Writing trans histories with an ethics of care, while reading gender in imperial Roman literature

Abstract

Two major barriers interfere with writing trans histories of the premodern world: the conflict between creating a legible or foreignised past and balancing the vastness of the social system of gender against individual performances of gender identity. In this article, I propose one methodology to bypass these barriers. Additionally, this methodology reminds us that both gender and history are systems which we use to generate narratives about ourselves and that these narratives always care for and nourish certain people. Here, I issue a call for trans historians to unabashedly write histories that care for and nourish trans lives.