Thanks to the fabulous Monica Roberts, I have discovered Iranti, an African queer rights organization based in Johannesburg. They appear to have excellent links to trans rights groups in many parts of Africa, and even put on pan-African conferences. Here is a great little video that they have made:

Right now, of course, such organizations are concentrating mainly on improving the lives of trans people. While some countries do have decent laws, others do not, and medical treatment also lags significantly behind other parts of the world. However, I hope that in due course organizations like Iranti will have the time to do more research into ancient African cultures and the place of trans people within then. I found found glimpses of evidence, but so much has been destroyed by European colonialists, and of course I have no knowledge of any African languages.

That African cultures were more accepting of trans people than European ones seems fairly certain. What evidence I have got parallels similar social systems elsewhere in the world. Also it appears that acceptance of queer people of all types among African Americans was much higher than among white Americans until fairly recently. There’s lots of evidence from musicians involved in the Dirty Blues in the first half of the 20th century, for example.

One of the things that really annoys me as an historian is the tendency of cis people to completely deny the possibility of trans identities in past times. Of course there is no way that we can prove how people from the past identified, and even if we could talk to them we’d probably find that their concepts of transness don’t match entirely with our own. The ways in which trans people understand their identities vary wildly both with time and between cultures. However, it is undeniable that people did lead lives in which they maintained identities that did not correspond to their birth gender, and to insist that all such acts were masquerades and deceits seems to me to do a great disservice to those people, and to be intellectually untenable.

Which brings me to this post on the Beyond Victoriana website, which has a very strong reputation among steampunk fans. It is about Mary Jones, someone assigned male at birth who lived as a woman for much of her adult life. Personal testimony quoted in the article suggests that Jones was happy in her female identity, proud of her womanhood, and accepted by members of her community. Nevertheless, the article goes full on with the misgendering, deadnaming, freak show and deceit narrative. It is at times like this that you realize that cis people who talk about intersectionality tend to have a memory lapse about what the word means when it comes to trans women.