Before gender : lost stories from trans history, 1850-1950 / Eli Erlick.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Explore the trailblazing lives of 30 trans people who radically change everything you've been told about transgender history

Highlighting influential individuals from 1850-1950 who are all but unknown today, Eli Erlick shares 30 remarkable stories from romance to rebellion and mystery to murder. These narratives chronicle the grit, joy, and survival of trans people long before gender became an everyday term.

Organized into 4 parts paralleling today's controversies over gender identity (kids, activists, workers, and athletes), Before Gender introduces figures whose forgotten stories transform the discussion

Mark and David Ferrow , two of the first trans teens to access gender-affirming medical treatment following overwhelming support from their friends, family, and neighbors. Gerda von Zobeltitz , a trans countess who instigated an LGBTQ+ riot 40 years before Stonewall. Frank Williams , a young trans man who was fired from over a dozen jobs for his gender. Frances Anderson , the world's greatest female billiards player of the 1910s.
Bold and visionary, Erlick's debut uncovers these lost stories from the depths of the archives to narrate trans lives in a way that has never been attempted before.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Written as a necessary corrective to transphobic and trans-denying versions of history, this important book tells the stories of 30 individuals in an effort to make transgender lives visible in ways that demonstrate strength, resilience, and humanness in all of its complexity and as it is affected by external sociopolitical factors. Erlick (founder, Trans Student Educational Resources) powerfully--and compellingly--argues that it's not the existence of transgender people that's new; what's new is the anxiety around them. By turns person- and research-driven, this is revisionist history at its finest: underlined by the author's lived experiences yet also clear, focused, and skillfully written, with attention paid to the barriers to research (e.g., destroyed archives, limited written records) and to the ways in which early work in the intersections of misogyny and racism have compromised which stories are available and how they have been told. VERDICT With chapters on transgender youth, activists, workers, and athletes living between 1850 and 1950, this book humanizes and historicizes the lives and identities of trans people in ways that, now more than ever, are critical for navigating systems that thrive on erasure, obfuscation, and misrepresentation of marginalized communities.--Emily Bowles

Publishers Weekly Review

"Transgender people are nothing new," according to this brilliant survey of "forgotten" trans lives. Historian Erlick makes a persuasive case that the anxiety surrounding trans identities today has not always been present in popular culture--that trans people have "existed... everywhere from the largest cities to the most remote villages" and been generally accepted by their communities. Rather, Erlick shows, it has been institutions--governments, schools, athletic associations--that have historically put up resistance to trans identity, enacting deliberate "interventions" to erase trans people. Examples include a "mass queer and trans uprising" against police in early 1930s Berlin, led by the now nearly forgotten trans countess Gerda von Zobeltitz, "that was later erased from history by Nazis"; and "one of Europe's greatest athletes," the Czech javelineer Stefan Pekar, who transitioned in 1936, "only for conservative bureaucrats to remove him from the record books." Other lives that Erlick uncovers show evidence of unhindered acceptance while also substantially revising to earlier dates trans history's supposed "firsts." These include a Black formerly enslaved trans woman whose Freedmen's Bureau--approved transition in the 1860s is earlier than any previously discovered. The fascinating conclusion Erlick draws is that there's no such thing as a "trans first"--only instances of first official acceptance. It's an essential and eye-opening paradigm shift. (May)