Trans Family

Who gets to be a family in today's world?The idea that the family is under threat is everywhere - on the lips of politicians, religious leaders, populist pundits. Yet family has never been the biological tradition it's often presented as. From Greek and Christian myths of birthing fathers and gender-nonconforming Roman emperors, to nineteenth-century women outraged that parents would gender their toddlers, to the drag mothers of New York's ballroom scene, history shows us that the family has always had a more complicated relationship to gender. Queer people aren't threatening to destroy an ancient, natural institution: humans have been complicating it from the very beginning.Blending history with memoir, Trans Family shows us new ways of thinking about the relationship between gender, biology and family. Historian Kit Heyam combats contemporary political narratives to reveal how feminism and trans liberation are entangled, and women stand to gain the most from thinking about family differently. Western culture today has much to learn not just from our own past, but from the glorious variety of many-gendered families across the world. Understanding this history can anchor and sustain us politically and it can also help us to build the families we want.If all of us could rethink the place of gender and biology in family life - what new ways of thinking about family might we create?