Searching for Trans Possibilities in Australia, 1910–39

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article uses Australian newspapers from 1910 to 1939 to pose some preliminary ideas about imagining trans possibilities before the Second World War. Using trans-ing analysis and drawing on ideas of trans-historicity, the article focuses on the ways that the Australian press represented males caught dressing as women, and the ways that those individuals explained their gender performances. Although the accused usually argued that they were only joking, reading against the grain suggests that the frequency and nature of these gender transgressions represented challenges to the established gender binaries of the era. Historians need to read such examples of gender non-normativity as part of an Australian trans-historicity for which shifting psychological, medical and social discourses would only gradually provide a language to articulate more diverse gender identities.