At the first Australian Conference on Transsexualism, convened in 1979, a Dr Michael Ross declared that Australia had the highest incidence of transsexualism in the world. Whatever proportion the good doctor was observing, it must be immeasurably higher today; and yet until now there has been no formal history of gender-diverse Australians.

On one level, this is no surprise. Gender dysphoria is a subjective experience, its sufferers tending to hide their pain, and some historians consider it anachronistic to label our predecessors according to contemporary social understandings, not least since terminology shifts every generation. Conscious of these pitfalls, Noah Riseman has made a good stab at a difficult topic.

Transgender Australia: A history since 1910 grew out of Riseman’s previous book, Pride in Defence (2020), in which he and co-author Shirleene Robinson transcribed the stories of queer Australians in the military. As in that work, Riseman’s use of oral histories allows a multitude of trans voices to take centre stage, and he structures them to recount a history that can be loosely divided into eras of criminalisation, sexualisation, medicalisation, and liberation.