Trans History You Never Learned in School
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Comments
Historical Tales
I have written a number of stories based on historical figures:
"Sporus" - about the transwife of Emperor Nero
"Proof for the Emperor" - about a Roman trans-emperor
"The Bisley Boy" - about the mystery of the virgin queen
"The Dark Lady" - about the inspiration for Shakespeare's trans love poem
"The Maid of Orleans" - about how a raving trans fathered a French dynasty
"La Chevaliere" - about another Frenchman ... sorry, Frenchperson
"The Governess" - about an early governor of New York
I would be interested in any other characters in the past that might have a story I can fabricate around them.
With Erin I am compiling a book of historical stories in this vein, so watch for details.
Maryanne
Historical
How far back in time? Also, how recognizable should s/he be?
-- Daphne Xu (a page of contents)
Have you got something for me?
The oldest incidences that I have covered are in Roman times "Sporus" and "Proof for the Emperor" are about well documented MTFs.
I have a story lined up from the 14th century, and "The Bisley Boy", "The Dark Lady" and "Maid of Orleans" are from the 17th.
"Chevaliere" and "The Governess" are from the 18th century and I have two others from that period.
The rest are 19th and a couple early 20th.
Any ideas?
Maryanne
Maryanne
Possibilities
I was thinking more along the lines of J. Edgar Hoover. He's the only one I can remember thinking of at the time of the post. But just now, Edward D. Wood Jr. came to mind.
-- Daphne Xu (a page of contents)
Billy Tipton
The jazz pianist who lived as a man for 50 years, led a touring band, married a woman, adopted children, and, allegedly, his wife didn't know he was a woman until she/he died. I believe he died in the late '80s. There's a documentary and a couple of books out there on him. He was definitely more than a cross-dresser. If gender confirmation surgery (F-to-M) were advanced enough in the '40s or '50s, he would have certainly undergone it.
Sammy
Alexander Stephens: One That Got Away?
I'd read this at least two places -- one was a 1980s Civil War novel, either William Safire's Freedom or Gore Vidal's Lincoln, I can't remember the other now, but it was nonfiction: Southern lawyer and politician Alexander H Stephens (1812-1883), vice president of the Confederacy, prominent member of the U.S. Congress before and after the war, and governor of Georgia who died in office, stood four feet eleven, weighed 90 pounds, never married and died childless. The novel said he was suspected of being a woman.
But the writer of his 1988 biography, on the Wikipedia talk page, says the height is a myth and that he was five feet seven, though he did weigh less than 100 pounds and was frail all his life. An illustration of the original Confederate cabinet on Wikipedia (from Harper's Weekly in 1861) depicts him as roughly the same height as the others at the conference table, but it seems to have been sketched from individual photographs and not an actual group picture.
Eric
An Ignored Aspect of Being Transgender
Yes this disillusionment with our natural gender has gone on for just yonks', or longer. An aberration that increased in the 20th Century is that with increasing medical skill, patients increasingly demanded for Doctors to alter their physiology to make it conform to their cross gender ideas.
I wonder if T folk would be happier if they were not able to have their bodies carved up in a desperate effort to accomplish what nature did not? One thing for sure is that Psychological folk and Medical folk have roundly cashed in on us dummies.
Gwen 'Just my opinion'
I just wish
that I had been able to find any of this back in the 1960's, but in the small town I grew up in, there was no information of any kind that would have told me I was anything but what my mother accused me of when she almost beat me to death: a perverted, weird and disgusting thing.