In this lecture, historian Jamey Jesperson considers the utility of “trans woman” or “trans womanhood” as categories of historical analysis by identifying patterns and parallels of gender transformation from antiquity to the modern age. Just as she examines the risks of tracing such a global phenomenon, she challenges the insistent historiographical refusal to name it. To flip colonialist charges on their head, she pulls from her dissertation on Indigenous North America, de-romanticizing it as an exotic place “before the gender binary,” but rather just one corner of the world where certain binaries could sometimes be crossed. And almost always, this was towards woman.

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