Earlier this term, I wrote a blog post for Nursing Clio about the ways in which teaching my class on Transgender Issues has evolved over the last fifteen years. I first taught this course in 1998 when very few students knew what “transgender” meant and only occasionally would a transgender student enroll; in 2013, not only are students well aware of the topic, but I typically have four or five who identify either as transgender or somewhere else along the gender continuum. Most everyone in the class is cognizant of many of the controversies that surround the subject, such as what pronouns to use for those who identify as transgender or gender fluid. The demographics of the classroom have made teaching the class easier in some ways, as I described earlier, but harder in others, as I will explain here.
I used to worry that the cisgendered (non-trans) students might say something offensive to the lone trans student; now that the numbers have shifted, I see that I have an additional concern: how do I present this material to young adults who are in the midst of their own identity formation, who might find the history of transgender identity painful and difficult to absorb or even hear and read about?
Since I am a historian, we spend several weeks studying transgender identity in the past, at a time when the word “transgender” didn’t even exist, though cross-gender behavior certainly did. Talking about these earlier eras can be tough for some, or “triggering,” as one student put it. Language is powerful, and how words are used changes over time. Does it make sense, for example, to label 18th-century persons as transgender if they occasionally adopted a cross-gender social role? Does that do justice to their experience? If such historical persons had had the choice to identify as trans, would they have? Possibly, though I think that we just don’t know enough about most historical actors to make this call. Usually we don’t know their motivation or what their wishes might have been, and so I like to proceed cautiously in recounting their histories. This means that I don’t automatically assume that all cross-gender behavior in the past implied a “trans identity” in the way we have come to think of it today. Which raises a broader question: how can we get students to think historically, particularly when they feel a stake in the subject being studied?
I wanted to cultivate more complex thinking that does not perpetuate the notion of a timeless or ahistorical present, and yet some students resisted my approach. They were eager to claim historical instances of transgender behavior and wondered about my reluctance to label people who lived long ago as “transgender.” For example, if I referred to someone in the 17th century not as transgender but rather as a man who sometimes lived as a woman and sometimes as a man, a handful of students saw this as perpetuating insensitive stereotypes about transgender people. Because I did not label such a person using contemporary terms, and because I referred to the gender assigned to them at birth, it was as if I was judging them to be somehow inauthentic and deceitful.
Nothing could be further from the truth, of course; my goal is to honor what we actually know, not what we imagine. Sadly, we don’t have much historical evidence to determine definitively why some people made the choices they made and lived the lives they lived. In fact, we know very little. Often people who crossed the gender divide have entered the historical record because they upset the strict gender binary, and so available documentation about their lives is particularly negative and harsh. As with any historical analysis, it is incumbent upon us, I believe, to take an imaginative leap, to try to enter their world to understand it (this is not the same as condoning past negativity), rather than to merely impose present-day assumptions on the past.
To take another example: formerly, people who were born with atypical genital anatomies were known as hermaphrodites. Today that term is no longer used, as it conjures the idea of mythical monstrous creatures, as in the 16th-century woodcut depicted here.
It is hard to hear words or descriptions that are offensive today, no matter how they might have been used in the past. How can we preserve the historical record, avoid anachronism, and at the same time remain sensitive to those whose lives might somehow directly connect them to these historical actors?

Escaping one’s own particular context can be challenging for some students who are at a vulnerable place in their own lives. Though I will still teach about the past, no matter how hard it is to hear, I have learned from this term’s students to be more sensitive to what might spark emotional pain. It is not easy to recognize oneself as transgender or intersex, or as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, for that matter. It is not easy to see oneself in the negative ways that gender nonconforming people in the past (and even the present) have been depicted. In the future I am going to alert students on the syllabus, on the first day and repeatedly throughout the term, that this class will indeed contain some triggers. Someone who is just beginning to embrace a gender nonconforming identity might appreciate the professor’s ongoing recognition that it is challenging but important to maintain some distance between their own lives and their scholarly engagement with the past.
Of course, students in other marginalized groups have to deal with similar concerns. When I teach about slavery in my women’s history class, I am attuned to how difficult it must be for African American students in particular to listen to 19th-century rationalizations of human bondage, for example. And yet the subject still needs to be taught. In that class, I tell students that I realize how painful it can be to hear these words, even embedded in their historical context, which helps to ease apprehensions and open the entire class to learning. As more and more students are living lives beyond the gender binary, I see now that a similar approach should guide the presentation of transgender history as well. As historians, we are pleased to find that history actually matters to our students today, and it’s our challenge—and obligation—to our students to prepare and equip them to learn by developing new means to think historically.
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This problem, whether painfully or just intellectually awkward, surely arises with many historical categories. Often, one is taking a position within a current debate about the relationship between our categories and those of the historical actors under consideration.
Was James VI & I a homosexual? It’s a late 19th-century category. Rictor Norton might want to claim him, but Jonathan Ned Katz would not. Many historians of sexuality would say that one cannot understand him by imposing an anachronistic identity. Do we understand him better by asking whether he sometimes practised sodomy or by attributing to him a homosexual identity? He couldn’t know what a “homosexual” was. Even Oscar Wilde could not until the end of his life.
Was Isaac Newton a great scientist? It’s an early 19th-century category. Scientists tend to brush aside as foolish his profound commitments to alchemy and theology. Many historians of science would say that one cannot fully understand his work as a natural philosopher without considering all of his intellectual activity. Newton couldn’t fail to be a good scientist by working on alchemy. He couldn’t know what a “scientist” was. For much of his career, even Faraday couldn’t know what a “scientist” or a “physicist” was.
Was John Locke a liberal political theorist? Or an empirical philosopher? He could not have described himself as the first and would have firmly avoided the second. In the late 19th century, he would have been described as both.
These cases may seem less urgent than trying to diagnose the Chevalier d’Eon, but they involve the construction of modern categories and the desire to create an ancestry. They can arouse considerable passion, because of their implications.
Do we discover categories that we can legitimately read into the past, or do we invent categories that form identities only after they are generally accepted? Are the categories of the past, and the motives and actions to which they lead, irrelevant by comparison with our superior categories?
Thanks for your comments, David. I love your last two questions, and I will use them in future classes.
Good. Reflexivity is hard to perform, and it is not always comfortable to remember that one’s own positions should, in principle, be explicable in the same kinds of terms as one explains the positions one studies.
Nevertheless, this is the obvious consequence of symmetry. If one is explaining both sides in some past dispute according to the same sorts of causes, it should be possible to explain one’s own in such terms.
Of course, there are those who believe that their knowledge, theory, or transcendent standpoint puts them above the mundane causes that make others believe whatever they believe.
Activists of all kinds detest the notion that their own positions need to be explained. It is others who have false consciousness, or psychological quirks, or self-interest, or delusions, or whatever. Scientists too are often angered by any suggestion of causation.
I think historians, sociologists and philosophers of science need to be a little more humble, accepting for ourselves what we always tell the scientists. Knowledge has to be made, not found. Truth claims have to be justified and defended. Theories are always contingent, no matter how strong they seem. Our categories are just, at best, only the best categories available.
I enjoyed reading this since it is from the perspective of a professor. I recently graduated from college, and it is reassuring to know that professors consider the emotions of their students in this way.
[…] of cutting-edge, socially relevant articles during 2013 on a lot of very important issues. From teaching transgender history to the impact of Kinsey to gender aspects of health care debates, Nursing Clio applies a very sharp […]
[…] This week, Nursing Clio is featuring posts written by undergraduate students. The following post was written by a student in Elizabeth Reis‘s upper division class on Transgender Issues at the University of Oregon. Using transgender history, identity, and politics as a lens, the course explores how sexuality and gender have been configured throughout American history. For this assignment, students were able to choose any topic and write a blog post in the style of other Nursingclio.org essays. Reis also wrote two posts during the term. You can read them here and here. […]
[…] This week, Nursing Clio is featuring posts written by undergraduate students. The following post was written by a student in Elizabeth Reis‘s upper division class on Transgender Issues at the University of Oregon. Using transgender history, identity, and politics as a lens, the course explores how sexuality and gender have been configured throughout American history. For this assignment, students were able to choose any topic and write a blog post in the style of other Nursingclio.org essays. Reis also wrote two posts during the term. You can read them here and here. […]