If you‘ve been wanting to learn more about trans and gender nonconforming history and are also interested in the academic field of making and creating history this will be a particularly interesting book.
Heyam collects a wide and varied number of historical cases of gender nonconformity from prisoners in British internment camps not only performing as women on stage, but also living as women full time, a gender identity in Japan‘s Edo period that marked the person as a permanent adolescent regardless of their actual chronological age, a gender in Afrika that was marked through the ability to inherit land and have wives, an intersex person in colonial Virginia who was forced to wear both male and female attire at all times to adhere to their intersex status as well as french Prostitutes that attracted better paying costumers through wearing men‘s clothes and more!
If you have already researched transgender history you might be familiar with some of these histories, but certainly not all of them. If you haven‘t researched transgender histories yet, but have at least a passing familiarity with trans existence nowadays, you will also have a great time reading this book.
I liked that this book especially allows for wiggle room when it comes to gendered presentation, looking at gendernonconforming history as part of trans history even if it cannot be proven (or disproven!) that said historical figures would identify as trans nowadays. At points the author is very careful and cautious, paying homage to more radical (and foundational) trans histories such as Leslie Feinberg‘s work without reaching the same inclusivity, but I still enjoyed the novel.