The Historical Crossdressing Project
An Informal Talk on the Project So Far
This is a transcript of a talk given on 27th February 2021 over Zoom. Most slides are not included.
Hi there! I’m James. I founded and run Gender Community Lending Library, with help from a few magical volunteers. To give a very brief overview of what we do, GCLL is a free UK postal library of primarily transgender books, open to everyone. Today I’ll be giving a talk on the project, which I expect to last about half an hour, and then I’ll take questions. In terms of content warnings, the talk will touch on some upsetting treatment of historical trans and intersex people.
I began GCLL because I wanted to lend books about trans history. I had learned, through the books I read, that it was vaster and more ubiquitous than I ever knew. There are a few stock historical figures who occasionally go viral on Twitter and Tumblr, like James Barry or Christine Jorgensen. But you don’t tend to learn that they are part of a rich tapestry of trans history. They aren’t isolated individuals, but representative of wider trends within historical gender diversity.
This talk is part of GCLL’s Historical Crossdressing Project, which was inspired by Emily Skidmore’s book, ‘True Sex’, on trans men in America around the end of the 19th century. To give an idea of why the book inspired a whole project, I’d like to tell a story. Early in the book, Skidmore mentions a key search term she used in American newspaper archives, something like ‘lived as a man’. I got curious as to whether there were similar people who lived in Britain, and plugged that term into the British Newspaper Archive. That evening, I excitedly told my parents just how many results I had found. My dad said something along the lines of, “you mean in London. Not here, in West Yorkshire”. I got to tell him that I had found someone assigned female who lived as a man for ten years in my dad’s hometown. And that’s what the project is about: using primarily newspaper archives to locate people who lived cross-sex lives well before the invention of the term transsexuality. That is, our trans ancestors. I also look at how the attitudes of the British press towards these people changed over time. Right now, the very basic details of the coverage of each person are recorded on a public Google Map. I also write Twitter threads about a few of the trends I notice, and hopefully this is the first of many talks.
In this talk, I am going to focus on the period between the late 1700s and 1850. That was my initial search range, for a couple of reasons. Partially, it’s to avoid focussing on one sex and giving an impression that trans history is one sided. I could, for example, just use the search term 'lived as a man’, with no restrictions on the date, and I would have so many results that I would be reading about trans men for months and months. But that would exacerbate a pre-existing problem: there is already surprisingly little published content on 19th century male to female crossdressers. Additionally, when I search chronologically, using a variety of terms, it can give a very good idea of changing attitudes to crossdressing over time, as I can watch the language and tropes in the reporting change.
The first case studies I would like to look at are from the 1840s. I’d like to show three different sources of information, and see which ones strike you as looking or feeling ‘trans’.
Case One:
ODDS AND ENDS - Last week a lad named Ford was committed from Bow-street for robbing ... a hatter in Blackfriar’s Road of a considerable sum of money. It seems that so soon as the young villain perpetrated the theft, he adopted female apparel, and actually set up housekeeping with his ill-gotten gains
Source: Lancaster Gazette, 15th November 1845
Case Two: https://www.digitalpanopticon.org/life?id=obpdef1-26-18451124
Case Three:
He wore a black velvet bonnet, veil, and semi-cap helping to conceal the false character of handsome display of long black ringlets. He was soon unmasked, and possession was taken of a large box, found in his room, containing a quantity of women’s apparel, including habit shirts, petticoats, and a prodigious bustle, and several caps and feathers.
Source: Sun (London), 6th November 1845
So, if you hadn’t guessed already, these are all the same person: Caroline Foster, born William Rowe, arrested 1845. Some reports did get names and details wrong, which speaks to how careful we have to be with our sources.
The quote on the left [Case One] is the entirety of the first article that I found on Caroline. When I did, I wasn’t sure whether it was right to include it on my Google map. There are a number of practical reasons why male criminals dressed as women in the early 19th century, which I’ll go into later. I don’t include those criminal cases on my map, mainly because there are quite so many of them. I don’t want trans people to skim the map and think ‘there was no one like me in history. All these people were only crossdressing to escape the police’. But, something about this case caught my eye as being a little different, and that was the housekeeping! This had the implication that Ford, in fact Caroline, wanted to dress as a woman going forward - not just for a very brief, one-off period of hours or a few days, but for months or years. So, I included the case.
And, lo and behold, that was a good decision! Soon I found more sources, and learned Caroline’s story. She had just gained a job as an errand boy for a silversmith. She robbed him of several expensive watches, pawned them, and tried to set up a hat shop under her new, female identity. Being sixteen, she was not especially cautious: she didn’t leave the area, and even visited the silversmith in women’s clothing, assuming he and his wife wouldn’t recognise her - which of course they did. She was arrested and sentenced to transportation for ten years. For some reason she was kept in jail in England for four years before that sentence was carried out, but she did survive the voyage. We lose track of her when she finally arrives in New South Wales, aged twenty.
As you can see, the Digital Panopticon, although in many ways the most reliable record, shows very little of this. There is no trace of trans history, or even crossdressing, in this record. This is one reason why I focus on newspapers. An awful lot of the people I find via the newspapers didn't commit crimes obviously relating to their gender or sexuality, and we don't necessarily have trial transcripts if they were imprisoned. That is also why cross referencing between sources is incredibly important, to get a deeper, more textured sense of a person’s life.
So, what was Caroline's world like? I'm now going to talk a little about cultural trends I've picked up on around sexual and gender variance.
We tend to think of 19th century Britain as a place governed by rigid conceptions of binary sex, but this really wasn't the case. I would first like to talk about this in the context of intersexuality, or, variations in sexual development - not just to shed light on understandings of sex, but because these narratives are inextricably connected to what we might consider to be early trans narratives, with many ambiguous cases and a wide overlap in terminology.
In the early 19th century, sex chromosomes and sex hormones hadn't been discovered. All sorts of observable conditions - like infertility - might have been due to what we now consider an intersex condition, but that wouldn't necessarily have been how it was considered at the time. The unambiguous accounts of intersexuality that we find, typically using the search term 'hermaphrodite', are based around ambiguous genital configurations - usually observed at birth; sometimes only apparent at puberty. Ambiguous genitalia are observed in maybe 1/5000 births in Britain today - but there's reason to believe they may have been slightly more common in the Victorian era, since high rates of cousin marriage are thought to increase the rate of ambiguous genitalia at birth.
So, how were people with visible variations in sexual development treated? Often quite poorly. The earliest result of my 'hermaphrodite' search was a fifteen year old, Michael Anne Drouvert, who was exhibited naked across Europe for many years from 1750.
Their parents agreed to this in exchange for money. They were seen by the British royal family, and achieved some level of fame: there are references to them eighty years later in a newspaper article in 1833, comparing them to the famous male to female crossdresser Lavinia Edwards. Ambiguous gender was a subject of much curiosity in the late Georgian and early Victorian era: plenty of newspaper reports on court cases involving both hermaphrodites and crossdressers talk about mobs or jeering crowds waiting outside the court.
However, that isn't the whole story. I have also found multiple accounts of 'hermaphrodites' with ambiguous gender presentations who lived relatively normal lives. The clearest example is James Clough, who died in 1826 in Blackburn and was stated in his obituary to do men’s work and to wear a man’s cap and a woman’s dress. It would seem that James led a purposefully non-binary life, and that this was acknowledged and to some degree accepted by the local press.
I’ll now move on to talking about more clear-cut cases of cross-sex behaviour.
Let’s first talk about FtM crossdressers. I'll be brief, because there has been an awful lot written on this - including books GCLL stocks, such as Female Husbands by Jen Manion.
Most of what has been written about involves certain archetypes, constructed by the media, such as the 'female husband' and the 'female sailor' or 'female soldier'. The term 'female husband' was first used by Henry Fielding in his 1746 pamphlet by this name, but newspapers subsequently adopted it and used it all the way up to the early 20th century. I think the details are easiest to articulate in modern terms: female husbands were almost all working class, stealth trans men who married after their social transition. They were usually discovered to be trans when they died, and newspapers tended to theorise that they crossdressed to earn money from their labour. Similarly, female sailors crossdressed supposedly to go to sea, and female soldiers to go to war. The terms lasted a good century in newspaper coverage of the phenomenon, and there was a wide trend in the early 1800s for books, some biographical, about female sailors and soldiers. Sometimes newspapers even published excerpts of these books for their readers. Notably, female sailors and soldiers were typically easier to explain in normative terms: for example, through patriotism, or as following a male lover.
What’s important to understand, is that female to male crossdressers were reported on in a very particular way. Sometimes it was patronising. Sometimes it was emphasized that they were exceptional labourers. Their marriages were frequently portrayed as troubled. But there was limited malice or disgust, and sexual impropriety or homosexuality was rarely more than hinted at, at least in the articles I’ve seen. Here are a few quotes.
Now let’s talk about women like Caroline. Reports of male to female crossdressing were absolutely ubiquitous in the early 19th century, but not for reasons we would regard as queer. In fact, it was because criminals would frequently wear veils to disguise their identity. Dressing as women probably also conveyed other advantages for them: for example, a group of men walking together down a country lane might be more suspicious than a group of women. Women might be less likely to be suspected of crimes to begin with. In the late 1830s, technological advances allowed police to convey fugitive descriptions up and down the country very quickly, via telegram, so better disguises became necessary. And, finally, there were long traditions in Ireland and Wales of violent worker’s rights movements crossdressing, which we see in the Rebecca Riots in Wales and with the Rockites in Ireland. In fact, crossdressing with criminal intent was so normal, that I found a number of reports on crimes that attributed them to ‘an individual in women’s clothing’ despite no evidence being given that the criminal wasn’t a woman. Since evidence was given in most crossdressing cases - say, a witness hearing the criminal’s deep voice - it seems as though criminality itself was enough to suspect a person appearing to be a woman, of crossdressing.
In this light, MtF crossdressers who changed their dress to explore or articulate their identities must already have seemed threatening. They would be associated not just with criminality, but with threats against property ownership, empire and the social order. I actually don’t find any acknowledged association with prostitution before the 1830s, at which point accounts explode in frequency, reaching a fever pitch in the 1840s, during which many women like Caroline were transported, typically for robbing an implied client. That combination of threats, sexual, criminal and social, seems to have formed a potent mix.
In fact, for both trans men and trans women, an awful lot of the prejudices we contend with today can be seen developing during the early Victorian period. In that light, I really do feel comfortable calling many of these people ‘trans’, because they exist in continuity with the modern western trans experience. I would like to see people like Caroline more frequently positioned as our direct antecedents.
I’ll finish up by reading a quote from the seminal trans novel ‘Stone Butch Blues’, by Leslie Feinberg. Although it is now decades old, as with so much current trans fiction, ‘Stone Butch Blues’ contains a passage in which the protagonist stumbles upon a record of a past trans person and feels immediate kinship.
My breathing slowed. I popped a quarter in the machine and printed out the article. I read each word carefully. The obituary reported the death of a servant in 1930. Her body was found in a rooming house. Her name was never mentioned. Nothing more: no diary, no clues. All I had were these few words on a page to know her by. I closed my eyes. I would never have the details of her life and yet I could feel its texture with my fingertips.
Thanks so much for listening.
