This limited catalogue of scholarship should not be equated with a general dearth of trans historical consciousness. On the contrary, hunger for lineage is rampant within trans and gender-diverse (TGD) communities, as evidenced by the proliferation of backwards-glancing films, television dramas, and books such as POSE (2018–), Gentleman Jack (2019), Transparent (2014–19), the rebooted Tales of the City (2019), The Danish Girl (2015), The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017), Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox (2018), Leslie Feinberg’s canonical Stone Butch Blues (1993), The Watermelon Woman (1996), We Both Laughed in Pleasure (2019), and the 2019 re-release of Paris is Burning (1990), to name just a few examples.

Alicia Vikander and Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl (photograph via Allstar/Universal Pictures)

Contrary to what Reay suggests, the past is everywhere in TGD culture.

More to the point, the underdeveloped state of trans historical scholarship is perhaps better attributed to the historical and ongoing oppression of TGD people rather than to any failure of interest or imagination. Long criminalised and still stigmatised, gender non-conforming people too often endure precarious lives on the margins. As a result, trans voices are often silenced within mainstream archives and trans scholars are rare within the hallowed halls of academia. Little wonder, then, that we know significantly less about history’s gender-benders than we do about, say, Eleanor Roosevelt or Alfred Deakin.

Reay, however, gives little credence to these structural forces. Instead, he constructs a historically illiterate straw man, living only in the present, unwilling or unable to conceive of a deep trans past. This is the audience Trans America sets out to school. The aim is to kick their putative amnesia to the curb. Having established this mandate, Trans America then takes readers through the story of trans experience in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present, a chronology presented over five chapters rich with enthralling detail and stunning images.

Trans America is a deeply researched history that encompasses both trans medicine and vernacular cultures. To his credit, Reay paints a longue durée history of ‘sexual and gender flexibility’, showing that the blurred boundaries and indeterminate identities often associated with the transgender turn of the 1990s existed on the streets decades earlier. His critique of the ‘medical model’ will also resonate with contemporary TGD readers, many of whom continue to endure strict medical gatekeeping and dehumanising rituals of ‘treatment’.

Despite sections that beguile, the book’s prose and conceptualisation both feel undercooked, as though Trans America was rushed to publication to capitalise on the ‘trans tipping point’. In terms of content, notable omissions abound: trans-exclusionary feminism escapes mention; Indigenous and other non-Western gender formations are given short shrift; the experience of violence and incarceration is handled in a mere three paragraphs; and the whiteness of the term ‘trans’ itself is ignored until the final pages of the book. Throughout, the ways in which class and race shaped trans experience is the elephant in the room. Nor does Reay articulate the specificity of the ‘American’ trans experience, and at times he conflates US trans history with a broader Western past. More laudable is the concerted attention given to transmasculine experience, too often relegated to the sidelines of trans discourse. The sensitive analysis of drag cultures is another highlight, with the text enriched by exquisite photographs of performers.

In his quest to be authoritative, Reay makes light of the profound epistemological challenges of trans history. As is well known, we can only apprehend gender non-conforming lives in the past via words and categories that are themselves historical artefacts. Our current terms – ‘transgender’, ‘genderqueer’, ‘gender non-conforming’ – only date back a few decades. Even the antecedent terms ‘transsexual’ and ‘transvestite’ are less than a century old. Can we name someone as trans before this identity existed? How should we parse lives that troubled or rejected gender norms prior to our modern taxonomies of gender difference? For Reay, the answer to this conundrum is to construct a strict periodisation that limits ‘trans history’ to the invention of these concepts by medical experts, a process begun by European sexologists in the late nineteenth century. He dismisses the activist refrain that ‘trans people have always existed’ as ahistorical nonsense.

But this is a deceptively simple solution to a thorny problem. True, trans people who were named and identified as such are a recent phenomenon. Yet that does not mean we should ignore earlier evidence of people who presented and lived as a gender different to that assigned at birth. We cannot retrospectively name these people as ‘trans’, but nor can we comprehensively exclude them from the remit of ‘trans history’. This is an unresolvable tension, one that makes a mockery of historiographical pretensions to know the past. Much as TGD lives today resist the taxonomical impulses of the medical gaze, the trans past is an undisciplined history that refuses to be definitively bounded and known.

As a serious work of scholarship, which undeniably adds texture to the trans past, Trans America represents a step towards the thriving historiography the TGD community deserves. Within its pages, other scholars will find an invitation to dive even deeper into trans history, drawing out complexities we’ve only begun to glimpse. In this flawed yet pioneering history, Reay helps launch a conversation that will, it is to be hoped, continue – passionate, rigorous, fiercely contested – for years to come.