slinkling

While I was in Wales, when I wasn't hiking, collapsing after hiking, drinking local beer after hiking, or blogging, I read Emily Skidmore's True Sex, and I recommend it highly to those of you who are interested in queer history! She traces the lives of eighteen American trans men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which is fascinating in itself, but part of her focus is that, while queer history has tended to focus on cities and the development of queer communities in them, these men pretty much all lived in small cities, towns, or rural areas, and clearly did so by choice in most or all cases. I mean, many of them moved around a lot; they could have moved to Chicago, but they stayed in Nowheresville. And they could sometimes be welcomed and treated as men there even when their communities knew they were AFAB.

Also, of course, a significant number were only publicly revealed as AFAB after years of living as men, sometimes only after their deaths. Skidmore doesn't spend a lot of time on this, but to me that means that there were a lot more stealth trans men who never got found out at all.

I did want her to dig deeper into racial issues, She often ties the ability to live as a man to white privilege, but I think that tie is weak without a discussion of the experiences of, and community acceptance of, black (or other nonwhite) trans men, which she doesn’t really offer.

Her research is impressive, and it's smoothly readable, not jargony. I recommend it highly!