Sam Rutherford (he/him)
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echomikeromeo.bsky.social
Sam Rutherford (he/him)
@echomikeromeo.bsky.social
5.2K followers 1K following 430 posts
Lecturer in LGBTQ+ History/History of Sexuality, University of Glasgow.

I wrote this book: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/teaching-gender-9780198937494
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echomikeromeo.bsky.social
Delighted and moved by these eloquent advocates for inclusion in sport!
Merle, a new DEW team member says, ‘I joined the team as a new member this year and as a person new to the university. I was appalled to hear of the university’s attempt to regulate the college league and its players on the basis of an oppressive, harmful, and baseless Supreme Court ruling.’ For Sophie, another DEW player: ‘Our team has, and will always be, a welcoming, open, and inclusive space for those who share a passion for football. I am outraged and heart-broken at the decision to exclude trans women from college football. The college league is not affiliated with the FA, so it doesn’t have to abide by those rules. The aim of college football is to spread the joy of the game to those who want to play and provide a community - why on earth would you exclude anyone from this? I and my fellow teammates vehemently refuse the exclusion of our trans siblings, and I will not be part of a system that asks for that.’
October 26, 2025 at 12:11 PM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
A reminder that if you're in the area it is not too late to join us at the Glasgow Lab for Intersex, Non-Binary and Trans Studies launch event tomorrow afternoon! Register here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/glints-lau...
'GLINTS: Glasgow Lab for Intersex, Non-Binary & Trans Studies' printed in coral on a lavender background
October 20, 2025 at 12:30 PM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
A scheduling accident means that I am spending my Sunday prepping *two different* PGT-level intro to trans history class sessions for tomorrow!
Gender, Politics and Power: Trans History Sam Rutherford Discussion questions What have trans approaches offered to gender history? Is trans history the history of transgender people? How has trans history engaged with the questions of 'acts vs identities' and 'materiality vs discourse' that have characterised debates in the history of sexuality? What does trans history tell us about how race and empire have shaped the history of gender? How can we be responsible practitioners of trans history at a time when trans people are the target of an unprecedented culture war? Core reading Kit Heyam, Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender (London: Basic, 2022), Introduction Kit Heyam, 'Gender nonconformity and military internment: curating the Knockaloe slides', Critical Military Studies 6, no. 3–4 (July 2020): 323–40 Jamey Jesperson, ‘Trans Misogyny in the Colonial Archive: Re-Membering Trans Feminine Life and Death in New Spain, 1604–1821’, Gender & History 36, no. 1 (March 2024): 91–111 Week 5 of my PGT course 'Approaches to Queer and Trans Histories'. The text is too long for the alt text box but the full syllabus is available in pdf form here: https://samuelrutherford.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/hist5193-2025.pdf
October 19, 2025 at 10:09 AM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
I did not know that Glasgow played a pivotal role in Rocky Horror!
Let’s talk about “Rocky Horror.” Can you describe how you created the look for Frank-N-Furter? I didn’t really create it myself. I was grimly unaware when I read the role and started to rehearse it that the national costume of Transylvania was a corset and whatever else you put with it. But the costume designer, Sue Blane, had worked with me before in a remarkable repertory theatre in Glasgow, Scotland, called the Citizens Theatre, where we had done a production of “The Maids,” by Jean Genet. I played one of the rather grubby sisters, Solange. And Sue designed that outfit. For “Rocky Horror,” she went to a market in Glasgow called the Barras, where all kinds of crap was sold, and she found a Victorian corset for three pounds. I wore it back to front. [Laughs.]
October 13, 2025 at 11:13 AM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
Back when trans studies actually *was* relatively new, rather than continually being reinscribed as such! Chronicle of Higher Education, 1998: www.chronicle.com/article/tran...
Dr. Gilbert is among a growing cadre of “trans” people on campuses who are going public. Organizations for gay, lesbian, and bisexual students have already begun tacking a “T” on the end of their names to embrace “transgendered” or “transsexual” students. In the past year, students and professors have also pushed universities to extend protection to transgendered people under policies that prevent discrimination against minorities. What’s more, work by transgendered scholars is making transgender studies a hot new topic. One of the most important contributions to the field, a transgender issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, edited by Susan Stryker, is due out next month from Duke University Press. A flurry of other publications on the topic is expected this spring and summer, and transsexual academics have started an electronic mailing list on the subject. (Those interested in joining the list, called “transacademic,” can send an e-mail message to mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk) “We are pioneering a new field of scholarship,” says Dr. Stryker, an independent scholar, who changed from male to female in 1991, a year before earning her Ph.D. in history from the University of California at Berkeley. “This whole area is going to become an increasingly big social concern over the next decade.”
October 11, 2025 at 10:43 AM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
We're starting a new 'ArtsLab' (research network) in trans studies at Glasgow! It's very exciting and I hope that in time we can become a real centre for research in this field. Find out more - including details of our upcoming launch event - on our website: www.gla.ac.uk/colleges/art...
Logo with the words 'GLINTS: Glasgow Lab for Intersex, Non-binary and Trans Studies' in coral text on a purple background.
October 1, 2025 at 2:56 PM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
No idea if the students will connect with this, but moved all over again by teaching it today:
P. 3 of Eve Sedgwick’s essay “Queer and Now,” where she talks about reading as a space for forging queer identity
September 29, 2025 at 12:07 PM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
As the only academic historian employed in a UK university who has 'LGBTQ+' in my job title, I think about this a! whole! lot!
Recent stories about job adverts requiring applicants to explicitly commit to principles, which were withdrawn because they contradicted Office for Students advice, underlined how EDI had assumed an outsized influence in university life, continued Pace. “But many appointments – some with highly politicised job titles – have already been made across the sector on this basis.”
September 12, 2025 at 7:44 AM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
Can't resist the temptation to offer some historical context on this, also! (Rutherford, Teaching Gender, p. 84)
'In the late nineteenth century, of the thousands of students enrolled at uni­versities in cities like Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Liverpool, and London, half lived at home; of the rest, although women were more likely to live in halls of residence, most men lived in private lodgings. Typical experiences of student life involved a lengthy public transit commute to campus and continuing ties to one’s home community and childhood friends, but also new kinds of independent access to urban leisure spaces.'
September 10, 2025 at 12:52 PM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
There are plenty of ways to teach 'sexuality' and not all of them involve canonical texts, but I am once again setting out my stall that those who use Foucault might consider using Rubin instead!
The beginning of Gayle Rubin's foundational essay 'Thinking Sex', from p. 4 of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader
September 1, 2025 at 2:46 PM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
Curious to know if this is for Political Reasons (Duke special collections grant) - could any folks in the know email me if they have intel?
'Harry H. Harkins T'73 Travel Grants for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History was offered from 2018-2024 and is currently on hiatus.'
August 27, 2025 at 6:49 AM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
My favourite Eve Sedgwick quote is never not relevant!
p. 20 of Eve Sedgwick's book Tendencies, containing a joke about the homoeroticism of the western canon
August 25, 2025 at 6:57 PM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
Astonished to see this very long interview with @rebeccadonkennedy.bsky.social about trans equality in the usually transphobic Herald! www.heraldscotland.com/news/2541309...
'Kennedy adds: “Trans people must be able to access the services everyone needs, and have the same rights to safety, privacy and dignity as everyone else. Clearly, insisting that they’re treated as their biological sex at birth all of the time makes that impossible… There are many court cases happening all across Scotland and the UK that totally lack trans people’s voices – that tell a false, incomplete or stigmatising story of what it means to be trans and what trans people want and need to live good lives.”'
August 24, 2025 at 9:00 AM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
This semester almost all my teaching is PGT, so in that context essentially yes - here's the language I'm using for my PGT course (I just want to add in a couple links/references):
Use of Generative AI is not permitted in any of your work for this course. The intellectual and ethical limitations of AI-generated academic work are widely documented. Furthermore, as postgraduate students, it is essential that you practice key advanced historical skills such as reading and synthesising information, compiling bibliographies, and planning essays. Without being able to do these things independently, you will not be able to succeed at more advanced elements of a History master's programme, such as researching and writing a dissertation. I would much rather work individually with you to support you in building these skills, than I would read an essay automatically generated from a large language model. The latter is unlikely to attain the depth and specificity required to receive a good mark on the assessment.
August 14, 2025 at 10:29 AM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
Really appreciated this!! I have a piece coming out soon(!) that answers the ‘what use trans history in these times’ Q slightly differently (and from the other side of the Atlantic) but there’s a lot here that resonated with me:
Why, then, do we need the past when we have come so far so fast? Two reasons. First, our collective ignorance about the transgender past is being used against us. During oral arguments for the Skrmetti case before the Supreme Court in December 2024, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked if there was a legacy of discrimination against transgender people. One lawyer hesitated. He might not have known what to say, like most of us who didn’t learn about this in school. He mentioned anti-cross-dressing laws and military ban as two examples, but there is a substantial historic legacy of discrimination. If the leading voices for transgender rights in this country don’t know our history, we are in real trouble. The radical right is counting on this. Second, we are not so different from the trans people who have come before us—and this fact may well sustain us in the years to come. Most trans people throughout history have lived, loved, struggled, resisted, and persisted without any of the legal protections, family support, social networks, or medical care that are widely available today. On Transgender Day of Visibility in March, pioneer trans theorist Sandy Stone offered a hopeful message: “We’ve taken 10 steps forward. Now we’re about to be beaten five steps back. But at the end of the day, we’re still five steps ahead. That’s how culture works. That’s how progress works…. We’re not going back from that.”
August 11, 2025 at 6:23 PM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
2. Laurie Marhoefer's concluding comments about where queer historiography is now, a decade after Doan's queer critical history:
These essays refuse that narrow view. They see queer politics as always embedded within broader political commitments, not necessarily in ways that benefted all queers or that led to a queer liberation that we would like to see (Hirschfeld’s commitment to eugenics, for example). They fnd queer and trans people in the past but also centre questions of politics and power. As someone who began to work in this feld when a narrower approach was standard, I fnd it heartening to see, twenty years later, all of these younger scholars working in the other mode of queer and trans history, the more expansive and critical mode. Ten years ago, Laura Doan published a powerful call for a queer critical history.80 That critical practice was not, however, what you see here—what defned that practice was a fascination with the historical nature of identity categories. If you ask me, the foundational problem in the feld was not that we were approaching the archive with an ahistorical notion of identity, but rather that it was standard to write histories that excluded whole archives, that left out crucial questions about power and liberation. It is this other critical queer history, an expansive interrogation of power and exclusion, that has, in fact, drawn the new generation of scholars.
August 5, 2025 at 4:42 PM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
1. Some thoughts from Sara Friedman about how Hirschfeld responded to the rise of Nazism, that for me resonate with the current moment:
Screenshot of p. 7 of the article. It's too long an excerpt for the alt-text so I'd recommend just looking it up in the article if the screenshot isn't accessible for you.
August 5, 2025 at 4:40 PM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
a) don't buy my book from Amazon but
b) obsessed that Amazon thinks I'm my 17th-century theologian namesake:
Amazon screenshot of my book. At the bottom there is a section called 'Follow the author' with a picture of the 17th-century theologian Samuel Rutherford instead of the 21st-century historian Samuel Rutherford
August 1, 2025 at 2:03 PM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
Here's a photo of the plaque on the ship that I took when I noticed this last Christmas, after 25 years of taking this route (note also the language of 'settlers', which the plaque treats uncritically, raising questions about other ways that this story could be told):
Memorial plaque which reads: The M.V. Queen of Cumberland was named in honour of the village of Cumberland, B.C., which was founded in 1888 as a coal mining camp, with British, Japanese and Chinese immigrants forming the three main groups of miners. Between 1888 and 1964, coal mining disasters claimed the lives of 295 workers. Harsh, unsafe working conditions and a relentless production schedule contributed in large measure to this toll of tragedy. Ginger Goodwin, himself a coal miner from Cumberland, attempted to unionize the miners and became a martyr to their cause when he was shot under dubious circumstances on July 26, 1918. On the occasion of the commissioning of this vessel, the Honourable Glen Clark, Minister of Finance and Corporate Relations, dedicated this plaque on behalf of the Government of British Columbia, to the settlers of Cumberland, and their descendants, in recognition of their courage and perseverance in pursuing better working conditions and fairer wages for coal miners. Their legacy continues to serve as an important beacon to others involved in the evolution of British Columbia's history of labour emancipation. Vancouver, B.C., April 25, 1992
July 27, 2025 at 12:00 PM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
I appreciated this interview with Badar Khan Suri in @readlux.bsky.social: lux-magazine.com/lux-for-life...
"Everyone has their own role to play. Hopelessness at this time is a crime. One has to show moral courage to say what is happening is wrong, be it the genocide in Gaza or the transition to authoritarianism in the United States. As Nelson Mandela demonstrated, we have to even brave imprisonment for truth and justice to triumph over evil at this time. "Most importantly, I would like to talk about Gandhian ideology, which has nonviolence and forgiveness as guiding principles. Revenge perpetuates a never-ending cycle of violence. Respond to hate and harm with peace and compassion. It takes more courage to do so. True strength lies in the ability to forgive and not seek vengeance. So these things we should keep in mind. Every generation has to pass through certain tests. These are our tests. "Islam says that if something wrong is happening, stop it by your hand. If you can’t do that, if we are not powerful enough, use your tongue to oppose it. Make noise, write, do something. And if you can’t do that, at least be on the right side in your heart. Say that something wrong is happening."
July 26, 2025 at 1:07 PM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
I'm really jazzed about Emily Cousens' recent article about Robert Stoller's and Virginia Prince's collaboration (academic.oup.com/hwj/article/...), and also struck by how much their dynamic reminds me of Symonds and Ellis working together on Sexual Inversion:
Screenshot of pp. 81-2 of Cousens' article. 'Stoller was reliant on the co-operation and assistance of influential and wellconnected members of the trans community to provide the necessary data for his own sex/gender research. In addition to thanking her for her lectures, Stoller’s letter demonstrates this reliance on Prince’s community contacts, asking for help with: "a rather lengthy questionnaire we have prepared, in which we are trying to search out the attitudes of a number of different groups of people in the population regarding certain specific gender and sex role problems. This project would be incomplete if we could not get data from an extensive group of transvestites. Is it possible for you to mail out 400–500 of these questionnaires to members of your group? Such data would be invaluable to us.57" Prince’s combination of academic authority and embeddedness within a network of trans individuals made her an essential contact for Stoller. His letter ends by thanking Prince not only for her community-based assistance, but for her intellectual influence.'
July 25, 2025 at 10:41 AM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
Super excited about this! A colleague tipped me off to it ages ago and I finally acquired a copy!
A copy of the book Courage to Be: Organised Gay Youth in England 1967-1990 by Clifford Williams
July 17, 2025 at 9:56 AM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
International news 89 years ago! (Nottingham Evening Post, 28 May 1936):
Surgery's Triumph Over Sex. Remarkable Case of Woman Athlete. Gland Secret. Success after two operations. A well-known British athlete who gained international honours as a woman has, as a result of two operations, changed her sex and become a man. For 30 years Miss Mary Edith Louise Weston, of Oreston, near Plymouth, lived the normal life of a woman and, in addition, won the British women's championship for putting the shot and throwing the javelin. Now 'she' is Mr. Mark Weston, and has discarded skirts, blouse and silk stockings for trousers, shirt and collar and tie. On Wednesday she received the following certificate signed by Mr. L.R. Broster, a Harley-street specialist and surgeon at Charing Cross Hospital: 'This is to certify that Mr. Mark Weston, who has always been brought up as a female, is a male, and should continue life as such.' Mr. Weston, as a woman, was selected for the world's women's championships, and won medals for throwing the javelin, the discus and putting the shot. He competed as a woman in the world games at Prague in 1930.
June 21, 2025 at 7:00 PM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
100 years of Scottish queer (& trans) history is on Thurs!
Powerpoint slide that reads: Outline of this talk I. Busting some myths II. Community & chosen family in interwar Aberdeenshire & Edinburgh III. Law reform meets discos in the era of gay liberation IV. Youth bodily autonomy & trans everyday life in the shadow of AIDS & Section 28 V. Queer (& trans) history *is* Scottish history: lessons for now
June 2, 2025 at 4:25 PM
echomikeromeo.bsky.social
There is nothing new under the sun
Screenshot from Washington Post: "New laws in Ohio, Utah and Florida are reshaping general education, the core classes college students take to meet graduation requirements. The laws mandate that students take civics courses focused on Western civilization and bar classes centered on race or gender from counting toward core requirements. "Lawmakers say it's time to refocus unwieldy college course offerings on essential texts, not content steeped in identity politics..." Excerpt from p. 20 of Eve Sedgwick's Tendencies (1993): "... In the very first of the big 'political correctness' scare pieces in the mainstream press, Newsweek pontificated that under the reign of multiculturalism in colleges, 'it would not be enough for a student to refrain from insulting homosexuals .... He or she would be expected to ... study their literature and culture alongside that of Plato, Shakespeare, and Locke.' *Alongside*? Read any Sonnets lately? You dip into the Phaedrus often?"
June 2, 2025 at 9:22 AM