As nonbinary trans and cis gay scholars, respectively, we queer the potential of a history of education committed to recovering trans, gender-nonconforming, and queer existences erased by Western colonial violence. Drawing on the case of António Custódio das Neves (1858–1888), born in Portugal and assigned female at birth but growing up male and called the "Woman Man" or "Man Woman", we confront colonialist erasure of such existences. Through "critical fabulation" (Saidiya Hartman) and "embodied re-membering" (Karen Barad), we develop a reparative trans* education history of António's experiences, venturing into what "could", "might", or "might yet have been". We work "with and against the archives" to address gaps and absences as dynamic tensions towards becoming. Indeed, trans or gender nonconforming experiences did (not) yet exist (if) only (differently) "at their intersection with institutions of disciplinary power" constraining the conditions of their im/possibility. Rejecting linear temporality and dominant historical narratives, we envisage "impossible stories" as "recombinant narratives" that tangle past, present, and future. Using trans as an "identity and analytic", we flesh out "trans*" experience anew from a situated mesh of time, place, age, gender, ethnicity, and class, resisting closure and foreclosure of "possibilities for justice-to-come". Thereby undoing radical differences of male/female, Self/Other, here/there, and now/then coemerged with Modern Western colonialist ventures, we make a broader case for historiography of education's need to trouble colonialisms that continue to haunt it as it reproduces systems of power sustaining a "grammar of violence" – of "cis colonial gender binaries – and "difference as apartheid".
Martins et al. (Tue,) studied this question.