Rediscovering Trans History (Review)
Charles Hamilton, a travelling medicine-seller in 18th-century Somerset, was a dapper, charming suitor, wooing a landlady’s niece and settling into the role of husband until, in 1746, the newlywed bride denounced their marriage as fraudulent. After a Glastonbury jury ruled Hamilton had impersonated a man, news of the young mountebank’s trial and shaming led Henry Fielding to cash in with a sensationalised pamphlet. This now largely forgotten entry to Fielding’s catalogue of reprobates and rakes gave newspapers a term for people like Hamilton, who had been assigned female at birth, lived as men and legally married women: the ‘female husband’. The challenges of interpreting the fragments of evidence about these people’s lives, written by those who had the social and economic order of marriage to defend, becomes in Jen Manion’s hands a masterclass in historical rigour, empathy and craft.
Joining Hamilton in this transatlantic history are a cast of figures brought to the page through new digital technologies and exhaustive archival research: the innkeeper James Howe, a ‘model citizen’ until an extortionist forced her to adopt female identity to clear her name; labourers like James Allen and Henry Stoake heading working-class households; cross-dressing soldiers and sailors, some well-known to history and others not; the independently wealthy Albert Guelph, the frontiersman Joseph Lobdell and the disparate individuals whom the press started calling ‘female husbands’ in the late 19th century as this social category born of 18th-century property relations started to break down. All were objects of fascination for the literary culture. None could continue their lives as men after the events that brought them into the historical record.
Writers then and now have held them up as exemplars of rebellious women, while more recently others have celebrated them as ‘trans ancestors’, or tried to reveal their ‘real’ gender. Manion, in contrast, sets cis (non-trans) people’s fascination with trans people’s identities aside. Refusing to be ‘bogged down’ in details of how female husbands and their wives took bodily pleasure, Female Husbands’ questions are instead steeped in trans and gender-non-conforming people’s daily lives (of which Manion too has some experience) and the press, literary and legal sources that mediated their practices and relationships.
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If Female Husbands deals with a period that historians once struggled to make legibly queer, Barry Reay’s Trans America picks up the story of sexual and gender indeterminacy when modern identity terms coalesced. The books’ accounts overlap: the Connecticut doctor Alan Hart, Manion’s only subject to have known medical gender affirmation as possible, appears in Reay’s first chapter as an ‘early lesbian/trans case’ in the files of one 1920s US psychiatrist theorising gender variance as homosexuality. Reay’s main interests are the emergence of ‘transsexual’ as a category in the 1960s and 1970s for those desiring surgical intervention, the 1990s ‘transgender turn’ when gender non-conforming people like Feinberg defined themselves outside conventional gender systems altogether, and the blurring of boundaries between sexual and gender identity that Reay worries may be forgotten if ‘transsexual’ and ‘transgender’ become overly fixed categories themselves.