In the early twentieth century, activists and sexologists across central Europe, Britain, and the United States proposed that there existed a “third sex” (also called “urnings”), defined as people born in one sexed body with the soul of the opposite. Central to the making of this category was the notion that throughout all human society, such “urnings” had existed, and that “civilized” people needed to recover this category in order to ensure the progressive development of white civilization. As one not ably wrote, the path through the upwards development of civilization ran through white people’s capacity (as indigenous people inevitably died out) to cultivate “Red hearts in a white world,” in other words, to take the best practices of indigenous people, while be moaning but ultimately underwriting their eradication.

In this experimental paper, I will introduce the writings of some of the most influential urnings, including Edward Carpenter and J. William Lloyd to explore the complicated relationship between early twentieth-century conceptions of gender-non-normativity, imperialism, and indigenous erasure. From there, I will offer some provocations for how grappling with the imbrications between the emergent category of transness and settlercolonialism could reshape how we conceive of and do public history. How, inother words, can we hold both the liberatory potential and reactionaryimbrications of early queer thought? How can foregrounding this originary violence challenge us to forge more liberatory decolonial public history and transnational solidarities in a global moment of anti-trans and “anti-gender” panic?

Dani Joslyn (she/they) is a visiting lecturer of American Studies at Barnard College and a scholar of sex and social movements in the long nineteenth century. They received their PhD in History in 2025 from New York University, where her work was supported by the New York Public Library, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the Social Science Research Foundation. She has an article in revise and resubmit status with Modern Intellectual History, and has writing forthcoming in Public Books and Time Magazine, in addition to existing publications in Spectre Journal, The Revealer, and Religion Dispatches.