Celebrating Trans Awareness Week

Hey y’all! I’m Kaye, I’m a Client Strategist here at Fandom, and I’m bringing this blog post to you from a couch where my cat keeps putting his paw on my hand like “Mother, cease typing.” As a queer woman whose wife is trans, Trans Awareness Week and Trans Day of Remembrance are very important to me. I am also an enormous nerd, so I volunteered to write our history blog commemorating this week. We’re sharing this blog internally, too, for employees to learn more about and celebrate Trans Awareness Week.

I would love to start off by telling you exactly what Trans Awareness Week we’re on. It might be the 26th – but that’s dating from the first Transgender Day of Remembrance, a vigil in 1999 that a small group of trans women hosted in honor of Black trans women Rita Hester and Chanelle Pickett, who were victims lost to hate crime. It might be the 22nd – there’s some thinking that it first began being widely celebrated in 2003, when the National Center for Transgender Equality was founded in the US. It might be the 16th, dating from when the International Transgender Day of Visibility was established by Rachel Crandall Crocker (March 31st, btw).

But there’s no specific date of the first Trans Awareness Week. It is, like so many celebrations of marginalized identities, something that sprang up over time to put the spotlight on trans folks and allies, the advocacy work they’re doing, and the joy of their lives. The week starts today, November 13th, and continues through the 19th, just before the Trans Day of Remembrance on November 20th.

The goal of this week is to take action! And it can really be anything. Donate to one of the many worthy trans advocacy groups, talk to a friend to help them understand trans identities a little better, volunteer with a local LGTBQ+ group, or maybe… do some reading on trans history.

Trans People Throughout History[]

Trans people have always been around, even when they haven’t been acknowledged explicitly as such. Part of the reason for that is because the strict gender binary that Western culture features just hasn’t been part of human culture forever. And part of the reason is because our modern understanding of gender and sexuality isn’t necessarily the same understanding that someone from a thousand years ago would have.

It’s because of that – even when it feels, like, painfully obvious a historical figure was gay or trans as we understand it now – that historians feel hesitant to label someone that specifically. For that reason, I will largely use the historically-accepted pronouns for these folks when their preferred pronouns aren’t known.

Alrighty, we’re on the same page now. Here are five transgender (or genderfluid, or third-gender) people from history!

The Gala Priests of Ancient Sumer[]

Dedicated to the Sumerian goddess Inanna, the Mesopotamian goddess of war, fertility, and love, all people who entered into this priesthood dressed and behaved like women. Some even took new, feminine names. This may have been a very early example of socially acceptable gender transition. Gala weren’t forbidden from having families, and many Gala of both sexes had spouses and several children.

The Caveman of Prague[]

In 2011, researchers disinterred a male skeleton that is estimated to be around 5,000 years old. Historians have suggested that this person was transgender or gay, and though of course we have limited understanding of how such ancient people interpreted gender, we do know that their burial practices were pretty specific. Men were buried facing west and took flint knives, hammers, or weapons to the grave with them. Women were buried facing east and with domestic items like jugs, pots, and the like. This skeleton was buried facing east, and had with them an egg-shaped pot and a few jugs.

Hatsheput[]

Born the daughter of Pharoah Thutmose I and his consort Ahmose, Hatsheput enjoyed an astonishing amount of power when she became Pharaoh in her own right. We know that she began wearing the regalia and clothing of Pharaoh because statues of her changed. She was generally depicted as a traditional queen when she was co-regent with her stepson, but once she came into power, her statuary and other depictions of her featured male regalia and began to also give her a male body. And for Egyptian art, this is key. It rarely depicted people as they were, but as they should be. By having her official portraits created this way, Hatsheput was ensuring she was immortalized in male regalia and with a male body.

Witold Stanisław Smętek[]

Witold was born intersex and assigned female at birth in 1910, in Kalisz, Poland. He became a renowned athlete, winning several medals at major championships across Poland. And for his entire career, he was the subject of intense scrutiny for his appearance, both from other athletes and from the press. In 1937 he decided to undergo gender reassignment surgery. His choice made headlines, and in his statement to the press, he acknowledged the harassment he’d experienced for his “masculine” appearance. "For a long time, I felt like I was being watched, I saw smirks, and I heard unpleasant rumors. So I've made up my mind and I say: I can't continue to be a woman. I'll become a man. In a week, I'll undergo surgery,"

Lucy Hicks Anderson[]

Lucy was born in Kentucky, and insisted from a very early age that she was a girl. When doctors told her parents to let her live as she chose, she renamed herself, began dressing as a girl of her time did, and didn’t look back. Lucy married twice, the first time for nine years and the second for the rest of her life. She was tried for perjury for lying about her gender on her marriage license, and at her trial, she told the court, “I defy any doctor in the world to prove that I am not a woman. I have lived, dressed, acted just what I am, a woman.” She was convicted, but the judge declined to jail her, and she and her husband Reuben lived quietly in Los Angeles until her death in 1954.

Thanks for reading this far, and I hope you learned something cool. Now take that new cool knowledge and take action for Transgender Awareness Week!

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