All About Yves
by Yves Rees
Allen & Unwin
Dr Yves Rees is a Lecturer in History at la Trobe University, has a regular history segment on ABC Radio and co-hosts Archive Fever podcast. The award-winning writer Yves is trans and uses they/them pronouns, volunteers at Transgender Victoria and is a co-founder of the transgender writing collective Spilling the T.
It was not until 2018, at 30 years of age, that they understood that they were transgender and, after accidently outing themselves on the internet, they had realised finally it was “undeniable”. As much as they wished it wasn’t true, they knew in their bones that they had to relearn to live as a different gender and also go back through their life to identify stepping stones of transness that had been there all along even though they didn’t have the words at the time.
Yves sets about analysing the messiness of bodies, gender and identity as they struggle to find their place in the polymorphous world – walking blind, “groping their way through unchartered space, fighting fear of the unknown with every step”.
Delving into history, they find 1960s laws in New York that stipulate female-assigned people need to wear at least three items of women’s clothing (and vice versa for male assigned people), enabling police to make arrests on their regular raids of gay bars. They also find that many cultures have honoured people with two spirits.
Finding they can no longer live as a woman, becoming a trans-man or trans-masculine would solve a lot of problems, but as a feminist they have no desire to enter the parallel universe of men. The binary world makes it difficult for people who don’t want to tick the F or the M box on the census, or anywhere else.
Yves breaks through historical and cultural impositions to navigate beyond the binary to a place there “we’re all just bodies, living and dying, in infinite marvellous configurations”. They have the words now, and they share their personal explorations for others to see beyond the stereotypes that limit our world and the people who inhabit it.
Lezly Herbert
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