Little Women

I never read it but I just found an interesting article in the New York Times… was Louisa May Alcott trans?

Did the Mother of Young Adult Literature Identify as a Man?
By Peyton Thomas
December 24, 2022


Louisa May Alcott balked when her editor asked her to write a book for girls. “Never liked girls or knew many,” she journaled, “except my sisters.”

Sisters were all it took. Alcott’s semiautobiographical “Little Women,” which follows a family of four girls through the Civil War, made her a fortune upon publication in 1868. Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy have become immortal. They’ve captivated readers around the world in 50 translations and numerous adaptations. Louisa May Alcott may never have liked girls or known many, but her name is now synonymous with girlhood.

It’s a name that she didn’t use all that often in her personal life. To family and friends, she was Lou, Lu or Louy. She wrote of herself as the “papa” or “father” of her young nephews. Her father, Bronson, once called Alcott his “only son.” In letters to her close friend Alfie Whitman, Alcott called herself “a man of all work” and “a gentleman at large.”

All this leads me to wonder: Is Alcott best understood as a trans man?

Whoa… what is this?

She was trans??????

Alcott scholars agree that she felt a profound affinity with manhood. “I am certain that Alcott never fit a binary sex-gender model,” said Gregory Eiselein, a professor at Kansas State University and the president of the Louisa May Alcott Society. In “Eden’s Outcasts,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Alcott, John Matteson wrote that she believed “she should have been born a boy.” Jan Susina, a professor of children’s literature, concurred, saying, “Alcott may have experienced what we today would consider gender dysphoria.”

It is hard to put twenty-second century labels on a nineteenth century person.

So is it inappropriate — anachronistic at best, misogynistic at worst — to describe Alcott as transgender?

I believe Alcott’s own statements give the lie to the notion that transgender identity is strictly a modern fad. “The historical record shows that people have felt in remarkably similar ways to contemporary transgender people,” said Susan Stryker, a professor emerita of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona. What’s more, Alcott is a pertinent figure at a moment when trans books for youth are under attack from legislatures and school boards. What would it mean if the mother of young adult literature was actually the genre’s father?

So what do I think?

I think we cannot put twenty-second century ideas on people from earlier times, there were too many variables. Take Joan of Arc, she dressed in male clothes does that mean she was trans? What about women who joined the military disguised as a man, did they just do it because they were trans? Or was it because they wanted to serve in the military? Or did they do it because there were no options for women except to bear children and raising them?

It is a neat theory but that is all it is, a theory. What do you think? Was Louisa May Alcott trans? A lesbian or straight?