Any line we might try to draw to separate lesbian/gay/bisexual history (LGB) from transgender history (trans) would be imprecise, blurry, and certainly not straight. Because of the incomplete archives we have, attempts to separate histories of sexuality and gender transgression often resort to pure guesswork. Worse, just trying to find that line forces us to consider all of history through two modern categories – gender and sexuality – making it harder to understand the very thing we are researching.
Even in just the last few decades, the meaning of “transgender” has shifted radically. To take one example: in 1996, Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors (one of the first popular histories of transgender people) was published with the subtitle “From Joan of Arc to RuPaul.” But today, RuPaul is considered a cisgender drag queen, not a transgender person. This shows how the conversation around transgender history has moved away from focusing on practices that cross gender norms (like drag), and towards focusing on people who self-identify as transgender.
“Transgender” has gone from an umbrella term for different behaviors, to an umbrella term for different identities.
While this is a triumph for self-identification, which allows people to express how they want to be understood regardless of how they might look to an outside viewer, it is not a stable ground from which to conduct historical research. Identity can be invisible, or unstated, and it shifts over time, making it impossible to definitively state the self-identification of people in the past. The importance of self-identification over behavior is, itself, a recent phenomenon worth investigating.
Therefore, we do not see “LGB” and “T” histories as discrete categories; rather, they are a collection of shared roots and overlapping fields of investigation. Many figures have a place in both histories, regardless of what terms they used to describe themselves. How can that be? For several reasons:
- For many people in history, we have no access to their private thoughts about their identity, making it impossible to label them “correctly.”
- Others may have identified in ways that don’t neatly overlap with our current ideas of “lesbian,” “gay,” or “trans.”
- Some may have changed their identification over time, or in different circumstances.
- Still others may have identified as cis and gay, but exhibited behaviors that transgress gender (like the RuPaul example above).
In all of these cases – and many others – it is impossible to separate what is LGB history from what is T history, and vice versa. And the further back in time we go, the less it makes sense to try and separate people into these categories.