The anti-trans brigade loves to claim that trans people are a modern invention (so much so that I am apparently much younger than my calendar years as I hadn’t been invented when I was born). When you provide them with examples of gender diversity from history they will claim that you can’t really know how people from the past felt about themselves, and anyway being trans would have been illegal back then so they would have been killed if they were really trans.

But what if there is evidence? Not autobiographies, because they can be unreliable, but evidence from independent witnesses who knew the person in question and can testify to how they behaved.

This is the subject of a new post that I have up on Notches, in collaboration with my friend Margarita Vaysman who is a professor of Russian Literature at Oxford. Having discovered the story of Aleksandr Aleksandrov, she started doing some digging. As a Russian speaker (she’s Ukrainian, as was Aleksandrov) she has been able to look at archives written in Russian and she has turned up some remarkable articles by late 19th century Russian historians. These two men were keen to know more about the famous hero of the Napoleonic Wars – allegedly a young woman who abandoned home and family to fight as a man for her country. What they found was clear evidence that Aleksandrov – a name he was given by the Tsar, alongside a Cross of St. George – continued to live as a man for decades after the end of the war.

She was always in male attire: a long black frock coat and narrow trousers, a tall black hat on her head and a cane in her hands, on which she leaned. She endeavoured to walk as upright as her years and strength would allow and had a firm step. She always conducted herself as a man and was offended if she were addressed as a woman; if this happened, she would get angry and respond harshly.

As you’ll see, there is a fair amount of misgendering going on. The learned gentlemen were not quite sure what to make of this strange person, but they were quite clear about Aleksandrov’s sense of self, and also that most of the people in the town where he lived were happy to accept him as a man.

I’m writing this because there is not a lot of background in the Notches articles. The two translated articles are quite enough material for one blog post. They are also rather too long for a typical paper in an academic journal. However, Margarita and I are working on papers, and we want to be able to cite these two pieces. We can’t do that unless they are published somewhere. Justin Bengry and the Notches team kindly agreed to put them online for us, for which we are deeply grateful.

The academics amongst you can look forward to a paper or two in due course. And hopefully I’ll be appearing at one or two conferences on queer history.