Mollies and Tommies

Another post on IFGE’s Facebook page caught my eye, this time about “Mollies.” Do you know about “Mollies and Tommies?”

They were in the 19^th century and they were either trans-women/trans-men or gays/lesbians who dressed up as women or men the exact meaning is subject to debate.

Fanny and Stella: The two Victorian gentlemen who shocked England
Dangerous Minds
06.18.2014
Posted by Paul Gallagher

Victorian England is sometimes thought a stuffy, sexually oppressive, puritanical world, where one did one’s duty, where children were seen and not heard, and table legs were covered to prevent lustful thoughts. But in truth, Victorian England was a world full of hypocrisy, where sex, poverty and crime were rampant.
[…]
Queen Victoria could just about believe that homosexual men existed, but didn’t believe there could ever be lesbians, as “Women do not do such things.” Of course, there was considerable sapphic sex in the olde queen’s day and long before, with women living together as couples. The most famous was John Ferren and Deborah Nolan, two women who married in 1747 and lived disguised as man and wife until Nolan died, and husband Ferren was revealed to be a woman. Many other women disguised themselves as boys and successfully served in the British army and navy, for example Hannah Snell (1723-92), Phoebe Hessel (1713-1821) and Mary Anne Talbot (1778-1808), who went from drummer boy to powder monkey.

But in Victorian times, one of the most infamous cases was that of “Miss Fanny Park” and “Miss Stella Boulton,” whose arrest and trial became one of the era’s most shocking episodes.

Misses Park and Boulton had been seen attending the Strand Theater in London, where they flirted with the men in the balcony. This pair of seemingly attractive Victorian women were in fact two men, Thomas Ernest Boulton (Fanny) and Frederick William Park (Stella).

From an early age, Boulton had identified as female and was encouraged to wear dresses. He formed a friendship with Park and the two became a theatrical double act, touring as Stella Clinton (or Mrs Graham) and Fanny Winifred Park to mainly favorable reviews. They also began frequenting houses and theaters while dressed in women’s clothing. A third man, Lord Arthur Clinton, a respected Liberal politician and godson to PM William Gladstone, became a lover/husband to Stella.

I think now we would call them trans-women, but back then they were called mollies.

In the paper “Bitches, Mollies, and Tommies: Bryon, Masculinity and the History of Sexualities” in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, D. S. Neff writes,

As the eighteenth century progressed, men who were formally known as "sodomites" became categorized as effeminate "Mollie," a term that had first been applied to female prostitutes. Edward Ward, writing in 1709 about "The Mollies Club" in London, observes that "there is a curious band of fellows in the town who call themselves "Mollies" (effeminates, weaklings), who are so totally destitute of all masculine attributes that they prefer to behave as women. They adopt all the small vanities natural to the feminine sex to such an extent that they try to speak, walk, chatter, shriek and scold as women do, aping them as well in other respects.

The women who lived as men were called Tommies, I think today we would call them trans-men and the mollies trans-women, although back then they were considered to be homosexuals.

Neil McKenna introduces Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England from Faber and Faber on Vimeo.


There was a writer, Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin who wrote as George Sands and lived occasionally as man. Whether she was trans or not is subject to debate, she was seen around Paris dressed as a man and smoking cigars which she claimed allowed her to enter men’s space for her books and the men’s clothes were cheaper than women’s clothes.

The movie “Impromptu” (is available on Amazon Prime) is about the life of George Sands,