This is a partial list of persons who are sometimes are listed as trans, but closer inspection shows that they are not.
Francois-Timoléon de Choisy (cross dreamer, yes, but not the out transvestite depicted in the posthumous faux-autobiography)
Edward Hyde/Lord Cornbury Governor of New York and New Jersey (1702-1708) was defamed as cross-dressing by second-hand accounts. Patricia U. Bonomi. The Lord Cornbury Scandal The Politics of Reputation in British America, 1998, demonstrates the lack of substance in the claims.
Anne Bonny & Mary Read Pirates who switched between men’s and women’s clothes as appropriate. Wearing trousers allowed women pirates the freedom to climb, work with ropes, go up and down ladders. All the same reasons that a 21st century cis female sailor also wears trousers etc. At their trial 16 November 1720 in Jamaica, they “plead the belly”. Sentence was suspended so that their pregnancies could be verified.
Charles Edward Stuart, aka Bonnie Prince Charlie, was on the run after the failure of the Jacobite uprising and the defeat at the Battle of Culloden, 1746, the last battle fought in Britain. The rumour was put out that he passed himself as Betty Burke, an Irish maid, and a painting of a young woman was said to be of him.
John Radclyffe-Hall, nepo-baby super-rich lesbian writer and author of The Well of Loneliness, a trans fiction partially based on the life of her associate Toupie Lowther. (Laura Doan: “[Radclyffe-Hall's] haircut was thought to be the most feminine of all the short cuts popular at the time, and she had her hair done at Harrods — not a barbershop. Even Hall’s famous sartorial choices were on the feminine side of what was known as the ‘severely masculine mode’… Nor did Hall and her partner Una Troubridge dress in a bizarre manner, wearing, as some biographers have claimed, clothing from a costume shop. The couple studied fashion magazines and built their wardrobes not from men’s tailors in Savile Row, but from the most chic of London’s department stores for women. [- unlike trans man Gluck who bought suits from the expensive men’s tailors]. Hall always wore a skirt and conducted herself in a completely womanly way - in short, Hall definitely didn’t model her protagonist, Stephen Gordon, after herself.”)
Herman Göring, commander of the Nazi Luftwaffe (fond of makeup, perfumes, fancy clothes - but fancy male clothes --> a homovestite)
Ernest Hemingway(Given the mild androgyny in The Sun Also Rises, 1926, and the cross gender play with his fourth wife, Mary Welsh which he used in his posthumously published The Garden of Eden. However he grew bored of the game and desisted.)
Bobbie Kimber (did a stage act as a woman, lived as female off-stage, but the claim to have had completion surgery from Dr Burou was disproved when her body was examined at her death).
Theodore Kaczynski (Unabomber) (In 1966 when sex changes were in the news as something new, Kaczynski - and many other cis men - played with the idea of being trans for a short period. When he spoke to a psychiatrist, he spoke of depression, and never about being trans.
Hope Stansbury (based on appearance and associates taken to be trans)
Andrea Feldman (Warhol superstar taken to be trans)
Kimberley Harrison (a cis psychedelist, associate of Timothy Leary, was confused with Kimberley Elliot of Miami's TAO in Susana Pena. "Gender and Sexuality in Latina/o Miami: Documenting Latina Transsexual Activists". Gender & History, 22,3,2010: 763.)
Lanah Pelley (a gender-bender punk who played some female roles in alternative films. Pelley played the male lead in Eat the Rich, 1987, and the advertising claimed, untruthfully, that Pelley had recently transitioned)
Michelle Obama & Brigette Macron. Transvestigation defamations
