the values of their chosen communities rather than seeking consolation in the presence of other queer individuals. As Harry Gorman’s remarks suggest, even trans men who lived in urban areas did not always choose to live in those locations because of the existence of queer subcultures there. This book presents a critical evaluation of the meaning of “community” for trans men; in doing so, it offers an alternative perspective from the near-universal embrace of the framework of community within LGBT history.16
In addition, True Sex tracks the ways in which the narratives produced around trans men changed as their stories circulated from local newspapers and courtrooms to national newspapers and sexological literature. For example, Ralph Kerwineo’s story was narrated far differently on the pages of his hometown papers than it was in the pages of widely circulating metropolitan newspapers like the Washington Post or the New York World. Whereas Milwaukee’s Evening Wisconsin reported that Kerwineo “adopted the disguise for moral and financial reasons and led an exemplary life while posing as a man,” the New York World depicted him as a dangerous deviant whose marriage to a woman constituted a threat to national security.17 By highlighting the distinctions between local and national iterations of stories about trans men, True Sex explores the ways that local communities negotiated with national discourses in order to forge their own boundaries of social membership. Recognizing the operation of this dynamic is a key insight because this process is precisely what escapes studies that seek to elucidate purely local or purely national accounts of queer history.
Lastly, True Sex articulates the uncomfortable insight that trans men at the turn of the twentieth century were not always “queer” as scholars use the term today—that is, dissenting, nonnormative, and critical of heteronormativity. Upon the revelation of their “true sex,” trans men often articulated their acceptability through their adherence to the norms of U.S. male citizenship. This tactic should be understood as an early example of “homonormativity,” which Lisa Duggan has defined as “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them.”18 Although homonormativity is most often thought of as being a formation specific to neoliberalism, this book lays bare the deep roots of this current phenomenon.
Archives and Methods
By utilizing both the traditional methods of social and cultural historians and the latest advancements in digitization, True Sex brings together a breadth of sources that would have been nearly impossible to accumulate only ten years ago. The primary sources for this book are newspapers—sources that over the past decade have been digitized and made available to researchers at an astonishing rate. I made use of these recent innovations and utilized several online databases, including America’s Historical Newspapers, the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America, Readex’s Early American Newspapers, and the Google News Archive. These resources enabled me to quickly search thousands of newspapers—many of which had been published in small cities and towns. Largely by using keyword searches such as “masquerade” or “as a man,” I identified sixty-five individuals assigned female at birth who lived as men during the sixty-year period of this study—many of whom have never been discussed in previous scholarship. Additionally, these resources enabled me to track the circulation of narratives in a way never possible before; whereas previous scholars who have looked at newspaper articles about gender or sexual deviance have generally focused either on one city or on the sensational press,19 digital resources have enabled me to use a much wider optic, tracking the circulation of stories from the local to the national context.
Indeed, using the methods of cultural history, I carefully tracked the ways that stories of revelation morphed as they circulated and how representations of trans men changed as they moved from the local to the national context. I noted whose voices were present in the articles and paid attention to what the national accounts left out or added to the local iterations of the stories. For example, were the trans men able to explain themselves in their own words or did journalists (or police officers) speak for them? I then combed through sexological publications to compare medical narratives of gender deviance with the stories that were written for popular audiences. This process—tracking narratives from local newspapers to national ones and then into medical literature—allowed me to read the narratives against one another and to think deliberately about the ways gender and sexual norms were being produced at the local and national levels as well as within the medical community.
In addition to reviewing newspapers and sexological literature, I also searched through census data, city directories, and marriage/divorce records to illuminate the ways the historical subjects of this book performed their identity to various institutions and what role(s) they played in their communities. Whenever possible, I also sought out court records and trial transcripts. These documents proved to be important resources to help determine the veracity of the newspaper narratives, both local and national, that were produced about the queer bodies discussed in this book. Taken together, the sources composing the breadth of research in True Sex illustrate the tremendous potential that digital archives hold for transforming the ways that scholars of queer history imagine the past. This method of carefully tracking the circulation of narratives clearly demonstrates the uneven history of gender and sexuality in this period and shows that this history is far more complicated—and interesting—than was previously thought.
Use of Terminology
This work is heavily indebted to, and in many ways is made possible by, the field of transgender studies. Transgender studies scholars such as Susan Stryker and David Valentine have shown how bodies are changeable and how the meanings attached to bodies are not the inherent result of the bodies themselves.20 Transgender theory has provided a method of inquiry that is evident throughout this book and that has profoundly shaped the way I approach the past and the individuals discussed in the subsequent pages. As Scott Larson explains, “Engaging in historical work from a transgender perspective opens up new modes of analyzing gender as broadly unstable and mutable, particularly by taking seriously the possibility that gender gets crossed, changed, destabilized, and remade in ways that are not restricted to two genders.”21 In carrying forward the insights of transgender studies, I have made conscientious choices regarding the names and pronouns used to refer to the subjects of this book.
I believe that these individuals should be considered within the rubric of “transgender history” as they provide clear examples of the ways gender has been made, remade, and transgressed in the past.22 This book provides clear evidence of the diverse range of gender expressions present at the turn of the twentieth century and explores how individuals and communities negotiated the porous boundaries of the gender binary. I refer to the historical subjects of this book with male pronouns because each of the subjects herein chose to live as a man for many years prior to his appearance within the public record, and many continued to live as men even after their queer embodiment resulted in arrest, incarceration, or other hardship. Additionally, I have chosen to prioritize the names chosen by the historical subjects discussed herein rather than the names assigned to them at birth as a way of honoring their self-identification.23
Furthermore, I refer to my historical subjects as “trans men” because they chose to live their lives as male even though they had been assigned female at birth. Thus, trans here suggests the ways in which the subjects of this book transitioned from the gender assigned to them at birth to the one with which they identified. I refer to them as “men” because they all expressed the sentiment that they were men despite their anatomy.24 Additionally, I chose to use the prefix or term “trans” rather than “transgender” since the latter as a category did not emerge until the late twentieth century and as such was not an identity category available to the subjects of this book. Also, I am wary that the use of today’s terminology would render less visible the historical specificities of the lives of the subjects discussed in this work. Of course, the term “trans” was similarly not available to the subjects of this book, but I have chosen to use it instead of “transgender” in hopes of conveying the open-ended nature of gender being made and remade.
In addition to the term “trans men,” throughout this book I also use the terms “true sex” and “queer embodiment.” I use “true sex” to refer to the sex an individual was assigned at birth. I place this term in quotes throughout the text to trouble the assumed connection between the sex assigned at birth and gender