We Were Never Lost: Trans Continuity, Folktale Fire, and the Warehouse of Empire

Reclaiming misfiled myths, archival magic, and gendered joy in the face of imperial forgetting.

Queer and trans stories were never lost—only misfiled. This Pride, we return with myth, memory, and joy, unearthing what empire tried to archive. A spell, a reclamation, a hum that never stopped singing.

Introduction: Pride in the Shadow of the Archive

This began, as so many things do, with a quote. Gabriel Oak Baker—an autistic genderqueer writer whose work often slips between the archival and the ancestral—wrote: “LGBTQIA+ folk stories were deliberately erased by Stith Thompson, an American Scholar and Folklorist who decided to filter out queer and Trans+ stories to what has become the most important collection of folklore throughout all of human history. But we can't be erased, and thanks to researchers – we learn more and more gender diverse stories that have been told since the first words were ever written down.” That one sentence sparked a cascade in me: images, questions, memories, a poem that arrived half-formed, humming. It was as if someone had whispered the word “misfiled” and my whole body answered, yes. Because we have always been here—queer, trans, gender-diverse in ways empires could neither name nor destroy—yet our stories were silenced not by absence, but by deliberate exclusion. Not by forgetfulness, but by filing systems.

This is not a reactive Pride piece. It is not a defence. It is a reclamation. A ritual. A quiet unfolding of something older than the violence that sought to contain it. In the current political climate—one that insists, ever louder, that trans people are a modern phenomenon, a social contagion, a Western fad—it is all the more vital to remember otherwise. To know otherwise. We are not anomaly. We are not invention. We are not aberration. We are continuity. We are the song the archive tried to muffle with glass cases and index codes. We are the story that slipped through the cracks, humming.

And we are, inconveniently for empire, returning. Not with vengeance, but with names, lineages, and joy. Pride, in this telling, is not the loudest banner or the most polished slogan. It is the quiet miracle of re-shelving a mislabelled tale. Of running your hands along a dusty spine and recognising yourself. Of lifting an artefact from the heart of empire and saying, this was never yours.

The Empire’s Warehouse: Narrative as Colonised Space

There’s a reason the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark lingers. The Ark—this ancient, holy object—sealed in a crate, wheeled into anonymity, and left in a vast warehouse lined with endless rows of identical boxes. No fanfare, no ritual. Just a silent surrender to bureaucracy. It’s a moment that feels deeper than fiction, like a confession from empire itself. Because we know, even if only in metaphor, that the real warehouse exists. That it has always existed. It is the British Museum’s basements. The Vatican’s secret archives. The locked drawers of the Smithsonian. The footnotes of Stith Thompson’s folkloristics. The syllabus that speaks of universality and cites only cis white men. These are not simply repositories—they are containment strategies. They are architectures of forgetting.

The folktale index most widely used today—the Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification system—is no exception. It attempts to collect and categorise the world’s oral traditions under numbered codes, a seemingly neutral effort that, like all acts of classification, is shaped by the values of its creators. It is here, in this folkloric warehouse, that queer and trans stories were marked as anomalies, if they were included at all. Stith Thompson, the American folklorist who translated and extended the index in the twentieth century, was explicit in his desire to purge “improper” material from the record. Queer motifs, gender transformation, and trans joy were often omitted, recoded, or deemed unworthy of serious study. But as Gabriel Oak Baker reminds us, and as Psyche Z. Ready’s work makes luminously clear, these stories were never absent. They were simply suppressed. Ready’s detailed exploration of tale type ATU 514, “The Shift of Sex,” uncovers dozens of variants in which assigned-female protagonists don men’s clothes, go on heroic adventures, are transformed into men—sometimes magically, sometimes ritually—and live happily ever after with women they love. These are not cautionary tales. They are stories of becoming, of triumph, of trans possibility.

And then there is the tablet. The legend of Ishtar’s descent to the Underworld, carved in Akkadian over two and a half thousand years ago, sits today in the British Museum under the catalogue number K.162. It was excavated from Kouyunjik—modern-day Mosul—by a British man and carried across continents to be retold in passive voice and museum placard. This, too, is a kind of narrative colonisation: the goddess of sex, war, and transformation transformed herself, descended into death, confronted her shadow, and returned. But her story, like so many others, was removed from the land that knew her name, reframed through Western grammar, and filed in a glass box. She is not preserved. She is interrupted. And yet—even from within empire’s vault—she still speaks.

What empire hoards, it cannot hold. A story sealed in a crate still hums. An artefact mislabelled still remembers its name. Even within the cold architecture of archive and empire, the sacred leaks. Something slips. A gesture, a glint, a whisper through wood and linen and time. You cannot truly silence what was born to transform. What was buried is not always dead—it is sometimes simply waiting. And what the empire calls containment, we might call cocoon. —Jaime Hoerricks, as a thought begins to take on words.

The Old Stories Never Ended: Seidr, Tricksters, ATU 514

The old stories never ended. They were not erased so much as scattered, coded, or buried under the weight of names not their own. In Norse tradition, Seidr—a form of trance magic often practiced by women and gender-nonconforming figures—was feared for its power to unravel fate, to speak with the dead, to heal, to curse, to know. Practitioners, especially men, risked being branded argr—unmanly, perverse—an accusation that carried both social ruin and metaphysical threat. Yet even Odin, the Allfather, learned Seidr from Freyja, donning a woman’s cloak to enter the state of altered knowing. Seidr’s power lay in its refusal of fixed borders: between worlds, between genders, between what was spoken and what was sung.

This refusal echoes through the tales of ATU 514. Psyche Z. Ready’s scholarship breathes new life into a folkloric type long dismissed as an oddity. These stories begin with a familiar gesture: a young woman dresses as a man to claim mobility, autonomy, or survival. But instead of being punished for this transgression, she is transformed. She completes quests, passes tests of masculinity, and is eventually changed—often magically, sometimes ritually—into a man. He then marries a woman and lives not in tragedy, but in joy. These are not grim cautionary fables. They are affirmations of becoming, of possibility, of transness not as failure or loss but as hero’s reward.

Ready’s work reveals a pattern deeper than any folklorist’s catalogue: that joy, too, has been archived—and often hidden. That these stories contain what they call a “secondary narrative,” one that speaks not just to gender transformation, but to the crushing weight of patriarchy. Violent fathers. Rigid marriage laws. Femicide. And amid all that: a figure who slips the frame, rewrites the ending, and finds love on their own terms.

We are told, again and again, that we are modern distortions. That our genders, our bodies, our ways of loving are new inventions. But the tales say otherwise. They remember us. And in doing so, they undo the lie that silence means absence. These stories were not waiting to be discovered—they were waiting to be heard.

The words are beginning to take form.

This is not a pause in the essay—it is the summoning at its centre. What follows is not a poem in the decorative sense, but in the oldest one: a spell, a ritual act, a calling-forth of what empire hoped to forget. The syllables carry weight. The cadence matters. Speak it aloud, if you can. Or whisper it back to the shelves that once tried to contain you. Let it echo.

This is the moment the story opens its own box. The archive breathes. The labels peel. The misfiled sing.—Jaime Hoerricks, as words begin to take on shape, form.

Filed Under Empire, Returned by Spell

There is a cuneiform tablet in the British Museum that tells the story of Ishtar’s descent into the Underworld.
It is inscribed in Akkadian.
It was unearthed in Kouyunjik—modern-day Iraq—by a British man, and placed in a glass case ten thousand miles from the soil that remembered it.

This is not preservation. It is theft polished and labelled.
The divinity of Ishtar—goddess of love, war, sex, and transition—turned into exhibit K.162.
She descended through seven gates, shedding her titles, her robes, her jewels—
stripped of every sign that marked her as divine.
Only in death did she meet her double, Ereshkigal, goddess of the deep knowing.
Only in death did the gods remember what she was worth.

She came back changed.
She came back aware.

And we—we trans ones, misnamed and misfiled—know something of this journey.
We too have been stripped of language, of story, of place.
We too have wandered the empire’s warehouse, labelled miscellaneous.
Not vanished—stored. Not silent—muffled by distance, translation, and theft.

Why is this tablet in London and not in Iraq?
Why is the tale of descent behind glass, when it is still happening?

Because empire fears the return.

It fears those of us who pass through every gate,
who descend into forgetting and return bearing memory like fire.
It fears the tricksters and seiðkonur and shapeshifters.
It fears that we might name ourselves—not in Latin, but in power.

So here we are.

We were the ones Ishtar sent back first.
The fox with the genitals. The princess with the sword. The one who defecated in the trickster’s house.
We were the proof that joy could survive empire.
We were filed under “unknown,” but we always knew where to find ourselves.

And now we come back, humming.
Not for vengeance. For continuity.
We carry myth, metadata, and metamorphosis.

We bring the story back home.

After the Archive: What Survives, What Sings

The poem has been spoken—or whispered, or held in the mouth like a relic of something older than language. And now, in the hush that follows, we ask: what lingers?

What returns is not just memory. It is motion. Hum. Story.

Because despite the warehouse. Despite the classification. Despite the outsider’s machine whirring its mechanised translation of a world it never belonged to—despite all of that, the stories are still here. We are the evidence. What the empire archived, it could not contain. What it hoarded, it could not hold. And what it tried to forget? We became.

This is the genre of return—not in the heroic sense of reclaiming a throne or restoring order, but in the queer and trans sense of reanimation. To return not to what was, but to what never stopped pulsing underneath: the rhythm of the fae child’s gestures, misread as nonsense; the shape of Ishtar’s descent, filed under “mythology” but never fully silenced; the whisper of the trickster who changed shape, changed name, changed world.

This is not restoration. It is continuation.

In The Lexicographer and the Fae, I wrote about the outsider who mistook classification for comprehension. Who watched movement and heard only disarray. Who took songs and transcribed only noise. He left satisfied, clutching a notebook thick with misreadings. But the fae? They mimicked his gait in laughter. They survived his naming. They lived on, not in the margins, but in the spaces he never learned to see.

The same logic persists today. We see it in diagnostic frameworks that call our communication “atypical,” our gestures “self-stimulatory,” our joy “excessive.” We see it in the Autism CARES Act and its funding streams, funnelled not toward the flourishing of autistic lives, but toward surveillance and normalisation. We see it in every data set that flattens us into “subjects,” every AI model trained to decode us instead of listen to us. And still, we survive.

Like the heroine who walks off the monomyth’s prescribed path—who refuses the linear arc of conquest and return—we do not seek the spotlight. We do not slay dragons. Our journey loops, retreats, descends, remembers. It is slow. It is sacred. And it is not for spectacle. As I wrote in The Autistic Heroine’s Journey, our stories do not end in triumph. They end in presence. And presence, under empire, is its own form of defiance.

Because empire has always feared what it cannot catalogue. The feminine in fluid form. The language that bends. The body that reorders its own meaning. It has tried to pathologise what it could not understand, and in doing so, it reveals itself—not as truth-teller, but as the frightened child in the corner, needing everything named and nailed down lest it disappear.

But we are not disappearing. We are reappearing. Again and again.

Each time a trans child finds joy in a tale they weren’t supposed to read. Each time a neurodivergent adult hears their rhythm in an old folk song, or their silence reflected in a fox’s transformation. Each time someone whispers a poem that was meant to be shelved and forgotten, and it moves—we return.

This is Pride. Not the parade, not the poster, not the corporate logo briefly washed in rainbow. But the act of inhabiting what we were told could not exist. The embodied insistence that our stories are not relics—they are recursive. Lived. Alive.

We are not artefacts. We are not anomalies. We are the ongoing.

So let the outsider publish his dictionary. Let empire build its warehouse. Let them call our joy disorder, our stories confusion. It does not matter.

The poem has already been spoken. And it is still singing.

Conclusion: Joy as Reclamation, Pride as Spellwork

And so we arrive—not at the end, but at the threshold.

Because what we have been weaving here is not merely critique. It is spellwork. A conjuring. A reclamation dressed in metaphor, footnote, and fire. Pride, in this light, is not performance but practice. Not mere visibility, but remembrance. A tracing of the lines that empire tried to scrub out—lines that lead not just backward in time, but outward in every direction.

We are still here.

We, the tricksters and seiðkonur. The shapeshifters and storytellers. The children who spoke in gestalts and were marked as broken, but who were only ever breaking open. We descend and return, again and again. Not despite the gates that strip us of name and robe, but because of them. We pass through forgetting not to be erased, but to carry back the memory they fear. We are the pattern that cannot be unstitched.

Our stories were never lost. They were archived in us. They lived in bones, in lullabies, in the pauses between diagnostic categories. They waited—not in silence, but in song—until we were ready to lift the lid. Until we were ready to call them home.

The archive did not forget us. It simply couldn’t understand what we were.

But we understood.

We remembered.

And we are remembering still.