What Color Is Trans? Notes on Trans Historiography in the Afterlife of the East African Slave Trade

What Color Is Trans?Notes on Trans Historiography in the Afterlife of the East African Slave Trade Sahin Acikgoz (bio) In today's world where trans communities are increasingly subjected to a myriad of administrative, legal, political, economic, and sociocultural violence, one might consider any attempt to write a nonsecular trans historiography predicated on Black eunuchs a total misnomer, at best, and an epistemic violence, at worst. How could the history of formerly non-Muslim Black eunuchs of the Ottoman Empire, one might be tempted to ask, tell us anything relevant about trans communities in Turkiye and the Middle East, let alone around the globe? In essence, such interrogation derives its currency from four principal postulations, the first three being more explicitly stated than the last one. First, transness only becomes legible and intelligible within the context of agency and consent. Second, transness is a modern concept; therefore, to designate that which is premodern as trans is an epistemological imposition and anachronism par excellence. Third, gender is the uppermost intersectional axis whereby transness is elucidated and identified, rendering such constituents as religion and race auxiliary at best. Last but not least, the epistemic and theoretical universe within which transness circulates and becomes meaningful as a category is located in the secular global North. The global South's function is to provide a reservoir of case studies to support that universe rather than offer conceptual and/or theoretical tools to participate in the knowledge production process. In this brief article, I argue that the ramifications of these postulations go far beyond creating a methodological cul-de-sac through their particular, that is, neocolonial framing of trans history. What is even more at stake indeed is the concomitant erasure of both geopolitics and the secular as ideology. Instead, I suggest that one reframe the terms of that interrogation and pose the questions as follows: How do different geographies and histories converge or intra-act (to use the Baradian term) [End Page 153] such that racial and religious alterity emerge as the chief constitutive markers of transness?1 And what would become of transness if trans historiography started with religion and race rather than gender?2 The trans (hi)story that I narrate in this piece starts with the non-Muslim Sudanese, Nubian, and Ethiopian children who got entangled in the messy, violent, and unpredictable webs of the East African slave trade, which not only destroyed numerous families from various ethnic groups but also systematically exploited their physical and intellectual labor. As Jane Hathaway states, these young children, who were part of a much larger population of slaves trafficked into the Ottoman Empire, were stolen, transported through various slave routes, mainly across the Red Sea, castrated, and sold to the empire.3 Since the so-called production of eunuchs was a costly, risky (due to the incredibly high death rates), and time-intensive process, eunuchs came with a higher price tag in comparison with uncastrated slaves from East Africa, indicative of just one of the many variegated workings of racial capitalism during this period.4 The Ottoman Empire, which started to become more actively involved in this slave trade in the fifteenth century, was, unsurprisingly, far from being the only polity that acquired these Black eunuchs, nor did it originate the practice in the first place.5 In fact, the empire drew largely on a variety of earlier Islamic polities as well as non-Muslim dynasties such as the Byzantines in its eunuch system, notwithstanding some structural and functional differences.6 Many of those children who survived this violent and forced castration process later converted to Islam and served in various capacities in different [End Page 154] territories of the empire. The Chief Harem Eunuchs even acquired tremendous political, religious, and economic power within the empire after the creation of the office of Chief Harem Eunuch in 1588 by Sultan Murad III.7 They were responsible for supervising the pious foundations for the holy cities (Mecca and Medina)8 and controlled dynastic reproduction.9 The burgeoning scholarship on the Chief Eunuchs has shed light on their role in dynastic and religious reproduction as well as their strategic proximity to the Ottoman sultans, which...