Trans Family

From the author of Before We Were Trans, a radical new history of the family through a trans lens.

Across the world, trans people face increasing backlash. Commentators claim that their very existence threatens everything essential to “the family.” But as trans educator and activist Kit Heyam shows, trans families are hardly new.

Shattering the tenacious myth of the natural, unchanging heterosexual nuclear family, Trans Family recounts how, from earliest antiquity, humans have always been able to understand family in ways that complicate, weaken, or outright dismantle its relationship to gender and biology. Ancient Greeks and early Christians told stories of birthing fathers, and gender nonconforming Roman emperors adopted sons to extend their lineage. Trans communities formed clandestine marriages in eighteenth-century England, “third gender” Hijra children roamed the streets in nineteenth-century India, and queer Black and Latine people forged sisterhoods and chosen families in New York’s ballroom scene. These oft-ignored stories reveal that today’s nuclear family is only a recent invention, deployed to enforce strict gender roles and assert Western dominance. We have much to learn from the variety of many-gendered families across history and around the world.

Vividly illustrating how the family has always made room for trans people, Trans Family offers powerful new possibilities for trans liberation.