I have several quite recent publications (the current book is from 2021) that address the intersection/overlap of female same-sex encounters and trans-masculine experiences in history. I thought it would make an interesting thematic group to cluster them as a series. (It may take more than one month, though I'm going to try to do multiple posts each week to get through more quickly.) A great many of the pulications the LHMP has previously covered in the range of cross-dressing, gender disguise, gender change, and transgender identity are rather dated. My perception is that academic work on the history of gender identity has shifted more significantly in the last 20 years even than work on lesbian history (and the field of lesbian history has shifted a lot!).
On the LHMP twitter account, I posted a thread on Transgender Day of Visibility about how I consider it impossible to study lesbian history without also studying transgender history. I hold this position not only because the subjects and themes of that study can often be difficult or impossible to distinguish, but also because the understandings that people in the past held regarding gender and sexuality made connections between the two that are vastly different from our modern framings of gender identity and sexuality.
If you go looking in European history for an understanding of female same-sex desire that excludes all suggestion of "desire for a woman is an inherently masculine attribute," then you have excluded a vast amount of the data. (This is the same trap as looking for an understanding of female same-sex desire that requires the position, "lesbian identity can only exist where there is solid evidence of genital sexual activity." But that's a rant for a different day.) Regardless of their subjective internal understanding of their gender identity, it is a regular (though not universal) theme in European historic contexts that sapphic desire implied some degree of innate masculinity. It was part of the landscape they lived in, and therefore it must be included in the scope of our study.
That said, the set of books I'm embarking on currently focus on some very different angles of the trans-masculine/lesbian interface and operate with different default framings. This is part of the reason for studying them together as a set.
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