Although the date of this article should serve as a warning for homophobic content, it presents an extremely thorough dissection of three topics: the evidence for Henry Fielding as author of The Female Husband, the relationship of The Female Husband to the objective facts of Mary Hamilton’s life and trial (i.e., tenuous), and the most likely sources for Fielding’s fictional additions and substitutions. I’m going to skim over much of the detailed evidence, but will use this opportunity to include the text of the primary sources that Baker quotes.
transgender identity
I’ve used this tag to indicate entries where there is clear evidence suggesting a transgender identity or, in fantastic literature, where an actual physical sexual transformation takes place as the resolution to an apparent same-sex bond.
LHMP entry
In 1746, a young woman named Mary Price discovered that her recently-wed husband was assigned female at birth. She considered herself to have been defrauded and brought the matter to the attention of the law. Her husband was tried and found guilty under the vagrancy laws. England had no laws that addressed cross-dressing or gender-crossing specifically, and the legal records indicate that the system did a certain amount of head-scratching to figure out what charges to bring—though they were clear that they planned to find something.
This study considers three categories of transgender experience. Although a variety of terms for these categories are noted, for convenience they are labeled erxing (two-shaped) corresponding roughly to intersex, nü hua nan (FTM), and nan hua nü (MTF). The period of study is primarily the Ming (1368-1644 CE) and Qing (1644-1911 CE) eras, though earlier material is also noted. The material is structured in five sections: an introduction discussing the source materials, a discussion of each of the three categories, and a brief summary of conclusions.
This article is a survey of recent work in trans and intersex historical studies covering the medieval period. Wingard notes that these topics have only been seriously included in book-length studies since 2020, following something of a hiatus in queer medieval history publications in general since the early 2000s. This particular survey focuses on work that studies “lived experience” via documentary sources and non-fiction texts, rather than a broader scope that includes literary and artistic materials.
I’m inadvertently continuing my theme of publications where I’ve already covered a more extensive version of the same material, though in this case by a different author. (Brown, Kathleen. 1995. “’Changed...into the Fashion of a Man’: The Politics of Sexual Difference in a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Settlement” in Journal of the History of Sexuality 6:2 pp.171-193.)
Our kick-off biography for this chapter is a long, convoluted story about expert hunter and frontiersman Joseph Lobdell, who left home in New York in 1855 for the wilds of Minnesota. Lobdell was famed for his hunting and well-liked, until by chance it was discovered he had a female body. His Minnesota neighbors took this badly and shipped him back to New York.
This chapter looks at one way in which male cross-dressers were sidelined in histories of the West—specifically, by focusing on racialized histories of cross-dressers, and so assigning the practice to non-white populations.
This section of the book examines how the reality of cross-dressing in the West was erased from the historic record. As usual, the chapter begins with a detailed biography.
As this chapter focuses on male cross-dressing, I will be skimming it more briefly. As in the first chapter, we begin with an extensive case history. “M” began dressing in female-coded clothing as a youth, and left home for the West at age 15 due to family conflicts. M preferred playing with dolls, cooking, and sewing rather than male-coded activities, but didn’t back down from fighting his bullies. Further questioning indicated that M’s mother had initiated both the cross-dressing and needlecrafts.
This chapter is probably the one of most interest in the book, cataloging and discussing cases of female cross-dressers. The text alternates between detailed case studies and general discussion.
In 1912, in Portland Oregon, Harry Allen (alias Harry Livingstone) was arrested and eventually charged with violating the Mann Act (transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes) due to having written to her partner (who presented herself as his wife) Isabelle Maxwell in Seattle, asking her to come to Portland, where she then engaged in prostitution to support them both.
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