The Historical Future of Trans Literature

Whatever happens against custom we say is against Nature, yet there is nothing whatsoever which is not in harmony with her. May Nature’s universal reason chase away that deluded ecstatic amazement which novelty brings to us. —Michel de Montaigne

If you were trying to get anywhere in the late thirteenth century, the Hereford Mappa Mundi wouldn’t have been particularly helpful; the map is rife with topographical omissions, compressions, and errors—the most egregious of which is perhaps the mislabeling of Africa as Europe and vice versa. Of course, as any medievalist will tell you, mappae mundi weren’t intended for cartographic accuracy anyway. Rather, they were pictorial histories, encyclopedias of the world’s mythological and theological narratives, records of medical fact and fable. Notable places—Carthage, Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Jericho—appeared, but their placement on the map emphasized their symbolic import rather than their geographical specificity. Thus, Jerusalem, at the very center of this map, was the moral center of the medieval world. The map’s graphic histories were organized chronologically, with the outermost strata of the circular map representing the deepest, most sedimented layers of recorded history and theology.

Bounding Africa, due east of the Nile, was a corridor of oddities, a single-file parade of queer embodiments and types: the Blemmyae and Troglodytes, Himantopodes, Cynocephali, Amazons, Marmini, and Monocoli. These foreign, “abnormal” people, marginally situated in this uniquely “African” space (though