A few weeks ago, on one of the first truly waterlogged nights of the rainy season, I counted roughly six dozen people in the Oregon Historical Society’s lobby. The historian Peter Boag was in town to speak about his exhibit, Crossing Boundaries: Portraits of a Transgender West, which runs through January 5. He was impressed with the turnout, he said taking the podium, because of the rain and because historical society lectures don’t often count their audiences in the dozens. But he also applauded the crowd’s courageousness in showing up in support of telling transgender stories.

Transgender rights are a monumental political issue, throughout history but particularly now. Gender-affirming care makes the most headlines at present, but other issues, like health-care access and legal protections against gender discrimination, stem from legislative bodies refusing to acknowledge that trans people exist at all. Boag’s show addresses the root of these umbrella discriminations and argues that transgender identity was central to the formation of the American ideal—because it was formed against it.

The exhibit, which was first mounted at the Washington Historical Society, is based around Boag’s 2011 book Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past. Researching in the Pacific Northwest between the height of the gold rush, in 1850, and the solidification of the 48 contiguous states, in the 1910s, Boag uncovered an awesome number of erased and misrepresented stories of people who identified and lived lives, in a multitude of ways, outside of their assigned genders. Diving through archival newspapers and police and state records, he rewrites biographies of figures like Dr. Alan Hart, who received gender affirming surgery at the University of Oregon Medical School in Portland in 1918. Collected, these portraits work to correct transgender history and in turn influence modern thought.

“[I]t has sometimes been assumed that trans people did not exist in significant numbers prior to the modern era,” reads one panel in the exhibit, before landing pointedly in bold: “This is not true.”

At the talk, Boag, who is a professor of the history of the American West at Washington State University, mentioned the public discourse Brokeback Mountain launched in the aughts, when “gay” was the ubiquitous pejorative in middle schools. People watching Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal fall in love onscreen asked, Were there really gay cowboys? The question is heavy with generalizations. But, emphatically, yes. While his chronology ends 40 years before the movie takes place, Boag’s book and exhibit are filled with stories of people of all genders and sexual orientations working on ranches and chasing the promise of westward expansion. However, the way queer characters of any sort have been derided, scapegoated, or altogether ignored in media and historical record makes Boag’s project particularly difficult.

How to tell a story that wasn’t allowed to be told? Boag’s work cites dozens of century-old news clippings, which are exclusively framed with “get a load of this” sensationalism. “Joe Monaghan [sic] Was a Woman,” read an incredulous 1904 headline in The Boise Idaho Statesman, with the subtitle, “Death reveals a secret hidden from the world.” The obituary, which misspelled the name of the Oregon rancher who had settled in Idaho, made him a woman in men’s clothing, misgendering him and erasing his trans identity.

This hostile framing wipes transgender stories from posterity. But still more pernicious was the lack of officially recognized vocabulary to accurately record how people viewed themselves. Transgender, the modern term reflecting a person whose gender identity and expression differs from the gender they were assigned at birth, wasn’t used widely until the late twentieth century. In turn, practical reasons for cross-dressing—mainly women dressing as men to gain rights—were used to explain away trans identity.

Counterintuitively, Boag points to the origins of the terms hetero- and homosexual, in 1869, as the genesis of ongoing antiqueer attitudes. As soon as we had a word for homosexuality, it became an abnormality, something queer, odd, strange, weird. And not just socially: homosexuality, used as a blanket term lumping together any combination of divergent gender and sexual orientations, was medically viewed as a malady caused either by mutation or modern environmental factors of “urban decay.” This binary lined up with a flood of others that compounded to form the modern Western understanding of humans.

Until 1800, Boag argues in Re-Dressing, Western thought believed in what the historian Thomas Laqueur called the “one-sex model.” “Accordingly,” Boag writes, “males and females were viewed as just different forms of the same sex,” with corresponding external or internal sex organs. Historians debate this timeframe, and some argue that the shift to the modern, two-sex belief happened as early as 200 years prior. Nevertheless, establishing the male-female binary presented another hierarchy. It also cast gender as a biological fact rather than a manifestation of a person’s own experience. And establishing these two genders as logical opposites, the theory cemented male-female sex as correct, heteronormative, i.e., biologically “normal.”

At the same time, the frontier was “closing.” At the turn of the twentieth century, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously marked the completion of the United States’s colonizing run with his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Boag calls the document “the most definitive, if not emblematic, white and heterosexual statement” about what the “frontier meant to the United States.” Movies and ad agencies answered with figures like John Wayne and the Marlboro Man, who embodied the cisgendered, phallocentric good old days that, of course, never quite actually were. This is where Boag makes his point: Not only have trans people existed as long as any other people, but it’s exactly at this moment that modern American identity took shape against trans identity.

During a Q&A after his lecture, Boag took a question about posthumously assigning historic figures gender identities. It’s well established that, along with not having the words to record specific identities, anyone who didn’t conform to the rigorous binaries of the day was seen as a threat. Still—and this is a familiar query—isn’t it problematic to presume how someone viewed themself?

Boag explained that his research turned up thinly veiled tells, unintentionally recorded evidence that “seeps” through documents. Patterns in arrest reports and recurrent newspaper phrasings served as markers to look further. “You don’t always know what you’re going to find,” he said. “But when you find it, you know what you found.” Had he found any signs of hope or allyship in his research? Only extremely subtle ones, like the second, “tenderhearted” obituary he found of Joe Monahan that retained his preferred pronouns.

The Q&A lasted far longer than the lecture. Boag was in a sort of gleeful disbelief. Here was a highly researched expert hosting something like an ad hoc town hall answering a well-meaning crowd’s earnest questions about transgender history. Someone else asked for Boag’s thoughts on historians presuming that certain art historical figures were gay. Boag countered: “The assumption that people were not gay is a problem, too! Or [were not] trans!” The crowd cheered. Rain blew sideways against the windows. Boag went on, wearing a wry smirk and rallying on the crowd’s enthusiasm, “Apparently it’s a bad thing?”