DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0004 Trans German Studies, A Conversation Sara Friedman and Laurie Marhoefer University of California, Berkeley / University of Washington This interview was conducted in May 2024 via Zoom while Laurie Marhoefer was in Seattle and Sara Friedman in San Francisco. Several comments referring to recent political incidents under the Trump administration were added in August 2025. Edited for readability. Sara Friedman: So why trans German Studies? How does “trans” interact with “German? ” Laurie Marhoefer: Why trans studies? Because there are all these fields that have been unaware of trans studies or ignoring it� And when you bring trans studies - which has been going on since at least the 1980s, by the way - into these areas of inquiry, you see new things, even in material you’ve read over and over for years� But I also think the German part is important� Trans people have always existed, but modern trans politics started in Germany - by the 1920s there was a collective movement of people advocating for rights� Concepts of transness, and identities, come out of the German-speaking world. And there’s lots of new stuff to be found, or old stuff to be reconsidered, the archive of the German-speaking world� The essays in this special issue do that� There are other scholars working on trans issues in German Studies as well - it’s not like, no one has done this yet - and their work is fabulous, too� Some examples include work by Zavier Nunn, Samson Dietrich, Bodie Ashton, Katie Sutton, and Jonah Garde� It’s all getting more widely known now, which is terrific. And there’s a lot more to do. Sara Friedman: I’m wondering if you could describe this German context more� All of these trends in German history and five different Germanies. And the trans angle is relevant the entire time� Laurie Marhoefer: That’s such a good question and it deserves a comprehensive answer! But maybe I can be less comprehensive and talk about some recent work that’s been exciting to me? Going to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to me seems like such an exciting possibility - Cedar Lensing-Sharp’s essay on Karoline von Günderrode in this special issue, for example� Robert 54 Sara Friedman and Laurie Marhoefer DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0004 Tobin’s work is so generative, but he isn’t incorporating a trans lens (Tobin 2000; 2015)� Karl Heinrich Ulrichs - I’m fascinated by the question of why, for so many years, we read Ulrichs as a gay thinker, when what Ulrichs writes about are people with female souls in male bodies, and vice versa - how would it change the picture to bring a trans lens to that archive? (Ulrichs 1994)� The medieval: Leah DeVun’s book, which is about England, is fascinating, showing that concepts of nonbinary gender are widely relevant to medieval people, associated with extreme good - angels, Jesus - as well as with what’s supposedly extreme evil - the Devil, non-European people (DeVun 2021)� Colby Gordon’s book on Renaissance England, which shows that concepts of transition, “social” as we would say as well as surgical, exist very broadly, and in some very famous authors’ work - Shakespeare, Milton, that sort of famous, even I have heard of those people (Gordon 2024)� Early Modern Trans Studies in English is a hot field, there’s so much cool work being done there - among much else I could mention, the prefix “trans” meaning, essentially, changing one’s sex, dates back to at least 1656, in English (Gamble 2019; on Early Modern Trans Studies see also Chess, Gordon, and Fisher 2019)� What about the German-speaking world, is it similar? To move to the twentieth century, it seems imperative to understand why the late Kaiserreich was so trans friendly, presiding as it did over the establishment of the certificates to “cross-dress” in public - which actually have roots in a much older French police administrative procedure, by the way� They are the first legal institutions for gender transition in history, aside from older institutions set up for people with intersex conditions� In all of these cases and in others, to bring transgender studies into German Studies leads us to ask new questions, not only to see that trans people - by which I mean people who transitioned from one sex to another - are present in all of these historical moments - and that’s an important project on its own, and it’s a scholarly project, I don’t want to knock it down at all - but also because trans analytics can bring in new questions that we haven’t thought of before, transforming our arguments and narratives� Sara Friedman: Trans studies is such an active field right now; can you describe some of the main themes and questions? What is it beyond finding traces of trans lives in the past? Laurie Marhoefer: I’m all for finding trans and nonbinary people in the past. It’s a scholarly project and it’s important� I would never say, trans work had to do more than that to be useful, or valid - I was trained as a grad student in the 2000s to say that such work has to “do more” to be useful, trained specifically to say that for the history of sexuality and for women’s history, but I’m now 46 and I’m convinced that that’s wrong, it doesn’t have to do more to be valid, nor does the history of sexuality nor women’s history� Trans German Studies, A Conversation 55 DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0004 Even so, for a German Studies audience, what’s exciting is that, in some famous instances we already have a sense of a trans past, though I think the reality far outstrips what we know - but we’ve got the trans people who worked with Magnus Hirschfeld, and we’ve got Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, and Harry Benjamin, the cisgender doctor who pioneered trans medicine in the US, was German American� That’s only the tip of the iceberg of trans people in German history� Trans studies, however, is not just finding trans people in the past, not that that’s not a worthwhile scholarly thing to do� It’s more than that� It’s about conceptual problems that really depart from queer theory in interesting ways - Hazel Rhodes’s essay in this special issue explores some of this theory� There’s a fascinating, generative tension between, on the one hand, poststructuralism and queer theory and on the other, trends in trans studies (Chu 2019; Gill-Peterson 2025)� The resurgence of identity and phenomenology versus 1990s queer theory and/ or social constructionism, and, for example, fascinating work on nonbinary vis a vis trans (Chu and Drager 2019; Amin 2022; Clare 2023)� Work on the imbrications of Blackness and transness, and on trans misogyny as a particular formation, one that cuts to the heart of Western culture (Snorton 2017; Lavery 2023; Gill-Peterson 2024)� Work on intersex (Malatino 2019); in trans scholarship, intersex is at times reduced to transness in scholarship in a way that’s both not an accurate account of the archive and also elides important distinctions for people at the time� Scholarship on what about transness is universal and what’s not, and what changes when we formulate it as universal or not, in varying ways (such as Chu 2019)� There’s a lot to read that is really surprising� Even if you’re like, hey I’m 46 and I don’t get surprised much by new scholarship - the great thing is, it’s a field with a lot of ideas that are unfamiliar, and generative. I think people may assume that it’s queer theory, only with trans people centered, and they get queer theory already, they don’t see how this is going to be all that revelatory� Though at times trans studies has positioned itself that way, as a sort of trans version of queer theory, rather than a challenge to queer theory (see, for example, Stone 1987; Stryker 1994), the field itself goes way beyond that. There’s lots that works directly against that, and it’s all and all more fun than queer theory, to tell you the truth� Sara Friedman: To return to what you said about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as Ulrichs, it’s interesting how inversion theory, at least as I’ve generally encountered it in sources and in historiographies, is considered a gay genealogy, but it could be so much more� It is just as much a trans genealogy� Laurie Marhoefer: Yeah, I think that’s right� And perhaps it can be both; you don’t have to pick one� It’s also striking to me how I was trained to read Ul- 56 Sara Friedman and Laurie Marhoefer DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0004 richs’s essays, and to say, without hesitation, well, that’s inversion, that’s a gay man writing - though Douglas Prestsell argues in his awesome new and exhaustive study of Ulrichs and his world that ultimately, for Ulrichs it isn’t transness that defines the Urning, there are lots of trans people who were in touch with Ulrichs� I feel not only the excitement of seeing something new in this text I’ve known for years, but also very puzzled about why it took me this long to see it, in that, we could make a study of that inability to see transness - what’s that about? Sara Friedman: This is such an interesting historiographical issue, and I think it relates to larger issues in writing about past lives and times while we are still negotiating and learning about our own lives and times� Could you speak more broadly to the history of sexuality and its fight for legitimacy? Laurie Marhoefer: Yeah, I think that that has been such a core problem for the history of sexuality and for other fields too, what I encountered in grad school when my well-intentioned mentors said, to get a job, it can’t just be about sexuality, the dissertation has to also be about some “bigger” and “more important” issue - and I’m grateful to them because I wouldn’t have gotten a job� Yet, indeed, how do we figure it out, when we are like, does this count as history, or is it disqualified? I mean, sexuality is pretty darn important to humans, often not only to us in the present, but in the past - as important as, say, the economy, no? It seems odd to be like, well that’s not important enough - my dissertation, for example, was about gay politics in the 1920s and the rise of the Nazis and what did that have to do with gay politics, and that wasn’t, my committee feared, going to seem important enough to hiring committees; my mentors said, by the way, can you also make this about the fall of democracy, too, or better yet, about some universal human truth? Which, yay I did (about democracy, not about a universal human truth, haha) and hey it’s a better book because of that, but still … if it had just been a book on the world’s first gay rights movement, seriously, that’s not important enough? Yes, readers, in the 2000s, in the US, that did not seem important enough� In the 1970s and 1980s, scholars broke into the academy - particularly in the US - and began to slowly and with great effort break apart a very rigid discriminatory hiring system, and in doing so they brought new, better scholarship� For the history profession, crucially, this was white women and Black women, getting academic jobs and publishing their books - Deborah Gray White, for example. When her first book came out in 1985, the Library of Congress didn’t know how to catalogue the book because there was no work on the history of women who had been enslaved; they had to add a cataloging category for enslaved women, for that book - to use a small example, to give you a sense of how - this was new work, and it was better - it improved our knowledge of Trans German Studies, A Conversation 57 DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0004 history� Before this we didn’t have any books on enslavement and gender or the particular situations facing enslaved women and how they resisted (Gray White 97). So, it’s the 1980s, the historians who wanted to keep these younger historians out, they are saying, again and again, well, you are not objective� If you are researching something and you happen to have an identity that is at issue in your research - such as, you’re a Black historian, you work on enslaved Black women - well, you can’t possibly be objective, we have to subject your scholarship to heightened scrutiny, to a higher standard� Oh, and by the way, if your identity is white and male and straight, it cannot ever be an issue in your research no matter what that research is on, as far as we are concerned, even if you are researching white men� Gray White has a powerful essay about writing her first book if you want to read a vivid example; I’m drawing this story from her essay� People literally said to her, you have to look more at sources that were written by enslaving white people, you are overrelying on sources by enslaved Black people� I am not kidding� One of the awesome points that Gray White makes about that, in fact, [is that] it was the opposite - she had an advantage as a scholar, there were major, major mistakes in the scholarship that she noticed right away because her life experience informed how she read the archive - it made her a better scholar than people who had worked on that material before she came along (Gray White 93—94)� Your question was about the field of the history of sexuality, and I wouldn’t claim it was the same challenges that Black women historians faced for the white people in the field of the history of sexuality in its early days in the 1980s and 1990s, because it wasn’t, and I don’t want to make a sloppy analogy� I’ve written elsewhere against analogies between racialization and implicitly deracialized sexuality categories (Marhoefer 2022, 79—87). But the objectivity thing, and the identity thing, they also got played against the history of sexuality, though in ways that were somewhat different. Such as, in backing away from defending the project of just finding gay people in the past - we gave that up, I think, because we were getting a barrage of “you’re not objective” criticisms, we were getting the accusation that we were projecting our identities onto the past, there were not gay people per se in the past, they didn’t call themselves “gay,” they didn’t have “identity” as we know it� One person I like on this is Robert Tobin, as he works on the very period that was often at issue, and the place - the German-speaking world - and he’s like, as much as I take Michel Foucault’s point, nevertheless … (Tobin 2000, 5) One direction onward after that critique is to assert, yes, I’m gay, and yes, I’m finding gay people in the past. If you doubt me, check my methods, do a goodfaith check� That’s something I like about scholarship, we have better norms than they did in the 1980s, there’s such a thing as best practices, you can check 58 Sara Friedman and Laurie Marhoefer DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0004 my footnotes and go back and read the material I read, and you’ll see, yep, gay people in the past� I’m doing good scholarly practice� Or, you can argue with my methods, or you can say, you know you can critique the book, but at this point, I hope we all agree that you can't throw it all out just because I’m an out gay man who wrote a gay history book� Some people will remember the debate about John Boswell’s books; I think a lot about that, lately� A lot of people went in this other direction, that is, to throw identity out altogether, to pretend it doesn’t exist and didn’t exist in the past� And to have an extremely high standard for historical identity� I want to come back from that direction, in the history of sexuality� Or have more than one path we can take� If people want to keep going there, ok, you do you, I’m fine with it. There should, however, also be space for people who say, first, I refuse for my whole project to be about identity, to be a journey quest with multiple levels and bosses all about, was there identity in the past or not? I refuse to have it be that, that’s been done, it’s boring, it’s also at times methodologically self-devouring, if you will, it leads into an intellectual dead end� I thank Zavier Nunn for pointing that out to me� And second, to allow there to be scholarship that says yes, there’s a historical trans identity, it’s historically specific, but it also crosses various periods, and various parts of the world� There are other historians who use identity categories, and other trans historical categories - capitalism, for example - without getting, you know, their dissertations thrown out� And we should be able to do that, too� Given the relatively common occurrence of gender transition in the past I see no scholarly reason to ban this� (On transition’s not uncommon occurrence see, among others, LaFleur et al� 2021, Chiang 2012, Chiang 2019�) Sara Friedman: Studies of any minoritized population undertaken by members of that population often get accused of not being “objective” enough� How do you deal with this? Laurie Marhoefer: I would say, challenge me on method� You don’t agree with my reading of this source, and you point out how there’s another possible reading� Or I’m missing some context you’re pointing out that changes the whole analysis, that’s great� That’s the community of scholars in action� But what I won’t accept is, I don’t agree with your reading because I know that you’re transgender and I think you’re projecting yourself onto your work� That’s not a scholarly critique and it’s not a particularly intellectually sound one� Sara Friedman: How has your life experience affected your trajectory as a scholar? Laurie Marhoefer: It’s quite striking to me, and fascinating, to be honest, that I wrote my whole first book without reading any trans studies at all. I want to blame myself and not my graduate program� But as a historical note, I went to graduate school at a program that specialized in the history of sexuality and Trans German Studies, A Conversation 59 DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0004 queer history and women’s history and African American history, in the 2000s� And we read zero trans scholarship� We read a little bit of queer scholarship� Not much, but some� Grad students would read lots of queer theory on their own outside of class, and put it on their comps lists, and faculty were supportive� A large number of the graduate students did queer history projects� One of my grad student colleagues was openly trans, too; I so respect that person, because it wasn’t easy� And yet, our profs didn’t assign me anything from trans studies, and neither did I find it myself. So my first book, my dissertation, I got to Berlin and immediately found trans people in the archive� Of course; they are in most archives� But I didn’t know what to make of them, or how to write about them� At the time, I didn’t think of myself as a trans person, I knew very little about trans politics, and I had not read any trans studies� Their transness didn’t seem central to my dissertation project - I didn’t understand how, actually, it was central, but the larger project would have to change to integrate that� And I was a bit nervous anyway about the dissertation being “important enough” as I said - bringing in these trans people didn’t seem like a way to fix that problem, either. Again, this was, oh, 2004, it seems like a whole world away, in terms of the huge attention to trans issues now, not all of it friendly� I was looking back at my first book recently; it’s about queer politics in the Weimar period and came out in 2015� I realized that some of my best examples of my overall argument in the book are stories about transgender women� What I was saying about democracy being this time of excitement and new sexual and gender freedom for people, the people who expressed that idea the most clearly in Weimar were not all trans women, but they’re disproportionately trans women. My best quotes are trans women, saying, the Revolution of 1918 really made things remarkably better for us. Now we can finally be ourselves, this is great� Which is one of my central parts of the argument of the overall book, but I never noticed, well, it’s particularly trans women who seem to feel that - other people feel it too, but a disproportionate number of the people who express that idea in vibrant and passionate language, even years later, are trans women� I think it was true for many cis people too, but if you were a trans woman it just hit you that much harder, because your situation was tough and 1918 brought such remarkable change - the first trans magazines, for example. For cisgender queers there’s an explosion of publications after 1918, but they did have stuff before. They weren’t starting from zero public print culture. Though, trans women surely read Ulrichs� Here’s where I need to integrate Ulrichs; see how I fall down on the job! That’s what is exciting about trans studies, I am telling you� Old dogs have to learn new tricks� 60 Sara Friedman and Laurie Marhoefer DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0004 Anyway, I’m now revisiting Weimar� To just write about the trans history there. It’s only about five pages in my first book; fast forward about ten years, and it seems so obvious to me that it should be its own book� The material that I nearly cut from the dissertation, and gave so little space to, then� Actually, I’m glad I only figured it out now, you know? The great thing about writing a book is, with luck you can write another book, a better one, and as time goes on, you learn more� Everything is a work in progress� Everybody write the book you're writing now, go for it! You can write the other book later� Sara Friedman: I think that is important to hear! What do you think is special about this particular moment that we’re writing in? Laurie Marhoefer: Well, I’m revising this interview just after the 2024 presidential election in the United States - full disclosure, I made a few additional updates about six months into Trump’s second administration, but we first talked before the election, and much of what we said was about that moment, before the 2024 election, which was a turning point, for the US and trans politics� In the 2024 election, the far right won its biggest gains in the US in at least one hundred years� It campaigned on transphobia� Some of its advertising was downright hateful towards trans people, dehumanizing� And in the month after the election, the consensus in the mainstream press was that that worked, and a lot of Blue State commentators blamed trans people for the big loss� Meanwhile, the far right proceeded to demonize trans people, and to go after us, such as in the banning of a new Congresswoman from bathrooms in federal office buildings, and vitriolic anti-trans executive orders in the first days of the new administration, the summary dismissal of trans people from military service, the yanking of funding from LGBTQ+ community organizations, all sorts of efforts to stamp out trans people altogether� All this has been devastating to trans people� We’re a small group� Sometimes it feels like we don’t have many allies at all, and a lot of mainstream media outlets do not cover it - the New York Times is particularly bad at covering it, and that’s what all my cis friends read� Since Biden’s election, the American Right has come after trans rights in a way that hasn’t happened before in history� It’s been catastrophic, it brought all sorts of draconian restrictions, anti-trans legislation, saying kids can’t play sports or get medical care� In Florida trans people are banned from airport bathrooms and many trans adults got their healthcare cut off, etc. There’s a website called Trans Legislation Tracker - 143 bills were introduced in 2021. But then, if you look at this year, so far, there are 580 bills that have been introduced just this year (2024)� I think a lot of people don’t get this, but it’s not that trans people are advocating for new accommodations and getting turned down� It’s that basic accommodations we have had in the US, and most countries, for generations, are getting Trans German Studies, A Conversation 61 DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0004 taken away� Such as, access to bathrooms in public buildings� It’s not like I can just use the women’s bathroom - all my legal documentation says I’m a guy, and I look like a guy, if I go into a women’s bathroom, the people there will understandably be alarmed� Someone might even call the cops� What will I tell the cops, that I’m a transgender guy? I don’t have any identification that says I’m female, because I am not� It’s a catch-22 and they know it� It just means I can’t use the bathroom� It’s embarrassing� Another accommodation we’ve had for many years is to be able to change legal documents to reflect our actual sex identifications. That has existed, with a lot less fanfare than you might think, for generations - there’s a French police regulation from Napoleon’s day that allows it for people assigned female at birth, it’s that old� They might take that away. (Update: in its first year, the second Trump administration did, making it impossible for trans people to get updated passports, and essentially banning visas for non-US citizens who are trans�) Access to health care, ditto� That’s a very old practice, well-established, supported by all the major medical associations� That very well may be banned by many states; several red states have already banned it for people under 18, and in a few weeks the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to those bans and may very well affirm them. (Update: it did, in US v. Skrmetti �) Trans people could be booted out of the miliary, even after decades of service, discharged just for being trans and losing the benefits they worked decades to earn� (Update: they were�) It is also possible that trans topics in higher education will come under fire, that you’ll be told not to teach a class with “trans” in the title� With all of this, the stakes are high for this scholarship. It’s offering an accurate account of our world, in which gender variant people exist, and thrive, and are not threatening predators, as the far right makes us out to be� It’s also offering modes of thought that advance the whole field of German Studies. Sara Friedman: I’m always struck by how focused these right-wing fears tend to be, how attached they are to certain spaces and issues� And it seems like the battles they choose to fight are disconnected from the concerns of people who actually experience violence� Laurie Marhoefer: Yeah, yeah, right? That’s such a good point� Yeah� Trans people, and disproportionately trans people of color, are subjected to really high levels of violence, largely by cisgender people� Sara Friedman: Apropos of that, what is the place of rage and perhaps also grief in scholarship? How do we account for that? Laurie Marhoefer: That combination can be so generative; two of my favorite books in trans history are engaged with rage and grief, and the sense of justice denied, and an intractable demand for justice� One is Jules Gill-Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child , how that book opens, it’s so powerful, and 62 Sara Friedman and Laurie Marhoefer DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0004 then C� Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides , the opening a reflection on the devastating death of Blake Brockington, again, really powerful and, also, helpful in centering the scholarly enterprise on what f…ing matters� This contrasts, for me, with work that obsesses on, is there a historical transgender identity or not, and then stops there� One way that scholarship on rage and grief can go is to give us another way to reframe death by suicide as a public health problem, which seems to me a necessary, long-overdue reframe, and then seeing how utterly morally bankrupt is all the banging on about trans kids, who are at disproportionate risk for suicide, like, bathroom bans and sports bans - or even, stripping away awards a trans person won at sports, just because she’s trans - all that is crap for their mental health� It’s terrible public health policy, aside from being just simply unethical, and mean, and weirdly obsessed with someone else’s gender� Sara Friedman: Going perhaps from the personal to the theoretical, I was wondering if you could speak a bit on how trans studies connects to other fields, like critical race, Black, Indigenous, and postcolonial studies? Laurie Marhoefer: Trans studies as a field, there are strong interconnections with critical race theory, Black, native, and postcolonial studies� Germanists also are working those fields. One place people could go for this is Transgender Studies Quarterly ; it has done some awesome special issues� Sara Friedman: Can you talk about challenges to the field? Laurie Marhoefer: Yeah, I would just say, one challenge is, peer reviewers can be tough, in a way that isn’t productive� This happens for queer scholarship, too� When you’re peer reviewing scholarship, and you’re not in-field for that scholarship, you tend to be very careful around those issues about which you don’t have training� This norm at times falls away for queer and trans scholarship, I’m not sure why but I think it’s because people just sort of don’t think there’s a field there anyway, so they feel empowered to weigh in about it, even when they don’t have a clue� A perhaps related problem is, at times reviewers can be somewhat flippantly dismissive, or even hostile. Sometimes a more rigorous academic practice, under the editor’s stewardship, could help with that - if the reviewer is just refusing to accept something, let’s all look at the source in question and decide, let’s do the due diligence, because at times that will open it up, you see that the author is not making this up, and the refusal to accept the author’s conclusion is not about what’s in the archive, it’s that the reviewer has a mental block here and it’s not a mental block grounded in a scholarly concern they have, it’s something else� This is on editors - not lightly do I add to the huge demands on them, but this is really something they can help with, to the benefit of the field - for editors to take care when selecting reviewers, specifically about, does this reviewer have a good foundation in queer and/ or trans Trans German Studies, A Conversation 63 DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0004 scholarship? Are they really qualified to review this? If they agreed to review and they’re balking at the piece, and I’m worried it’s not because of a scholarly concern, do I have time to look at the material myself, to possibly read in queer and trans studies a little, and to make a good call? There’s a certain amount of hostility out there towards trans people� At times, that gets into peer review, and that’s not going to be good for anyone� At the same time, we absolutely need editors to send stuff for review, even it takes more time than they might have to spend on another piece, and I thank them for doing that� Another challenge, which is not as big of a problem, is that trans scholarship is becoming kind of hot - though, with the dramatic change under Trump 2, this may no longer be the case� The core reason it got hot, however, is what I have been talking about: it opens novel and fascinating avenues for thought� And this goes for me, too, but I think also it’s important for those of us who are coming to the field now to make sure that we really read the field and read the whole field , not what just came out yesterday in the field. Ask ourselves, have we done due diligence, and also, have we given credit to the scholars who started these fields, and who worked in them before we came along? Some of them put their careers on the line to start the field. For me, some older work, and new work by people who have been in the field a long time and/ or founded the field, that’s been important, includes that by Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, Sandy Stone, and Jay Prosser, to name just some scholars� To be a bit more specific, and in this I’ll limit myself to my own discipline, I've noticed that historians, we have a tendency to - well, it starts with, we find transness in the archive� And we’re psyched� (Seriously, it happens a lot; I was revising this text and a friend texted because she found a trans person in her archive totally unexpectedly. That is not the first time that’s happened.) And then, we’re chugging along, we’re writing about it� But the next step should be, go to Transgender Studies Quarterly or the various versions of the Transgender Studies Reader , read some of the texts people have returned to again and again, ask someone in the field for help, for what to read. Because there already are historians and historically minded people in other disciplines who have been working on this for a long time� You don’t have to reinvent the wheel� Like, here we are in 2024, and I see that you made this wheel� Go you� It’s not a bad wheel� But FYI that wheel was also invented by someone else and in the 1990s, it was critiqued, in the 1990s, and since then, in trans studies, no one rolls along on that wheel without at least referring to that critique� And friend, I actually think, your wheel could be even better, if only you’d engage the field of trans studies� If anyone wants to see an example of a historian doing this, look at my first book! I invented some wheels on my own and they suck; I wish I could totally redo those parts of the book� 1 64 Sara Friedman and Laurie Marhoefer DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0004 Sara Friedman: And among the scholars who have been working on this for a long time, we should also remember those who are contingent faculty, who were forced out of the profession, or whose ideas were shot down right from the start� Our discipline tends to be rather conservative� These initial pioneers, the people working in the 1990s who invented the wheel, they were incredibly brave� Laurie Marhoefer: Yeah, yeah, totally! Let’s end with the bravery of the people in the 1990s; that’s a good place to end, and to start� Notes 1 Marhoefer, Sex and the Weimar Republic 5—61� Works Cited Amin, Kadji� “We Are All Non-Binary: A Brief History of Accidents�” Representations 158.1 (2022): 106—19. 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