guardian.co.uk – Prof Stephen Whittle
Whenever, wherever on this earth, we will find people who contravene gender boundaries. I’m not talking about the small ways of ‘queering’ gender, such as the lesbian separatists who wore dungarees in the 1970s. I mean the big ways: not just queering gender, but crossing gender. I mean the drive that makes people risk so much to represent a gender they feel is theirs, and yet is very different to the social, cultural and legal expectations of their birth sex. Whatever culture, country or epoch you choose to research, you will find a history of individuals who, if they lived now, we might now refer to as trans people.