Trans histories by trans historians are important. But with only a handful of trans history books and not a single academic journal dedicated to trans pasts, there are vast temporal, thematic, and geographical gaps in our histories. As two trans feminine graduate students in history at the University of Victoria, we set out to change that. In the summer of 2021, we took up editorship of our department’s peer-reviewed, graduate-student journal, The Graduate History Review, to create a special issue of trans histories by trans historians. It is with joy that we celebrate the release of a very special, special issue today — one that is proudly trans-edited, trans-designed, and trans-authored.

In talking about trans history, the cliché would be to describe it as a burgeoning field. As our exciting collection of essays shows, trans history is, in fact, already here. Moreover, it is being transformed by a wave of graduate students and early career scholars who are, finally and significantly, trans ourselves.

Graduate student imagination has shaped the contours of trans historical inquiry since its early days. Works including Emily Skidmore’s “Constructing the ‘Good Transsexual,’” Saylesh Wesley’s “Twin-Spirited Woman,” and Jules Gill-Peterson’s “The Technical Capacities of the Body,” show that graduate-student-authored scholarship makes up some of the field’s most influential foundations.  But what is unique about the upcoming generation is that we are no longer the exception to the rule. Like never before, we are entering graduate school out as trans, finding trans and trans-affirming mentors, and establishing community in institutions where we have been historically excluded.

But as historians, we know to be wary of the illusion of linear progress. Experiencing graduate-school-whilst-trans comes with a new set of challenges, especially amidst growing trans antagonism and neoliberal austerity. As trans graduate students, we risk bigotry from faculty, administrators, co-workers, and students, and without substantial institutional power to defend ourselves. In addition, the meagre graduate student wage is extra insufficient for those of us in active transition. Needing to dish out hundreds to thousands of dollars per year for trans care, not to mention taking weeks off for surgical recovery, places many of us at risk of financial and professional disadvantage. This is especially challenging for those who do this while multiply marginalized. We are not completing doctorates, landing jobs, publishing our first monographs, and securing tenure before transitioning; we are doing it all at once, with everything on the line.

Despite these struggles, we are driven by the significance of our presence. After decades of largely non-trans-authored scholarship on trans lives, the fact that we are trans historians doing trans histories is essential. Before the 2000s, historical research of what is being increasingly reclaimed as trans people and trans phenomena was largely interpreted through the singular lens of sexuality. Jonathan Ned Katz and George Chauncey’s respective canonical works Gay American History and Gay New York are replete with gender transgressive historical figures — Alan Hart, Mary Jones, female husbands, fairies, and so on — whose lives deserve, and are now being granted, a trans historical analysis.

Following trans feminine medievalist Gabrielle M. W. Bychowski, we consider each of the contributors to our special issue to be taking their rightful “transgender turn” in response to scholarship that has often failed to see the minutiae of trans life. Emotive, material stakes drive trans historians to create works by, for, and about our communities. Our creation of trans-centered scholarship is a duty to past, present, and future trans people whose stories would remain untold otherwise. We hope that this special issue takes a necessary step in filling in the ever-important and lively trans historiography from a trans point of view.

The contributions to our special issue are split between research articles and think-pieces. The former kicks off with a field-shattering piece from Chanathip Suwannanon. Through contextualizing Kiratee Chanar’s 1982 Thai novel Thang Sai Thee Sam (The Third Pathway) within the contexts of the Cold War, the global development of sex-change capitals, and white transsexual autobiography, Suwannanon reveals the possibilities of interpreting a semi-fictional work as a “Kathoey archive.” Next, we move to Will Hansen’s incisive examination of Hedesthia, Aotearoa New Zealand’s first formal transvestite-transsexual organization. Hansen succeeds in situating the group’s complex legacy within larger trans histories of Aotearoa New Zealand. Following suit, Juniper Oxford provides a formidable analysis of American trans feminine draft dodgers of the Second World War. Our research articles close with a bang with Penelope Higgins’ evaluation of fascism, propaganda, American imperialism, and global political economies of capitalism through close readings of 20th Century-Fox’s 1970 transploitation films Myra Breckinridge and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

Our think-pieces begin with Sam Dolores Sanchinel’s half-book review, half-autobiographical interpretation of Juana Maria Rodríguez’s Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Making Sex. Sanchinel gifts their trans femme perspective on the historiography of putas, interrogating and presenting the benefits of Rodríguez’s models of queer affective kinship and loving personal readings for trans studies. Next, Niamh Timmons presents a much-needed trans historical methodological intervention that pushes back against invocations of the Stonewall Riots as a single origin point of liberation. Instead, they argue for a ‘constellating’ framework that allows for multiple points of trans activist histories. Emily Cousens next considers how ‘androgyny’ was articulated and appealed to within trans feminine feminist knowledge production during the 1970s. Dean Leetal revisits the Jewish story of the Golem and ze extrapolates lessons from it for the benefit of those who are multiply marginalized as Jewish, trans, autistic, and neurogender like zimself. Closing our special issue is an insightful appraisal of trans public history by Moira Armstrong. Analyzing the London-based Museum of Transology, Armstrong conceives of the activist and community-based foundations of “radical (trans) trust” that can and should be adopted by the wider heritage sector.

We hope that the histories shared in these pages hold meaning for others in the way they have for us. We hope that the trans scholars who follow in our footsteps can use this to mark their path. We hope that, in the many years to come, we may look back from a changed field to a special issue such as this and no longer feel that it’s still so special after all.

To view our open-access special issue, please visit The Graduate History Review’s webpage here.