#trans historian

[enbycrip]

ID: a black and white photo and caption from a newspaper showing a young white trans man with light hair wearing a tweed jacket and high collar smiling at a young white woman in a pale dress as he brushes her mid-length dark hair. She is smiling at him from the slightly complex angle as he brushes her hair. The photo is faded and not great quality but their faces are clear.

The headline over the photo is “Here’s How I Used To Do It!”

The caption below reads “An expert at women's coiffures although not a hairdresser, Zdenek Koubek proves himself as he combs the locks of Cinda Glenn, New York night club beauty. Koubek knows all about coiffures from experience, since they were of concern to him when he was the foremost girl athlete of Czechoslovakia, prior to a sex-change.”

Zdenek Koubek was born in Paskov, Czechoslovakia (at the time) in December 1913, one of eight siblings, and competed as an athlete. With minimal formal training, he began running at age 17, decided to pursue it formally aged 19, and broke two world records at the 1934 world olympics.

Because queer and gender-diverse history is complex, I’m genuinely unsure if Zdenek was intersex. He seems to have been pretty gender-nonconforming when read as a woman in his early life and seems to have retired from athletics because he was harassed by people wanting him to undergo invasive “gender checks” after his gold medals at the 1934 Olympics.

Apparently the current obsession with “defining gender in sport” has roots back to the 1930s. Athletes competing in female athletics have been forced to undergo a variety of examinations for the purpose of declaring them “female enough”. They seem to have never been pleasant, appropriate, or anything other than invasive and dehumanising, and they seem to have always focused on a) defining gender by physicality b) defined that physicality in fairly arbitrary ways that are actually incredibly difficult to relate to anything objective, despite a veneer of scientific objectivity.

I can entirely see why the threat of such harassment would have caused Zdenek to decide an athletic or adjacent career wasn’t worth undergoing it, whether he personally believed himself to be intersex or whether we would recognise him as such today. The term “intersex” has many definitions, and is often challenged by medical professionals if it could potentially cover too many people - e.g. medical professionals have repeatedly challenged the term when used by AFAB people with PCOS, which can cause fertility issues, hirstutism etc, purely on the grounds of “that would make around 10% of women intersex”. Zdenek simply publicly stated “I was wrongly assigned as female at birth” without giving any other details - as he had *every* right to. Some historians have characterised him as intersex based on this, and others simply as trans; he appears, very reasonably, to have preferred to preserve his privacy on the details.

Zdenek went on a lecture tour of the US talking about his life and transitioned in 1936. At the time of this photo, he was pursuing a career in cabaret in the US. He seems to have been reasonably successful but never settled there, returning home and marrying a cis woman with whom he lived happily for the rest of his life, dying in Prague aged 72 in 1986.

He joined a local rugby team along with his brother Jaroslov after WWII and seems to have been an enthusiastic amateur player. I hope he got a lot of joy out of it, which he does seem to have.

Like so many queer and trans histories, Zdenek’s is somewhat obscured because so much of what has been written about him is always skewed by the writer’s own perspectives about gender and transness. Including the drive to impose a false binary on trans experience - which I as a nonbinary person know is certainly not universally present.

There are, of course, *absolutely* trans people who always have a strong feeling of gender equating to “knowing they are a boy/girl from an early age”, and I in no way wish to erase them or their experiences, but it must also be noted and acknowledged there are plenty of us with different experiences. There are people like me who feel “wrong” in our assigned gender from pretty early in life, all the way down to having quite strong dysphoria in puberty and afterwards, but don’t strongly ID as the “opposite” binary gender either. There are people who rub along fine in their assigned gender, or who have many issues with it but don’t know what they equate to, until they have some experience presenting otherwise and suddenly experience strong gender euphoria for the first time in their lives. There are people who never feel anything much at all about gender and only ever do any identifying purely as a matter of convenience because a very binary society requires it.

Cis people seem to find the “always knew/born in the wrong body” narrative the easiest to relate to, and I can only assume that is because it is the narrative that allows them to challenge our society’s gender-essentialist, binarist worldview the *least*. It is considerably easier, and requires much less thought and critical attention, to say “I guess sometimes the occasional person is just mistakenly assigned to the wrong category” than to question those categories, why they exist, what they actually are, how they are imposed, and whether they actually mean anything at all in an objective sense.

I have no idea where Zdenek fell on any of this, or if his experience was very different in another way.

I posted this to, as ever, note that we are not a new phenomenon. Trans people are part of human history. We have always existed. We have always contributed. The way the society we lived in perceived us *and* how the societies our stories have passed through perceived us affect how our stories are told today, and those things can make it complex to uncover the lived experience of the trans person behind all of that. Queer and trans history must always be about acknowledging those facts and uncertainties while doing our best to find out as much as possible about the actual lived experiences of our siblings in the past.

[emoryecho]

I’m three weeks away from finishing a Master’s in trans* history. Two years of work. After all I’ve learned, all the ideas and stories and skills I’ve gained, I’m left feeling, well, anxious. It’s like I’ve been given this great power, the kind an RPG hero gets at the beginning of an epic story, only to be dropped into a really hardcore resource gathering sandbox world. Lots of capacities, but none of them apply to the game…

All I is want to use what I’ve learned to help my community, but I haven’t learned how to do so sustainably. It’s a weird feeling to have. Moving from researcher to community historian: there’s no playbook here. And that’s scarier and tougher than getting this degree ever was.

I mean, I’m doing the work. I share with people the theory and stories. I put together a whole damn full scale professional oral history project all my myself, unfunded and without any institutional support. Yet still I feel like I’m not doing enough, or doing it in a way as impactfully as I could. A million ideas and new projects kick around, just begging for me to have the time, resources, and energy to do them. If only I had a way to do these things and survive.

[gayest-historian]

Creating the Transgender Flag

So today I'll be talking about the history and creation of the trans flag! This will probably be a shorter post but still equally as important of course

The transgender flag was originally created by Monica Helms, a trans woman from America, in 1999. She got the idea from Micheal Page who had created the bisexual flag a year earlier. Helms describes the meaning of each stripe in the flag as:

"The stripes at the top and bottom are light blue, the traditional color for baby boys. The stripes next to them are pink, the traditional color for baby girls. The stripe in the middle is white, for those who are intersex, transitioning or consider themselves having a neutral or undefined gender."

- Monica Helms

The original flag (pictured below) was later donated to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in 2014 by Helms.

Later on, in 2019, Helms published a book in which she expresses shock that her flag design has been adopted so wholeheartedly by the trans community. I'd like to end off this post with that quote.

The speed with which the flag’s usage spread never fails to surprise me, and every time I see it, or a photo of it, flying above a historic town hall or building I am filled with pride.

- Monica Helms

[yourdailyqueer]

G. Samantha Rosenthal

Gender: Transgender woman (she/they)

Sexuality: Queer

DOB: 24 January 1983

Ethnicity: Ashkenazi Jewish

Nationality: American

Occupation: Historian, writer, activist, professor

[gayeilgeoir]

Historical woman- “I freed my people from a draconian dictatorship while also fighting off the king of said dictatorships marriage advances. I spoke 9 languages and was famed for my brains. I taught young girls how to fight and trained them in battle tactics. I lived with my girlfriend all my life, she helped make key decisions with me about the good of our people, took over running when I could not, and fought alongside me in the battle I died in, we were found dying in each others arms after the battle ended”

Male Historians- “SHE WAS A HOT SEXY WOMAN WHO LOVED MEN SO MUCH!!!”

[brandyschillace]

I’m copy-editing my book on the first #LGBTQ (gay/ #trans) rights movement, circa 1900-1933. It begins with hope for a new century. It ends with Nazis. And it looks like 2000-2023, with an election to determine if our remaining ten years will bend toward justice or #fascism. INTERMEDIARIES, May 2025

The book tracks 4 things, which intersect in ways profound and political. 1. discovery of hormones and the idea that “sex” was a moving target 2. discovery of genes and subsequent rise of eugenics 3. The first gay rights movement 4. A campaign against women, gays and Jews that became Nazi fascism.

It required deep dive into Berlin archives, which occurred in the midst of covid and Russian invasion of Ukraine. It meant translating and hunting down ephemera, it required the good offices of many researchers, academic and non academic, to help compile the most comprehensive and accurate account

It saw the retrieval of a lost story—that of Dora Richter, the first to ever undergo gender affirmation surgery—and then! The discovery that she did not die in the Nazi purge. She is—was—remains: the girl who lived. (Take that, JKR.) It has been the hardest book I’ve ever written. I spent more than my first advance just gathering all the resources, I went quite literally into debt for it. But I hope it will also be the best book I’ve written so far.

[ezekiel13]

Y’know Vulpes’ lottery?

I presume it is inspired by Elagabalus’ lotteries, where she killed people and stuff.

So. Trans fem Vulpes anyone?

[menlove]

not to be like. Annoying about it. but what really gets me abt beatles fans of like. really Any demographic who complain that it's disrespectful to assume john & paul were anything but straight boy besties bc "men can show affection for their friends" or whatever is just like.... once again it always comes back to: if this were a man and a woman, would anyone be out here crying about their friendship or would it just be an uncontested fact about rock history? like. when you look at everything they've ever said about each other, what their friends and partners have said, the songs they've written about each other, etc it's like. pretty blatant. the only reason it's Not a "fact" is because it's two men. like whether you want to think they had a physical relationship or not (which is smth we can never know bc that's no one's business) it's just so weird to insist it's disrespectful to point this stuff out. like. again. do you guys say any of this stuff when people talk about straight relationships in history? or is this hesitance and distaste Solely reserved for gay people?

(none of this means anything to my followers who don't care abt the beatles scroll on ur fine I'm talking abt ppl deep into this but w a side of homophobia they can't shake)

[jeannereames]

"There is no one about whom more have written more variously." --Arrian, speaking of Alexander

(...οὐδ᾽ ἔστιν ὑπὲρ ὅτου πλείονες ἢ ἀξυμφωνότεροι ἐς ἀλλήλους... [Anab. 1.1.2])

[dullahandyke]

like maybe im an idiot but imo queerness being trendy to the point that some allocishet ppl r pretending to be queer to join in (and maybe finding out theyre queer while theyre there) is a good thing

[wismoth]

conservatives/transphobics really do get mad at you for pointing out that clocking a trans person isn't necessary huh

[ezratheunready]

Fighting for my life trying to update my legal name change on my passport and ID before Trump takes office but they make it so fucking difficult to get a goddamn ID.

Literally scary to mail in my passport to get it renewed just days away from Trump’s inauguration…

[czlowiekz1nogawgrobie]

My dear brother,

I am writing to you

In quite a foul mood.

The cause of which

I will not describe,

Since I know you don't like to read

About dreams and visions.

But brother, I have a few questions,

Worries that I know you could ease.

Do you think in the future

I'll still be seen as a man?

I know I wasn't born one,

But I've become an expert on hiding that.

People see me passing in the street,

Suit and tie all prim and proper.

And say: "Hello good Sir."

Without a question.

But do you think that perhaps

Long after, I am overdue.

When there are just bones

And buttons of a suit.

Left of me.

Will people look at my grave,

With a name that I chose

But was not given

And call me a lady?

The mare thought distresses me greatly.

Which is why I am writing to you.

You have a great mind

Truly one of a kind.

So I thought:

"If anyone knows how I can

Avoid such terrible fate.

It'll be brother mine."

So please advise me the best you can,

And I'll await your response patiently.

As I know you can have a slow pen.

With great gratitude,

Your brother and fellow man

H. R. T.

(A letter from a woman

To her brother

Signed only in initials.

Year: unknown.)

[gayest-historian]

Claude Cahun (1894-1954) was an artist, photographer and advocate. They discovered themes of gender roles and identity in their photography. They're also by far my favourite historical figure so it only seems fair to talk about them in my first post! I'll definitely be discussing them more in depth eventually!

[dkettchen]

everyone please repeat after me: 👏 gnc-ity is in and of itself queerness, it by itself qualifies you as part of the community, being queer is about not conforming to the oppressive system that is gender roles in any capacity and literally nothing more or less specific than that 👏

also more importantly: I propose that instead of coming out, queer celebrities should simply *reveal* that their cisheterosexuality was actually just a marketing ploy by their corporate overlords to try and stoke controversy and make money off of them pretending to be cishet, I think this will solve many problems and be very entertaining to me personally

[timelessmulder]

that's a similar but not quite the same vein as people who act like historians are like, i don't know, hiding the Queer Historical Figures or whatever

like sorry we aren't saying "yes this person is 100% gay" when we don't, like, actually know. at least for me personally i was taught not to say things like that with full certainty