Transgender men who lived a century ago prove gender has always been fluid
In a her new book, ‘True Sex,’ historian Emily Skidmore looks at their lives and how society has treated them
In 1914, Ralph Kerwineo, a self-assigned man from Milwaukee, had a dalliance with a woman who was not his wife, prompting his actual wife to report to the authorities that her husband wasn’t biologically a man at all. Kerwineo was arrested for disorderly conduct, but later freed. He was told by the judge he ought to dress as a woman while in Milwaukee if he wanted to stay out of trouble.
The case of Kerwineo, born Cora Anderson, captured the nation’s attention, but in her new book, True Sex: Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, historian and Texas Tech professor Emily Skidmore identifies a surprisingly wide range of responses Americans had to the scandal. As Skidmore says in describing the case to the hosts of the Backstory history podcast, the national response was “automatically Ralph Kerwineo is a deviant, is someone who is pathological, and how terrible he took advantage of this poor woman.” (He was referred to as the “girl-man” in some articles.) “But what’s fascinating,” Skidmore continues, “is that what the Milwaukee papers really do is they interview Ralph Kerwineo’s former bosses and they’re trying to understand what his life as a man was like. And if his life as a man was respectable, then his foray into masculinity was understood as something that was, you know, kind of OK.”
To listen to today’s politicians — prudish and prurient alike — one might think that gender categories were once perfectly stable and that transgender individuals are somehow an invention of the late modern age. But history shows that as a social category, gender has always been constructed, subject to debate, and to one degree or another, fluid. In True Sex, Skidmore explores the varied histories of American trans men long before that designation even existed. Reviewing newspapers and the literature of the field then known as “sexology,” as well as census data, court records, and trial transcripts, Skidmore weaves a tale of American gender that’s far more complex than many might think, one that reveals that it has never been a fixed reality.
In the absence of a framework for thinking about transgender experience, various terms were used to describe outed trans men, from “female husbands” at the end of the 19th century to the more scientific (and pathologized) “female sexual invert.” Eventually, these individuals were classified simply as lesbians. Of course, lesbianism would become the banner under which civil rights were initially won. Still, with each label came a further foreclosure of certain possibilities. Trans men were less able to pass as men and claim some of the privileges of “straight” life.
Skidmore’s book explores the lives of trans men who mostly successfully passed as men. But their choices were often viewed through the lens of “masquerading” and concealment, meaning at some point they were bound to be “found out.” She describes the voyeuristic thrill with which the popular press often reported on the moment of discovery when an individual’s “true sex” was revealed, a moment that Skidmore believes shows a great deal about beliefs surrounding biological truth at a time of heightened anxiety about gender and sexuality, as well as race and national borders.
In focusing on the turn of the century, True Sex challenges historians’ traditional periodization when it comes to gender. Analyses of gender fluidity have often been confined to specific decades like the 1920s, when play with social categories was more overt than it had been before. Skidmore also offers a geographical corrective. Though the discourse of queerness that has emerged in the past half century has centered largely on urban spaces where people were thought to be freer to explore their identities (a bias gender scholar Judith Halberstam called “metronormativity”), Skidmore illustrates the ways in which queer family-making often flowered in rural places. She points out that during periods of American history when people were more mobile — westward expansion being the primary example — marriage “was regulated by religious and legal officials, as well as through informal means of community control.”
In other words, for many peripatetic couples, simply arriving in a new town and introducing yourselves to your neighbors as man and wife was good enough — no one was looking for a formal marriage certificate. In this way couples legible as “straight” were able to enjoy the considerable social benefits of heterosexuality and marriage. Still, many couples chose to marry, even as legal reforms of the early 20th century raised the stakes on having one’s “true sex” outed.
In the first 30 years of the 20th century, as the discourses of both eugenics and sexology were gaining ground, dozens of states put statutes on the books to legislate fertility and marriage. In some states, these laws granted panels of doctors the right to sterilize people deemed unfit for parenthood. There was also a spate of marriage laws designed, in Skidmore’s words, “to identify ‘problem’ husbands and wives before they were allowed to reproduce.” But some trans men, including Kerwineo, still slipped under the radar and had “normal” marriages.
That’s a point that supports her larger claim that men like Kerwineo were not necessarily “queer” in the contemporary sense of the word, by which she means “dissenting, nonnormative, and critical of heteronormativity.” Rather, though they were frequently described in the mainstream press as living outside of polite society, many trans men, by passing as straight men, had quietly taken their place within it. Before Kerwineo’s “true” identity was made public, he was able to live as a classic American male: straight, married, employed, respected.
Through human stories, True Sex underscores the folly in believing there is a singular, uncoverable truth at the heart of gender, sex, or race. Rather, she illuminates the surprising realities of the lives of trans men a century ago, and also the ways that categories of identity intersect. As George Chauncey wrote in his well known 1994 study, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, “the relationship of the gay culture to the dominant culture was neither static nor passive: They did not merely co-exist but constantly created and re-created themselves in relation to each other in a dynamic, interactive, and contested process.” If anything, the lives of trans men like Ralph Kerwineo demonstrate that the meanings attached to bodies are continually shifting and are contingent on time and place. Against a narrative of unmitigated oppression, Skidmore deftly shows that in the absence of circumscribed identity categories, some trans men were able to claim the benefits of male privilege and in so doing access, however fleetingly, a priceless status: freedom.
True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Emily Skidmore is published by NYU Press and will be available on September 19, 2017.
