Good morning, afternoon, and evening, everyone! Welcome to the first panel Q&A of the 2021 AskHistorians Digital Conference!

This panel explores how, even within the larger subfield of queer history, non-gender-conforming individuals are often hidden or unacknowledged, often for both methodological and political reasons.

I’m the panel moderator (/u/khowaga), and I’m excited to be part of this gathering once again. Our panelists will be here for an AMA between 1 and 3 PM Eastern time (6 and 8 PM GMT), but we’re giving everyone a couple of hours’ head start to post questions as you have them!

Panel Description:

How do we write histories of individuals and communities whose existence is ignored or unacknowledged? When it comes to trans people, not only is the historical record itself full of silences, many historians and laypeople alike would prefer that they stay erased. Even queer histories shy away from acknowledging non-gender-conforming historical figures, for both methodological and political reasons. In a contemporary climate where the backlash against trans people’s right to exist only seems to grow in strength, this panel confronts the erasure of non-gender-conforming lives both within and beyond the academy.

Panelists:

Matthew Schilling (/u/LordEiru), presenting his paper The Question of Queerness and Soft Erasure

In June of 2020, Gay Pride co-founder Fred Sargeant made a controversial claim from a now-suspended Twitter account that “Trans people have no early history so they have to take LGB figures and trans them to create a history” (sic). Sargeant claimed further both in the quoted tweet and other since-deleted tweets that figures like Marsha Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Maria Ritter both “did nothing” at Stonewall and claimed that Johnson was merely a drag queen “dragged under the ‘trans umbrella’” and not trans herself. Sargeant’s claims met resistance among the broader queer community but did gain traction among other anti-trans groups that make similar claims about trans identities being a modern fabrication with no history. Such claims are not unique to trans groups and are familiar to the broader queer community, which has often fought over its status in the historical record.

​This paper investigates the complexities of queer identity and queer history and the various methods that can lead to a missing history. Of particular interest is Judith Bennett’s “‘Lesbian-Like’ and the Social History of Lesbianisms” work and her criticisms of scholarship that focused on the elites and their writings in questions of historical queerness over “people who were more real than imagined and more ordinary. The work also considers Michael Warner’s Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet and the framework of heteronormativity and consider if historians critiquing “anachronistic” labels reproduce heteronormative bias rather than provide historical context.

Caitlin Hartweave (/u/chartweave) presenting her paper Warrior Women: The Chevalier d’Eon and Trans Narratives in the 18th Century Atlantic World.

The Chevalier d'Eon was assigned male at birth, lived the first fifty years of her life as a man and then very publicly transitioned in 1777, living the rest of her life as a woman. Though she did not fit the feminine norms of her time, she was still recognized and accepted as a woman, largely due to the way she presented her life story in memoirs, newspapers, etc. She rewrote her story as that of an assigned female at birth individual, raised as a boy by parents desperate for an heir.

Cases of gender-non-conformity in history are often thought of as exceptions; the Chevalier d'Eon was exceptional in many ways, being an elite, white person at the center of French and British politics, but she was not the only gender-non-conforming person in the early Atlantic world. By comparing d'Eon's narratives to other less well-documented ones from the long eighteenth century, I argue that the language and narrative tropes d'Eon and others used to explain their genders come together to form a cultural vocabulary of gender-non-conformity. Rather than being foreign to society, this vocabulary was widely understood, making gender-non-conformity legible within the British and French empires. Gender and gender-non-conformity were particularly salient/fraught during this time, as the Atlantic revolutions raised questions about almost every aspect of society. The narratives gender-non-conforming people and their commentators chose were a large deciding factor in what separated 'acceptable' gender-non-conformity from the unacceptable.

Previous scholarship on d'Eon has stubbornly continued to refer to her as a man and use he/him pronouns without much question. I argue that this decision obscures more than it reveals about both d'Eon and how gender worked during her time.

Ask us Anything!

Thank you to the brilliant panelists and fabulous moderator for your work. I was lucky enough to watch this panel as part of the editing, and I found it incredibly fascinating.

Considering the sparse records and material you have to work with in this part of history, I'm very curious if you have any good tips or tricks you could share when it comes to researching marginalized or overlooked history? Any keywords that could provide good thread? Good places that tended to be treasure troves of info?

Thank you so much for this panel- it was a fantastic way to start binging the panels. I limited myself to two questions, but might come back with followups.

1. I work on disability history, and this panel sounded familiar because there are challenges to applying modern terms onto past bodies when the term would have no meaning. One way to think of disability in the past is variability, or looking at anything referred to as a difference or deviation from the norm without attempting to medicalize or diagnose a disability. You touch on a lot of this in your discussion, so could you talk more about this idea of variation in gender/queer history and how even looking at people who identify as masculine or feminine, we learn boundaries and the meaning behind crossing them?
2. This is directed more at Caitlin, but Matt feel free to chime in if you want. I'm interested in how you have the story of the Chevalier d'Eon and she tells her story and asserts her identity, and you mention the stories of politicians claiming opponents crossdressers, like Lord Cornbury. This gives an interesting dichotomy of pride and shame around the concept of gender non-conformity and I was wondering if you could talk more about that.

Thank you for this presentation, and for taking the time to answer our questions!

With the Chevalier d'Eon, there's plenty of evidence about her gender identity, so it's an easy call to discuss her using she/her pronouns. I wanted to ask about a thornier character I've run into studying Roman slavery, Sporus/Sabina.

Sporus is described by Roman sources as a young freedman who Emperor Nero forcibly castrated and married. They portray this marriage as a sick joke. Nero was also married to a cisgender woman and a cisgender man at the same time, and the cisgender woman is presented as the "real marriage." Most modern writing I've encountered takes this version of the story at face value.

However, Sporus reads as a trans woman to me. She presented as female for the rest of her life, went by the name Sabina, and was addressed as "lady" and "mistress." She was one of Nero's last four companions when he fled the palace and committed suicide, and continued to play a role as a Roman empress in the ensuing political chaos, marrying two different wannabe emperors in attempts to boost their legitimacy as Nero's successors.

I read Sabina as a trans woman. But sexual coercion was a constant reality for Roman slaves and even freedmen, and the traditional account of Sporus as a victim of sexual coercion seems plausible too. My question is: as a historian, how do you talk about someone like Sporus/Sabina whose gender identity is unknowable? Do you go based off their gender presentation, even if their gender presentation was potentially coerced? Do you use gender neutral language? Hedge by saying "he/she" and "Sporus/Sabina"? Make an educated guess based on the available evidence?

Thank you for this, very happy that you did this! Very needed.

I have two pet peeves I usually bring up in queer circles when discussing history, I would love to get some thoughts about them from you.

1. The whole thing about "they were only friends" is to me problematic, because even if they were - couldn't they have been gay friends? I feel at times queer people can fall into a trap trying to argue that certain people were definitely romantically involved or had sex to appease the sexual norm, following the bar set up by heteronormative historians to begin with. You talked about different kinds of erasure of people's identities, but I see a danger in focusing on the sexual or romantic act as being the defining proof of queerness because it can easily erase any form of queer community from history. Speaking for myself, my sexuality doesn't just change how I relate to people when it comes to attraction, it changes how I get friends and how I create a shared experience of lesbianism. And this also becomes a problem for trans people, because the normal criteria for how to determine if someone is queer is through what sexual acts they perform. Not to mention that asexual people get written out completely, either by not being recognized as queer at all or being rewritten to be homosexual since that's easier to conceptualize to most compared to something like a Bambi lesbian.

2. It's easy to talk about how older history of trans people are being erased, but I've also seen difficulties for many to understand more modern history as well. For one thing, cis homosexual people have at times problems understanding certain ways trans culture expresses itself as queer. But even among trans people, there exists difficulties understanding trans culture from other cultures than your own. I often see for example contemporary Kathoey culture of Thailand to be misunderstood and generalized in Western queer cultures. Since the common, and not necessarily untrue, understanding as transphobia being perpetuated by colonial powers back in the day, a lot of transphobia in other cultures gets simplified to just being a colonially implanted thing. For Kathoey, it can in some cases make it so it seems Thai trans people, having more of a noted history asa third gender, do not face certain struggles they're going through - since the culture itself is shifting, so are also Kathoey people's demands for more rights in Thailand. And it can also mean uncritically thinking about other third genders, from Hijra and Two-Spirit. Two-Spirit is often portrayed as being an example of how history is full of acceptance for trans people - but that can mean not asking questions about what kind of social rights these people had for example. And it begs the question: since these cultures had their definitions of who gets sorted into a third gender, are there historical trans people in these cultures we miss uncovering, because we're just using the third gender category as a stand-in for trans, even though they're not the same?

This could be for either panelist, but I know /u/chartweave is interested in the Atlantic world. How much of our understanding of gender non-conformity is constructed from within the Atlantic framework? How does that compare to how it appears in other parts of the world?

Thanks so much for this panel, it was excellent. I have a question for each of the speakers:

​

u/LordEiru: I was extremely happy when you brought up the 2017 study about Bj. 581 in Birka and its response, that was very much on my mind as a depressingly familiar song and dance when you were talking about the "lovers" burial. Interestingly, the authors of that study implicitly reject a "trans" interpretation of Bj. 581, saying that while it is certainly plausible, they take what is in their mind a more "straightforward" interpretation by saying that she was a Warrior Woman. The discussion at the end about how we already impose heteronormativity and cisnormativity onto the past seems to me to be perfectly highlighted there - they effective say that the inhabitant of Bj. 581 was a cis woman who was a professional warrior (and yet still face the same sorts of backlash as queer identifications had).

Do you think there are tools from your study of more recent queer and transgressive gender identities that can help guide interpretations of premodern cases like Bj. 581, especially in societies where we still have not really figured out that culture's understanding of what is a non-transgressive gender identity, and if so, what are some of those tools?

​

u/chartweave: When you were describing the portrait of the Chevalier D'eon as Athena, what struck me is that there is a long history, most notable with Jeanne d'Arc, of French warrior women. In your research, did you find 18th century "warrior women" referring back to the models provided by previous warrior women figures (one could also think of Elizabeth 1 in full battle plate for an English example) or did they skip that to jump straight to Classical and mythological comparisons?

Thank you for the great video everyone. My question is how does Trans history intersect with race history?

How can or should historians research being an 'other' on multiple levels when the archive is already so sparse?

For either panelist, is there anything you'd like to add on that you didn't get time to discuss in the video?

Thank you for this panel! It is so interesting.

My question is more theoretical and methodological one: What sort of theoretical and methodological framework do you view as most useful/sensible in approaching Identität in the past?

Thanks to all the panel! I was curious where you see the field going in terms of navigating the issues you raise here about the complexity of historical identity. Is there change underway? Where would you like to see the field going?

What sort of different perspectives/changed narratives do you think new methods can offer?

What was it like for you, the authors, researching such intense and emotional subjects?

Very neat stuff. What drew you to research or look into these subjects?

Thank you so much for your work. This is awesome. Thank you.