This article was written by James as part of the Historical Crossdressing Project. Content notes: discussion of a slur, historical violence towards transgender and intersex people, discussions of genitalia.

The key to digital archival research is search terms. Databases like the British Newspaper Archive don’t have search engines as sophisticated as Google, and scanned material that has been transcribed incorrectly is rarely comprehensible, let alone searchable. As a result, it is important to use a great variety of search terms, and to check articles before and after relevant excerpts to verify that nothing has been missed by the search. …