A week or so ago there was a lengthy Twitter conversation between myself, Kit Heyam, and Greg Jenner (who is the historical consultant for the BBC’s Horrible Histories show). It was occasioned by the publication of a new biography of James Barry, someone who is often held up as an example of a trans person from history. This post is not about Barry. I have bought the new biography, which appears to be making the case that Barry strongly identified as female despite living as a man, but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet. Rather the post is more generally about how we interpret evidence from history.

The first point I want to discuss I owe to Kit. It is that conversations such as the one around Barry do not happen in a vacuum. It is a long-held tenet of belief among certain self-styled Radical Feminists that trans people are a recent invention, and indeed a creation of the Patriarchy. Their view is that trans people cannot have existed in the past because the concept of being a trans did not exist then (and indeed do not exist now other than in our own perverted imaginations). As a consequence of this there is a determined effort to “reclaim” any possible evidence of trans men from history and to prove that these people saw themselves as women. The new Barry biography looks like it may be part of that effort. The musical which portrayed Billy Tipton as a flamboyant drag king rather than someone who lived as a man for most of his life certainly was.

The sort of argument being made comes over very clearly in the Guardian review of the Barry biography. Look at the word choices: “scandalous subterfuge”, “adopted a male persona”, “was, in fact, a woman”, “perfect female”, “masqueraded as a man”, “deception of breathtaking proportions”.

BINGO! And I have only got as far as the second paragraph.

The message is very clear. As far as the reviewer is concerned, Barry was “really a woman”, and that presenting as a man was an act of deceit. By extension, the reviewer is also making the case that all trans people are engaged in acts of deceit because, like Barry, we can only “really” be the gender we were assigned at birth. It is not surprising, therefore, that trans people tend to treat such claims with some skepticism, given the level of political bias involved.

In practice, of course, we can never be sure how people from the past thought about themselves. Absent a time machine, we can’t go back and ask them. All we can do is look at their behavior and make judgements based on that. What we see varies enormously. There are people from the past who cross-dress occasionally for festivals and similar occasions, much like people do today for Halloween. There are people from the past who cross-dress for entertainment, like modern drag performers. There are people from the past who cross-dress for economic advantage, but give it up as soon as the opportunity arises. There are people from the past who cross-dress to signal their sexual tastes. And there are people from the past who cross-dress for most of their adult lives.

Cis historians tend to present all of this as masquerade, and assume that all of these people identified with the gender they were assigned at birth. Certainly they talk about them in those terms. A point I make in opposition to this is that cis historians have never suffered from gender dysphoria and have no idea what it is like. Most trans people have strong personal experience of having to live in a gender that does not suit you. We know how hard that is. We find the idea that someone should successfully live most of their adult life in a different gender without having a strong affinity for that gender, to be quite bizarre. It would be incredibly stressful.

A study I would love to see done, but can’t do myself because it would require access to archives in US universities, is a comparative study of people assigned female at birth who fought in the American Civil War. There were a lot of them. Estimates range from 400 to 750. That’s a good sample size, though not all of them will have left much evidence. Why they did this is subject to a great deal of debate. My view is that there is no easy answer, because they will all have had their own reasons:

• Some will have done it to stay with husbands, brothers or lovers;
• Some will have done it because they were poor and the army offered employment, a home and food;
• Some will have done it because they strongly believed in the cause of the side they fought for;
• But some of them continued to live as men for the rest of their lives once the war was over, which suggests a rather greater affinity for masculinity.

Again you can’t prove that these people identified as men, but it is possible that they did, and hard to see how they would have coped with life otherwise.

Another point I want to make is that saying that someone from the past was “really a woman” is just as anachronistic as saying that the person was a “trans man”. The idea that the human race is divided into men and women, and that never the twain shall meet, is a relatively new one. These ideas developed in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries as science began to give us tools to quantify this separation. Before we knew about chromosomes and sex hormones, the existence of other genders was a possibility and often taken for granted.

We should remember, for example, that many ancient societies made significant use of eunuchs in various roles. The Assyrians were the first to use eunuchs in court on a grand scale, but they existed in Sumer too. The Chinese also made extensive use of eunuchs. Cai Lun, the person credited with the invention of paper, was a eunuch. So too was China’s greatest naval hero, Zheng He.

Many eunuchs, of course, still identified as men, but others identified as a third gender, or even (so the Kama Sutra tells us) as women. Indeed there is a long written history of this behavior in India, and it continues to the present day.

It is also worth noting that, if someone was made a eunuch as a child, which was fairly common (and a necessity for making castrati singers) then it constitutes both surgery and hormone treatment (in that male puberty is prevented), which are the two pillars of modern gender medicine.

Interestingly many ancient sources (including the Bible) talk of people who are “natural eunuchs” or “born eunuchs”. What this means is not clear, beyond the fact that these are people who were believed to have been born with no sexual interest in women. They may have been intersex in some way, they may have been more like modern gay cis men, or they may have been more like modern heterosexual trans women. My guess is that they would have included all three, because ancient people didn’t have the tools or language to distinguish between these categories.

It is also true that many tribal cultures around the world show evidence of social structures designed to accommodate people who live outside of the gender binary. We have plenty of historical reports, and where those cultures haven’t been destroyed by colonialism those practices continue today. You can find examples in the Americas, in Polynesia and Australia, in parts of Africa, in fact pretty much everywhere that tribal cultures are still found. How these cultures make allowances for trans identities varies considerably: some may have a third gender; some may allow only male-to-female transition; or only female-to-male; and some have both. The fact that these traditions exist proves that a need existed, which must prove that people in those societies identified in some way as being outside of the gender binary.

One of the reasons why social structures accommodating trans people are so varied is that trans people themselves are very varied. The idea that there is only one sort of trans person — someone who wants and needs full medical transition from one binary gender to the other — is just as false a distinction as the binary itself, and one that has caused a great deal of harm to trans people down the years. This brings me to my final point, which is that anyone who says that “trans people” cannot have existed in the past because ideas of medical gender reassignment did not exist back then is using a very limited definition of what “trans” means that doesn’t begin to cover the diverse identities that we see in the trans community today.

The modern trans community includes people who identify as being members of a third gender for social purposes. It includes people whose gender is inextricably bound up with their spiritual beliefs. It includes people who want to transition socially but not medically. It includes people who are gender-fluid: comfortable presenting in more than one gender. It includes people who don’t understand the whole gender thing and wish it would go away. All of these people feel comfortable identifying as trans now that being trans does not require you to undertake full medical transition and adopt one of the binary genders thereafter.

So when I talk about looking for trans people in history, I’m not looking to prove that any of these people would opt for full medical transition where they born today. Some of them might, but others surely would not because if being trans is a natural part of the human condition then we should expect trans people from the past to be as diverse as trans people are today.

My starting point is to look for evidence of people living outside of the gender binary. Providing that they are doing so as part of their normal life, and not just cross-dressing for special occasions, all of those people are trans in some way or another. If I can’t pigeonhole them into a specific part of the modern trans community, well so what? Their identities have to be understood in the context of their local culture anyway. It may be that some of them did strongly identify as their birth gender, but in that case I would want to see proof of that being the case, not taking that as the natural assumption.

And you know, looking at it that way, the past is absolutely full of trans people.

I spent Saturday in Bristol for the OutStories Bristol Annual General Meeting. The official business was done very quickly because I have been taught how to run a meeting by the brilliant Mr. Standlee. This allowed us to get on with the more interesting part of the day, which was a talk by Dr. Jana Funke of Exeter University on the subject of Radclyffe Hall. I have a very nice recording which you can listen to here.

The meeting, by the way, took place in the Wills Memorial Building at Bristol University. It is a faux medieval fake, presumably built with the proceeds of the tobacco trade, but it does make for a nice backdrop. Goodness only knows what the face on the lectern is about.

One of the things that interested me about the talk is how much of Hall’s writing has fantastical themes. She does a lot of time travel and body-swapping. Both she and Virginia Woolf used these techniques to write about sexuality and gender in a way that would attract less attention, in contrast to The Well of Loneliness which was explicit and banned. It rather reminds me of Russian writers using science fiction to write about politics.

The other thing I latched onto was discussion as to Hall’s gender identity. Jana used female pronouns throughout because Hall and her acquaintances do so. However, she notes that Hall has a very masculine gender presentation. I could add to that the doubly-masculine name of the female hero of The Well of Loneliness, Stephen Gordon.

During the later 19th and early 20th Centuries most people conflated ideas of sexuality, gender identity and gender presentation. If you were an “invert” (the term used for homosexual people at the time) then you were expected to adopt characteristics of the other end of the gender spectrum. Lesbian couples were expected to be a femme and a butch, and the femme partner was not seen as an invert in the same way that the butch was.

Some people will argue that we can’t identify Hall as trans because the term did not exist back then. Certainly she wasn’t able to able to adopt it for herself. Nevertheless, there were people of the time who clearly identified in a way we now recognize as trans. Dr. Alan Hart had his top surgery in 1917 and went on to take testosterone once it had been identified by science and pioneered by Michael Dillon. The important question for me (and my thanks to the young lady in the audience who made this point) is whether Hall herself identified as a man.

You can do interesting comparisons of biographies to throw light on this. Michael Dillon (whose shortly to be published autobiography I have just been reading) clearly identified as male from a very early age. Alice Sheldon, on the other hand, was much more ambiguous. Her lesbian feelings seem to have so horrified her that she never acted upon them, and while she occasionally wrote of wanting to “be a man” it isn’t clear whether this is a gender issue or a yearning for the freedom and social status that masculinity would have given her, or a combination of both.

One thing that I learned from Jana is that Hall was known as “John” to her close friends, so she had in fact adopted a masculine persona. That definitely suggests more of a trans personality. Jana also pointed out a photograph in which Hall is dressed as a native American warrior (her mother was American and she fancifully assumed native descent).

What most gave me the sense of a trans person, however, is what Jana said about The Well of Loneliness, specifically its ending, which is not a happy one. At the end of the book Stephen Gordon fakes an affair with another woman so that her beloved Mary will succumb to the advances of a man and get married. As Jana noted, many modern lesbians dislike the ending. It is hardly a good advert for lesbianism.

Because I had been reading Dillon’s biography, his relationship with Roberta Cowell was in my mind as I was hearing this. We will never know for sure why she refused his offer of marriage. He appears to have been something of a misogynist, which would not have appealed to the independent-minded Cowell so fresh from a life of male privilege. There is some suggestion that she strung him along to get his help in obtaining surgery. But years later in her autobiography Cowell states that her marrying Dillon would be like two women getting married, suggesting that she rather literally thought he wasn’t man enough for her. That’s a very cruel thing for one trans person to do to another, but trans people are no more free of cruelty than anyone else.

Listening to Jana talk about The Well of Loneliness, I wondered about Stephen’s reasons for abandoning Mary. Did Stephen think that she wasn’t “man enough” for her lover, and that it was therefore her duty to step aside in favor of a “real man”? And does this mean that Stephen identified as a man, but was ignorant of other trans folks and so didn’t know that something could be done? If that’s the case, did that reflect Hall’s own feelings about gender?

Ultimately we can’t know. Because of the conflation of sexuality, gender identity and gender performance it is possible that Hall felt she could only be a proper lesbian by being a man, even though she identified as a woman. Certainly enough trans people down the years have been accused of being gays and lesbians who are ashamed of their sexuality, so the idea is very much in the public consciousness. But I agree with Jana that it is possible to read both Stephen Gordon and Radclyffe Hall as trans men rather than butch lesbians, and I think that the end of The Well of Loneliness makes much more sense if you do.

Wikipedia tells me that the novel ends with Stephen pleading with God to, “Give us also the right to our existence!” Chin up, old chap, we’ve done it for ourselves.

Last Friday I had a day in London which I spent mainly doing research in the British Museum. Part of that involved following up items in R.B. Parkinson’s fine book, A Little Gay History. However, I found that several of the items in it are not currently on display, and I found quite a few more than might have been featured.

This post is photo-heavy and quite long so I am putting the rest of it behind a cut.
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