Precedented

Who gets to be a family in today's world?

The idea that the family is under threat is everywhere - on the lips of politicians, religious leaders, populist pundits. Yet family has never been the biologically essentialist tradition it's often presented as. From Greek and Christian myths of birthing fathers or gender-nonconforming Roman emperors, to seventeenth-century men pregnant with thousands of babies or nineteenth-century women outraged that parents would gender their toddlers, to the Hijra of South Asia or drag mothers of New York's ballroom scene, history shows us that the family has always had a more complicated relationship to gender. Trans and queer people aren't threatening to destroy an ancient, natural institution: humans have been complicating it from the very beginning.

Precedented shows us different, better ways of thinking about the relationship between gender, biology and family. Blending history with memoir, Kit Heyam combats contemporary political narratives to explore how feminist struggles are entangled with struggles for trans liberation, and that women stand to gain the most from thinking about family differently. Western culture today has much to learn not just from our own past, but from the glorious variety of many-gendered families across the world.

Understanding this history can anchor and sustain us politically and it can also help us to build the families we want. If we had the solidarity, community and inspiration of history - if all of us could rethink the place of gender and biology in family life - what new ways of thinking about family might we be able to build?