I discovered Jen Manion’s powerful book, Female Husbands: A Trans History while perusing a feminist book club’s reading list. The history of anything piques my interest. As a citizen of the world and as someone with dearly held trans people in my life, I want to learn more.

Manion (Associate Professor of History at Amherst College) writes that, “as a historian, it is my mission to try to understand how female husbands understood themselves and were perceived by others in the terms of defining gender and sexual difference than were available to them in their lifetimes.”