gender than we do, or at least differing ones. Am I right?

Yeah, absolutely. It was really, really important to me to write this as a global history because it's a really effective way of showing that the way we have of thinking about gender now in contemporary western culture is a recent phenomenon and a really glo you know a really kind of um locally specific phenomenon actually it's not the default way of thinking about gender it's not the traditional way of thinking about gender that then people are deviating from it's a recent social construct um and a very western a very local social construct um just because you know we live in a world um in which we take western constructs as the default so often doesn't mean that that is the right way or the only way or even the most common way to think about gender

um so yeah so instead um before we were trans as you know, is a history of different ways of thinking about gender and ways of experiencing gender in multiple cultures across the world, while also showing that actually in Western Europe trying to correct a mistake that's often made even by folks who are sympathetic to trans history and are looking for those histories. When they go back and look at histories from other cultures, there's a common error made. Can you just tell me about that? So white trans people, and I say this as a white trans person, do this so often where we're looking for kind of easy ways to prove the validity of our own genders. And so we kind of seize upon these experiences from cultures that aren't our own. And we look at them through a Western lens and very, very rarely on their own cultural terms. And we also tend to do this thing where we say, okay, my gender is valid because look at India, they have the hijra. And hijra did not ask to be kind of instrumentalized

for the cause of proving the validity of white people's genders. That's not what those people are for. And it's really troubling to me when there's this kind of romanticizing, fetishizing approach to genders from non-Western cultures that takes no time to understand them on their own terms. And crucially, that takes no time to actually understand what those people might need, how we can give back rather than just taking by using them and then discarding them when we've made our point. And so that was something that I was really keen to try not to do throughout the book and hopefully succeeded. And it feels like a missed opportunity to actually understand more about the world and about gender. If you are going, looking at someone else's experience,

either elsewhere in the world or historically and saying, well, what I want to get out of this is that it's going to prove something about me and my specific experience. You're going in with a real idea about it rather than saying, hey, what might this, if I really understand what this means to the person I'm talking about in the cultural context that they're in, what might I learn about gender that I have no idea about in my current limited frame of reference where I sit here in 2023. Yeah, absolutely. Going, there's a big, big difference, isn't there, between going in with a goal in mind to get something out of it and going in with an open mind as to what that interaction might reveal and how that might change the way that you might think. Yeah.

Yeah. So let's talk about some of these stories. Do you, I hate to ask you this away, but do you have a favorite that you enjoy telling and starting with? I guess I do have a favorite. I love many of the people I wrote about. Not all of them. Some of them, as we might go on to talk about, are not actually particularly nice people. But one of the people who I really enjoy talking about

is a 17th century servant um who was known sometimes as thomas and sometimes as thomasine hall um so they were someone who was born in the north of england and where i am right now um born in newcastle emigrated um to what's now virginia in the us um and they come to prominence the reason we know about them, is because in 1629, they stated in a court of law, I am both man and woman. Which is an awesome thing to hear somebody declaring in a court of law in the 17th century. And what it turns out they meant by that is they lived sometimes as a man, sometimes as a a woman sometimes as what they understood as both and they had an intersex body and so um the reason i tell their story in the book is to talk about the intersections between intersex histories and trans histories and how we might

look at that in a kind of ethical way um but um the other reason i love telling their story there's two reasons um other than their kind of incredible defiance in that courtroom um one of the reasons i love telling their story is when you say this person had an insect's body lots of people want to know exactly what that body was like now even if i knew i wouldn't necessarily want to tell you out of respect for um the privacy of that individual but actually i don't. And I don't know because the manuscript that tells us about that trial is damaged in precisely the place that would tell us what their body was like.

There's like, what, just like a little inkblot or like a little singed? There's literally a hole in it. Like it's a page we found in a video game, like we're playing Myst or something, and there's just, oh, the one part that has the secret code is burned away. It's absolutely incredible. It's like a real piece of trans resistance in the archive, which I absolutely love.

That's so funny. It's so frustrating if you're a prurient historian who's just dying to know about somebody's genitals in the past. past oh the one spot uh so so funny uh why was this person in court to begin with they were in court because of fornication um so they'd been sleeping with someone who we only know as great bess and we don't know anything about bess and she was great great, though, apparently. Great Bess. Yeah, yeah. So they'd been sleeping together. And then as part of that fornication trial,

it quickly became apparent that people weren't sure exactly what kind of sex they might have had. And so then the focus very quickly became, okay, what is this person's actual gender? And about a third of the town weighed in with their opinions on what was going on with this person's body in the end and this is the other reason i love this story the court concluded all right you know what you say you're both man and woman actually we think you're right and your sentence is to wear a mixture of men's and women's clothing for the rest of your life so that everyone knows

you're both man and woman wow wait really that was the that was a sentence that a court could hand down genuinely yeah so it was they had to wear men's clothing um but with a female coded headdress um and a female coded kind of apron um to mark them out and this is it's really interesting thinking about this isn't it because in some ways like if you're a modern non-binary person for many of us like that's kind of a cool sentence that's like okay you must express your gender um yeah and you know for so in some ways presumably that was a bit affirming for thomas or thomasine in other ways what presumably that was a bit affirming for Thomas or Thomasine. In other ways, what it does is it locks down their fluidity.

Because what they'd actually been doing was living sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman, kind of changing how they wanted to be on any particular day. But this was saying, no, you're going to be static. You're not going to be confusing to us anymore. And this is a time at which men and women's dress was obviously very, very different. And so everybody was dressed almost, I would guess, almost in close to a gender uniform. And so this would mark this person out as like, this is the town weirdo, right? Like we are, everybody knows this person can no longer go back or maybe, maybe they were worried about being deceived and now they can no longer deceive us that sort of thing yeah absolutely um that's exactly right about the way that clothes

were understood in that period and the other thing with clothes in um early modern western culture is that they were they were seen as something that not only reflected but also kind of shaped who you were underneath so like that's why they get so scared about things like um cross-dressing on the stage um because people are actually potentially going to be changing who they are underneath if they wear the clothes that are associated with a different gender so um this was also a way of kind of saying okay you say you're both man and woman we're going to make sure that's true you can't be a man by wearing men's clothes you can't be a woman by wearing women's clothes you've got to be both And that's what your clothes are doing.

perhaps more people in North America, in the colonies, living with this sort of gender expression or identity. What does this story tell us about gender more widely at the time? It tells us that people have the capacity to understand someone as both man and woman. And I think that's really significant because, like we said at the start of this we live in this culture now where the narrative is the standard narrative is this is a new way of thinking we've got to overturn our old ways of thinking about gender in order to get our heads around these weird non-binary people actually all we're doing is going back to ways of thinking that we've lost so in the 17th century it made perfect sense for people to be like, OK, this person's both man and woman. We'll get them to dress like that then. And what that shows us then is it kind of unlocks a new perspective on the way that people across the board in the North American colonies and also in the British Isles where they'd come from.

People across the board had the capacity to think like that. They had a way more complex understanding of gender than I think we normally give them credit for. So that one little court judgment shows us what could have been going on in a heck of a lot more people's heads, I think. Yeah. And you also write about with all of these cases,

the danger of us, like we immediately think, okay, I know all the gender identities in my life, right? That friends of mine have, or that I've encountered or that I've read about on the internet here in, here in the U S in 2023, which one of those was Thomasine slash Thomas, right? And you write a lot about the danger of that sort of thinking. How does, how do you think about this person just to get us started in that piece of it? I how do you think about this person uh just to get us started in that piece of it i've got to think about thomasine as or thomas as both man and woman because that is the only record i have of the words that they used um this is quite tricky because on the one

hand this line of argument of saying you've got to talk about people on their own terms that can so kind of segue very quickly into saying well so you're right there were no trans people in the past um and in a kind of absolute self-definition sense there have only been trans people as long as people have been saying i am a trans person yeah but what i kind of argue in the book is i think there's a really really important distinction to make between trans people and trans history so i would say thomas or thomasine they were not a trans person because that's not what they said about themselves and i think an ethical way of looking at any other human being whether they're dead whether they're alive whether i know them whether i don't an ethical way of looking at them has got to start with accepting the way that they understand themselves and seeing them on their own terms rather than imposing mine.

And that felt really, really important. So Thomas O'Tomacine was not a trans person, but I do think their story is trans history. Because if we think about trans history as history that shows us that gender has never been straightforwardly tied to the body or straightforwardly binary or straightforwardly rigid or something that you can't play with, then that enables us to see, okay, well, if that's always been the case, then of course, it stands to reason that we can still think about gender in that flexible, playful, messy way now. And that distinction between saying these weren't trans people, but this is trans history,

feels like one that can allow us to navigate that really tricky line between saying there weren't any trans people in the past and saying there has always been gender nonconformity and there have always been people messing with gender. I find that really beautiful. And first of all, I love the really thoughtful way that these are difficult issues. And, uh, I feel that the way you explain that was so thoughtful, but also understandable to me, very clear. It gives me the language I need to understand it. I also think it, it helps me understand the title of the book before,

it helps me understand the title of the book before we were trans, because transness as a word didn't exist at this time, right? But there's still a we that goes back, that extends backwards. Do I have something right there? That's exactly where the title came from. Yeah, it took a long, long time to come up with it. I think my partner came up with it in the end, but it was exactly what I wanted to communicate was there is a continuity not of terminology but a continuity of community um and actually a really important kind of strand of the book is sort of reckoning with the fact that we inevitably have kind of emotional connections to this history and that marginalized people in particular people like trans people who've been told that we don't have history and that we don't have community and there aren't many of us and we may grow up grow up without knowing anyone like us um that looking to history

for a sense of community is really important and so it is really crucial not to just be like well there were no people like you in the past because they didn't use the same words as you that to me feels like abandoning people in the present who really need this history as a sense of cruelty. Yeah. So, is there a person in your book to, let's do another story, is there a person who, and forgive me, it's been a few months since I've read it, so I don't remember every star off the top of my head, is there one that does a little bit more closely resemble what we would see today as a, we would say today is a trans person or no?

Or are they all more interesting, complex stories than that? Even though none of them use that word. Yeah, the answers are kind of yes and no to that i mean so that you know there are some um 20th century stories um of people you know who access medical transition and therefore do resemble our um contemporary ideas of being a trans person a bit more but i talk about those people specifically because even if they resemble our own ideas of being a trans person they often didn't define themselves in that way you know some of them were like actually i'm intersex because they have a different understanding of transness to what we do now um but I suppose I really I wrote this book because I wanted a space to tell the stories of the people

who make who when you tell their stories people go oh well that's not trans history that's just right something else yeah that's not trans history that's just gay people or that's just gender non-conforming fashion or that's just the history of the theater um and i wanted to say it is those things but it's also trans history because of what it tells us about the um kind of malleability the um playable witness with of gender, there was one story in the book where, and please fill me on the details, but it's a historical figure who there was a, there was a contemporary dispute about whether this person is part of trans history or lesbian history. Do I have that right? And do you mind talking about it a little bit, even though I know it it's maybe still, there's still some heated thoughts about

this particular story. Yeah. And well, you know know that's why it's worth talking about isn't it um so i think who you're talking about is ann lister um who those who've seen gentleman jack um either on the bbc in the uk or on hbo um in north america um will know ann lister and lister was a um wealthy 18th century landowner from um west yorkshire in the uk very close to where i am now um who um has been treated for many many years as part of lesbian history because um that uh they lived as a woman and um had relationships with other women and wrote a diary and code which was only cracked um kind of hundreds um hundreds of years after more than 100 years um after their death um which revealed um these affairs with women and which showed really clear kind of

self-consciousness of, I am someone who loves women. And so a lot of lesbians, you know, really rightly and understandably seized on this of saying, this is someone with a lesbian identity, right? This is someone who is really conscious of, I am the sort of person who is attracted to women, which we hadn't kind of got very the sort of person who is attracted to women which um we hadn't kind of got very much evidence of people in their own words thinking like that

in the 18th century before so that's really cool and interesting and also had an interesting and complicated relationship with gender and gender non-conformity so they dressed in a way that was seen as masculine and sometimes their partners found this really attractive and sometimes they didn't. They were given men's names by their lovers sometimes. And they wrote in their diary, and I think this is really interesting. They wrote in their diary about not wanting to be seen as a woman by their lovers, about it being uncomfortable when their lovers did certain things sexually, because then it made it seem like those lovers saw them too much as

a woman. So we have someone who is incredibly important to lesbian history and also who tells us some quite interesting stuff. I think about the history of gender and perhaps about the relationship between gender and sexuality. Um, and the reason I wanted to write about that in the book was partly because it's a neat example of someone

who kind of speaks to both of these marginalized groups who don't have much historical representation today. But also because that really came to a head when a permanent plaque was erected at the church in york in the north of england where anne married their long-term partner and walker and i say married you know advisedly um it was um a union that was not kind of legally sanctioned as a marriage but was one that the two of them saw as a marriage um in 1834 um arguably the uk's first lesbian wedding um and so a plaque was erected there and there was a lot of wrangling over whether the wording should describe an as gender non-conforming

um which was not a word that an used but was kind of you know a description of their behavior or whether it should say lesbian which also wasn't a word that Anne used. And it ended up with the plaque originally saying gender nonconforming. And then after a lot of backlash from lesbians who felt unrepresented being recast to say lesbian. what what this feels like to me is a real missed opportunity to recognize that ann lister's story is a story that speaks equally to trans people and to lesbians um and the emotional connection to history doesn't have to be this zero-sum game where we're going no this person's a lesbian no this person's trans but actually if we think about it in terms of kind of feeling a sense of community with people in history in our real lives, we can belong to lots and lots of different communities. We don't sort of say you could only be one thing.

And so it stands to reason that people in the past can also belong and speak to lots of different communities. but because partly because we live in a world um where the political conversation is manufactured to construct divisions between different sectors of lgbtq communities i think um and partly also because we live in a world um you know in contemporary western culture where we've drawn this really strict dividing line between gender and sexuality which is actually really recent um that leads people to think oh well this person's got to be one or the other um we've drawn this really strict dividing line between gender and sexuality, which is actually really recent. That leads people to think, oh, well, this person's got to be one or the other. And the reason I wanted to write about all these messy histories in Before We Were Trans was in part to say, no person is one or the other.

And just because these stories are trans history doesn't mean they aren't also simultaneously other kinds of history at the same time. Yeah, I mean, it seems like it's going back to a little bit of the same error that we were talking about also, where there's this effort to ask, well, what was this person really? According to our rubric, as though our current rubric that we've all semi-agreed upon, there's this type of person, that type of person, that type of person, which bucket, which one of our buckets do we put them in without realizing, hold on a second, our buckets, we just came up with these buckets a little while ago.

And 50 years from now, we might have different buckets. And rather than compete, first of all, why do we need to compete? But second of all, rather than putting them in one of our buckets, what if we just take what Ann Lister said as, you know, this is what we know. We know about them, what they said about themselves and the evidence that we have. And there's plenty to learn about from that. Right. And take her own words seriously. Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, maybe by looking at the past and seeing they have different buckets, we might think, are buckets even the right thing? You know, maybe we should be having like paddling pools or some other kind of more capacious receptacle that can contain more of ourselves. Maybe looking at the past might inspire us to do that. Well, and we in the present, our own, everyone's own conception is a little bit messy as well, right? Of themselves. Like I've, I have many, many queer and gender non-conforming friends. Very few of them are in very narrow buckets themselves. They're, they all, they tend to have, when you talk to them, a messy story of their own that is very interesting. And we can like maybe extend that same grace to people in the past. Yeah, absolutely. If you ask any trans person today, it's very,

very rare that we had the classical trans narrative of, I knew when I was three and I conformed perfectly to all the gender stereotypes and I never had a moment of doubt. And now that I've transitioned one way forever permanently, I will be conforming to all the stereotypes of my new gender. And my gender is also just my gender and definitely doesn't have anything to do with my sexuality or my relationship with clothing and we don't make those demands of cis people you know we don't demand that their gender can be perfectly separated from the way they feel about sex or clothes or roles in society or anything else but we make those demands of trans people like Like in order to be really trans, you have to be sure it's just about gender and not about

any other aspect of yourself. And no human being is like that. Like you say, we're all messier than that. Yeah. When you tell that story of Ann Lister in the book, I detected like a little bit of pain on, on your part that the, that, that the story of the dispute in contemporary society, you know, was a little bit distressing to you. I was wondering if you could talk about why that is. Yeah, you're not wrong. So I was a member of the committee that put together that initial plaque. And that was the one that said gender non-conforming um and i was working with various other kind of representatives of um queer groups within york um and what we didn't really realize at the time was that the consultation we did about the wording well didn't really necessarily reach

the right people for like a variety of kind of locally specific reasons and it also didn't last long enough because there was one of the community groups that kind of locally specific reasons and it also didn't last long enough because there was one of the community groups that kind of was keen to work to a specific timeline i'm not going to throw them under the bus by saying who it was but um there was one group that yeah resulted in it being a bit more rushed than it needed to be um and what that meant was we ended up not really anticipating the backlash that was going to come and some of that backlash was really transphobic and involved you know threats of violence etc um some of that backlash was not transphobic it was just lesbians who felt really hurt um and that in a way was

harder to deal with because um yeah it wasn't it wasn't what we'd wanted to do to hurt people um and it's taken this happened in was it 2017 or 2018 a little while ago anyway um and i'd been invited so many times since that happened to speak about it or to be on unlisted panels or to write blog posts about it or to be on an list of panels or to write blog posts about it or to write articles about it and i turned them all down because i wasn't ready um after going through the real onslaught of online hate that that episode um precipitated and it was only when it came to writing that this book that i thought okay i've finally sort of got the the distance i need from it and also i've got the

space to tell this in my own words and on my own terms and to talk about what i think went wrong but also the fact that i don't think the solution that um the groups who worked on it afterwards came to where it just says lesbian instead i don't think that that's a great thing either either for anne or for whole groups of diverse queer people today um i think it homogenizes and flattens someone who was actually really complex and interesting and whose complexity we could embrace more than we have yeah i i what i find fascinating about this is how important this history is to so many people that, that it really, people got so passionate about it. Occasionally, as you say, hateful about it, if it didn't go the way that they wanted. But yeah, it's, I don't know. It's just so,

it's interesting when history is so present in people's minds and when it becomes a, a battlefield that makes you think about what history is for and who it's interesting when history is so present in people's minds and when it becomes a a battlefield that makes you think about what history is for and who it's for i think it becomes particularly kind of emotionally fraught for people who don't get that much representation in history in a way yes like if you know if you are any shade of queer or you know anything if you are from any marginalized group essentially um it's very rare that you get representation in mainstream historical narratives or that you'll be taught histories that you recognize um as being about people who relate to you at school um and so when you do find someone you really really cling to them um and we end up kind of

fighting over them as if they end up kind of fighting over them as if they're really kind of scarce resources because we just haven't been given it feels like enough to go around um and this is why i think it's so important to reframe the way we think about it and to think instead of this person belongs to me and only me and we have to claim them um in this kind of capitalist way um yeah to think instead you know okay can we um how can we think about history as a source of community and how can we think about um being multiple groups of people being in community and in solidarity with these people from history without it taking away from other groups of people feeling the same thing. Yeah. I mean, history is a renewable resource.

Everybody can, you never run out of people being able to see themselves in a historical figure and get knowledge and understanding from it. So my God, this conversation is incredible. I cannot wait to keep talking to you after the break. We'll be right back with more Kit Ham. OK, we're back with Kit Ham. You've been telling us these incredible stories about gender nonconforming people of all types in the past. But we mostly told story. We told a story in Virginia, one in the UK. I'd love to get into some of the stories you tell about folks in other parts of the world throughout history do you have a favorite uh from all of

the rest of of the globe from the whole rest of the world um yeah one of my favorites is um the story that i opened the first chapter after the introduction with um which is the monarch of nongo in what's now angola um whose name was njinga mbande um and i say monarch very advisedly um because njinga was assigned female at birth but when they reigned they reigned as king not as queen um i wanted to tell that story because i wanted to think about the fact that probably the most common way that trans history gets dismissed is when people look at a story and they say, well, that's not trans history. That's just a woman making her way in a patriarchal society. So she had to dress up as a man in order to achieve the things she wanted to achieve. Right.

She had to dress up as a man in order to achieve the things she wanted to achieve. Doubtless, those stories and those experiences exist in lots and lots of places. Njinga's story is different, though. And many, many similar stories from similar periods and similar places are different because Njinga ruled as a king because the role of monarch was male in their society. So when you became monarch, you became king. That's what there was. And to a modern Western ear, that sounds kind of regressive. That's like saying, what, there's no such thing as a ruling woman. You can't be a woman and rule at the same time. But you've just got to get your head around the fact that that wasn't a repressive value in 17th century Ndongo.

And it remains not a repressive value in many, many cultures today. It's just different. It's not worse. How so? Because I'm having trouble getting out of my current conception in 2023 US. It's just different and not worse because if you, how to put it, if you don't think that one gender is automatically better than another then it shouldn't matter that someone's gendered experience changes depending on the role they're occupying you know if you don't live in a society that says women are worse then it shouldn't be a

problem to say well being a woman isn't something that's compatible with this particular box, or this particular role. If that makes sense. I think so, yeah. The thing I suppose that also complicates Njinga's experience, and this was another reason it was really interesting

to research and to write about, was because they ruled as king in part because that was the way that the role of monarch was gendered in their society. But it was also a really strategically convenient thing to do because at the time that they were ruling Ndongo, they were having to negotiate with Portuguese colonizers. And the Portuguese very much did come from a patriarchal society. They were very much going to respect a king way more than they were going to respect a queen. So it's really, really hard then to tease apart, you know, what was going on for Njinga's experience. Were they just ruling as king

because that was the way they understood it culturally? Or was there also a bit of them that was like, well, the more I look masculine, the more I'm going to be able to negotiate effectively with these people who want to take over my country. It is impossible to separate those two things. And the story of gender nonconformity in non-Western cultures is so often a story that's also about Western colonization. But what's really important to say is that's not always a story of just, we had all these genders and then the colonization squashed them. You know, sometimes that's definitely the story, but sometimes it's also a story of we have these gendered experiences and then people resiliently and creatively shaped them differently in response

to their experiences of colonization. Right. Like, oh, there's these new people on the scene and ah, I can tell they have different gender ideas than I do. And so maybe if I present myself in a way that they will understand as X, whatever it may be, then I can accomplish the thing I want to accomplish. And that's okay with me because I am blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's a far more interesting story. Yeah, and that's a far more interesting story. Yeah, I think so. And it's also a story that gets away from falling into some of the traps that,

even if you're trying to write anti-racist history, you might fall into where you present people of color as primarily victims. And don't get me wrong, there are a lot of stories of victimhood and pain and harm in the history of gender nonconformity and its relationship to colonization, particularly in North America, I've got to say. But there are also a lot of stories of agency and resilience. And it's really essential to tell those stories alongside the stories of harm, I think. Yeah. of harm i think yeah how much do we know about njinga's you know personal life in terms of how they they presented themselves or do we really only have the sort of like monarchical history we really only have the history written by white western onlookers and this is a real it's a real challenge um in writing a lot of

these histories um is that the sources that have been preserved um are the sources from societies with primarily written rather than oral traditions um which are often the oppressor societies the colonizer societies um what that means then is you have to look at their records of how this person behaved or what this person did. And you have to sort of try and put yourself in that person's shoes and say, okay, we know they behaved like that. Why might they have been behaving like that?

yeah. And, um, and try and reconstruct their perspective and their terms of, um, understanding themselves kind of as best you can. Um, but it's probably,

if people often ask me, what was the biggest challenge in writing this book? That is it, is the fact that you're so often working with sources that were written by the people who are perpetuating the harm that you're trying to write against. Yeah. Well, I can see how given that sort of paucity of information about like the details, there's a lot that one can fill in one's own blanks in this story like if you want to see this figure as someone who said hey this is a woman taking power and just sort of uh maintain that identity and put on the shoulder pads that you know women put on in the 1980s here in the U.S. to be a little bit more masculine, right? I just got to compete with the boys, right? You could see that in this story if you wanted to,

but I think what you're illuminating is there is a dimension of gender nonconformity that you can see as well. Do I have that right? Absolutely, yeah. So this is another one of those stories that different people can find sensitive community with. So you can understand Njinga as an incredibly defiant woman, and that's really important to lots of people and lots of women in Angola today. You can also understand simultaneously Njinga as a person who showed that gender

was not determined by what your body was like. And that's really cool and really interesting and really affirming to lots of trans people today. And instead is determined by the role that you take, the, the person that you act as in society or something along those lines. Yeah, exactly.

So gender can be something that you do and um not just something that has this kind of one-to-one causal relationship between your bodies like this so you've got to be this you've got to live like this you've got to be understood as this um and actually the more you look at um you know i said that we can often find these histories and these different ways of understanding gender in Western European history as well. If you look at around the same time as Elizabeth I in England,

she was also being called king and prince and being understood as somewhat more male as a result of having a male- or masculine coded role. Really? It wasn't as absolute in England, but it was still something where gender was complicated on the basis of what role you took in society. Yeah.

Yes, I love that. Just the complication of it being the interesting part, that it's not a clear cut story as gender is not in our time as well yeah exactly and all these stories are you know they take they take time and thought and feeling okay with ambiguity and discomfort in order to really get your head around them and i think that's why you know they don't make good sound bites um they don't make good kind of um political sticks to beat the opposition with you know but they are essential to tell because they reflect the reality of our own gendered experiences being complicated today as well like we talked about before i'm curious how uh yourself as a white person writing in the in the UK, you know, when you're writing stories about folks from, you know, other cultures, other countries, especially places that were that were

colonized by white folks, how do you try to get yourself out of that lens and, you know, write about them in a way that is, uh, honors their specific experience, even though you don't, you know, have, have that personal connection. It was really important for me to reflect honestly about the difficulties of doing that and the limits of my own perspective and, um, the places where it felt uncomfortable or hard or sometimes impossible for me to do so you know one of the um aspects of gendered experience that i write about um in the last chapter of the book is gendered experiences that are spiritual um so people can understand um their gender as inherently spiritual or as a spiritual experience and not

really a gendered experience you know it looks gendered to me because i have my gender glasses on from um the uk but it's not in fact gendered in the way that they understand it and it is it is really difficult for me to just sit here and say well this person became a man through a prophecy because that's not something that i kind of empathize with or understand um but it's essential for me to write it on their own terms in a way that honors the fact that it's true for them even if it doesn't make sense to me um and i suppose the other thing i really wanted to do with the book was to try as far as I could to use it for anti-racist purposes um so to not only tell these stories on their own cultural terms rather than through western

goggles where I say all these people are kind of non-binary and these people are kind of trans women or whatever didn't want to do that um but also to say look, if we look at, for example, the reason we think about biological sex as binary today, actually, the process of us coming to think like that was a racist process, a eugenicist process. And our constructs of how we think about biology today oppress some bodies more than others. And those bodies are bodies of color. oppressed some bodies more than others and those bodies are bodies of color and um so that also felt to me like a way of using the platform that i'd got for as much anti-racist good as i could within the context i guess yeah i'm also curious about you know your uh in terms of your own your own gender identity and your own experience how does does that, you know, how do you bring that experience to the work or what do you personally get out of it, doing this history?

That's kind of the origin story of the book in a way, because I came to understanding of my own queer identity through identification with the queer past, really. I didn't have particularly many, you know, growing up, i didn't have particularly many you know growing up i didn't have particularly many people of the same experience who i could relate to but i did know that i felt an incredibly deep sense of community um with queer masculinity in the past um and it took a long time for me to work out what that was about you know for a while i was like maybe i believe in past lives and that's what this is um and um only when i discovered what transness was did i figure out um what was going on for me um but that meant that it's always felt incredibly personal and

important to me and that's really the reason why the book is also about what emotional connection to history can kind of do for us, why it's okay not to be a historian who's ruthlessly objective and detached from their subject and how actually no one is like that. And if we... Yeah, even the objective historians, they're covering up that they're getting something personal out of it. They've got some little hobby horse they're riding or some little wish in their heart that they're seeing in history, always. Yeah, I genuinely believe that. And particularly, even if what you're emotionally committed to is the idea that we shouldn't have emotions,

that in itself is a feeling. The people who tell us that history shouldn't be political and we should leave all the statues up of people who committed awful harms in the past. You know, those people are having a lot of feelings about history, right? You can tell by the way they talk. Yes, they are. Yeah, it's inherently personal. And I mean, history is also, unless you're just recounting every event that ever occurred which is impossible you're always telling a story and a story always has a point and something to communicate if it's a good story um it is a beginning middle and end it has a character it has a it has a fucking story it's a story there's no and and uh that means that it it is meant to work on the emotions to

some degree, right? Yeah, absolutely. And actually, you know, this is what my first book was about, about how the medieval king Edward II got his queer reputation. Turns out it wasn't by people telling the facts. It was by people trying to tell really, really good stories. But that's, yeah, that's another story entirely. But absolutely. And what you're also deciding when you're crafting a historical narrative is whose narrative you're telling, right? And what you're leaving out and

whose perspective you're coming at it from. And none of that is objective ever. Well, one story to sort of round us out here that I'd love you to tell that I just thought was honestly the most entertaining story in the book was what happened in internment camps in World War I and the communities that formed there. I found it so fascinating. Can you tell us a brief version of that one? This is really the other origin story of the book. This is where I started thinking about these issues. And this is when I found out about what happened in Nocalo internment camp on the Isle of Man and subsequently in nocalo internment camp on the isle of man and subsequently in lots of other um internment and prisoner of war camps which is

that these were camps that were just for people assigned male at birth um but there were people who lived as women for the full four years within those camps and what i mean by that is they use women's names they were called by she her pronouns and they dressed as women um and historians have looked at this in the past and said oh well they were doing this because they were playing female roles on the stage because there were theaters within these camps um but it's one thing to play a female role on the stage it's another to get off the stage and keep the dress on and keep the wig on and keep the name um and this is incredibly widespread um in any all assigned male at birth camp um that you have within the first or second world wars is incredibly widespread um that the kind of normal rules of society get suspended and there's this opportunity that opens up for people to live as a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth um and given the incredibly

widespread nature of it what that tells me is probably some people were doing it for a laugh probably some people were doing it for theatrical purposes possibly um probably some people were doing it because it enabled them to sort of sleep with men with more impunity for to feel sort of straight while sleeping with men. And probably some people were doing it because that was how they felt most comfortable living. And we can acknowledge all those possibilities existing simultaneously within these camps. And these were internment camps for, during World War I, on the Isle of Man one. Who was interned here?

On the Isle of Man, this is a really kind of um untold scandal of british history i think um who they were interning were not prisoners of war they were civilians from quote-unquote enemy countries who were assigned male at birth and of military age and had been present in the uk when the war broke out so some of these people were just on holiday and they got rounded up um some of them had had families that had been there since the 17th century. They just never kind of got citizenship. They rounded them all up and they locked them all up. And so it was a mix of, you know, German nationals, Turkish nationals, et cetera, who were in these camps.

But yeah, really important to say they were not combatants. They were civilians who were locked up. civilians who are locked up. And I think what I love about this story so much is that you imagine some of these people finding some freedom in this situation of unjust imprisonment. They're being imprisoned in a time of war. They're like, why the fuck am I in here? Right. But at the same time, for some of those people, they have the opportunity to be themselves in a way or to find a mode of expression that they did not have before in the sort of, you know, little jury rigged society that springs up inside of this camp. It's just I don't know. It's just it's a very beautiful image. I'm sure many things about it

were not beautiful, very much so. But I can't help but find myself smiling when I think about it. Yeah, absolutely. And it's another one of those stories of kind of finding resilience in places that you wouldn't expect people to find resilience, right? And finding agency in situations where they had so much agency stripped from them. But actually this was an opportunity that perhaps they never would have got on the outside. Yes. It feels like this would make a good movie. That's like I like I'm picturing the the the sort of like coming out around Christmas time, sort of we've got a combo. There's something for dad with the you know, with the war setting and everything. But then also dad can go with his queer kid because there's a really wonderful little narrative of, you know, with the war setting and everything, but then also dad can go with his queer kid

because there's a really wonderful little narrative of, you know, uh, queer resilience in this, uh, in this story somehow. I would watch the heck out of that, honestly. I'm here in LA. Maybe I'll take a couple of pitches on it. I don't know. Um, uh, what, what happened to these folks after the, you know after they left the camp? Mostly, we don't know, which is incredibly tragic.

So, you know, I'd love to know. I'd love to know how many of them continued living in the way that they did in the camps, how many of them didn't, how they felt about that. We have one account of one diarist who did not live as a woman in the camp, but of them didn't how they felt about that um we have one account of one diarist um who did not live as a woman in the camp but who observed briefly did um and he bumped into one of them um and he said oh and he didn't seem to care to be reminded of it and that's so that's such a tantalizing thing you know was it that he was embarrassed was it that it was like a painful memory because he enjoyed it a lot actually and didn't kind of want to be reminded that he couldn't have it anymore.

You know what was going on for that person? But they also kind of, in a way, the only kind of silver lining of not knowing is that it forces us to think, OK, well, given that we don't know, what if none of them did continue living as women afterwards for a whole variety of reasons? Does that mean that, you know know this isn't an interesting story does this mean that isn't this isn't part of trans history and i don't think it does because we still again have an example of people showing that gender can have absolutely nothing to do with your body and can be fluid it can be something that you can change and that's still an incredibly important piece of history even if it did only last for four years for every single one of them, you know? Yeah. Maybe some of these people were like, no, that was just in the camps, man. Like that was just, I was just doing that for four years. I had a nice time, but you know,

now I I'm back in London and that's not me anymore. And even that is an interesting, you know, history of gender nonconformity, even if that's just somebody's something somebody dips into for a couple of years in their life. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, really, that's the future I want to work towards, right? Where people can just dip into that for a couple of years in their life and then they stop and it's no big deal. And people don't go, my God, you regretted it. You were wrong. We have to make sure you're really sure before you're allowed to do it. No, just let people play. Just let people do the things and treat it as low stakes and it'll be fine. And, you know, that's kind of great. Yeah. Do you feel that, look, the,

the cultural climate with all of these issues is so hostile in so many places right now, both in the UK and in the US where I am. But at the same time, I feel that I've seen your book get a lot of traction. You know, I came across it because as I was telling you before the interview, it was just suggested to me by my, you know, by my audio book service I was using. I've seen it on out on the table in bookshops. You know, it seems like people are, there's an appetite for this history despite the sometimes, you know, inimical environment. How do you feel about the way things are going in terms of our, you know, ideas about gender in this history? I've been really, really kind of overwhelmed by the fact that people really seem to have

seized on the book and that I've had um such so many lovely messages from trans people who felt really seen by it who felt like their messy experience of gender wasn't something they've seen reflected in history before um it's been so lovely to hear that um and i think the more people who are equipped with the knowledge that it has always been the case that we can just play around with gender and that that can be low stakes and the world doesn't implode if we do that um the better um i think rigid categories and rigid power structures never disappear without a backlash and i think that is what they're seeing um one of the reasons for this backlash is that male and female have never been just identity

categories they've always been power categories um and people are really really afraid of the dissolution of those power categories um but it will come it will change um and the fact that so many people have felt seen by this book um gives me a bit of hope around that as well well and what your book makes me think about is that, you know, throughout history around the world, people's ideas of gender were very different than the ones we had that we have today, that they were not so rigid in so many other places. And that makes me realize, oh, the rigidity and the backlash that I've grown up with is not mandatory.

It's not part of human life. It is just something that's happening right here and now. And so there's the opportunity to have a more open and inclusive view that a lot of us are working to build. And we can have, it very much reminds me of the book Dawn of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengro that we've talked about on the show before. That was a work of anthropology about how humanity had so many different other forms of government than we have right now. So many different other ways of understanding social relations and hierarchy and power relations that it increases your understanding of what possibility is. And your book did the same thing for me. And I think it's, it's really beautiful.

And thank you so much for coming on the show to talk to us about it. Thank you so much. That's totally wonderful to hear. And I've really enjoyed this. Thank you. Well, the book again is called before we were trans folks can pick it up at our special bookshop,

factually pod.com slash books. Where else can people find a kit or where can they find your work? Have a look at my website, kitham.com. I'm also on, not to dead name anything in this conversation, but Twitter. That's the first time I've heard that referred to as a dead name. And it's very funny to me. Please be respectful of Elon. Let's not dead name his service. Okay. it's very funny to me please be respectful of elon let's not dead name

his service okay that's not kind to him um he wouldn't be kind to me if he met me so i think you know i'm on that social media site for as long as it exists um find me there if you like great wonderful under under the username kid heyham, I assume. Absolutely. And Instagram too. Okay, great. Thank you so much for being here, Kit. It's been wonderful. Thanks so much for having me. My God, thank you once again to Kit for coming on the show. If you want to pick up a copy of their incredible book that I

cannot recommend highly enough, head to factuallypod.com slash books. I know you're going to love it. If you want to support this show, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this podcast ad free for 15 bucks a month. I will read your name at the end of this podcast and put it in the credits of all of my video monologues. This week, I want to thank Brennan Peterman, Ultrazar, Busy B, Josh Davies, Lois Bell, and Amet A. Thank you so much for your support of the show. Of course, I always want to thank our producers, Tony Wilson and Sam Roudman,

everybody here at HeadGum for making this show possible. You can find me online at adamconover.net. You can also find my tour dates there. Once again, I'm going to Arlington, Virginia, Nashville, Atlanta, DC, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, Maine. I think I forgot a few. So head to adamconover.net to see all my tickets and tour dates. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next time on Factually.