In hir pioneering study, Transgender Warriors, Leslie Feinberg writes: ‘I couldn't find myself in history. No-one like me seemed to have ever existed’. Working for transgender rights entails striving towards the visibility and acceptance of transgender lives. Yet something more than tolerance of trans people's physical existence in the present is required. That something is full ideological existence – the ability to imagine a transgender past, and a transgender future. In this volume, ‘transgender’ is employed as a broad umbrella, including genderqueer, genderfluid, and non-binary identities, and is also used as a rubric for discussing ways of being that disrupt normative notions of binary gender/sex. We reference both transgender and genderqueer subjects in the title of the volume precisely to indicate that both formations operate against – and through – the same normative socio-cultural structures. ‘Transgender’, as a category, is a subset of ‘queer’, understood as defiant and often explicitly political non-normativity. Queerness encompasses sexualities and gender identities deemed ‘atypical’ in their cultural setting, as well as a mode of being in the world that questions dominant norms. Trans theories and readings emerge from the framework of queer theory, and owe much to its innovations. Yet ‘trans’ cannot be fully contained within the borders of ‘queer’. If queer was the call, trans is one of many responses. Trans scholarship brings its insights to bear through specific ways of feeling, knowing, and attending to sources that explore resonances between trans, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming lives across history. The term ‘subjects’ does double duty in the collection's title, referring to individuals and to topics, traces, and resonances which destabilize modern impositions of fixed binary gender on premodern culture(s).