True Sex

Emily Skidmore builds an absorbing and sometimes astonishing analysis of the queerness of the American past on the foundation of press stories about the “discovery” of the “true sex” of individuals who were assigned female at birth but chose to live as men. Using online newspaper databases and traditional archives to explore local and national responses to these moments of revelation—often occasioned by death, illness, or crime—Skidmore reveals that trans men were not universally denounced. Their gender transgressions were condemned only when they also departed from ideals of normative male citizenship, which required economic productivity, responsible heterosexuality, and persuasive claims to whiteness. Trans men's lives, and the debates through which Americans tried to make meaning of those lives, demonstrate “the open-ended nature of gender being made and remade” from the 1870s into the 1940s (p. 10). One of Skidmore's main interventions is to trouble the idea that sexological theories linking gender nonconformity and deviant sexuality were hegemonic during those years. She begins by discussing the disappearance of the designation “female husband” in the 1880s, contrasting local and national publications to show there was “no single coherent national narrative that explained gender and/or sexual deviance” (p. 16). Joining the recent challenge to the metronormative framings that long characterized LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) history, Skidmore argues that in small towns and rural areas, trans men who succeeded in inhabiting normative masculinity were valued members of their communities. Even after their gender transgressions became known, these individuals were often tolerated (continuing to cross-dress without penalty) or their choices honored (for example, when his “true sex” was discovered upon his death, William C. Howard was buried in men's clothes

Art · Hegemonic masculinity · Homosexuality · Human sexuality · Lesbian · Literature · Masculinity · Narrative · Normative · Political science · Queer · Sexual orientation · Sociology · Transgender · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society

• Being Born

  A Stone•Being Born•2019

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