"How Did We Get Here?" Etiology and Erasure in Trans History

Abstract

This article provides an overview of trans historiography, whose dominant form is etiological, searching for origin of contemporary categories of trans gender. Performing my own etiology of this historiographic tendency, I show the ways that it mirrors historic treatments of trans subjects, in privileging categories of body and identity over the lived realities of people and their communities. This academic fixation only repeats the historic and contemporary erasure that characterises transgender people’s everyday, and reduces the conceptual possibilities for trans thought and life.