I Never Knew... Female Husbands

In my morning search of the news I came across an article on WNPR about Female Husbands… Hun? So I did a little more research and found some more articles about the book.

LISTEN: Interview With Author Of ‘Female Husbands: A Trans History'
By Morgan Springer
June 11, 2020

For nearly 200 years, the term “female husband” was used to describe an individual assigned female at birth who chose to live fully as a man.

Historian Jen Manion, a professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts, said from the 1700s to early 1900s, the British and American press wrote about "female husbands" in a mostly salacious and sensationalized way. And when their assigned gender was revealed, they were usually detained by police and run out of town.

So that got my attention!

And I found…

Female husbands
Far from being a recent or 21st-century phenomenon, people have chosen, courageously, to trans gender throughout history
Aeon
Edited by Sam Haselby
07 May, 2020

One summer night in 1836, police found George Wilson drunk on the street in the Lower East Side in New York City. An officer took Wilson to the station. The officer believed that Wilson was a sailor, and also suspected that Wilson might not have been a man. Wilson had been legally married to a woman for 15 years, and living and working as a man for even longer. They told the police that their masculine gender expression was a temporary disguise for safety and ease of travel while they pursued the man they loved who had abandoned them.

The best defence against a hostile police force was to emphasise heterosexual romance and minimise the significance of gender nonconformity in one’s life. The truth came to light, however, when Wilson’s wife stormed through the police station to retrieve her husband. In an interview, Elisabeth disclosed that 15 years earlier she was not at all disappointed when she learned of her husband’s sex, and that they were happily married. Like the policemen who detained and harassed George and Elisabeth, the journalists who would later report on the incident were derisive. But George and Elisabeth were released without formal charges.

Female husbands were people assigned female at birth who ‘transed’ gender, lived as men, and entered into legal marriages with women. The phrase ‘female husband’ was first used to describe such a person in 1746 by the British playwright and novelist Henry Fielding. It circulated for nearly 200 years before losing meaning in the early years of the 20th century. It was never a self-declared identity category. No one was known to walk up to someone and say: ‘Hello, my name is George Wilson and I’m a female husband.’ Rather, it was a term used by others – usually male writers, policemen, judges and doctors – in reference to people whose gender expression was different from their assigned sex. Far from being a recent or 21st-century phenomenon, people have chosen to trans gender throughout history. ‘Female husband’ was a label predominantly used to refer to white working-class people.

Wow… I never knew, this is new history to me.

What does it mean? Were trans or were they lesbians?

It is so very hard to label someone from another time in history, you do not know if they were hiding a lesbian relationship for if they identified as male. For example Dr. Alan Hart was labeled as a lesbian by the lesbian community but Dr. Hart was taking male hormones, to me that defined him a male and a trans person.

But “female husbands” are harder to label and I don’t really think that we should label them.

In 1856, Miss Lewis of Syracuse in New York state fell in love with Albert Guelph, a charming newcomer. After a brief courtship, they wed in an Episcopal church the same year. The bride’s father soon became suspicious of Guelph and called the police. Together, the policeman and the father interrogated and examined Guelph on the suspicion that Guelph was a woman disguised as a man. They arrested and imprisoned Guelph. Justice Durnford sentenced Guelph to 90 days imprisonment in the penitentiary for violating the vagrancy statute – a very vague ‘catch-all’ crime applied mostly to impoverished people for being poor, homeless, begging, drinking or simply existing in public spaces. Vagrancy laws were also invoked for minor social infractions against morals or order.

It was a criminal offense to gay or lesbian as well as to crossdress, so did they crossdress to hide their lesbian relationship or were they really trans the answer is lost in history.

Female husbands in general were different from other groups who transed gender (such as soldiers or sailors) because they were in longterm committed relationships with women. Usually, these were legally binding marriages. This posed a much more dramatic threat to society, raising two different troubling possibilities: first, that female husbands were able to realise homosexual desire and participate in a same-sex relationship under the guise of a heterosexual one. This was a violation of both religious edicts and civil laws against sodomy. Second, female husbands threatened the notion that only those assigned male at birth could become men and enter into fulfilling sexual and romantic relationships with women. Whether husbands had strong identifications of themselves as people of masculine gender and/or same-sex desire was never clear. But it also didn’t matter because neither was welcome in society.

So I think that I will buy her book, it does sound interesting.