Third Feminine-to-Masculine Transition in Oakland, CA
Rollin’s latest forcible outing must have shaken him deeply. Probably suicidal but still undaunted, Rollin drew on his reserves of resilience and immediately embarked on his most drastic feminine-to-masculine transition yet. Just after returning from Brattleboro, he promptly moved to Oakland, California.[1] He took on the name that he used for the rest of his life: Rollin Kedzie Morgan. He enrolled in the University of California San Francisco’s School of Medicine.
Rollin also got married on either December 31, 1903, or January 1, 1904, to Alice Bush (1864–1926), a practicing physician at a time when few women were doctors, scion of a wealthy tax collector, and Rollin’s first cousin.[2] She was nineteen years older than Rollin. “As she [Alice] wanted to take Morgan under her care in such a way that there could be no comment or criticism[,] the platonic marriage was arranged,” explained the Vermont Standard (Woodstock, VT).[3]
The marriage was evidently one of convenience, yet Rollin and Alice apparently cared about each other. According to the Oakland (CA) Tribune, Alice’s friends “declared that the attachment between Dr. Bush and her…husband was one of real and enduring affection.”[4]
Rollin’s marriage to Alice was not unusual. Many trans men living around the turn of the twentieth century in the United States obtained legal marriages to buttress their identities as socially acceptable men.[5] Legal marriage conferred benefits on trans men who participated. First, it adhered to the societal expectations of male citizens. Second, even though marriage carried the risk of exposure and discovery, it could also help trans men to pass. In True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Emily Skidmore reminds modern readers that, “in an era where there was no access to hormone therapy, or no possibility of legally changing one’s birth certificate or driver’s license, attaining a marriage certificate as a man was perhaps the only way that trans men could inhabit masculinity in an official, state-sanctioned way.”[6] With these considerations in mind, we can better understand why Rollin took the risk of marrying Alice.
Besides marriage, voter registration also served Rollin as an official public acknowledgment of his masculinity, especially during a time when only men could vote. (Women in California were not granted suffrage until 1911.) In 1908, he was recorded as a voter in Oakland, a member of the Republican Party, and a “student.”[7]
Unfortunately, Rollin became sick around November 1908. He underwent an operation, after which he and Alice visited Rollin’s immediate family in New York City. Alice returned to California alone after this visit.
In August 1909, Alice filed to have her marriage with Rollin voided. The court records were sealed, so we do not know precisely what occasioned the end of their marriage.[8] Reading between the lines, we can conjecture that both Rollin’s medical procedure and discussions between Alice and his parents probably revealed that that Rollin was a trans man.[9] Alternatively, as Rollin’s first cousin, Alice could have known Rollin’s birth-assigned gender and entered the marriage for her own reasons, perhaps as cover for her own queerness. The marriage could have ended when knowledge of Rollin’s birth-assigned gender became too publicly known. The unhappy husband and wife went their separate ways.
The Vermont news coverage of Rollin and Alice’s marriage thematically resembled state coverage of his two earlier feminine-to-masculine transitions. Both the Vermont Standard and the Montpelier (VT) Evening Argus repeated the phrase from California papers that Rollin “posed as a man,” making his Oakland transition appear fake and unconvincing.[10] At the same time, both papers’ ominous references to Rollin’s “peculiar aberration of the mind”—“a hallucination of a kind by no means unknown to science,” in the words of the Argus—invited the supposition that Rollin was mentally unwell and perhaps a harbinger of greater societal problems.
Rollin came back to southern Vermont at the end of November 1909. He showed up at his friends’ house in Stamford with torn clothes and severe lacerations on his head. He said that, on his way to town, three masked men had knocked him on the head, emptied his pocketbook, and stole his three-hundred-dollar diamond ring “in a desperate fight.”
The Bennington (VT) Banner, source of Rollin’s account of the robbery, remarked snidely, “‘Dr.’ Morgan has had many experiences that have attracted much attention.” Scare quotation marks around “‘Dr.’ Morgan” suggested that he was a quack. The Banner also described Rollin’s two earliest feminine-to-masculine transitions as occasions when he had “masqueraded.” His “sensational divorce suit” also came up.[11] Rollin was thus portrayed as a trickster who used a fake title and a costume to attract attention: an untrustworthy con man.
Rollin may or may not have been accosted and robbed. (No suspects could be located, and his was the only account.) His story, however, had the ring of emotional truth. The three masked attackers could have corresponded to societal forces arrayed against him or perhaps his own feelings of despair. The wreckage of his marriage had certainly incapacitated him as completely and unexpectedly as a blow to the head. With the voiding of his marriage and the ensuing scandal, his economic security, represented by the contents of his pocketbook, had disappeared. Most significantly, a diamond ring, a piece of jewelry resembling an engagement or wedding band, had been stolen. Rollin viewed his recent experience as a “desperate fight” in which he had tried to hold on to his marriage and his wife, but he had lost them.
Rollin had not, however, lost himself. He had survived the humiliating dissolution of his first marriage, but he had also found himself. He now knew who he was: Rollin Kedzie Morgan. No longer would he allow his family and the world to misgender him.
Notes
[1] “Rollin K. Morgan…first made his appearance in Oakland eight months before the marriage,” which would date his move to just after his Brattleboro transition. “Woman’s Husband Not of Adam’s Sex,” San Francisco Examiner, 14 November 1909, 1.
[2] Rollin’s father George and Alice’s mother Ellen were siblings, making Rollin and Alice first cousins who shared grandparents. The California papers referred to Rollin and Alice as “distant” relations rather than first cousins, a fact that indicated that the two probably knew that they were closely related and concealed this information.
[3] “Girl Supposed She Was Real Man,” Vermont Standard (Woodstock, VT), 18 November 1909, 6.
[4] “‘Husband’ Was Woman, Not a Man,” Oakland (CA) Tribune, 14 November 1909, 20.
[5] Skidmore, “To Have and to Hold: Trans Husbands in the Early Twentieth Century,” chap. 5 in True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York University Press, 2017).
[6] Skidmore, True Sex, 141.
[7] Voter registration record for Rollin Kidzie Morgan, in John P. Cook, comp., Index to the Great Register, Alameda County, 1908, Fourth Ward—Precinct No. 11 (Alameda County, CA, 1908), no. 209.
[8] Information from this and the two preceding paragraphs comes from “Woman’s Husband,” San Francisco Examiner, 14 November 1909, 1.
[9] Alice’s possible ignorance of Rollin’s trans status was not as incredible as it may seem to modern readers. Other trans men in the twentieth century followed Rollin’s practice of keeping their trans status to themselves. Jazz musician Billy Tipton (1914–1989), for example, was discovered to be trans after his death. “The news,” in the words of a New York Times obituary, “came as a shock to nearly everyone,” including his family and fellow musicians. Dinitia Smith, “Billy Tipton Is Remembered with Love, Even by Those Who Were Deceived,” New York Times, 2 June 1998.
[10] “Girl Supposed,” Vermont Standard, 18 November 1909, 6; “Woman Married Woman,” Montpelier (VT) Evening Argus, 26 November 1909, 3.
[11] Quotations from this and the previous paragraph come from “Highwaymen in Stamford,” Bennington (VT) Banner, 2 December 1909, 1.
