Black On Both Sides A Racial History Of Trans Identity — What It Actually Is
"Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity" by Rhamonda C. Nixon is a 2020 nonfiction book that traces the historical entanglement of Blackness and trans identity in America. Nixon argues that the way we currently understand race and gender were co-constructed through similar processes of social control, medicalization, and legal categorization. The book isn't a how-to manual. It's a historical and theoretical argument. I first picked this up around 2021 when a graduate seminar required engagement with Black trans history. I went in expecting another surface-level survey. It wasn't. Nixon's approach is dense, rooted in archives, court documents, and medical literature from the 19th and early 20th centuries. She specifically examines figures like Alice B. Smith, a Black intersex person whose 1896 divorce case revealed how the law struggled to place people who didn't fit binary categories. That case alone should make any serious student stop and reconsider how "normal" was legally defined.
Black On Both Sides A Racial History Of Trans Identity — Core Arguments
The book's central claim is straightforward enough but easy to misunderstand if you skim it. Nixon contends that anti-Black racism and transphobia share a common mechanism: both rely on policing bodily boundaries and enforcing categorical purity. She draws on Audre Lorde's phrase "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" and applies it to how mainstream (read: white) LGBTQ+ movements have historically excluded Black trans people while piggybacking on civil rights frameworks without addressing race. Here's the part people miss: Nixon doesn't just say "trans history is also Black history." She makes a specific archival argument that the modern concepts of race and gender weren't parallel developments but intertwined ones. Medical texts from the 1800s routinely described Black bodies in terms that would later become standard language for describing intersex and trans people. Terms like "deviation," "degeneracy," and "irregularity" circulated across both racial and gender/sexuality medicine. This isn't a loose metaphor. It's documented in primary sources Nixon spent years compiling.
Who Should Read This and Who Won't
This book assumes you are comfortable with academic prose and historical methodology. If you're looking for a personal memoir or an accessible primer on trans identity, this isn't it. The writing is analytical. The citations are extensive. The index alone is worth the purchase price if you're doing research. Where it falls short — and I say this without hedging — is that the book spends relatively little time on contemporary lived experience. It's primarily concerned with 19th-century and early 20th-century archives. If you want to know how these historical dynamics play out in current policy debates or modern activism, you'll need to supplement this with other works. Nixon herself has noted this gap in later interviews.
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Practical Takeaways for Researchers and Students
If you're using this for a paper, thesis, or research project, here's what actually matters: Nixon's archival methodology is the most useful part of the book. She shows you how to read hostile or pathologizing sources against the grain. This is a transferable skill. When you encounter 19th-century medical literature that describes Black intersex people using dehumanizing language, the trick isn't to dismiss the source — it's to extract the factual content (names, dates, legal outcomes, physical descriptions) from the oppressive framework. I ran into a specific problem when I was cross-referencing Nixon's Alice B. Smith case with original court records. The district court transcripts had been misfiled under a different case name in the county archive. I spent three days tracking it down before realizing the index itself contained an error — the name was recorded as "Smith v. Smith" rather than including the plaintiff's full name. The workaround was straightforward but tedious: I searched the adjacent case docket numbers in the same volume. Correct case was filed three entries back. This happens more often than archivists like to admit. Always check the physical binding, not just the digital catalog.
The Download Situation
The book is published by University of Minnesota Press. It's available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook formats. I'd recommend the ebook if you plan to highlight and search text heavily, since the print edition's index and endnotes are excellent but not always digitally cross-linked. Legitimate sources are the publisher's website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local library's digital platform. There is no free official download. Any site offering a PDF for free is distributing it illegally, and the quality is usually poor — missing pages, bad OCR on citations, that sort of thing. Not worth the hassle. If Nixon's historical focus leaves you wanting more on present-day dynamics, Bruno Lothario's work on Black trans history in the early 20th century complements it well. So does Immanuel Lewis's research on how eugenics movements used similar rhetoric about gender and race. For a more contemporary perspective, MychalDenise Baker's Everyone's Got Something tackles some of the same themes from a completely different angle — more personal, less archival, but essential reading if you're building a working knowledge of this area. The field moves fast. Nixon's book came out in 2020 and already has successors building on its framework. That's a good sign — it means the work is being taken seriously and extended rather than sitting unchallenged on a shelf.
