Sasha de Buyl

What sparked your interest in this subject?

Growing up, my family were very spread out, and I didn’t have a strong sense of connection to the older generations. We were tucked away in the middle of rural Ireland but my mother’s family had spanned the globe in their migration. A distance of continents, coupled with multiple language barriers, meant I felt very removed from my grandparents and their generation. When I started to examine my own gender identity, I, like many before me, felt distance and isolation from other trans people who had come before. To an academic outsider, it felt as if the threads of trans history had been set down and the link between generations had been severed. A passing comment from a relative made me wonder if there had been anyone like me in my family, and this started the process of wondering how you could ever recover something like that.

Since then, I’ve been fascinated in how trans lives are preserved – not just a dry note in an official record, but the messy, sticky subjectivity of life well-lived – in historical records, and how fiction operates in this space between.

What’s the most surprising thing your research has taught you about your subject?

As part of my research, it’s been necessary for me to immerse myself in trans history and to learn as much I can, not just about individual examples of trans people but also about the developing field of trans historical study. I’ve relied on the brilliant scholarship of a new generation of historians and academics who are seeking out and carefully reading sources that challenge expected notions of transgender life in the past.

One of the most heartening things I’ve discovered is a multitude of sources and examples, across time periods and geographic regions, that provide evidence of trans people forming and living in community, both with other trans people and as part of wider communities. It made me realise that I had an expectation that any trans and gender non-conforming individuals would have lived very isolated lives, but this is certainly not the case!

What’s the most surprising thing your research has taught you about yourself?

That I make unexpected connections between subjects and that’s a good thing! Ultimately, my project is about how generations of trans people connect across time and space without the traditional methods people might usually rely on, such as record-keeping, ephemera, generational links, storytelling, and so this has proved to be quite useful.

If you were your own supervisor, what advice would you give yourself?

That I don’t have to do four PhDs (Creative Writing, History, Gender Studies, English Literature) in order to make this the best possible project, I can focus on what’s relevant to me.

Which researcher would you particularly like to spotlight?

I’d love to spotlight Isobel Harvey, a member of my cohort, who is based at the University of Glasgow and working on her thesis, ‘A Cultural and Natural History of Scottish Peatlands’. We had some fascinating conversations earlier this year about how bogs experience temporality in a non-linear fashion and I can’t wait to hear more about how her project is developing.