Unfinished patchwork, U.S.A., 1870-79. Wikimedia Commons.
LGBTQ Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBTQ themes is welcome in this series. LGBTQ Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a message to Chrislove.
Another piece of news this week, oh boy. The (formerly, and still almost) richest person, out of the 8 billion of us on Planet Earth, feels absolutely certain that I, and others like me, are a lie. And now, wants to use "artificial intelligence" to erase us. (Stand in line with your impotent eraser, buddy, alongside a pack of self-aggrandizing preachers and politicians and pundits, from Ohio to the Gulf of Oman.)
Though assumed to be female at birth, I—for reasons I consider good and sufficient—no longer think of myself as a woman, nor a man. I use the word nonbinary. The term in itself is not crucial to me. And for the record, my pronouns are freestyle: whatever.
I've been walking this planet some years longer than the (formerly, and still almost) richest person on earth.
And he can [censored, as I'd rather not get banned]. ;-)
What a good coincidence that nonbinary scholar Kit Heyam's Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender, published last year, was already on the schedule for LGBTQ Literature.
An antidote to all that, it's a dive into the real, rich, complex and confusing reality of human gender-bending experience on this planet, since—at least—ancient Egypt.
Quick note on spellings: When transliterating names and terms from different languages, different English spellings may be used by different authors. I've followed Heyam. There are also various "diacritical marks," accent marks and others. My tablet won't compass them, not recognizing keyboard shortcuts. I've left them off. No disrespect intended.
Six Stories
Before We Were Trans is foremost, in my mind, a rich trove of stories. Heyam does not ignore the towering icons of trans history such as Magnus Hirschfield and Christine Jorgenson. The majority of space, however, goes to lesser known individuals and groups. Not all their histories are pretty, or unproblematical. But here, as a sample, are six.
1. Ahebi
Once upon a time in Igboland (now part of Nigeria), a child was born in humble circumstances, about 1880. Assumed at birth to be a girl, in youth Ahebi suffered rape among other adversities and ran away to Igalaland, far to the north. There, after making a start in sex work, Ahebi developed a highly successful career as a trader, with extensive knowledge of geography and many connections.
At around 35, Ahebi returned home to Igboland and there, succeeded to a series of "intrinsically male" social roles. First Ahebi was chosen as headman of the village. In addition, the colonizing British appointed Ahebi their local "warrant chief."
Ahebi also...married wives for [Ahebi's] brothers...ensuring that these wives' children would become Ahebi's heirs....[Ahebi's] main role was as judge in a local court, and [Ahebi] was carried to court sittings on a hammock, accompanied by musicians singing songs that upheld [Ahebi's] maleness. (p. 54)
Finally, Ahebi imported the "Igala system of hierarchical singular leadership," and became a king.
Ahebi ruled...from an increasingly elaborate palace compound, which included farmland, stables and housing, alongside its own market, school, prison, and brothel. The school was unusual in providing education to girls, and the palace provided asylum for women fleeing abuse. Ahebi married multiple wives, including some of the formerly abused women. These wives could sleep with male friends, bearing children who would carry on Ahebi's family line, and some were also encouraged to engage in sex work with important Nigerian and British men who visited the palace. Through these political and sexual networks, Ahebi exerted influence....
By around age 60 Ahebi lost some of that influence, after attempting a religious function, that of invoking masked spirits—not only another exclusively male role, but one requiring special initiation. Political evolution and complaints of corruption contributed to the decline in power. Still, Ahebi continued living in the palace until death at almost age 70, in 1948.
Funeral rites, conducted for some reason several years in advance of death, treated Ahebi as male.
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2. The Ladies of Knockaloe
They weren't there to be punished, but life was disorienting and difficult.
From 1915 until the end of World War I, some 20,000 British-resident men of German extraction were confined in a set of isolated, all-male internment camps at Knockaloe on the Isle of Man. Viewed as potential enemy agents, some internees were foreign residents; others had even believed themselves British, but turned out legally not to be citizens.
Packed into tents and barracks, forbidden paid work, the internees nevertheless forged, as people will--with some help in this case from charitable organizations--an ad hoc society, with its own exceptional structure, economy, customs and consolations.
Perhaps the greatest consolation was theater.
Knockaloe had no fewer than twenty separate theatres, seven of which were located in the 'privilege camp', Camp IV [where better-off internees were confined and had access to small amounts of their own money]. Each camp saw an average of one show per week, with over 1,500 performed....[I]n Camp IV alone, over 170 internees were actors, and a further 74 worked in supporting roles.... (pp. 94 f.)
Naturally, some theater parts were female roles. And certain actors developed great skill in portraying women.
Camp workshops constructed elaborate outfits, wigs, makeup, and prostheses...The objective was for the audience to read the people acting female roles as female....with many developing reputations as leading ladies and starring in multiple productions. They were accompanied by other female-presenting internees, who acted as waitresses and theatre attendants. (p. 95)
Further, it was common that
[w]hen they stepped out of the spotlight, they retained their dresses, their wigs, and even their women's names...[T]hey were living, full-time, as women. (p. 96)
A former internee recalled that one young actor
'...looked bursting with health, and was...enthusiastic about all games. I don't know how he ever came to be cast for a female part, but he was...one of the most convincing proofs I have seen of the predominance of the intellectual or spiritual over the physical....[A]s that youth became more and more of what I do not hesitate to call a great actress...he also became more and more feminine off the stage, and no longer played hockey or football...but walked about mincingly with a little dog named Toutou, with a pink bow.' (pp. 100 f.)
Another specialist in female roles, the same memoirist wrote, somehow contrived a tent
'arranged as a genuine boudoir, scented white roses in a slender vase, everything covered with floral cretonne'. (p. 102)
To what extent sexual relations might have been, for some, a part of this experience—or possible in that highly invigilated setting—is unclear, though these pro tem women certainly had devoted admirers. Some posed for photos with male-presenting internees, like married couples.
Authorities knew all about the gender-bending and did not interfere, though they took care that no photographs of internees appearing as women were released outside the camps. Afterwards there was silence. A few years later, the memoirist found Toutou's owner respectably married to a woman, successful in a middle-class career, and preferring not to be reminded.
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3. "Moll Cutpurse"
Mary Frith, in the early 1600s, sliced a flamboyant, scandalous, ambi-gendered path through King James I's London.
So much so as to inspire characters in no fewer than three contemporary plays, two of which have survived. Frith served as model for the central figure in one comedy, The Roaring Girl, by the well-known authorial team of Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton. (The title plays on the then-term "roaring boy" for a dandified street bully.)
The exploits of...Frith gripped the gossips of London. Frith used gender nonconformity to facilitate petty crime, and embraced the freedom it brought to walk alone through the streets of London, to drink and to smoke; but...also knowingly manipulated the sex appeal it carried. (p. 77)
And sex appeal it did carry.
One Christmas Day, Frith stood in the gallery of St. Paul's Cathedral (the old gothic building that later burned), in full public view, and lifted a voluminous outer skirt to expose an under-petticoat tucked up to look like a man's breeches—showing two attractive, stockinged legs. Frith was arrested and punished, both then and at other times, but remained irrepressible; did well in her career as a professional thief and fence; and survived until 1659, aged over 70, outliving even the regicide and Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell.
Based on The Roaring Girl, Frith it seems was an easily recognizable figure in real life with many admirers, and took no nonsense from anybody. The stage persona of "Moll Cutpurse" went costumed in a male-coded jerkin and female-coded skirt; was a.k.a "Captain Jack"; drank with the play's villain; declined to have sex with him; and finally defeated him in a duel. The script makes it clear that Frith's appearance and behavior sent consistently mixed signals:
'woman more than man/ Man more than woman'; someone who, in the sun, has 'two shadows to one shape'; and several more. (p. 78)
A farrago of sexual innuendoes and puns made the same point. Audiences must also have enjoyed how
[u]nderlying all those jokes is the additional gendered confusion caused by the fact that no woman could act on the English stage... so Moll/Jack is a gender-nonconforming AFAB [assigned female at birth] character being played by an AMAB [assigned male at birth] actor. (79 f.)
Despite this prohibition, however, Frith at least once did appear personally onstage at London's Fortune theater—dressed as a man. Reportedly Frith wore a sword, played a lute tucked between those attractive legs, smoked a pipe, and advised the audience not to be deceived as to what a pair of breeches concealed.
Some years after these events, in 1620, a London gentleman wrote to a friend,
'Yesterday the Bishop of London called together all his clergy about this town, and told them he had express commandment from the King to will them to inveigh vehemently against the insolency of our women, and their wearing of broad brimmed hats, pointed doublets, their hair cut short or shorn, and some of them stilettos or poignards [daggers], and other such trinkets of like moment [that is, with male-coded meaning ]; adding withal that if pulpit admonitions will not reform them he would proceed by another course....' (p. 72)
In other words, the church leader was threatening a whole bunch of women who had adopted male-coded styles, with some punishment or other. What "course" he had in mind, and whether King James ever gave a thought to these women again, I can't say; if Wikipedia has it right, the good bishop died the next year.
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4. People like Tuways
A third gender?
Spin the dial of the Wayback Machine to the late 600s. Place: the Arabian peninsula, city of Medina, ruled by successors of the Prophet Muhammad. A society described by one scholar (Everett K. Rowson) as "refined and self-indulgent...dedicated to luxury and the pursuit of the arts."
Among the leading musicians of the time and place is an individual called Tuways, whose name became proverbial: "better at hajaz [a type of poetic meter] than Tuways"; "more effeminate than Tuways." Tuways headed a "loosely affiliated group" of individuals who
were hired separately and together to sing at events, and they drew praise for their cheeky wit, their physical attractiveness and their musical skill.…
Tuways and...fellow musicians presented in a feminine way: painting their hands with henna, styling their hair, wearing jewelery and feminine clothes....[T]hey were often placed between men and women in events programs, referred to by strangers with familiar nicknames (a...lack of respect associated more with women than with men), and admitted to women's spaces. (pp. 133 f.)
Despite having been categorized as male at birth, these entertainers were understood as no sexual threat, but rather, as individuals whose penis—if they had one—might be called "an unused weapon."
There was a name for them, mukhannathun, meaning "soft”—something of a pejorative, not unlike the English slur "molly," with the same root meaning. The Persian language had a synonym, which persisted at least down to the 1800s.
Some sources suggest these people were regarded as asexual, perhaps even as castrated. At least some, from the beginning, were also understood to have sex with men, taking the "bottom" role. Yet it is also apparently true that Tuways and some others early on both married and had children.
By the 800s, however,
being penetrated by men was -- along with lacking a beard -- an intrinsic part of their gendered categorisation. They continued to be seen not as women, or as gay men, but as a separate gender. (p. 135)
People in this category were disapproved of by conservatives and suffered persecution. Yet the term, at least, persisted.
In the 1000s, the Islamic philosopher al-Ghazali, laying out rules for proper conduct, specified that boys should not be dressed in silk or variegated colors, which were used by women and mukhannathun. Other early manuals indicated that mukhannathun were allowed to wear yellow, a color the Prophet Muhammad specifically prohibited to men.
Essentially, then, Heyam writes, these "people like Tuways" constituted, in part based on their sexuailty,
a group of people whose gender is woman-adjacent but ultimately neither male nor female. (p. 132)
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5. Thomas(ine) Hall
Born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the north of England around 1600, and christened Thomasine Hall, was a person who came to live life in alternating genders.
Raised as female, Hall at age 12 went to live with an aunt in London. When Hall's brother was drafted into the military, however, Hall followed him—as male—and served as a soldier fighting the French.
On returning...Thomas(ine) lived as female again, earning a living through lacemaking and other needlework, before emigrating in 1627. (p. 154)
Hall took ship for England's 20-year-old Virginia colony and there became an indentured servant. Gender trouble arrived a couple of years later when someone accused Hall of "fornication" with a maid called "great Bess."
In proceedings that followed, the question arose as to whether Hall was, in fact, a man or a woman. And there was no consensus.
Hall ended up enduring no fewer than five physical examinations and questionings, brusque and forcible, by a dozen different people of both genders, acting as individuals and in groups. In the process Hall was repeatedly ordered to change clothing to that of the opposite gender. No final conclusion was reached.
The matter finally made its way to court in the colony's capital of Jamestown. In a legal first,
'It was thereupon ordered at this court', the records state, 'that it shall be published in the plantation where the said Hall liveth that [they are] a man and a woman, [so] that all the inhabitants there may take notice thereof'. Thomas(ine), meanwhile, was ordered to wear a mixture of male-coded and female-coded clothing at all times: '[they] shall go Clothed in man's apparel, only [their] head to be attired in a coif and cross-cloth', female-coded headware, 'with an apron before [them]'. (p. 155)
Hall then disappears from the historic record.
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6. Kauxuma nupika
Born under another name in the late 1700s, to the Ktunaxa people living along the Kootenay River—which flows into the Columbia near what is now the the U.S./Canadian border—this person was at first assumed to be female. In 1808, the individual joined a traveling group of European fur traders and married one, a man who worked for an English trader named Thompson.
The marriage didn't last, however. Returning home,
they announced that they were no longer a woman, but a man. Their new name, Kauxuma nupika, translated as 'Gone to the Spirits' -- a chosen name that made clear to everyone how their gender was entangled with their spiritual experience.
Also out of that spiritual experience,
...Kauxuma nupika became a prophet...[T]his work led them to traverse the length of the Columbia [a distance of some 1,200 miles]. Together with their wife (whose name sadly doesn't survive), they prophesied to those they met, foretelling the death, disease and destruction that would accompany European settler colonialism. (p. 195)
The couple arrived on the west coast of what is now Oregon in 1811. At the English outpost of Fort Astoria, they encountered the same Thompson that Kauxuma nupika had known upriver among the other traders. Thompson eventually recognized the prophet. The warnings of Kauxuma nupika being unpopular with Native locals, Thompson protected the couple and hired them as guides on a fresh expedition northwards.
Kauxuma naupika's prophecies became more favorable after they traveled into areas that had already suffered smallpox epidemics. The couple received many gifts.
After their journey with the traders was over, Kauxuma nupika worked as a mediator, negotiating and translating between the Flathead, Blackfoot and Kutenai. It was through this work that they were killed, probably at some point in the 1830s, by a company of Blackfoot warriors. (p. 197)
Contexts
Isolated stories, selective, terse, yield only part of their potential resonance. I picked a few and told a part of each. Heyam interweaves much more, a tapestry of human experiences. Just for instance:
King Ahebi reigned in an African context, where even before him, individuals at first identified as female had a recognized path to become male. Among the pioneers of such paths was the Pharoah Hatshepsut, as early as the 1400s B.C. Other places where this kind of gender change was officially possible have included Albania.
The internment camps of Knockaloe were only one case where groups of persons understood as men, isolated in wartime, produced from themselves a cadre of pro tem women. Parallels took place in other internment, prisoner-of-war, and military camps. The theaters of Knockaloe also fit into a context of drag and theatrical cross-dressing that extends from ancient times to the present.
So does "Moll Cutpurse." And from another perspective, Mary Frith was part of another contemporary pattern: employing male-coded attire to attract male sexual interest. High-status sex workers in Venice and elsewhere did the same. As up-to-the-minute English women continued sporting male-coded wear, clergy fretted that such fashions might serve as a "gateway drug" encouraging men to have sex with men.
Tuways' group, in being defined by sexual behavior, had counterparts elsewhere. Premodern Japan recognized a "third gender" called wakashu. Assigned male at birth, wakashu wore a unique hairstyle with prescribed clothing. Their defining characteristic they had sex with men, exclusively in the "bottom" role. Men were assumed to be attracted to wakashu. So were women. In time, some female sex workers joggled the social order--by adopted wakashu-coded clothing.
Thomas(ine) Hall illustrates the policing of intersex individuals within our society's zero-sum mentality. In the interest of sustaining the binary, intersex people also have been involuntarily subjected to surgery. Others groups are also gender-policed. In 1800s science, Heyam writes, "[S]exual dimorphism was one of the things that divided people into different races: white people's bodies were the most 'perfectly' divided into male and female...." (pp. 17-18). Black female athletes today face extra scrutiny; trans female athletes face exclusion. Governments may not allow trans people recognition without proof of physical transition.
Kuaxuma nupika exemplifies people for whom a spiritual calling has been entwined with their gender. Another instance: certain devotees in India of the god Rama, called hijras. Living in family-like groups under a guru, they are classed as neither men nor women and present themselves in a feminine way, as a devotional rather than personal choice. To read Heyam's book is also to learn again and again how, throughout the global process of colonization, Christian authorities have undertaken to rub out--with heartbreaking cruelty--every trace of indigenous gender expression that failed to conform with their "god-given" binary.
An argument for expansive history
Heyam is upfront that "thinking about trans history is a difficult and messy business." (p. 4)
"We don't [even] think about gender and sex in a coherent way today" (p. 6), Heyam writes.
The predominantly white, modern West may be comfortable with simplifications like, "Gender is what is between your ears, and sex is what is between your legs." But people in other times and cultures have held and do hold other concepts of gender, linking it in ways that we in the Western "mainstream" do not, with such factors as sexual behavior, social role, costume, religious vocation, cultural background, and even age. Another disjunct is that, while speakers of Indo-European languages may obsess over pronouns related to trans identity, many other languages do not have terms for gender that map neatly onto our vocabulary, and may not use gendered pronouns at all.
A further challenge to trans histories:
The fact is that the discipline of history is set up to erase queer lives, and particularly trans lives. (p. 220)
Specifically,
[b]ecause trans people are a minority...[o]ur society treats cis-genderness as the default...state... This pervasive cisnormativity means that the cis perspective is...positioned as objective truth. (p. 19)
Historical figures are typically to be assumed cis (and straight) unless proven otherwise according to extremely demanding standards. Meanwhile, historical records that might even suggest otherwise are understandably sparse, while those records that do exist tend to be medical or legal in nature, thus potentially distorted by thoughtless, conventional usages and/or prevarication. The upshot: historical invisibility for trans as well as other LGBTQ+ people.
Heyam also warns against relying as a standard on the "narrow trans narrative we see emphasized in contemporary media" (p. 13).
Among other pitfalls is that trans identity may automatically be dismissed as inauthentic "disguise" if it carries any practical advantage. As well, the concept that valid transgender identity must be unambiguously clear, uninfluenced by circumstance, and permanent. Heyam posits,
Fluid, fleeting, and nonbinary experiences still count. (p. 115)
Additional hitches in writing trans history that Heyam touches are appropriation and territoriality.
Members of mainstream, white and Western cultures need to exercise extreme care not to assume that parallels and resonances with other cultures amount to an identity.
At the same time, members of different LGBTQ+ groups have run into difficulties over relative affinities with historical persons. For instance, take the English Anne Lister/Gentleman Jack, who in the early 1800s consistently dressed in an eccentric masculine-feminine style, and who culminated a series of affairs with women in a pioneering symbolic marriage. Is our remembrance of Anne Lister meant to be placed in a box labeled "lesbian," or "trans"? Heyam's response: if Lister's life story is found meaningful by people in both groups, then why not both?
In short, an expansive trans history need not present us with a restrictive checklist or set of exclusive compartments but can be
"...a gloriously messy set of realities that show us the creativity of what human beings can do...." (p. 230)
"Real" or "not real"?
Immersed all this gender complexity I found myself imagining a simile: the "gloriously messy set of realities" resembling a trove collected on a beach: shells and shell fragments, pebbles, bits of driftwood, egg cases of skates, sea glass, gull feathers, handfuls of sand, the odd live crab or so. Trying to contain the full complexity of gender within our familiar language and conceptual framework is like trying to carry home all this in a loose-woven, rickety basket; too much slips through.
You don't write about these things without wrestling with language and concepts and having to explain compromises. Heyam does that too.
We may be in something like that place where biological taxonomy was, in the 1700s before Linnaeus--a dozen competing understandings, systems of description and classification. Still in the exploration phase. Exciting.
Social conservatives confront us with a twin to the challenge facing gender historians: "If you exist, let's see you prove it!" And the limits of known history are claimed as "evidence" that trans identities are a novel thing and so--by another logical leap—invalid.
Constraints of existing language and concepts are taken as constraints of reality.
While right-wing extremists chant: "You don't exist and we hate you!"
Every trans person in this binary-based society has wrestled with it.
"Did anyone here...when you first came out, did you have problems believing yourself?"
Every single person in the room raised their hand. (p. 23)
And others, non-trans people who just can't find anything in their own feelings to correspond with ours, may scratch their heads and ask, "But isn't gender just a social construct?"
Yes; and no.
To say that sex and gender are both socially constructed isn't to say they're not real -- like other social constructs, including race, money and crime, they have material and life-changing consequences for all of us but it is to say there's no innate reason to think of them the way we do. (p. 6)
Shifting the terms
Me on a soapbox here: ultimately, these "culture" wars are about power. Who holds the ultimate right to define for you who and what you are ? On what grounds? And who has the right to determine those ?
Instead of continuing the exhausting fight to prove our realness in the past and present, I think it's time we changed the terms of the conversation. If we start to treat our standards of 'realness' critically, we can open up space for so many new ways to relate to gender....We can both widen the scope of trans history and enable people of every gender to live more freely and expansively. (p. 28)
Freely and expansively? No wonder that prospect twists into a knot the undies of people who would like to live in a closed and static and predictable and simple social system, with a place for everyone and everyone in their place—where the holders of power need not fear sands shifting under their position.
But what if the sex-and-gender binary were to become—like Aristotle's physics, the medieval Great Chain of Being, phlogiston, bleeding patients for fever, hair jewelry—obsolete?
Some trans people have even been prompted to argue that they were not 'born into the wrong body' but 'born into the wrong culture' (p. 92).
In cases where that has implied they "should have been born" into somebody else's culture, poorly comprehended by the outsider, it has been wrongheaded, Heyam points out.
But what about a culture yet to be ?
🌻🕊💜🐱
Supplementary
Kit Heyam's website
Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender at Hachette Book Group, with links for ordering. Some sources offer discounts.
Previous, related LGBTQ Literature diaries:
A Transgender Prophet in Revolutionary-era America
Nonbinary Ways of Being (personal/primer)
Videos for fun and further context:
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