i wonder how many historic trans men we’ve lost to “this WOMAN went by a man’s name, wore men’s clothes, took the job of a man, lived as a man… GIRL POWER!”
this isn’t a “pushing my identity on historic people” thing, it’s the fact that every single time i or another person brings up the possibility of someone like us in history, we’re immediately shut down, told that we didn’t “exist yet”, given a billion different reasons why we aren’t ALLOWED to see these people as reflective of us and our struggles and experiences – i get that we didn’t have the vocabulary back then but for so many of you the IDEA that someone who went to the same stretches that we do today to separate from their dead selves and identify similar to the way trans people do is too “far out there” and “disrespectful” to them somehow. they’re dead. we’re alive. we’re trying to connect the pieces. go get your kicks out of isolating us from history somewhere else, away from me.
yeah, there were women who did crossdress in order to take up jobs they would not have been permitted to access
but when people say it about Albert Cashier, who donned Union uniform, bound his chest, and lived as a man even after the Civil War, when he was reclusive and lived in a tiny village, after there would have been no incentive for him to do so, I question their motives.
I also question their motives when they list Alan L Hart, who legally changed his name and was one of the first trans men to pursue a hysterectomy, referring to himself as “a fellow.”
people DONT want historical figures to be trans. they WANT to interpret these historical figures as women, not trans men, because that makes them uncomfortable.
james barry was a surgeon in the 1800′s who was a trans man, referred to himself as a man in his own personal journals, and requested that he be buried without the body being examined. if his wishes hadn’t been ignored and the body inspected, he would have been buried and recorded as a man and not a “woman who disguised herself!”
i think it’s pretty fucking clear how he identified and thankfully people have moved towards gendering him properly in recent years
but yeah walking into a “women in the history medicine!” museum exhibit and seeing him as well as a placard stating that he was actually transgender was a pretty formative experience for me in the discovery of my own identity
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