Anyone else read this and interested?
I really enjoyed it. I liked the author's openness to a whole range of ideas, and in particular the chapter about gender in 16th century England.
I find Heyam really good on the impact of gender. I agree with them eg that clothes have meaning, and can see they're right that what people wear has a huge impact on their self image and also on the way that people see and react to them, so that their gender is partly self created by acting it, partly created by others. For myself I'm bisexual, and although I can find transwomen attractive as men and transmen attractive as women, I'm less attracted than I otherwise would be, which has to be because of the way they present themselves. Which is just a personal thing, but it does argue that gender is a real thing and not just 'nonsense'. And that's interesting and challenging to me as a GC person. It makes me think that perhaps I should go back to calling myself a terf, because gender critical isn't quite right.
Where Heyam is unconvincing to me is (not surprisingly) in arguing that sex is completely unimportant and indefinable, and as ever only started to be defined by evil colonialists. Heyam tells the story of the memorial plaque for Anne Lister, with which they were centrally involved, and the furore that erupted when it turned out to leave out the word 'lesbian'. Heyam says they left out the word 'because everyone KNEW she was a lesbian'. And yet Heyam takes any lack of specific naming of sexes in the past as evidence that nobody had sex as a mental concept. When surely it's much more likely to be because it was so completely central that it didn't have to be named - and because until very recently in history in most societies, gender roles and sex were so intertwined that it was assumed they could not be detached from each other.
There's also the lack of acknowledgement that many of the things they discuss as strands of gender primacy in the past were BAD things by any possible measure. Like the various motivations for getting boys castrated, the assumption that a person who wore a dress must be a woman, and would be treated by a dominant male sex class as sexually available because a) that's what women were for and b) men who stepped into a female role were intrinsically lesser, like women but worse. I know that history is not about making moral judgements but presenting eunuchs as precursors to the contemporary trans movement is a really odd and yet telling thing to do.
Where I do feel Heyam is quite right is in saying that it isn't possible for us to know what the motivation of people in the past was when they changed their gender presentation. That it's perfectly reasonable to think that those motivations could have been much closer to what trans people now express than is commonly thought (by people like me I guess). That to present in that way was often (though not always, see the chapter on West African leaders) the mark of outcasts, and their motivations weren't recorded. That's all very convincing.