Last year I blogged about the excellent talk that Juliet Jacques did for me as part of Bristol’s LGBT History Month program. The stars of the talk were Ernest Stella Boulton and Frederick Fanny Park. At the time I commented on how difficult it is for an historian to truly know how people from history self-identified. This year a new book has been published. Fanny & Stella, by Neil McKenna, tells the story of these famous Victorian cross-dressers, and apparently tries to get inside their heads. A review in The Guardian notes:

Using free indirect speech he [McKenna] ventriloquises Stella and Fanny’s inner worlds, creating a camp stream of consciousness in which the two young men think and function as lascivious women.

But did they actually see themselves as women? Would they have self-identified as trans had they known such a thing was possible? The Guardian‘s reviewer, Kathryn Hughes, doesn’t seem to be much help. She seems to buy into the view that Victorian society had of the pair, that they must be “gay men”. She even describes James Barry as a “sexual deviant”, even though there is no evidence that he lived as a man for sexual purposes. Indeed, all of the rumors about him during his life were about his being gay.

Ultimately it doesn’t really matter how Stella and Fanny saw themselves. What matters (and I say this after having spent part of this morning discussing the problems of dealing with gender-variant kids) is accepting that there are no rigid boxes that you can put everyone into. People cross-dress for all sorts of reasons, not just because they are gay, or just because they are trans, and trans people exhibit the full range of human sexual orientations. So I wouldn’t want to claim Stella and Fanny as trans pioneers, but equally describing them as definitely gay men buys into the assumption that all trans women are “really” gay men.

It sounds from the review that McKenna has done a lot of research and had access to contemporary documentation. I’ll be interested to read the book and see what he makes of it all.