Gender Benders, 1782-1920, by Jonathan Ned Katz

Here are primary documents about the lives of persons identified at birth as female, who later lived and sometimes identified as male, now understood as "transgender."

Reprinted from Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (NY: Crowell, 1976). Published originally on OutHistory in 2008.

Note by Jonathan Ned Katz added March 6, 2019 and revised August 8, 2024:

In regard to people in the past, it seems to me now that we best honor them (and our own present desire to understand them) by trying to discover the changing historical terms and concepts by which they understood themselves over their lifetimes. We also need to understand the changing historical terms and concepts by which others understood them over time.

It now also seems important to ask how all those terms and concepts expressed social judgments and were implicated in the power relations of individuals and classes, social systems, structures, and institutions.

New York Times: "she went to making love to the pretty girls," March 12, 1867

“woman’s rights have not attained to that degree of development”

In a report datelined London, February 27, and printed in the New York Times on March 12, 1867, a correspondent says:

Dr. Mary E. Walker has give a temperance lecture in the Fetter-lane Chapel . . , and as the medical students kept away, she got only applause and thanks and a bouquet. But another Mary Walker is likely to fare worse than our fair medica at Castle Thunder. She took it into her head a few years ago to don male attire, and engaged as a barman. Somehow the breeches seem to have put bad notions into her head, for she went to making love to the pretty girls who came after the family beer. One of them corresponded with her, and was engaged to be married to her. As making presents costs money, the feminine barman borrowed from the till, was detected, pleaded guilty, and is now waiting for her sentence. Her enamoured fiancé visited her in jail. They are not to be married at present, as woman’s rights have not attained to that degree of development."(1)

References

Monadnock [the correspondent’s assumed name], “European News…. Affairs in England….” New York Times, March 12, 1867, p. 1, report datelined London, Febuary 27, 1867. Cited in Sharon M. Harris, Dr. Mary Walker: An American Radical, 1838-1919 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), p. 94, n. 24 on p. 265.