Best practices around gendering people in the past

One of the challenges inherent in queer history is one of language - like, can we label someone who lived hundreds of years ago a 'trans' person, when that category didn't exist? In that case, most historians agree that when we do that, we're sort of applying a way of being, of understanding oneself, that didn't exist for that person at that time. We also see this in Averill's work when she chooses to use categories like "men who had sex with men" instead of labeling those individuals "gay men." Gay is a modern category that has a certain meaning to us today — but it had an entirely different meaning in the early 20th century. Then again, those modern categories do allow us to see and make sense of people in the past that perhaps we might have overlooked or understood differently. All this to say, this makes finding the right language to talk about female husbands complicated. For this reason, Manion does not call these individuals "trans." Instead, Manion uses the word "trans" as a verb rather than a noun — you may have even noticed that we've used that formulation a couple times already here. When a person assigned female at birth chose to live as a man, that was an action - and we can identify that action without applying that person to a category or making assumptions about the way they identified. To quote here from Manion, "to say someone transed or was transing gender signifies a process or practice without claiming to understand what it meant to that person or asserting any find of fixed identity on them.