Printer-friendly version
Author:
The link below to the daily Mail shows some photos from the Victorian era of some notable and not so notable cross-dressers, female impersonators and possibly some transgender women as well, including perhaps the first post operative transsexual woman, Lili Elbe made famous in the upcoming film starring Eddie Redmayne as The Danish Girl.
Worth a look.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3244622/The-origin...
There is also a link to the source of the photos.
Comments
Interesting.
It is interesting that such photos had survived this long. Thank you for posting the links.
Part of entertainment culture
Drag and camp stage acts seem to have been popular entertainment genres for ever but I thank my lucky stars that people like Lily Elbe paved the way for effective medical treatment through HRT and surgery today.
To imagine a Victorian lifetime, born transgender but not even having the words to understand oneself or that you were not the only one, is a nightmare.
Rhona McCloud
two things.
1) Most people who have photos from that period hung on to them tenaciously. Tintypes, lithographs, and early photography was VERY expensive, so you did your best to keep what you paid so much for.
That leads to
2) Those people don't look dour and uncomfortable because of their personal emotions - apparently the writer didn't bother doing any research before posting the photos. Even with gunpowder/flash powder photography, you had to stay in a single position for a LONG time. Smiles and frowns are very difficult to hold, so the photographer would insist they relax their face into whatever they could hold for two to four minutes (or more, if there was a problem). Basically, everything from prior to the 1940's or so will have that same set of expressions. (my great grandfather was a photographer that worked for the Canadian government, specifically on oceanographic voyages. I've seen a number of his photos, including the ones where he was in them - with his hand behind his back to disguise the camera trigger. *click* hold it... hold it.... hold it.... *click* relax. You had to manually open _and_ close the shutter)
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Thank you.
I already saw The Danish Girl trailer. Since I bawled like a baby, I wonder how I'll handle watching the movie. Thanks for the pics as well!
Love, Andrea Lena
Photoshop
Strangely some of these pictures looked photoshopped. Non-matching head and body sizes. Different black and white tone. Weird head angles. But some of them do look genuine. I've not seen these pictures before and it opened my eyes how hard it must have been for those in Victorian days. But this issue is still going on, especially in Muslim countries.