What is a “Trans Woman”?: Towards a Useful Category of Historical Analysis

In this lecture, historian Jamey Jesperson considers the utility of “trans woman” or “trans womanhood” as categories of historical analysis by identifying patterns and parallels of gender transformation from antiquity to the modern age. Just as she examines the risks of tracing such a global phenomenon, she challenges the insistent historiographical refusal to name it. To flip colonialist charges on their head, she pulls from her dissertation on Indigenous North America, de-romanticizing it as an exotic place “before the gender binary,” but rather just one corner of the world where certain binaries could sometimes be crossed. And almost always, this was towards woman.

This event is hybrid! To join online, please email aGZsZ2J0cSB8IGhpc3RvcnkgISBveCAhIGFjICEgdWs= before the event to receive the meeting link.

Jamey Jesperson is a Vanier Scholar, NACBS Fellow, and final-year History PhD Candidate at the University of Victoria. Trained in ethnohistorical and counter-archival research methods, Jamey studies trans histories of Indigenous and colonial Western North America before the twentieth century. She is privileged to have received awards for her writing from the Oral History Association, the LGBTQ+ History Association, Gender & History, and the Royal Historical Society, from whom her Goldsmiths MA Queer History thesis received the coveted Rees Davies Prize for “best thesis in the UK” in 2022. Through oral history, storywork collaboration with Two-Spirit Knowledge Keeper Saylesh Wesley, Jamey’s dissertation endeavors to re-story trans Indigenous lives and worlds on the Northwest Coast across the first century of colonial ‘contact.’ Her research can be read in History Workshop, Spectator, Gender & History, The Graduate History Review, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and a host of forthcoming collections published by Bloomsbury, Routledge, the University of Toronto, and Oxford University Press.

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