Magnus Hirschfeld’s Die Transvestiten – some more observations

Part 1:  3 misconceptions

Part 2: 2 more misconceptions

Hirschfeld as trans.

Misconception #4: the assumption that Hirschfeld was himself a transvestite.

The first such claim seems to be Vern Bullough’s Science in the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research, 1994:62 where he starts his 14-page essay on Hirschfeld with “Undoubtedly influenced by his own homosexuality and transvestism ….”. However, in the digital version of the book obtainable from Archiv für Sexualwissenschaft, (online) the words “and transvestism” have been removed. Nor did Bullough claim a transvestite Hirschfeld in his 11-page biography in Sexuality and Culture 7 (1) Winter 2003. Bullough had not given any footnote or other reason for his claim, and in effect withdrew it. However those two words in the 1994 hardcover version of the book seem to be the basis of claims elsewhere.

->Find a Grave’s Magnus Hirschfeld page says: “As a Jew living in a historically anti-Semitic country, and as a gay man and transvestite”, and of its nature gives no citations.

-> Tim Armstrong in his Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study, 1998, page 167, writes of Magnus Hirschfeld “Himself homosexual (like Haire) and transvestite, he was less dogmatic than Krafft-Ebing had been”. Armstrong gives no citation or quote to support this. 

->Marta Vicente. "The Medicalization of the Transsexual: Patient-Physician Narratives in the First Half of the Twentieth Century". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 76 (4), Oct 2021: 10, says “Hirschfeld, who also cross-dressed and was known among Berlin transvestites as ‘Aunt Magnesia’ ” and gives a footnote citing Charlotte Wolff’s 1986 biography of Hirschfeld, which does record his distaste at being referred to as “Aunt Magnesia” but no transvesting.

-> Patricia Gherovici, in her “Psychoanalysis Needs a Sex Change”, p4, says “He was also an occasional cross-dresser himself” – her only citation is Bullough, 1994, p68 - not p62. 

->Daniel Brook’s The Einstein of Sex, p96, says “When Magnus researched drag bars and balls, he reputably sometimes went in drag himself as ‘Auntie Magnesia’. A dowdy feminine version of his rumpled self, Auntie Magnesia presumably favored frumpy dresses…”. Endnote p276n96 cites only Robert Beachy’s Gay Berlin which talks of the balls but says nothing of Hirschfeld in drag. Brook actually then mentions that Hirschfeld found the practice of men doing female drag while “boasting moustaches or full beards” ‘distasteful and repellant’. This is Magnus Hirschfeld, famous for his bushy moustache, whom Brook has just suggested did transvest. There is no record of a Hirschfeld without his moustache.

Christopher Isherwood lived in Hirschfeld’s institute and has no such gossip in his autobiography Christopher and his Kind: A Memoir, 1929-1939, published 1976. And of course, if there had been any such rumours, the Nazis would have delighted in repeating them.

The canard is repeated in the EN.Wikipedia article.

We might also note that a gay man who does drag once or twice for a party or a ball, is not thereby a transvestite. Despite what Virginia Prince and the DSM have ignorantly claimed, there are indeed gay transvestites. However being a transvestite does require more than dressing up once or twice for a social event. The soldiers who put on drag shows for fellow soldiers and in prisoner of war camps – with a few exceptions – are not taken to be transvestites, nor are rugby players who drag up for a laugh.

Modern commentaries:

Misconception #5: the advertising pitch that Hirschfeld and Die Transvestiten are an untold tale.

The blurb for Shillace’s book says they are “the forgotten story”; the blurb for Brook’s book says “Today, he’s been largely forgotten”; a review of Brook on Amazon says: “Hirschfield comes up in many contexts but this is the first book I’ve found specifically about him.” And Bullough in his 2003 paper for Sexuality and Culture, wrote “For most of the last half of the twentieth century, however, Hirschfeld was more or less ignored in the English speaking world, despite the fact that two of his works, Die Transvestiten (1910) and Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (1914), were the most significant and authoritative works written on the subjects before Kinsey and his data and are still of importance to the current generation of researchers.” 

Er, No!

While there are no way as many books about Hirschfeld, as about Sigmund Freud, there are more books about Hirschfeld than about each of Havelock Ellis, John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, Albert Ellis, August-Henri Forel, Bernard Talmey, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Norman Haire and even Richard von Krafft-Ebing.

In my personal memory there were discussions with trans, gay and cishet persons where they knew at least of the book burnings, and often more. This is going back to at least the 1970s. However more importantly there have been many books, journal articles and magazine articles starting with Wolff’s biography in 1986, and then more and more.

A partial list:

• Charlotte Wolff. Magnus Hirschfeld: A Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology. Quartet Books, 1986: 107-6
• Vern L. Bullough & Bonnie Bullough. Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender. University of Pennsylvania Press 1993: 207-13. 
• Geertje Mak. ,Passing Women': im Sprechzimmer von Magnus Hirschfeld. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften, 9,3, 1998.
• Vern L Bullough. "Magnus Hirschfeld, an often overlooked pioneer". Sexuality and Culture. 7(1) Winter 2003: 62–72.
• J Edgar Bauer. “Magnus Hirschfeld's Doctrine of Sexual Intermediaries and the Transgender Politics of (no-) Identity” in Gert Hekma (ed). Past and Present of Radical Sexual Politics. Mosse Foundation for the Promotion of Gay and Lesbian Studies at The University of Amsterdam, 2004.
• Rainer Herrn. Schnittmuster des Geschlechts: Transvestitismus und Transsexualität in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2005.
• Ralf Dose. Magnus Hirschfeld: Deutscher – Jude – Weltbürger. Verlag Hentrich & Hentrich, 2005.
• Ibon Zubiaur. Pioneros de lo homosexual (Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, K M Kertbeny, M Hirshfeld). Anthropos, 2007.
• Elena Mancini. Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom: A History of the First International Sexual Freedom Movement. Palgrave Macmillan. 2010.
• Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) Une Pionier du mouvement homosexual confronte au nazisme. Le Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuelle, 2010.
• Patricia Gherovici. “Psychoanalysis Needs a Sex Change”. Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review, 7(1), 2011. 
• Jack Molay. “Magnus Hirschfeld's Theory of Transgender Intermediaries”. Crossdreamers, 19/12/2014.
• Ralf Dose. Magnus Hirschfeld: The Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement. Monthly Review Press, 2014 (translation of Dose’s 2005 book)
• Wouter Egalmeers. Magnus Hirschfeld’s exposition of ‘universal’ fetishism in his 1930 Bilderteil zur Geschlechtskunde. Research Masters Thesis, Radboud University, 2016.
• Ken Plummer. „Hirschfeld, Magnus (1868-1935)”. In George Ritzer (ed) The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2016.
• Heike Bauer, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture. Temple University Press, 2017.
• Manfred Herzer. Magnus Hirschfeld und seine Zeit. Gruyter, 2017.
• Emma Heaney. „’I am not a friend to men’: Embodiment and desire in Magnus Hirschfeld's Transvestites case studies”. Journal of Lesbian Studies,
• Wissen schafft Akzeptanz: Bundesstiftung Magnus Hirschfeld. Tätigkeitsbericht 2017.
• Darryl B Hill. “Sexuality and Gender in Hirschfeld's Die Transvestiten: A Case of the ‘Elusive Evidence of the Ordinary’”. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14, 3, 2018.
• Rainer Herrn. Der Liebe und dem Leid: Das Institut für Sexualwissenschaft 1919-1933. Suhrkamp, 2022.
• Brandy Schillace. The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story. W W Norton & Company, 2025
• Daniel Brook. The Einstein of Sex: Dr Magnus Hirschfeld Visionary of Weimar Berlin. W W Norton & Company, 2025

Magnus Hirschfeld’s Die Transvestiten – some observations

Part 1:  3 misconceptions

Part 2: 2 more misconceptions

Hirschfeld’s other Books

Misconception #1: the claim that Die Transvestiten is Hirschfeld’s definitive work on trans topics.

The Bulloughs, Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender, 1993 describe the book as “may well be the key work on cross dressing, even to this day”.

Most accounts of Hirschfeld on trans topics rely only on this 1910 book, Die Transvestiten, and sometimes the 1912 pictorial supplement, Der erotische Verkleidungstrieb. This is especially so with writings in English, in that these two are the only ones from Hirschfeld with a proper translation.

A list of Hirschfeld’s writings on trans and other Zwischenstufen persons (intermediaries) – the last two are in French as Hirschfeld spent his last years in exile in France:

• 1899. „Die objektive Diagnose der Homosexualität“. Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, 1.

• 1905. Geschlechtsübergänge: Mischungen männlicher und weiblicher Geschlechtscharaktere (Sexuelle Zwischenstufen). Verlag der Monatsschrift für Harnkrankheiten und sexuelle Hygiene, W. Malende, Leipzig.

• 1906. Berliner Tageblatt, 11. December, cited from Monatsbericht des Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees, VI, 1,

• 1910. Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb, mit umfangreichem kasuistischem und historischem Material. Verlag Alfred Pulvermacher, Berlin.

• 1912. with Max Tilke. Der erotische Verkleidungstrieb: Die Transvestiten. Verlag von Alfred Pulvermacher & Co., Berlin.

• 1912. with Ernst Burchard. „Zur Kasuistik des Verkleidungstriebs“. Ärztliche Sachverständigen-Zeitung, 18(23).

• 1913. with Ernst Burchard. „Ein Fall von Transvestismus bei musikalischem“. Neurologisches Centralblatt, 52.

• 1918. Sexualpathologie. Ein Lehrbuch für Ärzte und Studierende. Bonn. Volume II: Sexuelle Zwischenstufen. Das Mannlicher Weib und der Weiblicher Mann. (5 Sections: Hermaproditismus, Androgynie, Transvestitismus, Homosexualität, Metatropismus)

• 1926. „Ein Transvestit“ in Ludwig Levy-Lenz (ed). Sexualkatastrophen. Bilder aus dem modernen Geschlechts- und Eheleben. A H Payne.

• 1930. Geschlechtskunde, auf Grund dreißigjähriger Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeitet. Stuttgart. Volume IV Bilderteil.

• 1933. 'L'amour et la science'. Voila, 3, 199, 1 Juli.

• 1935. translated by W R Fürst. Le Sexe Inconnu. Éditions Montaigne.

For his more considered thoughts, it is essential to consult Sexualpathologie, Geschlechtskunde and Le Sexe Inconnu.

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Hirschfeld’s opinions, jargon and influence also appear in publications by his associates, which should also be considered.

Rainer Herrn. Schnittmuster des Geschlechts 2005:73:

“Hirschfeld's construction of transvestitism initially found its way into the discourse of sexual science and psychiatry only hesitantly. In 1911, the psychiatrist Theodor Ziehen was the first to use Hirschfeld's term in a textbook (Ziehen 1911, p. 622-3). Primarily due to the lack of published case studies, Hirschfeld tried to convince some of his sexually scientific colleagues of his new discovery through direct contact with transvestites. To this end, he invited sexologists who were friends or well-disposed towards him to a meeting. The renowned psychiatrist Paul Näcke reports on this:

'I myself had not yet seen such a case [...] and was therefore very grateful to Hirschfeld when he introduced me and several colleagues to about ½ dozen transvestites in his flat on 19 October 1911, two of whom appeared in very elegant ladies' clothes.' (Näcke 1912, pp. 237-238)

Following this presentation, which was attended by “several sexologists” - Näcke only mentions "Dr. Burchard and Dr. Merzbach" - a dialogue developed between the scientists and the transvestites, who, with one exception, were heterosexual. After this meeting, Näcke, who had already written several reviews, wrote the above-mentioned approving report on Hirschfeld's transvestite concept, but with the reservation that not all transvestites were heterosexual, but that bisexual, homosexual and asexual ones also existed. Hirschfeld came back to this later.

A total of eleven reviews were found for the text volume Die Transvestiten (The Transvestites), and a further eight for the book published two years later (Hirschfeld & Tilke 1912) in leading medical, legal and criminological journals. The majority of the reviewers report approvingly on Hirschfeld's separation of transvestites from homosexuals, their assignment to the intermediate stages, and on his proposal to make the official legitimisation of wearing clothes of the "other" sex dependent on medical certificates.” (DeepL translation)

• 1911. Theodor Ziehen. „Psychiatrie für Arzte und Studierende“. Vierte, vollständig umgearbeitete Auflage.

• 1912. Ralph Pettow. „Zur Psychologie der Transvestie“. Archive für die gesamte Psychologie, XXII.

• 1912. Paul Näcke. „Zum Kapitel der Transvestiten nebst Bemerkungen zur weiblichen Homosexualität“. Archiv für Kriminal-Anthropologie und Kriminalistik, 47 (3/4).

• 1913. Ossian Oehmig. „Beitrag zur Lehre vom Transvestitismus“. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, 15.

• 1916. Max Marcuse. „Ein Fall von Geschlechtsumwandlungstrieb“. Zeitschrift für Psychotherapie und medizinische Psychologie, VI.

• 1920. Hans Abraham. „Einige Bemerkungen über den weiblichen Transvestitismus“. Mitteilungen aus dem Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, X(4).

• 1921. Hans Abraham. Der weibliche Transvestitismus. Dissertation at Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität, Berlin.

• 1930. Felix Abraham. „Transvestiten!”, Die Aufklärung 2: 165.

• 1931. Felix Abraham. „Genitalumwandlungen an zwei männlichen Transvestiten”. Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft und Sexualpolitik, 18: 223-226.

The translations that we do have :

• 1931. French translation by Pierre Vachet. Perversions sexuelles, d’après l’enseignement du docteur Magnus Hirschfeld, par son premier assistant le docteur Félix Abraham. Paris: François Aldor. Discussion.

• 1932. English translation by Jerome Gibbs. Sexual Pathology: A Study of Derangements of the Sexual Instinct, Julian Press. Some extracts from Sexualpathologie, but no trans content.

• 1936. Magnus Hirschfeld, edited and translated by Dr Costler (Arthur Koestler), revised by Norman Haire. Sexual Anomalies and Perversions: Physical and Psychological Development and Treatment : a Summary of the Works of the Late Magnus Hirschfeld. Francis Aldor. The closest that we have to a translation of Sexualpathologie. Discussion.

• 1991. English translation by Michael A Lombardi-Nash. Tranvestites: The Erotic urge to Crossdress. Prometheus Books.

• 1998. Anonymous English translation. Felix Abraham. “Genital Reassignment on Two Male Transvestites”. The International Journal of Trangenderism. 2, 1. Archive

• 2022. English translation by Michael A Lombardi-Nash. The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress Illustrated Part (Supplement to Transvestites). Urania Manuscipts.

• English translation by Ericka Christie & Anne M Callahan of “Chapter XII: Androgyne Mania” from Le Sexe Inconnu. Online.

The Title

Misconception # 2: the assumption that the title is accurate

The full title is Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den Erotischen Verkleidungstrieb which translates as The Transvestites: An Investigation into the Erotic Disguise Drive. Michael Lombardi-Nash slightly revised this for his 1991 translation: Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress.

An ongoing problem was and is created by the word Erotischen.

It is generally accepted that being trans* is not a sexual orientation. Trans persons may be androphilic, gynephilic, asexual, hypersexual. None of these is part of the definition of being trans. For sure some persons do find cross-dressing arousing, but it is a severe distortion to put it in the title. Trans persons, however dressed, at work, shopping, walking in the street, visiting others etc, are not doing something erotic. Transvestitenscheins were issued to enable working in the desired gender – not an erotic activity.

Initially, Hirschfeld had complied with the general opinion at that time that Geschlechtsverkleidung (German for cross-dressing) was a type of homosexuality. However among his patients and elsewhere he encountered trans women who were not at all androphilic, and objected to the assumption. For 1910’s Die Transvestiten, Hirschfeld overcompensated, and for the 17 case studies that comprise Part 1, he systematically excluded gay trans persons. This created a problem re ‘female transvestites’, almost none of whom went with men or had a husband. Only one such case was included: his 15^th case, Helene N, who alternated between men and women.

Rainer Herrn: (Schnittmuster des Geschlechts 2005:57-8)

“Hirschfeld had described cross-dressing as a characteristic typically associated with homosexuals around 1900, and in 1906 he distinguished for the first time between homosexual and heterosexual cross-dressers. And although there were enough homosexual men in the environment of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee who presented themselves in women's clothes - not only at balls - including Hermann von Teschenberg and Willibald von Sadler-Grün - Hirschfeld chose for his casuistry of seventeen cases exclusively those who neither exhibited same-sex inclinations nor had corresponding experience. At the same time, he also knew other homosexual transvestites personally, as can be seen in Volume II of his Sexual Pathology” (DeepL translation)

Hirschfeld of course reverted back in Sexualpathologie, 1918. As quoted in Koestler-Haire’s Sexual Anomalies and Perversions, p197 hard copy, p167 ecopy:

“From the comprehensive data at our disposal we find that about 35 per cent of transvestites are heterosexual and an equal percentage homosexual, while about 15 per cent are bisexual. The remaining 15 per cent are mostly automonosexual, but also include a small proportion of asexuals”.

Hirschfeld had altered the meaning of ‘transvestism’ by making it by definition an erotic activity. The Transvestitenscheinen were issued - at least nominally - for mainly vocational reasons. They were not regarded as erotischen Verkleidungstrieb (erotic urge to dress up). They were issued so that the trans person could live, work and get on with life - the frequency or lack of a sex life did not come into it.

Darryl Hill questions just how heterosexual, the 16 male-born cases studies in Die Transvestiten were? He writes (p324)

“Despite the fact that Hirschfeld wanted to differentiate transvestites from homosexuals, a minority of the cases described homosexual experiences and fantasies. Vern and Bonnie Bullough [p210] observed homosexual fantasies in six of the cases: Messrs. C, D, F, I, J, and P. Including Mr. J, however, is a mistake, since he did not relate any homosexual fantasy. Only one case study, Mr. F, clearly desired men and had had both previous experiences and fantasies. Hirschfeld recorded this: "At twenty-one, on vacation in the Orient, he consented to anal intercourse by Arabians" (51).

Even more problematic for Hirschfeld's contentions was the fact that many of the male cases entertained sexual desires for men but only when presenting themselves as women. Since the man-to-woman crossdressers largely see themselves as women, this desire is probably best understood as heterosexual, but even in that day it was probably partly seen as homosexual. Following this rationale, Messrs. B and M expressed desires to be with men when dressed as a woman. Mr. B indicated a willingness to flirt with men only when dressed as a woman: "I have never had an inclination toward men; only when dressed as a woman do I like to flirt and play with them" (27). Mr. M, who desired to be the passive partner in a heterosexual encounter, said that he was willing to give sex with men a try but only as a woman.

…

Hirschfeld's contemporaries criticized him for not seeing the latent homosexual tendencies in most of his respondents, mainly because he failed to use deep psychoanalysis, but these tendencies are obvious even without psychoanalysis.”

Some may see most of Hirschfeld’s 16 case studies in Part One of the book as Autogynephiles or something similar (this is not my opinion) and therefore Erotischen as an appropriate label. Even if this were the case, it would apply to Part One of the book only, and not to Part Two “Criticism (Differential Diagnosis)” or Part Three Ethnology and History”. So Arguably Erotischen could be acceptable in the subtitle for Part One, but is definitely inappropriate in the title of the entire book.

However, it is Die Transvestiten that is mostly read, and Kurt Freund and Ray Blanchard in the 1980s, as they developed their concept of Autogynephilia, were able to cite Hirschfeld as a pre-cursor.

• Kurt Freund, Betty Steiner & S. Chan. Two types of cross-gender identity. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 11, 1982:49–63.

• Ray Blanchard. “Origins of the Concept of Autogynephilia”. Feb 2004. 

• Darryl B Hill. “Sexuality and Gender in Hirschfeld's Die Transvestiten: A Case of the ‘Elusive Evidence of the Ordinary’”. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14, 3, 2018.

Trans words in German

Misconception # 3: the claim that Hirschfeld ‘coined’ transvest* words.

Book after book after book claims that Hirschfeld ‘coined’ Transvestiten, etc. The earliest claim that I have found re Hirschfeld supposedly coining Transvestiten (not Transvestitismus) is in Charlotte Wolff’s 1986 biography where she simply says on p107 that he coined it, but gives no support to the claim. The problem of course, as I have pointed out several times, is that one cannot coin a word, or group of words, that already exist. It seems that he did introduce the transvest* words unto German, and they quickly did replace the rather cumbersome Geschlechtsverkleidung. He also altered the meaning to make transvesting an erotic activity.

However various transvest* or travest* words had existed in Italian, French and English since the 17^th century, sometimes but not always meaning gender crossing. Those who claim that Hirschfeld ‘coined’ the terms implicitly imply that he was so badly read that he was unaware of the various forms of these words. For a man of his education, who had travelled in the US, England, France and Italy, this is unlikely.

Then there is the word Transvestitenschein, the licence or permission to transvest. The Paris Préfecture de Police had been issuing Permissions de Travestissement since 1800, and Transvestitenschein is a translation of Permissions de Travestissement (altering the emphasis from the permission to the actual licence). Hirschfeld rendered the French word travestissement into German as Transvestismus, and travesti/e as Transvestiten.

Hirschfeld had an extended stay in Paris in 1892 while studying for his medical exams, and would have become aware of the French practice. He made contact there with the eminent Jewish physician Max Nordau. In 1910 just before finishing Die Transvestiten, Hirschfeld spent a few months in London and then Paris.

Hirschfeld was also an active nudist, and German and French nudist groups had joint meetings. We know that it was at such a meeting that Hirschfeld met the French future sexologist Pierre Vachet. Vachet was still a teenager in 1910 (he was born in 1892) but as he was training to become a doctor, he would have talked about medical practices in Paris.

Hirschfeld mentions the French Permissions de Travestissement in his Die Transvestiten, although he does not give the French expression.

P274-5 in the Lomabardi-Nash translation, “There are cases in which women work in bricklayers’ suits and driving uniforms, and the police overlook that. At the governor’s office they said that strictly speaking the present question could only be decided by a police regulation dated November 7, 1800, that made the authorization of the many frequent masquerades at the time subject to a physician’s certificate that the male or female applicant needed the special clothing for reasons of health. Exceptions to this have occurred from time to time, for example, Aurore Dupin (George Sand), Rosa Bonheur and Marguerite Bellanger, the Margo of Napoleon III, who made the empress jealous. In earlier days there were more applications for permission to wear men’s clothing, but since the introduction of clothing that easily reminds a person of the stronger sex, for example, for women who ride bicycles, the desire of women for other manly apparel appears to have decreased.”

P384: “A French farmer from the suburbs of Paris went to the police for permission to wear women’s clothing and received it, for “business reasons” no less. He said that a woman’s dress was necessary as a part of his equipment to do his kind of work at a nursery garden. Permission for the same thing was granted to a Paris potato merchant.”

P385: “Rosa Bonheur, too, in her petition to the government for permission to wear men’s clothing, gave as her reason that dresses prevented her from finding artistic motifs in nature.”

Charlotte d'Eon - Addendum B - Untruths, Comments, What modern label would fit?

Part I: Le Secret du Roi - Russia and then England. 

Part II: Return to France, Return to England

Part III: Addendum A - Legacy, Bibliography

Part III: Addendum B - Untruths, Comments, What modern label would fit?

--------------------------

Untruths.

The following were added to various d’Eon biographies, but later research fails to confirm them. They are almost certainly false.

- that d’Eon was born female and raised as a male.

- that d’Eon participated in the masquarade balls in Moscow dressed as female.

- that d’Eon as Lia de Beaumont was a lectrice to the Russian Empress Yelizaveta Petrovna Romanova.

- that d’Eon was frail and delicate as a boy and that he was dressed by his mother in girl’s clothing.

- that at age 26 d’Eon in female guise caught the eye of Louis XV.

- that d’Eon was seduced by Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV.

- that d’Eon became a Chevalier and was induced into the Order of St Louis in recognition of his role as a Dragoon in the Seven Years War.

- that d’Eon had an affair with Sophia Charlotte of of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen Consort to George III, and that D’Eon was the father of George IV.

- that d’Eon was a member of the English Hell-Fire Club.

- that d’Eon was courted by Benjamin Franklin.

The major sources for these untruths were d’Eon’s own cross-dreaming which was incorporated into both the La Fortelle (auto) biography 1779 and the unpublished autobiography found at Brotherton Library, and Gaillardet’s first 1836 biography. Farrer comments: “This is very nearly cross dressing fiction, a century in advance. To conclude, I think that all the Leeds autobiographical writings of Mademoiselle d'Eon are fiction of the deepest kind even more so than Gaillardet's first book.”

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Comments

Whilst Gary Kates’ biography is the most detailed and the most reliable, it is annoying that he continues to use male pronouns for d’Eon even after 1777. In the recent BBC short documentary Kates uses “they’ instead, but never ‘she’.

As does, for example, Patrick Califia, who actually wrote of d’Eon, p12, “he kept a journal in which he referred to himself by feminine pronouns”. This despite p49n16 writing: “female pronouns will be used for transsexual women”.

The Wikipedia article on the Ordre Royal et Militaire de Saint-Louis (which does not mention d’Eon as a recipient) says: “ Catholic faith was mandatory, as well as at least ten years' service as a commissioned officer in the Army or the Navy”. D’Eon returned from Russia in 1761, and became a captain of Dragoons. He fought at the Battle of Villinghausen in July 1761, and was wounded at the action at Ultrop. In 1762 he was sent to London as an assistant to the French Ambassador. That makes one (1) year, not ten in the military. As Kates says (p93): “the medal was not really for his military services. Rather it was .. [for] diplomatic service”. The UK still maintains the practice of giving high level titles to some of its diplomats - see David Frost who was recently made a lord for his negotiations with EU.

D’Eon ran up debts of 100,000 livres in only four months, when he was acting ambassador! How much was that? www.historicalstatistics.org/Currencyconverter.html says that “100,000 French livres tournois [1663-1795] in year 1763 could buy 32,682.682472401524 gram gold. The price of 32,682.682472401524 gram gold in year 2015 was 7,208,587.425194473 French franc. In 2015 France adopted the Euro at €1 = FRF 6.55957, and so 7,208,587 livres = €1,098,942. Add another few years inflation, and round to just over €1 million.

D’Eon was given a £500 advance in 1805 for the autobiography that was never published (until very recently). At a time when the the average wage was £20 a year, that was 25 years income for ordinary people.

Did people actually believe that d’Eon was a woman prior to 1777? James Lander comments: “The very earliest reports of the rumour are conveyed in letters whose writers clearly do not believe the gossip. When gamblers in London soon began placing large wagers on the issue, the majority were betting that d’Eon was a man (i.e. that the rumour was false). A year or so later, most of the people who asserted that the rumour was actually true had vested interests for doing so. D’Eon’s intelligence chief, Broglie; Broglie’s secretary, Drouet; and the later foreign minister, Vergennes, had all been members, like d’Eon, of the ‘king’s secret’. The testimony of Drouet, the only one of the three who, as reported by Broglie, actually investigated the matter physically, was not only erroneous but probably deliberately false. Support for d’Eon’s supposed female-status was also given by one of Vergennes’s agents in the negotiations, Pommereux, who was an old family friend of d’Eon. The libellist, Morande, and Vergennes’s final and successful envoy, Beaumarchais, also supported d’Eon’s hoax, but they too had wide-ranging reasons for doing so, as did the former chief of police and later minister of marine, Sartines, a friend of Beaumarchais and close colleague of Vergennes. Louis XV never showed any real belief in the hoax, and certainly not enough to make him relent regarding d’Eon’s negotiating proposals. However, Louis XVI, who came to the throne in 1774 as a very naive nineteen-year-old, may well have believed the tale told him by so many eminent advisers, though even that is not certain.”

Most of the persons mentioned in Lander’s comment were members of Le Secret du Roi - so in effect it was a Psych-op, a disinformation project by secret agents. Joel Paul in his 2009 Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, A Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution, implies that one outcome of the project was to get Louis XVI to side with the American Secession.

Of course the French still humiliated over their losses in the Seven Years War did not need much nudging to support the Americans.

With reference to the American Secession, we should note that Chief Justice Mansfield, who presided on the farcical trial of gambling debts re d’Eon’s sex, and then later ruled that such gambling debts were not enforceable under English law, had made a more dramatic ruling in June 1772 when he ruled in the case of Somerset v Stewart that slavery had no legal basis in England. This became one of the major causes of the American Secession in that the slave states were concerned that the ruling would be expanded to cover them also.

Lander comments on the purchases of items of female attire via Mrs Lautem in 1775: “D’Eon’s papers show that he made numerous purchases of female clothes in the months before and after this date, but most can be understood as gifts for female acquaintances, particularly his ‘landlady’, Madame Lautem, who, along with her wine-merchant husband, was also a good friend of the Chevalier. Earlier we noted d’Eon’s purchase of earrings and a bracelet for this lady, and it is clear that she was reimbursed by d’Eon for the purchase of a considerable number of ‘stays’ (or corsets) around this time. While it may seem odder to us than it did to them that the Chevalier was paying for corsets for the wife of a good friend, one possible if somewhat far-fetched interpretation is that d’Eon was using the corsets himself, perhaps to combat his own corpulency so he might still fit into his beloved dragoon officer’s uniform. Whatever these other purchases may signify, the order, placed on 28 October, for a complete outfit (in the black silk that d’Eon would later in life favour), seems to indicate that on this special day, d’Eon had decided to prepare for a trip to France in the near future – a trip which, under the terms of the Transaction, required that he appear in female dress. If d’Eon secretly longed to don women’s clothing, then he might soon satisfy that desire with a degree of (apparently) official approval.”

Surely couturière Rose Bertin at that first dressing 21 October 1777 must have noticed that Mademoiselle d’Eon’s anatomy was a bit off: facial hair, flat chest, male gait, male voice - not to mention what she between the legs. To rise has she had done from working-class origins to such eminence must have required guile and political savvy. Perhaps she did indeed notice, and just went along with what was expected. She managed to survive the Revolution unscathed, although she had to live abroad for three years. Her business in Paris did continue tough, and in old age she retired to her estate in Épinay-sur-Seine.

If we are looking for an 18^th century trans person who approximates to our modern concept of transsexual (although of course they had to live it without benefit of external hormones or modern surgery) the best candidate is John de Verdion. I have yet to find a book about D’Eon that even mentions the existence of Verdion although they were in Londonat the same time 1770-1800.

I always found it odd that those who write about d’Eon stuck with ‘Chevalier’ the male form of the word, and insist on using the transient title over 200 years later. The female form is 'chevalière'. D'Eon is hardly the only trans chevaler/chevalière. So are Marie-Pierre Pruvot (Bambi) and Amanda Lear. Why is it that those who always say Chevalier d'Eon do not say Chevalière Pruvot and Chevalière Lear? Here is the Wikipedia list of Chevaliers (which does not include Charlotte d'Eon). And of course the EN.Wikipedia biography entry is for "Chevalier d'Eon" not "Charlotte d'Eon de Beamont". The FR.Wikipedia entry is for "Charles d'Éon de Beaumont" - yet another Wikipedia entry for a trans person under the pre-transition name.

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What modern label would fit?

Autogynephilic?

Kay Brown commented: “the term Eonist which was named after a famous historically significant cross-dresser, who by his history, is easily recognizably autogynephilic”. Now this is not a surprising claim from Brown who after all declared Christine Jorgensen to be autogynephilic.

Some of the problems in applying a 21st-century concept like 'autogynephilia' to the 18th century:

1. A lack of early-transitioners to compare to. It seems that there were many early-transitioners in 18^th-century India and South-East Asia. In Christian Europe where sex and gender expression had been so repressed, it is almost impossible to name any at all.
2. Nor is there any evidence of D’Eon being gynephilic.
3. Brown seems to regard autogynephilia as sort of an essentialism, that is a resultant from DNA modified by epigenetics. If so why are there not loads of such persons in the 18th century? Is modern pollution the required epigenetic? The best known transvestites in 18th century London are George Selwyn, who loved to attend public executions in drag, and Horace Walpole who dressed as an old woman for masquerade balls. Neither ever married and historians discuss whether Walpole was gay.
4. HSTS/AGP is a 21st century social construction that fails to fit anyone in the 18^th

Femmiphilic?

As the Beaumont Society was so named at a time when its membership was limited to heterosexual transvestites of the Virginia Prince type, it was implicitly declaring d’Eon to be femmiphilic. Likewise Susan Valenti naming her retreat the Chevalier D’Eon Resort, and Virginia Prince publishing books as Chevalier Publications.

However as there is no evidence that d’Eon was at all gynephilic, this is inappropriate. It is hard to conceive that that d’Eon would have been a member of any such club.

Vern Bullough makes the claim – that surprisingly has been ignored in the debate about social construction - that “there is no evidence in Western culture of what might be called a heterosexual transvestite consciousness before the twentieth century”, and probably not before Magnus Hirschfield modified the term 'transvestite' in 1910.

Transvestite/cross-dresser?

Loads of modern writers simply describe d’Eon as a transvestite, even when referring to pre-1777. The points made against regarding d’Eon as Femmiphilic apply here also.

The verb ‘to transvest’ has been recorded in English as early as 1652, and even earlier in Italian. 'Travestissement' was being used in France by 1692. The concept was around in the late 18^th century, but rarely applied to d’Eon.

D’Eon actually transvested less than the general public, many of whom did so for the masquerade balls that were so popular at the time. D’Eon is not recorded as doing so.

Homovestite

Prior to 1777, d’Eon was a diplomat for 20 years, and a Dragoon for only one. Despite this he persisted in dressing (up) as a Dragoon, and after 1777 when she complied with the Royal Command to dress as female, she several times requested permission to again dress as a Dragoon. Surely this is makes d’Eon a homovestite, and this is a more acurate descriptor than ‘tranvestite’

Mollie

Apart from the masquerade balls, the major incidence of transvesting was found in the Molly houses. Of course this was rather low in the class system, and even if interested d’Eon would not be found at such a place.

Eonist?

Havelock Ellis used d’Eon’s name for the trans persons whom he met and/or read about in the 1920s. However as we have discussed he did not meet Ellis’ definition of an Eonist, and thus was not an Eonist.

Strictly speaking, for one to be an Eonist, one, being born male, should intimate that one was born female and has been brought up male, and be living male.

GIDAANT=Gender Identity Disorder of Adolescence or Adulthood, Nontranssexual Type?

This term for a trans person who is neither fetishistic nor desirous of bodily changes, sort of fits, but the term introduced in the DSM IIIR is a residual term for those who did not fit into the other more accepted terms. As the other terms lack exemplars in the 18^th century, a residual term is otiose.

Intersex?

From a misreading of the report on d’Eon’s death in 1810 at the age of 81, it has been suggested that d'Eon had Hypogonadotropin eunuchoidism or Kallman's syndrome, a congenital sexual disorder characterized by underdeveloped genitalia and sterile gonads. D’Eon reported childhood urinary tract disorder but this is insufficient data for such a diagnosis.

Incidentally transsexuality is extremely rare in patients with Kallman’s syndrome. Only one such case has ever been reported.

Incel?

D’Eon by all reliable accounts was non-sexual, a situation that modern persons regard negatively. Some modern Incels transition so as not to be Incel anymore.

However that is a 21^st-century mindtrip. D’Eon was an 18^th-century Catholic, and in his milieu Chastity was positively valued, leading many to become monks or nuns.

Cross Dreamer:

The modern concept of Cross-Dreamer is probably more useful. A Cross-Dreamer is one who would be of another gender, have fantasies of being or becoming another gender who may, but are not necessarily, be sexually aroused by such ideas.

The idea of being born female but raised and living as male, as put forth as rumour and then in the 1779 biography under the name La Fortelle, and the unpublished autobiography of her final years, is certainly Cross-Dreaming - although not the more common type of such dreams.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) and cis gender play

The fictions of Ernest Hemingway had from way back induced skepticism re his machismo and bravado. This took a more interesting turn in the late 1980s with the posthumous publication of his Garden of Eden in 1986 with its gender play and gender swapping, followed the next year by Paul Hendrickson's article for the Washington Post (which was reprinted in other publications) which interviewed Hemingway’s three sons and how they coped with his image. This was the first time that the reading public became aware that the third child, Gregory was a conflicted trans woman better known as Gloria. In 1988, Kenneth Lynn’s seminal 600-page biography opened up the field with some anecdotes to which the word ‘androgyny’ was applied, but he did not incorporate Hendrickson’s findings.

In the 30+ years since, there has been a slew of books on Hemingway’s life and works with particular attention to sex and gender. Critics and some other readers have found homoeroticism, homophobia, repressed femininity, misogyny, fetishism, sodomy, transvestity and masochism.

The Ken Burns & Lynn Novick 2021 PBS documentary, Hemingway, taken by some as revelatory, actually does not contain anything re sex or gender that was not known in the 1980s and 1990s, but does fill out the images with old newsreels and photographs.

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Some comments on aspects of Hemingway’s life that have been proposed by critics as Androgyny or Pseudo-Androgyny.

Baby clothes

For the first few years of his life, young Ernest was kept in dresses. This was not unusual for his generation. If this somehow had a lasting impact, we would expect most young men in the 1920s to be closet cross-dressers.

From the 16th century and into the 20th, young boys wore skirts or dresses until roughly the age of reason (seven or so). One reasons given was toilet training. The Breeching, the first wearing of trousers was an important rite of passage, often celebrated with a small party.

Gender swapping with sister

Ernest and his sister Marcelline were 18 months apart. Their mother Grace apparently had a fantasy of having had twins. She paired them. She dressed them alike, and Marcelline was held back a year so she and Ernest could go through school in the same class.

An unusual practice. However there is no indication that this affected Marcelline’s gender identity. She married at age 25 and had three children. She had a career as a lecturer on literature and the theatre, and wrote a book about her family.

The Sun Also Rises, 1926

The word ‘androgyny’ has been used by several critics in relation to this novel.

Two characters are relevant.

Jake Barnes suffered an unstated injury in WWI and was rendered impotent. So he is a sort of eunuch. There is a traditional attitude which regards eunuchs as somehow androgynous, despite their condition being an involuntary mutilation, despite which the majority remain gynephilic with a male gender identity.

Brett Ashley is more seriously described as ‘androgynous’ although it is still androgyny light. She keeps her hair short in a masculine fashion, and is regarded as having a masculine attitude to sex in casually taking and leaving her male sex partners. She is not lesbian; she does not wear masculine clothes (in 1926 this means that she does not wear trousers). Doing things in masculine fashion was considered feminist at that time and was sometimes regarded as androgynous.

I have written an entry on trans men in the late 1920s. They were all much more androgynous and/or masculine than Brett Ashley.

The Garden of Eden, 1986

The posthumously published novel by Hemingway in which the two protagonists, David and Catherine, get the same short haircut and play games of both being the other gender.

This is apparently based on games that Ernest played with his fourth wife, Mary Welsh. They did this for a while and then desisted. It did not develop into transgender changes for either of them. Such gender play by heterosexual couples is more common than generally admitted.

Father of Gloria

It is now well known that Ernest’s third child transitioned after four wives and eight children and took the name Gloria. There are very few recorded examples of a trans woman having a trans (or trans inclined) father. Virginia Prince and her father Charles Lowman are the best known.

Meyers alone reported in 1999 of Gloria: ‘Transposing his own fantasies onto his father, he claimed that Hemingway couldn’t sleep at night because he dreamed he was a woman”.

Stoller’s concept of a toxic family

Eby draws a parallel between Grace Hemingway and her son, Ernest, and the mother-son dyads discussed in Robert Stoller’s two books called Sex and Gender. In these dyads the son becomes the mother’s “feminized phallus”. Stoller partially based his ideas on the Agnes and the Lance cases, and found a few others who fit his pattern, but they all involved childhood or teenage trans gender expression quite different from what is found in Hemingway. While Eby rewrites the Grace-Ernest dyad to approximate Stoller’s pattern, the gender expression by the boy is missing.

Conclusion

Fantina writes (p76)

 “If we can identify Hemingway as heterosexual but not quite straight, we can do worse than refer to him as a queer heterosexual or as transgendered even if he never cared to or dared to admit it himself” and “What Hemingway does in The Garden of Eden and elsewhere is to affirm the patriarchal social mandate while undermining it in sexual relationships. Hemingway’s male characters often engage in subversive sexual practices but they usually reaffirm other patriarchal values and always reject homosexuality. … Hemingway’s ideological identification conforms to the compulsory heterosexuality demanded of men (and women) in twentieth-century America, while his desire integrates more fluid notions of sexuality. While homosexuality can never present a viable option to Hemingway, it is too facile to call his stance a simple denial. Even if Hemingway felt homosexual desires but willed himself straight, we have to accept the results of his own personal project.”

I do not agree with Fantina, or with most of the writers listed below. 

Was Hemingway a Dark Dreamer as defined by Jack Molay: “people who have managed to suppress their transgender side completely. They are not even aware of splitting (i.e. a mental compartmentalization of their other side)”. Well, no, because of the queer suggestions that pop up in his fiction. But it is not at all clear that he was a CrossDreamer either because cross-gender dreams were only a sometime focus. We can certainly rule out negative concepts like Autogynephilia which has a historical association with the concept of CrossDreaming but is now quite distinct, in that (despite the title of Eby’s book) there is no record of anything deeper than gender play within heterosexual relationships - nothing that could seriously be designated fetishism (either the psycho-analytical usage or fetish subculture usage).

Charlotte Bach proposed that all persons, cis and trans, gynephilic, androphilic and asexual, feel a pull to be be the other sex, to attain complete individual integrity as a member of the species. This can be denied or, as she put it, asseverated. Hemingway dabbled, he indulged in gender play sometimes, but he never asseverated his potential femininity. More often he denied, and asserted his masculinity, often to the point of bombast.

To dabble is to do something intermittently or superficially, without full commitment. A trans dabbler may transvest once or twice and then desist, or write about it only a bit. Some, but by no means all, dabblers - when presented with the example of a committed trans person - will turn transphobic, as Radclyffe Hall did re Victor Barker.

We should also point out that many cis persons who are not writers will also dabble in gender play as much as Hemingway did, but not being writers do not leave a paper trail. We sometimes know of them via anecdotes and gossip, as we do with Virginia Prince’s father, the renowned orthopedic surgeon Charles Lowman. If we did not have Hemingway’s writings, anecdotes and gossip in other persons’ biographies is all that we would have, and the proposal that he was somehow trans would not have received attention.

We should also mention that trans persons often - especially in earlier years - dabble in gender play attempting either to fit in or to deconstruct the heteronormative sex-gender. Like cis-het persons dabbling in queer play, gay and trans persons do straight gender play but desist, finding that they do not fit in that role.

• Ernest Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises. C. Scribner’s, 1926.
• Henry King (dir). The Sun Also Rises.Scr: Peter Viertel, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway, with Tyrone Power as Jake Barnes and Ava Gardner as Brett Ashley. US 130 mins 1957.
• Ernest Hemingway. The Garden of Eden. C. Scribner's, 1986.
• Paul Hendrickson. “The Hemingway Heritage: Papa's three sons are still living in conflict with the powerful image of that famous and macho writer” The Washington Post, August 23, 1987.
• Kenneth s Lynn. Hemingway. Fawcett Columbine, 1988.
• Mark Spilka. Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny.University of Nebraska Press, 1990.
• Nancy R Comley & Robert Scholes. Hemingway’s Genders: Rereading the Hemingway Text. Yale University Press, 1994.
• Carl P. Eby. Hemingway’s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood.State University of New York Press, 1999.
• Jeffrey Meyers. “The Hemingways: An American Tragedy”. Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 1999. Online.
• Lynn Conway (ed). "The Strange Saga of Gregory Hemingway", 2003. Online.
• Richard Fantina. Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism. Palgrave, 2005.
• Mauricio D Aguilera Linde. “Hemingway and Gender: Biography Revisited”. Atlantis, 27,2 December 2005.
• John Hemingway. Strange Tribe: a Family Memoir.The Lyons Press, 2007.
• Jacob Michael Montie. Couples Therapy: Gender and Sexuality in the Sun Also Rises. MA Thesis Portland State University, 2011. Online.
• Paul Hendrickson. Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961. Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.
• Zagria, “Gloria Hemingway (1931-2001) writer, doctor”. A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 5 November 2011. Online.
• Philip Kaufman (dir). Hemingway & Gellhorn. Scr: Jerry Stahl & Barbra Turner, with Clive Owen as Ernest Hemingway and Nicole Kidman as Martha Gellhorn. US 155 mins 2012.
• Brittany J Barron. “I’ve Never Felt Such a Bitch”: Lady Brett Ashley’s Trauma and Androgyny in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises”. Anastamos, April 2019. Online.
• Richard Bradford. The Man Who Wasn't There : A Life of Ernest Hemingway. Tauris Parke, 2020.
• Ken Burns & Lynn Novick (dir). Hemingway. Scr: Geoffrey C Ward. US 320 mins 2021. Webpage.
• Mary Katherine Tramontana. “Ernest Hemingway: The Old Man and the Androgyny”. Esquire, 05/04/2021. Online.
• Jack Molay. “Yes, Ernest Hemingway was Transgender”. CrossDreamers, April 5, 2021. Online.

Anne Bonny and Mary Read, Pirates

1720 was the year of a major crime, the first international stock bubble and crash that was the South Sea Bubble in England, The Mississippi Bubble in France and the Windhendel in the United Provinces (Netherlands). Built on slavery and colonialism, and mixed with public debt engineering, the bubble lead many small investors into bankruptcy.

Later that year there was a distinctly lesser crime that was to become iconic, although because of the time it took news to cross the Atlantic, word of the event did not reach London until 1721.

The Jamaica Colony, which was mainly a vast prison colony where African slaves were obliged by extreme violence to toil in sugar plantations for the enrichment of an English elite, had encouraged pirates to operate from Jamaica from the 1650s, as long as they did not attack English ships. They were even issued with letters of Marque to make it official. One Jamaican pirate, Henry Morgan was arrested in 1671 and summoned to London, but was acclaimed by the population as a hero, and so was knighted instead. He returned to Jamaica where he served as Governor three times. By 1685 the remaining pirates were evicted from Jamaica and they relocated to the Bahamas.

Boston Gazette, 31 January 1721

On 16 November 1720 there was a trial of pirates held in the High Court of the Admiralty in the Jamaican capital St Jago de la Vega (later to be known as Spanish Town) presided over by the Captain-General and Governor in Chief, Nicholas Lawes. Captain Jack Rackham and his crew of twelve had been caught off Negril on the west side of Jamaica. They were tried, accused of “Piracies, Felonies and Robberies on the High Seas”. The reading public was intrigued by the fact that the crew included two women: Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

Although no-one had been killed, the victims had been taken captive “in Corporal Fear of their Lives”.

Witness Dorothy Thomas described how, while sailing on the north Jamaican coast in a canoe with provisions, Rackham’s sloop approached and Rackham relieved her canoe of “most things that were in her”. The two women in Rackham's crew “wore Men’s Jackets and long Trouzers, and Handkerchiefs tied about their Heads, and that each of them had a Machet and Pistol in their hands and cursed and Swore at the Men … That the Reason of her knowing and believing them to be Women then was, by the largeness of their Breasts”.

Two French volunteers, John Bessneck and Peter Cornelian, who had been captured by Rackham, testified to a raid on Thomas Spenlow, master of a schooner taken on 19 October. They testified in French and it was reported via an interpreter that the women “were very active on Board and willing to do any Thing … they wore Men’s Cloaths; and at other Times, they wore Women’s Cloaths”.

All thirteen accused were found guilty. Both women plead ‘not guilty’ but said nothing in their defence. However after being found guilty, the two then “plead the belly”. Sentence was suspended so that their condition could be verified. Nothing further is recorded. Apparently the eleven men were quickly hanged. Rumour has it that Mary Read died of complications from her pregnancy. Nothing further is recorded of Anne Bonny.

Just over three years later an otherwise unknown writer, Charles Johnson, published A general history of the robberies and murders of the most notorious pyrates. This contains a lengthy chapter on Anne Bonny and Mary Read which fleshes out the meagre details from the trial using the standard pattern of tales about 18th century adventurous women, both making them bloodthirsty amazons and also wives and mothers. While there is no account of how he could know what he added to the trial record, the book was a best seller, and is the source of most books on piracy for the next 300 years. In a second edition, Johnson acknowledged that some ‘gentlemen’ had challenged the first edition’s accuracy.

Mary Read killing - no historical basis

As with Charlotte d’Eon and other 18^th century characters of note, the story was filled out in various ways, but modern scholars are unable to confirm the additions.

With one exception. In 2020 Tyler Rodriguez, a YouTuber who investigates mysteries, using the Mormon online genealogy database, was able to access the Parish Registry of Burials of St Catherine. First he found an entry for “Mary Read, pirate” as dying 28 April 1721, which fits the rumour that she died from complications of pregnancy. Then he found an entry for an Ann Bonny as dying 29 December 1733. If this is the same Anne Bonny, then she stayed in Jamaica. However we don’t know how she avoided execution.

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I have followed Julie Wheelwright and Tony Bartelme in this account. I have not linked to any of the EN.Wikipedia entries for they all seem to be based on the fictional additions of Charles Johnson. Likewise the 2021 book by Robert Peal is yet again a paraphrase of Charles Johnson. Peal totally ignores Jo Stanley's book and the writings of Tony Bartelme on the subject.

The recent Starz television series Black Sails featured Anne Bonny as a major protagonist. However the script for that series openly mixed characters from Stevenson’s Treasure Island with some real historical pirates and with Charles Johnson’s fictions. Impressive as it was, it does not claim to be true.

Anne Bonny in Black Sails based on an 18th century imagining

In 1930 John Robert Moore (1890-1973), a Daniel Defoe scholar, proposed that Charles Johnson was a pseudonym for Defoe. He also added 140 other titles to the Defoe canon, more than any other scholar. Furbank & Owens comment: “In our view, his argument for ascribing the General History of the Pyrates to Defoe was hopelessly flawed and depended on verbal ‘parallels' so vague and generalised as to carry no conviction at all; moreover, it ran up against awkward objections and problems with which he did not really cope”. Nevertheless many library and online catalogues now attribute the book to Defoe. There is no record of Defoe visiting Jamaica to interview witnesses.

So, were Read and Bonnie transvestites or even trans men? There is no shortage of publications claiming such. They are even cited in introductions to transgender history.

However. One witness testified that they switched between men’s and women’s cloaths as appropriate.

Jo Stanley (p44) writes: “wearing trousers did make practical sense. The reason most women donned breeches was to travel safely, to avoid molestation and to get into situations where only men were supposed to be. Wearing trousers allowed women pirates the freedom to climb, work with ropes, go up and down ladders.” All the same reasons that a 21^st century cis female sailor also wears trousers etc.

Here is an illustration of how women dressed around 1700. Does anyone think that a person so dressed could climb a mainmast or swim between ships?

So were they transvestites?

There is no reason to assume that they were. Not Proven!

• The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, and other Pirates.Robert Baldwin, 1721. Online.
• Captain Charles Johnson, A general history of the robberies and murders of the most notorious pyrates : and also their policies, discipline and government, from their first rise and settlement in the island of Providence ... With the remarkable actions and adventures of the two female pyrates, Mary Read and Anne Bonny. To which is prefix'd an account of the famous Captain Avery.Ch Rivington 1724. Online.
• Jo Stanley.“The women among the boys” and “Uncovering the oceans’ Roaring Girls” in Jo Stanley (ed). Bold in her Breeches: Women Pirates Across the Ages. HarperCollins, 1995: 51-60.
• Julie Wheelwright. “Tars, tarts and swashbucklers” in Jo Stanley (ed). Bold in her Breeches: Women Pirates Across the Ages. HarperCollins, 1995: 176-189.
• P N Furbank and W R Owens. A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe. Pickering & Chatto, 1998: xix-xx.
• Tony Bartelme. “The true and false stories of Anne Bonny, pirate woman of the Caribbean”. Charleston Post and Courier, Nov 21, 2018. Online.
• Tony Bartelme. “A 22-year-old YouTuber may have solved Anne Bonny pirate mystery 300 years after trial. Charleston Post and Courier, Nov 28, 2020. Online.
• Robert Peal. “Anne Bonny and Mary Read: The Pirate Queens of the Caribbean”. In Meet the Georgians: Epic Tales from Britain’s Wildest Century. William Collins, 2021: 26-39.

Did Magnus Hirschfeld coin the term Geschlechtsverkleidung?

Magnus Hirschfeld used two words somewhat interchangeably: Geschlechtsverkleidung and Transvestiten.   The former is a pure German word while Transvestismus is a Latin-based loan word from French and Italian.   

 

While Hirschfeld titled his 1910 book Die Transvestiten, in the contents to the book he mainly uses Geschlechtsverkleidung, and in the text itself, he often shortened it to Verkleidung.

 

Let us break down the word.

Geschlecht=sex, Kleidung=clothing, and the prefix ver in this context modifies the meaning of dressing to be other than normal.  Verkleidung can also mean in disguise.  Geschlechtsverkleidung means gender dressing, or Gendervesting. 

 

Geschlechtsverkleidungstrieb is also used.  Strieb means drive, so Geschlechtsverkleidungstrieb means the urge or drive to cross dress.   

 

Compare the English ‘Cross-Dressing’ which also means the same as Transvestism but uses only English roots rather than loan words from French and Italian, in turn based on the Latin.

 

 

What do people mean when they claim that Hirschfeld coined ‘Transvestitismus’?

Actually Hirschfeld never uses the word Transvestismus on his 1910 book.   He uses Transvestiten several times.  He mainly uses Verkleidung, sometimes Geschlechtsverkleidung.

 

• Presumably they mean that he we was well-educated enough that he took from Latin trans + vestit-, a form of vestiō (“I clothe, I dress”), and created what he mistakenly assumed to be a new word that he could use in alternation with Geschlechtsverkleidung.   Perhaps he also considered Latin derived words to be more classy.
• They also implicitly imply that he was so badly read that he was unaware that the various forms of transvest* and travest* had been in use in most west European languages since the 17^thcentury.

 

Here is the Oxford English Dictionary entry for the verb form, to transvest, which it records for 1652.

 

 

What about Transvestitenschein?

Transvestitenscheinen were permits for Geschlechtsverkleidung issued by the Berlin police and arranged by Hirschfeld.   

 

Was Hirschfeld totally unaware that the Paris Préfecture de Police had been issuing Permissions de Travestissement since 1800?   Note that the Paris Préfecture de Police went ahead and used a transvest* word without waiting another 110 years for Hirschfeld to coin it.   After all, such words were in common use.

 

In 1929 when Violet Morris sued the  Fédération française de sports féminins (FFSF), they cited the  1800 Ordonnance and criticised Morris for never having applied for a Permission de Travestissement.  However Morris’ lawyer produced a letter from the Commissioner of Police giving assurance that they no longer pursued women in trousers.

 

So why is it that Hirschfeld is frequently - but incorrectly - credited with coining Transvestitismus, but is never credited with coining Geschlechtsverkleidung?

 

 

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The earliest claim that I have found re Hirschfeld supposedly coining Transvestiten  (not Transvestitismus) is in Charlotte Wolff’s 1986 biography where she simply says on p107 that he coined it, but gives no support to the claim.

 

Wiktionary is very confused.   They claim that the English word ‘transvestite’ is “From transvestitism, from German Transvestitismus, coined in 1910 by Magnus Hirschfeld”.    Thus one is really impressed that J Wright in 1652 was able to use the verb form without waiting another 258 years for Hirschfeld to coin the term.

 

 

 

 

John Talbot divorced 1967

In 1961 John David Talbot married a widow, Mrs Eileen Poyntz, matron of an old people’s home in Brighton, Sussex. Eileen, now Mrs Talbot, realized that John was anatomically not the man she expected – but continued to live with him for a year.

Five years later she filed for divorce. The judge in the case, Justice Ormrod, declared that John Talbot was a woman, and immediately granted a decree nisi of nullity. John Talbot did not contest the petition and was ordered to pay the costs.

• Talbot (otherwise Poyntz) v Talbot, (1967) 111 S.J. 213.
• “’Husband’ was a woman”. Liverpool Echo, 27 February 1967: 14.
• “’Husband’ turned out to be a woman!”. Reading Evening Post, 27 February 1967: 1.
• Stephen Cretney. “The Nullity of Marriage Act 1971”. The Modern Law Review, 35,1, 1972: 57n4.
• Christopher Hutton. The Tyranny of Ordinary Meaning: Corbett v Corbett and the Invention of Legal Sex. Palgrave MacMillan, 2019: 74, 83.

There seems to be a small confusion as to whether Justice Ormrod in this case is the same Justice Roger Ormrod (1911-1992) as in Corbett v Corbett. Cretney and Hutton write as if they are the same. EN.Wikipedia(Timeline_of_LGBT_history_in_the_United_Kingdom) says that the Justice was Benjamin Ormerod (1890-1974) – but is alone in this claim.

Hutton says p83: “Whereas in Talbot, Ormrod had in effect brushed aside the (non-)marriage, in Corbett he felt obliged to deploy the full range of medical and legal argumentation”.  Surely a pertinent difference was that April Ashley (Mrs Corbett) had had confirmation surgery but there is no suggestion that John Talbot had also.

The Inner Temple Library booklet Transgender Law: A Short History, Online, quotes Justice Ormrod as saying re Talbot v Talbot: “Marriage is a relationship which depends on sex, not gender”.  However this sentence is actually taken from his Judgment (p19) on Corbett v Corbett.

Several sites (example, example, example, example) repeat the Ormrod sentence assigned to Talbot v Talbot and actually add that he thereby ruled that transsexuals were not permitted to marry under British law. However as John Talbot apparently had not had surgery this was not so. Nor was Talbot v Talbot cited as a precedent in later cases.

Glen or Glenda but not Virginia Prince

First a reminder of previous postings.

Virginia Prince

Part 1 – Youth and First marriage
Bibliography
Part II – Second Marriage
Part III – Femmiphilic activist
Part IV – Full-time Living
Part V – Transgenderist dowager
Jargon terms and general comments

Edward D Wood

Edward D. Wood, Jr (1924 - 1978) film-maker, pornographer

I commented in the latter: "Ed was active in heterosexual transvestite groups in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s. So was Virginia Prince. But neither appears in the books about the other."

I also wrote in Virginia Prince Part 1, re the initial contacting of Los Angeles transvestites in 1952-3: "However there were cross-dressers who were not invited such as fellow Angeleno and heterosexual Edward D. Wood, Angeleno Sascha Brastoff, José Sarria who was starting to organize fellow drag queens in San Francisco, and the majority of female impersonators, such as those who performed at Finocchio's in San Francisco. Nor was the invitation extended to female cross-dressers."

Prince was heavy on pseudo-respectability, and Wood was not 'respectable'.

Glen or Glenda not inspired by Prince

In 1953 the divorced Arnold Lowman (Prince's male persona) was in the newspapers attempting to modify his visiting rights and reduce his alimony, and was again named in the press as a transvestite and his father threatened to disown him. This was at the same time that Christine Jorgensen was in the news after returning from Denmark, and it was announced that Bela Lugosi’s next film would be called Transvestite. The director, Edward D Wood, announced that the film, which was eventually called Glen or Glenda, would have no relation to the transvestite divorce story then in the Los Angeles newspapers.

Aftermath

In 2011 Michael Franklin at the University of Minnesota in his PhD thesis, Spectacles in Transit: Reading Cinematic Productions of Biopower and Transgender Embodiment, includes a footnote 35 on p28 which refers to Rudolph Grey, Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Ed D. Wood, Jr. 1995 p39-40, and makes a dramatic comment: "Incidentally, this oral history biography contains a photograph of Ed Wood standing in a group of people on the set of Glen or Glenda with Virginia Prince, whom the photo caption describes as an 'unnamed transvestite.' ”

That is it. No reasoning is given for this identification.  No reference to a mention in Transvestia magazine, to a comment by someone who would know or anything else.

Laura Horak, "Tracing the History of Trans and Gender Variant Filmmakers", Transmedia, Spectator, 37,2,Fall 2017,  has a endnote 47.  "See photo of Prince on the set of Glen or Glenda in Grey, Nightmare of Ecstasy, 39-40", and uncritically cites Franklin.

Here is the photograph in  Nightmare of Ecstasy on p41 (not 39-40).   Ed Wood is second from the right standing, and the 'unnamed transvestite' at the right.

Here is 'unnamed' next to a photograph of Virginia Prince a few years earlier (1948).

Hypothesis not confirmed!!!