Transgender Day of Remembrance at Gothenburg City Museum

The Tuesday Club highlights current events with a cultural history link. On November 20, Sam Holmqvist lectures at the City Museum ( Göteborgs Stadsmuseum) to pay attention to the Transgender Day of Remembrance. Sam Holmqvist is literary historian and author of the first book on Swedish transgender history, Transformationer (2017).

Here are three quick questions to Sam Holmqvist.

Why is this an important day?

Transgender is an at the same time invisible and reviewable group – often the majority society tries to pretend that we do not to exist, as often the same majority society is provoked by our existence. Transgender Day of Remembrance is an attempt to remember and honour our own, in our own way.

Transgenders have always been, but are invisible in history. How have you worked to get these stories?

In particular, by researching and writing. I have written a doctoral thesis (Transformationer) that deals with what we today call trans transcribed in fiction in the nineteenth century. While I was working on that project, I also began to interest myself in how people have lived beyond their gender standards, and how people have looked at gender and gender exceedances.

What can we look forward to on Tuesday?

My lecture will be about how gender crossers lived before the word transgender existed. I will tell you a bit about how gender has been perceived in history, and what opportunities there were to live and identify outside the categories man and woman. The story is full of people that we would call transgender today. Many have (open or sneaky) alternated between gender identities and expressions. Others have lived as a different sex throughout their adult lives than they were attributed to at birth. Sometimes stories about transgender people have attracted a lot of attention. Other times they have not brought any appearance at all, or even noticed. The only thing we know for sure is that as long as there are limits there is something that is on the verge, and as long as there has been gender there have been people who did not fit into them.

Tuesday club: We remember trans history ( Tisdagsklubben: Vi minns transhistoria)
Tue 20 Nov 15.00-16.00 (Sign Language Interpreter) at Göteborgs Stadsmuseum, Sweden.