Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender (feat. Kit Heyam and Marty Davies)

Historical Homos

Heads up! This is the episode where we solve gender.

Famously a "construct," it turns out Mx. Gender has been around for hundreds of thousands of years.

This podcast is only 70 minutes long so we're sticking to the last 5,000... but still. Not bad.

Join Bash and his honoured guests this week – Kit Heyam and Marty Davies – as they delve into the deep-cut history of gender, long before we had words like cis, trans, or nonbinary.

Kit Heyam is the author and historian behind Before We Were Trans, our guiding text for this episode. And Marty Davies is the founder of Trans+ History Week, an award-winning initiative now in its third year in the UK.

You might think – like Bash did for an embarrassingly long time – that gender and sex binaries have been the norm since the beginning of time.

Everyone has "male" and "female" right? Husband and wife, penetrator and pregnancy-haver. And that's that.

That's actually wrong. It's waaaay messier than that. As long as there have been humans, there has been what Kit Heyam calls "gender disruption."

This essentially experimental and creative approach to gender is in fact the norm – the one thing we find in almost every civilisation.

As if that weren't enough, here are some other essential things you'll learn about in this episode:

• Ancient Egypt's female pharaohs, who insisted on wearing their beards
• (Plus, why their high priests didn't like gender creativity – spoiler alert: it fucked with their revenues!)
• A 17th century stand up comic who once wore trousers in St. Paul's Cathedral (WITCH!!!!! KILL IT!!!!!)
• The elegant and silk-draped wakashu, who were a third-gender class of adolescent sex workers in early modern Tokyo
• And the truth of why writing trans+ history is so fucking hard but so necessary.

As always thanks for listening, and if you love what you hear, please leave us a FIVE STAR ONLY review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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Episode Credits:

Written, researched, and hosted by Bash. Special thanks to guests Kit Heyam and Marty Davies. Edited by Alex Toskas and Jamie Wareham.

A QueerAF and Historical Homos Production.