Global Histories of the Trans Present

Are trans people new? Is sex binary? Can sex change? These questions and their precedents have monopolized gendered politics and have taken on global significance in recent years.

Following Foucault’s formulation of a history of the present—a genealogy of how we got here—this course is a history of the trans present in that it charts the ways in which sex and gender have been ontologized across borders and contexts, often in ways which regulate and police bodies within borders. It historicises the divisive discourses that animate present day politics, showing that sexual dimorphism’s legitimacy has been continually contested in different ways and from different standpoints for centuries, and that arguing for or against the universality of sex/gender is a move that people across left/right and liberal/illiberal political lines have historically made.

The path towards trans’ contemporary inception is not only uneven, including many discontinuities as well as continuities. It is also global and disturbing, requiring the violence of empire, eugenics, and slavery to cleave sexual dimorphism into two, whose “binary logic” trans then seeks to muddy and muddle—in ways which sometimes yield to ideas of what sex and gender “really are”. Trans people do have a history. And it is longer than transphobes would like us to believe. But it is not a pleasant or necessarily radical history. It is also not solely the history of people who are trans. Rather, this history is plural and fractious, and is a history of everyone who has ever existed in a world where gender and sex are operating concepts.