Three factors—race, socioeconomic class, and rurality—intersected and overlapped in Rollin’s life, affecting his transitions in various ways.

Rollin likely thought little about his race, but recent scholarship has demonstrated the inextricable relationship between race, gender, and transness. In Histories of the Transgender Child, Julian Gill-Peterson argues that constructions of trans identity in the twentieth-century United States were implicitly racialized, with a White trans child held up as the ideal.[1] In Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, C. Riley Snorton examines the intersections of transness and Blackness at various moments from the early nineteenth century on in the United States, highlighting how race has intertwined with the creation of transgender subjects.

Catherine Rooks, a Black contemporary of Rollin’s who undertook a feminine-to-masculine transition, was read as a Black man, pursued, and nearly arrested. Rooks’s experience illustrated a biased societal connection between Black men and criminality that Rollin, a White man, did not face. "Edenburg Folks Thought They Had Negro Robinson," New Castle Herald (PA), 26 March 1908, 1, 10.

In terms of race, Rollin benefitted in his feminine-to-masculine transitions from being a White man. C. Riley Snorton, in a discussion of Black identity and trans identity in American history, notes that both gender and race have functioned as open, mutable categories through which society commodifies and controls Black people.[2] Snorton’s analysis applies to the experience of Catherine Rooks, a Black contemporary of Rollin’s who, because of being read as a Black man, was pursued and nearly arrested. Rooks, who was traveling to reach an ill brother in March 1909, transitioned from a feminine identity to a masculine one, assuming men’s clothes for safety. Unfortunately, police in Edenburg, Pennsylvania, mistook Rooks for a local Black man who had shot his wife and fled. Rooks was detained and questioned. Police provided Rooks with train fare out of town and advised changing back into women’s clothes.^[3] During a time when the prospect of lynching terrorized Black Americans, Rooks, as a Black person, was immediately conflated with a violent shooter because of longstanding racist connections between Black masculinity, violence, and crime. In contrast, Rollin faced no such difficulty.

Race and class intersected in complex ways for trans people of the era. For example, Rollin’s contemporary, Nedra McGregor, described by newspapers as “colored” and “a mixture of Spanish, negro, and Indian,” took on men’s clothes and a masculine identity in December 1908. McGregor traveled from Jacksonville, Florida, to Quincy, Missouri, working along the way to earn money. When outed, McGregor was taken in by a women’s mission, which eventually subsidized McGregor’s attendance at Western College and Industrial Institute in Macon, Missouri, possibly in an attempt to reform McGregor. News coverage described no fines, imprisonment, or judicial chastisement for McGregor. Perhaps such treatment (focusing on education rather than punishment) could be explained by the fact that McGregor, who was reportedly intelligent and fluent in several languages, evinced accomplishments consonant with an upper-class, highly educated childhood.^[4]

As a White man with a white-collar background, Rollin left no indication that he thought about his race and his class in relation to transition. In contrast, Cora Anderson/Ralph Kerwinieo, another feminine-to-masculine person who had long-term relationships with women, explicitly considered transition in the context of race and class. Anderson/Kerwinieo, described as an “Indian,” and Marie White were studying to be nurses at Provident Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, in 1901. They “found out how hard it [was] for a woman (especially a woman with dark skin) to make an honest living and decided to double up and form a home,” according to retrospective news coverage in 1914. Anderson/Kerwinieo explained, “If I assumed men’s clothes I would be better able to obtain work[,] and as a man I could protect my wife from insult.” Anderson/Kerwinieo proceeded to live as a man for over a decade. In Anderson/Kerwinieo’s experience, a masculine identity facilitated societal acceptance for someone with “dark skin,” yielding higher earnings, the possibility of moving up in socioeconomic class, and a chance to protect White.^[5] For Anderson/Kerwinieo, the intersections of race, class, and gender had to be carefully examined.[6]

Notes

[1] Julian Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

[2] C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), particularly chap. 2, “Trans Capable: Fungibility, Fugitivity, and the Matter of Being.”

[3] “Edenburg Folks Thought They Had Negro Robinson,” New Castle (PA) Herald, 26 March 1908, 1, 10.

[4] “Nedra M’Gregor to Be Educated,” Hannibal (MO) Courier-Post, 18 December 1908, 1.

[5] Idah M’Clone Gibson, “Amazing Double Life of Cora Anderson,” Wisconsin State Journal (Madison, WI), 11 May 1914, 2.

[6] Skidmore’s detailed analysis of Anderson/Kerwinieo’s case concludes that he “took great pains to portray himself as an indigenous person who had wholly embraced the lessons of economic productivity and heteronormativity, and gotten ensnared in gender deviance simply because of his overzealous desire to be a productive citizen.” Skidmore, True Sex, 127.