Reflections on Before Trans
by Rachel Mesch, now available in paperback
I did not set out to write a history of trans identities in nineteenth-century France. In fact, at first I thought I was writing a book about marriage. I wanted to examine the intellectual partnerships between certain women writers I had studied in my earlier books and their devoted husbands. It wasn’t long before I noticed that the women in those partnerships were far more interesting than the men. As my research continued, I realized that two of those writers whom I had always treated as women identified deeply with masculinity. The plot thickened, and a different project was born: Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France », reissued by Stanford University Press in paperback this Spring.
As a cisgender heterosexual scholar, I hesitated at the outset of my research to use the term transgender to refer to my first subject, the explorer-turned writer Jane Dieulafoy. I had studied Dieulafoy in my previous book, which was about modern women who could balance femininity with feminism in French women’s magazines at the turn of the century. Dieulafoy always stood out, in a well-tailored men’s suit, as the exception who proved the rule.
As I began to write about Dieulafoy, I found that, in 2015-– light years ago in terms of the history of trans studies– readers frequently misunderstood what I meant. They kept assuming that I was analyzing someone who wore pants as an idiosyncratic feminist act. I realized that in order to write about transgender identity, I needed to name it as such. Not a simple feat, of course, because the term did not yet exist in the nineteenth century. But clearly, as my research proved, there were people in this time– and as we know now, in every century– who felt misaligned with the gender assigned to them at birth. This deeply ingrained sense of self was the reason that Dieulafoy, an otherwise deeply conservative figure, would subvert gender norms. Soon I would come to understand that the writer Rachilde was similarly misunderstood. Rachilde was often described as someone who “resisted interpretation”– so full of contradictions were their writings and persona. But once you recognized nonbinary identity as the motivating impulse of Rachilde's challenges to gender norms, everything about them seemed less contradictory. They wore pants and also did not see themself as a feminist. It suddenly made sense.
I was fascinated by the difference between Dieulafoy and Rachilde's lives– one holding tight to conservative values, the other embracing scandal and eros. I was also fascinated by how two people in the same place and time could realize their identities in such different ways, latching onto the narratives that resonated most personally. As the saying goes, if you’ve met one trans person, you’ve met one trans person. Ditto for the nineteenth century.
Jane Dieulafoy saw their own life as a version of the Joan of Arc story and adhered to Catholic principles; Rachilde on the other hand embraced decadence and perversion, and assumed that they were stricken with the disease of the century: hysteria. How did my third subject, Marc de Montifaud, see themself? none of your damn business, they might have answered. Let me just be myself, railed Montfaud, as those around them tried to force them into boxes – not to mention literal prison.
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Because of my own position as a cishet scholar working on this topic, I was determined to expose myself to as many trans voices as possible to understand better the impulses that might have driven these writers; this work enabled me to resonate with aspects of my subjects’ writings and creative acts that had been long overlooked. Reading memoirs by Jennifer Finney Boylan, Joy Ladin, and Jan Morris, and embracing the critical framework of Anne Czetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings, I heard the pain in Rachilde’s (anti)hero/ine who was unable to find a language through which to express themself, a tear streaming down their cheek that I could swear had not been there when I first read the novel – presented as a feminist screed– during grad school. I could see the angst in Dieulafoy’s protagonist struggling whether to reveal themself to the family that had assumed their daughter was dead. How to demonstrate that they were still the same person, just a fuller version of whom they had always been? And I could hear the rage in Marc de Montifaud’s insistance Je suis moi, I am me. Because I had read Jack Halberstam, Leslie Feinberg, Kate Bornstein, and so many others’ efforts to catalog a gender diverse past, and because I had watched the elegiac scenes from Joey and Faith Soloway’s Transparent in which contemporary characters mingled with their trancestors, and because of so many other sources literary, academic, and popular, I could grasp all of these writers’ desire to place themselves in history. Still, and despite my scholarly grounding, I was aware of how my vision was limited by my own personal experience. Looking back, I see that my framing was also determined by the particular scholarly moment in which I wrote.
Reading these memoirs, researching trans and queer histories, and studying the nineteenth century more broadly, I was familiar with narratives of exclusion and suffering documented by Czetkovich and others: the pain of not belonging, and of not finding yourself in the story, of feeling denied by language itself; the brutalizing stigma created by the nascent medical profession; the strictly binary structures of French society, where women themselves were not yet citizens. Before Trans is a deeply empathic work in which I tried hard to bring my subjects’ overlooked feelings to the surface, and in which the trauma of trans lives serves as a vital element of my subjects’ “gender stories”– my term for the shifting stories that they told through literature and art to make sense of an experience that was outside of nineteenth-century language.
Now, several years into my own work on gender diversity in nineteenth-century France and several years past what has been called the “trans tipping point” in academia, I see that there is another vital element very much present in these stories– just as crucial to trans lives in the past as it is in the present: that of trans joy. I realize that I was not fully able to appreciate this aspect because trans sorrow preoccupied the scholarly narrative. After all, trans lives were under attack, as they continue to be.
I see now that signs of this joy were present nonetheless- in the work of scholars like Jen Manion and Emily Skidmore for example, with their examples of people living satisfying lives in the nineteenth and early twentieth century as a gender that was not the one assigned to them. My current research centers the kinds of moments of self-recognition and affirmation that you can see in the images on the cover of Skidmore’s book, as her subjects meet the camera’s gaze. By considering photography and other nineteenth-century past times as outlets for gender expression, I am exploring how non-normative gender creativity was present and celebrated in many forms of nineteenth-century entertainment and in private lives. While it goes without saying that we must acknowledge and study the pain of the past, it’s also crucial to recover this other overlooked history: the ways in which gender non-conforming individuals have always found ways to express themselves and to recognize each other, and to see the joy in that possibility, even if fleeting.
Four years after the initial publication of Before Trans, I have come to realize that these archival glimpses of self-affirming pleasure are just as vital to queer and trans history as the trauma of the past. I’m delighted to see in rereading my book that there’s a substantial record of that pleasure: the flash of recognition in Montifaud’s (Figure 53 in the book) and Dieulafoy’s eyes before the camera.
The delight that Dieulafoy takes on the page in describing themself as a French hero. Rachilde’s playful embrace of their identity as a werewolf. In order to continue to chart the unexplored histories of queer and trans lives, it is now time to more fully research, explore, and celebrate this other archive of feelings.
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