“Both Your Sexes”: A Non-Binary Approach to Gender History, Trans Studies and the Making of the Self in Modern Britain

Abstract

Using the life-writing of historian and playwright Muriel St. Clare Byrne (1895-1983), this article develops the concept of a non-binary historical methodology. It argues that historians should take gender as a historically contingent category to allow alternative logics of embodiment, selfhood, desire, and relationality to be more clearly seen. Drawing on trans studies, the article situates Byrne within contemporary conversations about universal bi-sexuality within sexology and psychoanalysis. Her rewriting of the psychosexual model in her memoir, which underwrote a claim to ‘both her sexes’, represents one of the paths foreclosed by the mid-century turn to the gender/sex/sexuality model.