"Trans Time Travel is staggeringly beautiful. Thomas Page McBee’s writing is fluid, cinematic, and deeply felt, lingering in the body long after the final page. In exploring the cycles of visibility and repression, he exquisitely weaves together a multitude of trans voices, revealing the interconnectedness of our collective journey toward gender liberation. This book is a powerful meditation on transformation, a reminder that despite all efforts at erasure, our expansiveness persists. It is an urgently needed and remarkable achievement that will forever transcend time and space."—Elliot Page, author of Pageboy

“Few writers move as effortlessly between the deeply personal and the sweep of history as Thomas Page McBee. Trans Time Travel is rigorously intelligent without ever sacrificing its humanity, precise without losing its sense of wonder. A work of extraordinary generosity and curiosity, weaving memoir, reporting, philosophy, and cultural history into something wholly its own. This is the book I have been waiting for, to be able to share with those who need it—whether someone needs to see their own experience and ancestry reflected back or to step into a new way of relating. It's a volume that strips away the insanity of the current cultural discourse around transness, distilling it into something necessary and, well, timeless.”—Lena Dunham, author of Famesick and Not That Kind of Girl

Trans Time Travel will be published Jan 12, 2027 by Scribner (US) and Canongate (UK) and is available for pre-order now.

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, McBee gives us the lens of trans time—nonlinear, multiple, cyclical—a radical perspective that opens up new ways of seeing both the past and the future.

Exhausted by a political cycle dominated by anti-trans cruelty and convinced that the nation is asking the wrong questions about gender, McBee sets out to ask better ones, bringing readers across the country and through time. Blending memoir, reportage, history, and cultural criticism, he digs deep into our national archive, tracing the surprising ways stories of gender variance appear in the media and public record—and the alternating cycle of liberation and repressive backlash that leads, again and again, to a collective historical amnesia.

Seeking to recover what has been lost, and offering an expansive, vivid vision of our shared past, Trans Time Travel moves from the Public Universal Friend, an 18th-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 19th-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 clear-sighted, hopeful way forward.