Subjugated Histories

This post is about a video by Leslie Feinberg in which she talks about subjugated histories.

There is a video on YouTube that I found quite a few years ago, which I have only recently realized is actually a clip from a short film called Outlaw that was made by director Alisa Lebow in 1994. In this three-minute clip Leslie Feinberg talks about learning about the berdache people who took on the roles of the opposite gender. She describes the rage she felt when, as an adult, she learned for the very first time that there have always been people like her throughout history. I feel like a lot of people, myself included, can relate to this anger at discovering important information that had been withheld from them. In school we learn about the cis, straight, white men of history, with the occasional outlier. These days information is more readily available, but only if you go searching for it. I, like Feinberg and so many others, did not learn about people like me when I was in school and that makes a significant impact on a person. To not be able to learn about people who look like you is damaging. It forces you into thinking that you are the only one instead of letting you in on the reality that people like you who have always existed across the world and across time. In this clip Feinberg notes that it is not a mistake that this information has been hidden away. When she asks the museum curator who these people were, his first response was asking her why she wanted to know. There is a reason this information has been hidden, because it is dangerous for people to know. Learning about how genders outside the binary have always existed shakes the foundation of a system that our society has been built around. Learning this information forces one to look twice at how our culture is structured and it gives power to those who know that they are outside of society’s gender system because it shows them that they are not alone. This is part of why I love trans studies, it is so thrilling to learn in an academic context about transgender people because I have never had that opportunity before. I never learned about queer people in school growing up, so this research project allows me to take matters into my own hands and find the information that I haven't been given.