Trans Time Travel

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 uses the lens of trans time—nonlinear, multiple, cyclical—offering up radically new ways of seeing our past and our future. Blending memoir, reportage, history, and cultural criticism, Trans Time Travel digs deep into our national archive, tracing the surprising ways stories of gender variance appear in the media and public record and the cycles of liberation and oppression that inform a collective historical amnesia. In a journey across the country and through centuries, the book moves from the story of the Public Universal Friend, an eighteenth-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 nineteenth 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 clearsighted, hopeful way forward.