Trans Time Travel: A Journey into American History

Summary

Award-winning author Thomas Page McBee takes readers on a kaleidoscopic journey into the American archive, illuminating four centuries of gender-variant history—and the cost, to all of us, of its erasure.

In this groundbreaking, urgent book, Thomas Page McBee gives us the lens of trans time—nonlinear, multiple, cyclical—a radical perspective that opens up new ways of seeing both the past and the future.

Exhausted by a political cycle dominated by anti-trans cruelty and convinced that the nation is asking the wrong questions about gender, McBee sets out to ask better ones, bringing readers across the country and through time. Blending memoir, reportage, history, and cultural criticism, he digs deep into our national archive, tracing the surprising ways stories of gender variance appear in the media and public record—and the alternating cycle of liberation and repressive backlash that leads, again and again, to a collective historical amnesia.

Seeking to recover what has been lost, and offering an expansive, vivid vision of our shared past, Trans Time Travel moves from the Public Universal Friend, an 18th-century genderless preacher and evangelist who taught and embodied gender equality; to Western outlaw and sex symbol, Harry Allen, who “smashed hearts” up and down the West Coast; to an overdue re-reporting of the life and murder of Brandon Teena, sensationalized first in newspaper accounts and then in the cult ‘90s indie film, Boys Don’t Cry; to Mary Jones, a sex worker in 19th-century New York, whose arrest made her a tabloid sensation of the newfound penny presses; to the pioneering work of midcentury philanthropist and psychonaut, Reed Erickson.

Personal, profound, and perspective-shifting, Trans Time Travel reckons with a hostile present by looking back—and offers a clear-sighted, hopeful way forward.