Manion was one of four historians who took part in a panel discussion now featured on the website for BBC History Magazine and BBC History Revealed.
“I think what’s been really exciting in the past decade is how much the LGBTQ community, and especially young people, has been really interested in our history,” said Manion, an associate professor of history and author of Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge, 2020). “I see it especially in the transgender community: people are really hungry to understand the longer lineage of these kinds of experiences, and what a trans life was like before modern times.”
Manion also commented on the “distrust within the queer community about what publishers and professional historians do with the records of our lives” and the importance of fighting against efforts to suppress and marginalize queer history.