Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects.

Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives-ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. The story of Christine Jorgensen, Americas first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Revealing instances of personal sovereignty among blacks living in the antebellum North that were mapped in terms of cross dressing and canonical black literary works that express black mens' access to the female within, he concludes with a reading of the fate of Phillip DeVine, who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena in 1993, a fact omitted from the film Boys Don't Cry out of narrative convenience. Marion Sims, the father of American gynecology, to the negation of blackness that makes transnormativity possible. In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women by J. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials-early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films-Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence.

Riley snorton black on both sides