A Real Life 'Albert Nobbs'

And life wasn’t kind to the real Albert Nobbs,

The 'Curing' of Australia’s First Transgender Man
One Irish maid lived as a man in 19th-century Melbourne for decades. The horrifying story of his discovery and “treatment” speaks to attitudes about transgender people that circulate to this day.
The Atlantic
By Olga Khazan
Dec 18 2013

Ellen Tremaye was not like most of the other passengers aboard the Ocean Monarch, a ship sailing from Ireland to Victoria, Australia in 1856. Though the 26-year-old, Irish domestic servant was traveling alone, she brought along a trunk full of men’s clothes labeled “Edward de Lacy Evans,” fueling speculation that she had been abandoned by a suitor after being tricked into bringing his belongings aboard. Then there was her unusual behavior: She wore the same green dress every day, but with trousers and a man’s shirt underneath. She told her fellow passengers that she was going to marry her ship-mate, Mary Delahunty, as soon as they reached Australia, and she reportedly had “intimate friendships” with two other women who shared her bunk at various points in the voyage.
[…]
Tremaye soon left the job and traveled to Melbourne. We don’t know precisely what drove what happened next, but at this point Tremaye transformed forever. He began using the name Edward De Lacy Evans, started dressing in men’s clothes, and married Delahunty. (In line with Evans’ apparent wish to live as a man, I’ll use male pronouns from this point forward.)

According to accounts from the time, the couple “did not live comfortably together,” and they separated in 1862.

Over the next two decades, Evans went on to remarry twice, all while working as a miner and blacksmith around Australia’s southeast, according to a history of Evans by the historian Mimi Colligan.

He was committed Lunacy Ward of the Bendigo Hospital where they found out that he was anatomically female,

Doctors diagnosed him with “cerebral mania” and “mental weakness,” and offered him only female attire to wear. He refused to wear it, or to eat, for days at a time. Over the course of Evans’ three-month treatment, physicians subjected him to extensive vaginal and rectal probing, during which he reportedly “sobbed and wept.”

Was he transsexual? Was she a lesbian who could live with a woman with raising questions of her sexuality? The story ends with…

“The story of Ellen Tremayne is an example of the lengths to which some women had to go in order to live as they wished,” Colligan wrote. “She gave false statements at her ‘marriages’, risked ostracism, and endured exposure to a gaping audience as a show-freak. However, dressing and living as men perhaps gave her a sense of power lacking in her female role.”