John Coulter (1834 - 1884) servant, labourer

John Coulter was a man of definite masculine appearance with good muscular development.

At the age of twenty-one he was working as a man-servant on a farm near Dungannon in County Tyrone. In this position he courted his master’s daughter, and was successful in marrying her.

From 1872 he worked for the Belfast Harbour Commissioners as a labourer. In 1878 his wife started living apart from him because of his dissipated habits.

He died from injuries caused by falling down a flight of stairs, and was discovered to be female bodied.

His wife returned to bury him.

The story was written up in The Lancet.

*not the Irish surgeon-apothecary who became famous for working on whaling ships in the 1820s and 1830s.

• “Extraordinary Personation case”  The Lancet, Feb 2, 1884: 229.  Online.
• Havelock Ellis. Sexual Inversion. In Studies In The Psychology Of Sex. Random House. 1936: 246

James Allen (1787 – 1829) labourer.

In London, groom, landlord, and pitch-boiler and then sawyer, James Allen was married to Abigail Naylor, known as Mary from 1807.

In 1829 he died in an accident at work, and examination of his body produced the claim that he was a ‘woman’. He was buried in a private vault, to protect his body from resurrection men.

• C.J.S Thompson. The Mysteries of Sex: Women Who Posed as Men and Men Who Impersonated Women Hutchinson, 1938. Causeway Books,1974. Dorset Press, 1993: chp XV
• F. Gonzalez-Crussi. Three Forms Of Sudden Death, And Other Reflections On The Grandeur And Misery Of The Body. Picador. Harper & Row, 1986: 61.
• "The Female Husband". In Martin Duberman. About Time: Exploring the Gay Past. A Meridian Book, 1986,1991: 24-30.

William Sidney Holtom (1886 – 19??) haulier, navvy

Sarah Withers married a farm labourer, William Holtom at the age of 18. However Sarah felt quite wrong in the situation, and after two years left. “The idea struck me that it would help me if I dressed as a man, as I did not like the idea of domestic service. I spent the few shillings I possessed in buying men’s clothing, and then tramped to Birmingham.” The one thing that Sarah took from the matrimonial home was her husband’s name. Sarah was now William Holtom.

In 1924 William Holtom was working on a coal wharf in Birmingham where he met Mabel, the sister of his employer. He was already living with a woman, and Mabel had a young daughter. They met again in Worcester, where Mabel was in service. Although he refused to marry her, they both left their existing partners and set up common-law in Evesham, Worcestershire.

William worked as a coal heaver, a cow-man, a road mender and a timber haulier. In the latter he had been employed taking large trees from the Cotswold hills, driving four or six shire horses. In 1927 his best workmate was killed under the wagon that he was driving, and his nerves went to pieces. This led to his quitting that work. After medical treatment he worked as a navvy in a team building a bridge. He also did odd jobs and repaired boots.

William smoked the extra-strong Black Twist, specially ordered by the local tobacconist. He drank cider, and went with mates from the pub to the English Football Cup Final. He was also a thoughtful and considerate husband and father. In 1928 Mr and Mrs Holtom had a baby son, whom they named William after his father. In April 1929 the Colonel Barker story was prominently in the newspapers, and Holtom expressed indignation at the masquerade.

However two weeks later, Holtom was taken ill, and admitted to the Evesham Poor Law Hospital men’s ward with enteric fever. He was then 42. This led to a discovery of strapping around his chest, and he was hastily transferred to the women’s ward. The story was quickly picked up by the local, and then the national press. He was moved to a private ward for privacy.

Oram p69

As William recovered, the police considered charging Mabel with making a false statement to the Registrar of Births and Deaths at Evesham with regard to the father of her second child. Holtom, under the name Sarah Holtom, was called as a witness before Evesham Borough Police Court and admitted that he did not know who the father was. Mabel appeared at the Birmingham Assizes 11 July and plead guilty. The court heard that her estranged husband, abandoned five years before, was willing to take her back, if he could find work where they were not known. Mabel was bound over in the sum of £30 ‘to be of good behaviour for two years’.

• “An Evesham ‘Col Barker’: A Man-Woman Timber Haulier”. Evesham Journal, 11 May 1929:2.
• “Another Man-Woman: Amazing Fortitude of Masquerader”. News of the World, 12 May 1929:5.
• “Man-Woman’s Pose for 15 Years”. The People, 12 May 1929:3.
• Rose Collis. Colonel Barker's monstrous regiment: a tale of female husbandry. Virago, 2001: 182-3, 189-93.
• Alison Oram. Her Husband was a Woman!: Women's gender-crossing in modern British popular culture. Routledge, 2007: 1-2, 68-73.

______________________

The spelling of William's name varies.   Oram settled on Holton, Collis on Holtom.

João W Nery (1950–2018) diving champion, psychologist, manual labourer, writer.

Joana Nery was the youngest of four sisters. In a struggle with her own body, she became a Brazilian diving champion at age 16. She won 30 medals, and had acquired a more muscular body.

She graduated in psychology in 1973 at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and taught at the universities of Gama Filho, Hélio Alonso and Celso Lisboa.

In 1976 Nery attended a clinic organized by Dr Cesar Nahoum and was diagnosed as transsexual. The next year he underwent a clandestine mastectomy and hysterectomy from Dr Roberto Farina in Sao Paulo, and was put on testosterone. Farino considered phalloplasty for João, but Farino had been convicted for doing genital surgery on a trans woman and was still appealing.

João is considered to be the first surgical trans man in Brazil. This was the period of military government (1964-85) when such surgery was illegal, and there was no possibility of having documents re-issued in the new gender.

João W Nery was not able to work in universities, but did work clandestinely as a psychologist. He worked as a taxi driver, builder, retailer, tailor, computer teacher and masseuse. In 1984 he published his first autobiography. In 1987 he adopted the son of his second wife, and continued as his father after the marriage broke up. His fourth marriage has been the most successful.

Nery’s second autobiography came out in 2010, which led to a series of media interviews.

In his sixties, Nery suffered from arthritis, and had a lumbar spine and hip prosthesis. The last surgery led to a heart attack, but he was able to ride his motorcycle to the hospital in time for treatment.

++He died at age 68 after a struggle against cancer.

• João W. Nery. Erro de pessoa: Joana ou João? Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Editora Record, 1984.
• Millos Kaiser. “Corpo Estranho: Em 1977, João Nery foi pioneiro ao se tornar a primeira mulher do Brasil a mudar de sexo”. Trip, 15.12.2009. http://revistatrip.uol.com.br/revista/184/reportagens/corpo-estranho.html.
• “Matéria com João W. Nery”. O Globo, 17 de outubro de 2010. Online at: www.ftmbrasil.org/2011/03/materia-com-joao-w-nery-em-revista-o.html.
• João W. Nery. Viagem Solitária - Memórias de um Transexual 30 anos depois. Editora Leya, 2011.
• “João W Nery por ele mesmo”. O babado e certo..., 28 de outubro de 2011. http://obabadoecerto.gay1.com.br/2011/10/joao-w-nery-por-ele-mesmo.html.

PT.WIKIPEDIA

Martha Toth (1883-1933) A Hungarian pioneer.

Martha Toth worked 20 years at a factory in Buda Pest. She lived by herself, and had no man in her life.

At age 50 she had a heart attack and died. The summoned doctor found that she was male-bodied.

• London Life, Oct 14th, 1933: 3. Reprinted in Peter Farrer. Cross Dressing between the Wars: Selections from London Life, 1923-1933. Garston: Karn, 2000: 342.

Harry Leo Crawford (1875 – 1938) manual worker, convicted murderer.

Eugenia Falleni was born in Florence, Italy, the eldest of 22 children, 17 of whom survived, and moved with her parents to New Zealand about 1877.

Eugenia frequently ran away as a teenager and sought employment in brickyards and other places where he dressed as a boy. He worked on a ship, but his original gender was discovered and he was put ashore at Newcastle, NSW with a baby girl, whom he called Josephine. He found adoptive parents for the girl, and continued under the persona of Harry Crawford.

Harry worked at manual jobs in Sydney: in a meat factory, hotels, laundries, a rubber company, and as a servant. In 1910 he was a yardman and driver when he met Annie Birkett, a widow with a nine-year-old son, also Harry. They married in 1913 at a Methodist parsonage.

They quarrelled loudly, to the notice of the neighbours, especially after Crawford’s daughter, Josephine, came to live with them. In 1917 Annie was apparently threatening to reveal his deception. Harry and Annie celebrated the Eight-Hour-Day holiday with a picnic, but Annie did not return home. Crawford claimed that his wife had left him.

Josephine moved out, and Crawford and his stepson moved to inner Sydney. In October the police found a charred female body in bush land, but the inquest ruled that the cracks in the skull were consistent with being drunk and accidentally burnt after sleeping by a camp fire. In 1919, Harry Crawford remarried.

In 1920, Harry Birkett went with his aunt to report his mother’s disappearance to the police, who then identified the charred body they had found in 1917, and arrested Crawford. He asked to be held in the women’s cells. Crawford, indicted as Eugenia Falleni, dressed as a man for the preliminary hearing, but as a woman for the trial.

The senior crown prosecutor accused him of murder to hide ‘her sex fraud', and called 28 witnesses. The government medical officer played down the possibility of the accused being an invert in that she had given birth to a child. The conclusion of the prosecution’s case was the display of Falleni’s dildo. The defence, a junior barrister allocated by the crown, argued that Falleni was innocent, that he cross-dressed in that he was a ‘congenital invert’ and not a’ sex fraud’, but called only one witness. He produced and cited Eugene Talbot, Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs and Results, 1898, in an attempt to get the medical officer to concede that the accused was a congenital invert. The judge asked the defence if he were ‘setting up insanity, or not?’

In his summing up, the judge reminded the jury of the ‘the imposition that had been practised’, summarized the prosecution case, and hardly mentioned the defence’s contention that the accused was a congenital invert. The jury of twelve men took two hours to reach a verdict of guilty, and Falleni was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to detainment at the Governor’s Pleasure. An application for leave to appeal the conviction and sentence was dismissed by the Court of Criminal Appeal.

The press referred to Falleni as a ‘man-woman’ and published only masculine photographs.

Falleni served 11 years and was released in 1931. She lived as a woman, possibly as a condition of parole, using the name Jean Ford. She ran a boarding house in Paddington, Sydney until 1938 when she was fatally struck by a motorcar.

Crawford is the subject of a film, I, Eugenia, 1998 by Gabrielle Finnane, and a play Eugenia, 2007 by Larae Parry.

*Not the footballer nor the Alaska politician.

• Herbert Moran, ‘Portrait of an Invert’, in his Viewless Winds: Being the Recollections and Digressions of an Australian Surgeon. Peter Davies, 1939: 241–2.
• Suzanne Falkiner. Eugenia, a man. Sydney: Pan Books 1988.
• Ruth Ford. “’The Man-Woman Murderer': Sex Fraud, Sexual Inversion and the Unmentionable 'Article' in 1920s Australia”. Gender & History. 12(1) 2000: 158-196.
• Carolyn Strange, 'Falleni, Eugenia (c. 1875 - 1938)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Supplementary Volume, Melbourne University Press, 2005: 121-122. www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/AS10153b.htm.
• “Eugenia Falleni, alias Harry Crawford”. National Library of Australia. http://nla.gov.au/nla.cs-pa-http%253A%252F%252Fcollection.hht.net.au%252Ffirsthhtpictures%252Fpicturerecord.jsp%253Frecno%253D31246

EN.Wikipedia.

____________________________________________________________

Ruth Ford: “Although she was on trial for murder, she was also effectively on trial – both in the courtroom and in the press – for her gender-crossing, and for his subsequent marriages and sexual relationships with women. Newspaper headlines focused predominantly on her gender-crossing and her marriages, and depicted the alleged murder almost as a secondary offence. (p159)”

Did Crawford actually kill his wife?  The prosecution’s case was that he did so to prevent being outed.  However Annie seems to have known eight months before her disappearance at the latest, and Josephine, and to a lesser extent the women in the Italian community, had known all along.  The corpse in question had been ruled an accidental death, with a change of mind only when a body was needed for this case.   On the other hand, Annie was never seen again, and Crawford behaved as a widower when he took a second wife.

Crawford/Falleni served his time in a women’s prison.  He did not revert to male on release.   However it is likely that this was a condition of the parole.  Also he was known to the public, and having been imprisoned, he was unwilling to risk it again.

Of course, in 1920 and again in 1931, there was no transgender community to complain about stereotypes in the press and to offer support.

A cis male, tried for a domestic murder in 1920, would likely have been charged with manslaughter.

Albert D.J. Cashier, (1844 - 1915) soldier, laborer.

Jennie Hodgers was born in Clogherhead, County Louth. Hodgers emigrated to the US as a male stowaway.

As Albert Cashier he enlisted in the US Civil War with the 95th Illinois Volunteer Infantry in 1862 at age 18. The regiment was involved in almost 40 battles, including the siege at Vicksburg Mississippi where they suffered heavy casualties. Cashier was once captured by Confederate forces but managed to escape and return to his regiment.

He settled in Saunemin. Illinois in 1869. He worked as a farmhand, church janitor, cemetery worker and lamplighter. He voted in elections. He applied for a military pension in 1890 but, as he refused the required medical examination, it was not granted.

One neighboring family discovered Cashier's body sex when he was ill, but maintained the confidence. A second application for a three-fourths disability pension in 1907 with the complicity of his doctor was approved. He was awarded $12 a month. In 1910 he was hit by his employer's car which broke his leg. The doctor discovered his sex but remained quiet.

A year later Cashier became seriously ill, and was taken to the Soldier and Sailor's home in Quincy, Illinois, where the doctors agreed to respect his chosen gender. However he became increasingly mentally disturbed by 1914 and was transferred to the State hospital where he was coerced into wearing women's clothes and his condition deteriorated rapidly. His story was leaked to the press and reprinted across the US.

He died six months later.

His tombstone was in the name of Albert Cashier. His executor spent nine years tracing his identity back to Jennie, and was still unable to find any heirs. His estate of $416 was given to the county. In the 1970s a second headstone was added giving both his names.

• Julie Wheelwright. Amazons and Military Maids: Women who dressed as men in pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. Pandora 1989: 140-1,146-7.
• Gerhard P Clausius. “The Little Soldier of the 95th: Albert D.J. Cashier” Illinois State Historical Society. 51,1958.
• Richard Hall. Patriots in Disguise: Women Warriors of the Civil War. Marlowe & Company, 1994: 20-6.
• Stephanie Stevens. "Remembering the Civil War Veteran Albert D.J. Cashier". TransAdvocate, May 25^th, 2009. http://transadvocate.com/autumnsandeen.
• Lon P. Dawson. Also Known As Albert D.J. Cashier: The Jennie Hodgers Story, or How One Young Irish Girl Joined the Union Army During the Civil War. Compass Rose, nd.
• “Albert Cashier”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Cashier.

Happy Ned Taylor (? - 1887) sailor, labourer.

Elizabeth Taylor grew up to be Ned.
Although British, Happy Ned Taylor served in the Union Navy during the American Civil War, and was immortalized in a well known ballad.

“My name was Elizabeth Taylor,
But bless you I’ve long been a man;
I served in the fleet as a sailor
When the war o’ Secession began;
I fought for the North like a good un
Though I wasn’t a Yankee mysel;
And why it all ended so sudden
I’m dash’d if I ever could tell!”

At the end of his service, Ned worked in the docks at Liverpool, then as a navvy and as a farm labourer. The 'fact' that he was female-bodied was only discovered again after he died.

• Julie Wheelwright. Amazons and Military Maids: Women who dressed as men in pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. Pandora 1989: 42.
• “Female Sailors”, Notes and Queries. VII series, IV Dec 17, 1887: 486. Online at:  http://bit.ly/9Ko9L3.

Frenchy Vosbaugh (1827 - 1907) bank clerk, restaurateur, ranch hand.

Katherine Vosbaugh was born in France to a well-off father who gave her an excellent business education. He died when she was twenty, but by that point she was an expert accountant and spoke four languages.

She assumed male guise when she moved to the United States with the ostensible reason of securing employment - although he stayed in the male role for the rest of his life.

After working in various cities, Frenchy settled in Joplin, Missouri where he worked for fifteen years as a bank clerk. He took a wife at this time. At least part of the reason was to save her good name for she was pregnant. However the child died after a few months.

After the child died, the couple moved to Trinidad, Colorado where they opened a restaurant.

The wife drifted off and Frenchy took a job as cook on a big sheep ranch, sleeping the same room as the other men.

At the age of 78 he contracted pneumonia and was hospitalized. The medical treatment led to the discovery that he was a woman. However he was allowed to remain in the hospital, working as a man, for what turned out to be the last two years of his life.

• “Woman Who Posed as Man 60 Years, Dead/Born in France/Only Reason Was to Secure man’s Work”. The Trinidad Advestiser. Nov 11, 1907. In Jonathan Ned Katz. Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary, Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. 1983, Carrol & Graf Publishers, Inc. 1994: 323-4
• Louis Sullivan. Information for the female to male cross dresser and transsexual. Seattle: Ingersoll Gender Center. 1^st Ed Janus Information Facility. 20 pp1980.2nd ed 48 pp 1985. 3rd ed.. iii, 123 pp1990: 10.

Edward de Lacy Evans (1830 – 1901) maidservant, labourer.

Ellen Tremaye arrived in Melbourne, Australia from Waterford, Ireland in 1856, where she had borne a child, possibly illegitimately. Her birth name may have been Ellen Lacey. She travelled with a trunk full of men’s clothing, and only minimal female clothing. She made passes at women, and some thought that she was a man travelling as a woman.

After a year as a maidservant, Evans began living as male.

Edward de Lacy Evens soon married Mary Delahunty who had come on the same ship. Delahunty left him after a few years, and when she remarried in 1862 she explained that it was not bigamy in that her first husband had been a woman.

Evans also remarried in 1862 to a young Irishwoman, Sarah Moore. They stayed together until her death of pulmonary tuberculosis in 1867.

The next year, Evans married again, to a 25-year-old dressmaker assistant, Julia Marquand. Evans worked as a carter, miner, blacksmith and ploughman. In 1877 they had a daughter, following visits to Julia by her sister’s husband.

In 1879 Evans had a breakdown and in Kew Lunatic Asylum (later the Willsmere Hospital) was discovered to have a female body. His wife told the press that she was unaware that he was not a man, but he had never undressed in front of her. Julia stayed in the same town as a single mother. Her paternity suite against her brother-in-law failed. She did not remarry and lived to the age of 71.

Evans made a meagre living as a ‘man-woman’ exhibit in side shows for a few months, and then appealed for readmission to the asylum. He was taken as an inmate at the Immigrants Home in Melbourne but was compelled to dress as a woman. He lived as Mrs de Lacy Evans in the home for 21 years, refusing to speak of his former life.

He died of influenza at the age of 61.

• Lucy Chesser. “ ‘A Woman Who Married Three Wives’: Management of Disruptive Knowledge in the 1879 Australian Case of Edward De Lacy Evans” Journal of Women's History, Vol. 9, 1998.
• Mimi Colligan. “The Mysterious Edward/ Ellen De Lacy Evans: The Picaresque in Real Life”. The La Trobe Journal. No 69 Autumn 2002. http://calisto.slv.vic.gov.au/latrobejournal/issue/latrobe-69/t1-g-t9.html.
• “Edward De Lacy Evans”. Melbourne Gay & Lesbian History series. http://melbqueerhistory.tripod.com/evans.html

Bill Allen (1906 -1949) mill worker, labourer, bus conductor, murderer.

Margaret Allen was born in Bolton, Lancashire, the twentieth of twenty-two children, and raised in Bacup.

He dressed as a man, even in childhood. Other people referred to him as Bill, but usually shunned him except when he was buying drinks in the pub. He worked in the mills, and loaded coal.

In 1935 he had a mysterious stay in hospital, and afterwards claimed that he was now a man.

From 1942 to 1946 he worked as a bus conductor, a ‘clippie’ on the Rawtenstall buses, but was dismissed for pushing the passengers, and even cuffing them on the back of the head when they moved too slowly. He then moved to live in Bacup Rd, Rawtenstall in what had earlier been a police station.

In August 1948, Bill murdered Nancy Chadwick, an elderly eccentric neighbour who was believed to be a rich miser. He made himself obvious to the Lancashire C.I.D. and Scotland Yard officers, got under their feet and pointed out Chadwick’s missing handbag in the River Irwell behind his house. They searched his house and found bloodstains in the coal cellar. The defence counsel argued that Margaret passing herself off as Bill was a form of insanity.

He was hanged January 1949 at HMP Strangeways, the last trans person to be hanged in the UK.

• Colin Wilson & Patricia Pitman. Encyclopedia Of Murder Pan Books 1961, under Allen, Margaret
• Jay Robert Nash. Look For The Woman. Harrap 1981, under Allen, Margaret.
• Molly Cutpurse. The Tragic and Transgendered World of Margaret Allen. 2012. 
• "Odd Man Out: Did bus conductor Maggie Allen really commit murder?".  Lancashire Telegraph, no date. Online. 
• Denise Beddows.  Odd Man Out: A Motiveless Murder. 2018.