One of the interesting things Manion does in this book -- though I believe she attributes the practice to someone previous -- is using "trans" as in "to trans gender" as a verb. (I don't think trans has quite made it through all the grammatical parts of speech yet, but it's worked its way through preposition to adjective to noun, so verb was a reasonable next step.) Sometimes a particular bit of imagery or re-framing can click an idea into place, and trans-as-verb did that for me.
I've been working on how to express and explain a unifying historical concept between female same-sex desire and trans-masculine identities and performance. The current view of sexuality and gender as being completely independent axes becomes a hindrance to understanding how people in history understood their own and other lives. It also encourages the treatment of historical persons as the "property" of specific modern identities--and those identities as a scarce and valuable resource. It's part of what encourages people to see a sharp divide in history between "femme-femme" love and desires/relationships that evoke a masculine-feminine dynamic.
If "trans" is an adjective or a noun, it tends to be treated as an either/or category. One is either trans or cis. A binary. But if "trans" is a verb, then it's an action that can be done to different degrees, either intermittently or continuously. One can trans gender a little or a lot, and it was still transing gender if one stops doing it. It's no longer a defined border to be crossed; a different territory to be inhabited. (My imagery is flashing on the classical Roman regional definitions of trans-alpine and cis-alpine Gaul: territories defined by their relationships both to Rome and to the mountain barrier.) Viewed in this context, one can understand any type of behavior, presentation, or inherent characteristic that does not align with a culture's established gender archetypes as performing the action of "transing" without the need to make a judgment about whether that action has effected a change in the person's category status.
This is a way of framing the idea that I need to think about some more and explore further, but I think it could be very useful for discussing historic lives without hitting some of the trip-lines that move the discussion into arguing over who "owns" those lives.
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