Trans Time Travel: A Journey into American History

by Thomas Page McBee

Award-winning author Thomas Page McBee takes readers on a kaleidoscopic journey into the American archive, illuminating four centuries of gender-variant history—and the cost, to all of us, of its erasure.

In this groundbreaking, urgent book, Thomas Page McBee uses the lens of trans time—nonlinear, multiple, cyclical—offering up radically new ways of seeing our past and our future.

Blending memoir, reportage, history, and cultural criticism, Trans Time Travel digs deep into our national archive, tracing the surprising ways stories of gender variance appear in the media and public record and the cycles of liberation and oppression that inform a collective historical amnesia. In a journey across the country and through centuries, the book moves from the story of the Public Universal Friend, an eighteenth-century genderless preacher and evangelist who taught and embodied gender equality; to Western outlaw and sex symbol Harry Allen, who “smashed hearts” up and down the West Coast; to an overdue re-reporting of the life and murder of Brandon Teena, sensationalized first in newspaper accounts and then in the cult ’90s indie film Boys Don’t Cry; to Mary Jones, a sex worker in nineteenth century New York, whose arrest made her a tabloid sensation of the newfound penny presses; to the pioneering work of midcentury philanthropist and psychonaut Reed Erickson.

Personal, profound, and perspective-shifting, Trans Time Travel reckons with a hostile present by looking back—and offers a clearsighted, hopeful way forward.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

256 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication January 12, 2027

About the author

Thomas Page McBee’s Lambda award-winning memoir, Man Alive, was named a best book of 2014 by NPR Books, BuzzFeed, Kirkus, and Publisher's Weekly. His “refreshing [and] radical” (The Guardian) new book, Amateur, a reported memoir about learning how to box in order to understand masculinity’s tie to violence, was published in August to wide acclaim.
Thomas was the first transgender man to box in Madison Square Garden, a “masculinity expert” for VICE, and the author of the columns “Self-Made Man” for the Rumpus and “The American Man” for Pacific Standard. His current column, "Amateur," is for Condé Nast's Them. A former senior editor at Quartz, his essays and reportage have appeared in the New York Times, Playboy, and Glamour.
Thomas has taught courses at the City University of New York’s graduate school of journalism; served as an advisor to the Knight Foundation/West Virginia University journalism school reporting project, 100 Days in Appalachia; and worked as a television writer for the forthcoming Netflix show, Tales of the City.
He is passionate about the importance of diversity in media, and speaks and teaches about related topics all over the country. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife.