Trans Time Travel

'This is the book I have been waiting for' LENA DUNHAM'Staggeringly beautiful' ELLIOT PAGEAward-winning author Thomas Page McBee takes readers on a kaleidoscopic journey into the archives, 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 - a radical perspective that opens up new ways of seeing both the past and the future. Blending memoir, reportage, history and cultural criticism, he digs deep into our shared history, 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 to a collective historical amnesia.Seeking to recover what has been lost, Trans Time Travel moves from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a complicated cultural touchstone (and Shelley's personal connection to trans history), to the Public Universal Friend, an 18th-century genderless preacher and evangelist who taught and embodied gender equality, to outlaw and sex symbol Harry Allen who 'smashed hearts' at the turn of the twentieth century and inspired a play staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company.Personal, profound and perspective-shifting, Trans Time Travel reckons with a hostile present by looking back - and offers a clear-sighted, hopeful way forward.