Digging up the past

Together with their podcast partner Oran Keaveny, Iarf hlaith O’Connell is rethinking his relationship with Irish queer history as their identity has evolved. While previously they felt represented by iconic lesbian figures, are the trans-masc heroes they discover as equally affirming?

“I thought I had found my place in Irish history as a lesbian, but then I transitioned and I had to start all over again.” This is how Oran Keaveny opens their latest iteration of the In Awe of Mná podcasting project. The project began in 2019 when myself and Oran met as undergraduates in UCD, both of us coming at the world from very different places but uniting instantly over our two great lovesIreland and lesbians.

At the time, I had been ‘out’ as a lesbian for over five years, whereas Oran had just recently come to the term and as a natural result, we spent a lot of time discussing lesbian culture and lesbian history. While we were heavily engaged in and enjoying our self-taught lesbian studies, we were simultaneously lamenting the fact that so much of what we were talking about was coming from a British or American context. So, as many similarly annoying people had done before us and have done since, we decided to make a podcast about it. We released a handful of episodes where we interviewed prominent Irish lesbians and bisexual women about their personal experiences of lesbianism in Ireland–as well as in the context of their varying fields–the idea being that we could create a space for ourselves in both contemporary Ireland and within its history.

Five years later, myself and Oran are still annoying, still friends and still completely obsessed with Ireland and its lesbians. Nonetheless, we are very different people. We both have new names, have left Ireland and have taken on new identities to the ones we were expressing in 2019. As a result, when Oran approached me with the idea of revisiting the podcast from a trans-masc perspective I was very resistant. It can be difficult to look back on yourself pre-transition, and even more difficult to look back on yourself at 20. Whereas Oran was keen to still find their place in both queer and Irish history as a transmasc person, I was less interested in dragging up the past. Oran’s idea was to search for Irish trans figures in history as we had done for the original podcast and see if they could again find a place for their current strain of queerness, begging the question: “How much longer can I keep holding out for a hero in Irish trans-masc history?”

Without giving too much away, Oran did find some explicit Irish trans representation through the lens of Dr James Barry, although this was not exactly what they had hoped for. Dr James Barry was a trans man born in Cork who went on to become an extremely proud military surgeon in the British army, or as I summarised to Oran, “Another example of a British military, colonising bastard.” This conflict of interest sparked questions for us surrounding how much representation actually matters, but more specifically, does the representation of an individual identity matter if values of community and solidarity are not illustrated through it? Although myself and Oran identify as trans-masc now, does that mean that we can see ourselves in someone like Dr James Barry before the likes of Margaret Skinnedar and the other revolutionary lesbians we spoke about in the original series?

If you would like to hear us explore these questions further, along with a conversation on the life of Dr James Barry between Oran and Oxford historian Eliott RoseThompson, the revised episode is available now on the QueerAF podcasting channel presented in conjunction with the Trans+ History Week collective.