Sexuality: Female Husbands: A Trans History - Manion

Female Husbands: A Trans History - Manion (2020) KEY Economics Race Role of society in determining gender roles Introduction “Hamilton, Wilson, and dozens of others like them were designated ‘female husbands’ -- a term that persistently circulated throughout Anglo-American culture for nearly 200 years to describe people who defined categorization … By their very existence, they challenged essentialist understandings of sexual difference. They demonstrated by their actions every day that gender was malleable and not a result of one’s sex.” (1) “ Female Husbands: A Trans History follows the category of ‘female husbands’ from its origin in 1746 through its demise just before WWI. The book highlights the very fact that people assigned female at birth chose to trans gender and live fully as men, in small towns and big cities, in the UK and the US … people persisted living as men despite tremendous risk, danger, violence, and punishment … I utilize these accounts to offer a rigorous social history of the lives lived by female husbands as well as a cultural history of the category of ‘female husband’” (2) “Gender conformity itself was the punishment required by authorities and neighbors alike.” (1-2) “Female wives were sometimes portrayed as innocent victims of deception, though they were often active participants who knowingly and happily chose to enter these unconventional partnerships … female wives of female husbands are often overlooked and neglected as queer figures of the past … despite this public erasure, female wives held a tremendous amount of power in their marriages because they could publicly denounce their husband’s gender at any time. Wives were known to do this under two circumstances: when they were surprised to find out their husband was female or when their husband denied them a divorce on favorable terms. There is no denying that female wives gave legitimacy and stability to the gender of female husbands in the eyes of coworkers, friends, and society.” (3) “Even when authorities weren’t clear about the exact wrong committed by a female husband and their wife, they knew it was up to them to get to the bottom of a situation and decide. In this process, they reveal to us how they understood sexual difference and why the social conventions of gender were important to them.” (3) “In the case of female husbands in particular, it is impossible to isolate economic and social power from gender and sexual freedom. Sexual freedom—including the freedom to have sex with women, to not have sex with men, or to not have sex at all—was at the heart of the vast range of social powers that accompanied manhood … female husbands invite us to grapple with what exactly gender is.” (6) “ Female Husbands attempts to do just that, exploring the complex role played by the female husband in the changing understanding of sexual difference as well as the emergence of heterosexuality as an ideal relationship form. It principally explores the relationship between sex and gender, while examining sexuality secondarily. Throughout, I show that female husbands belonged to a category that was never simply woman or man. It was effectively a trans position, in one way or another, affirmed through accounts that move back and forth between masculine and feminine descriptors and male and female pronouns. Female husbands were put into a political category when they were outed; they did not control the narratives that were crafted about them. Gender is relational, external, and often out of our control. Female husband narratives attest to the importance of external recognition in defining and stabilizing gender.” (10) Chapter 5: The Workers “Much was made about the efforts of white people presenting themselves as men to secure work that only men were hired to do … the existence of this unique group sparked commentary on a host of issues large and small, from theories of economic transformation and the changing workforce to detailed descriptions of the clothing they wore … News reports focus chiefly on labor and mobility as the motivating forces for transing gender, characterizing female assigned people as autonomous economic actors.” (139) “African Americans who transed gender as a vehicle for freedom. This group was described in runaway ads when slaveholders suspected they used gender as a form of disguise to aid their escape … in the long, slow transition from slavery to freedom, African Americans were criminalized and heavily regulated through loosely defined policing categories such as ‘vagrancy’ and ‘disorderly conduct.’” (140) George Wilson (1836, New York City) “American policing in the North grew exponentially during the antebellum period. This change reflected not only population growth in cities transformed by industrialization but also growing hostility toward the poor, homeless, and unemployed. African Americans were especially vulnerable. Police were principally charged with protecting private property but many spent the bulk of their time patrolling for minor public disturbances, conflicts between people and disorderly conduct … very loosely defined vagrancy laws.” (141) “The transgression of a gender norm always opened the door to the threat of a sexual transgression. By looking at female husbands within the broader context of antebellum laborers who transed genders, we can better unpack the significance of material status and sexual intimacies in shaping dominant attitudes toward those who transed genders.” (152) Female Sailors/Charles Williams (1834, Navy/Boston) “... the ‘female sailor’ was fundamentally, and implicitly a category bounded by whiteness, reserved for and used to describe the kinds of freedom that white people assigned female achieved when they passed as white men.” “Williams served in the US Navy and was later charged and convicted of stealing two hogs in New York City in 1834 when they were 26 years old.” (153) “When black people assigned female at birth presented themselves as men to get away from the violent exploitative system of slavery, they were also in search of the freedom to live and work on their own terms—a transing of gender for freedom.” (156) “The overriding force was the captain’s belief that women were to behave one specific way and in so doing, they earned the protection of men like him … the conflict between what people assigned female at birth could do and what they were allowed to do was again exposed.” (158) Chapter 7: The Criminalized Poor “There was no single principle or law that maintained a gender binary and hierarchy; rather, it was redefined with each challenge and each attempt to suppress that challenge.” (198) “This [anti cross-dressing laws in the 1843 - 1886] intensified the focus of the policing authorities on a wide range of public spaces that supported the intermingling of people across races and class, provocative entertainment, sex work, gambling, illicit sexual intimacies, and expressions of gender nonconformity” (199) “Those who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century experienced a shift in popular attitudes about gender in ways that were not obviously positive or negative. Rather, these new beliefs were tightly bound up in political and scientific discourses of race and class, leading to various outcomes depending on the particulars of one’s existence.” (199) “Libdell’s The Female Hunter was published before they embraced a male gender expression more fully, before they came to love and marry a woman, before they were declared a female husband in the press, and before they were institutionalized for their gender nonconformity and poverty.” (202) TIES BETWEEN POVERTY AND THE IMPACTS OF GENDER NONCONFORMITY “It is somewhat ironic and even a little sad that Lobdell, a person who fought against the tyranny of the gender binary in their own life, was part of the colonizing project that imposed it on other people. Through land theft and municipal expansion, Native American communities -- known for embracing a wider range of gender expressions and identities beyond the binary -- were marginalized, and in some cases destroyed. There is no singular concept for a transgender, third sex, or two spirit person in native American culture. Rather, each nation might have a special word for such a person, often one that did not neatly translate into any modern or Western concept and changed over time.” (211-212) THIS CONTRADICTS THE GUERCIA READING ON INDIGENOUS 2S FOLKS “Lobdell’s poverty and gender -- and eventually their marriage -- were all bound together, making Lobdell a source of mockery and embarrassment. There was one clear upside to Lobdell’s slide into poverty amid the scrutiny of family, neighbors, and even the national press: the love and companionship of a woman.” (218) Conclusion “Female husbands were not simply disruptors of heteronormativity and sexual difference; they were empowered by and helped to stabilize liberalism, including the white supremacy that was embedded in the gender binary.” (258) ECONOMIC ARGUMENT OF FEMALE HUSBANDS “Another explanation is that people wanted to live as men -- or to not live as women -- regardless of the romantic or sexual implications. Financial security, geographic mobility, and/or gender identity were all motivating factors. Gender, not sexuality, was the salient category.” (260) “Just because anyone could, however, does not mean that everyone or even significant numbers of people did. They revealed competing ways of defining sex, when a marriage certificate said one thing and a doctor declared another.” (262) “In the 18th century, female husbands were less threatening because the prospects for widespread gains in women’s education, economic opportunities, and political rights seemed dim. But advances in women’s advocacy, autonomy, and mobility made the prospect of a world without men more imaginable … New concerns about female homosexuality motivated doctors and psychiatrists to protect white women who ascribed to conventional gender norms from the threat of those who transed gender, especially if they were African America. Medicine threatened potential female husbands with a diagnosis of ‘abnormal’ and forced institutionalization. But such policing and stigmatizing efforts themselves never fully deterred people from transing gender.” (263)