In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Emily Skidmore
  • Don Romesburg
True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. By Emily Skidmore. New York: New York University Press, 2017. Pp. 253. $27.00 (cloth).

In a trim and tight first book, Texas Tech University history assistant professor Emily Skidmore analyzes the experiences of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century trans men in the United States. Skidmore’s success is built upon a compelling narrative that seamlessly weaves together a solid engagement with the field’s historiography and a decidedly twenty-first-century archive: small-town newspapers that have only been made digitally accessible over the last fifteen years. Her principal argument is that in order to understand these men she had to shift away from big cities and focus on gender-diverse subjects who sought normative lives rather than queer identities, communities, or subcultures. Skidmore’s findings have substantial implications for how trans and queer historical approaches might differ, particularly in relation to the early twentieth century.

True Sex moves thematically rather than strictly chronologically. Skidmore’s first chapter details how emergent discourses of sexology in the 1870s and 1880s produced newspaper coverage describing the trans man, variously, as both the last “female husband” and, using a more modern moniker, the lesbian. Previous scholars have marked this moment as a cultural pivot from the tendency to frame same-sex relations through the concept of romantic friendships toward a developing heterosexual/homosexual binary.1 Skidmore urges us to see more continuity across the era. Local newspapers tended to report sexological explanations as just one possible way to evaluate men “discovered” to be trans. “The opinions of neighbors, co-workers, and wives mattered much more on the local level when it came to determining the reaction to trans men” (42), Skidmore explains. Once these stories circulated nationally, however, sexological discourses on lesbianism and inversion gained greater currency, especially from the 1890s on.

In the second chapter, Skidmore carries forward the theme of how small-town familiarity facilitated viable trans lives for those who most closely conformed to normative expectations of masculinity. After Booneville, Mississippi, resident Willie Ray revealed his female birth assignment on the stand in a 1903 trial, for example, national press coverage highlighted that Ray had to wear skirts after the trial, perhaps to give readers a sense of a restored moral order. In actuality, he continued to live out his life in the same community while dressing in male attire. As Skidmore suggests, the “optic of [LGBT] community” (66) through which much queer history narrates its subjects as searching for people “like them” may better serve lesbians and [End Page 164] gays than bisexuals and trans individuals. Indeed, Ray’s search for belonging and resemblance kept him aligned with local masculine codes and norms rather than compelling his move to a big city to find a queer subculture.

Chapters 3 and 4 delve deeper into forces of normativity that situated some trans men as more able to inhabit local masculine codes and relations than others. Chapter 3 describes how whiteness enabled the media to frame some trans men’s lives as individual and meritorious (if curious) feats of passing and to further mark such men as valuable, productive citizens worthy of readers’ recognition. Those less able to perform either normative masculinity or whiteness were far more likely to be viewed through frames of social and sexual deviance in this era of expanding Jim Crow, restrictions on immigration, and the development of the field of eugenics. In this, Skidmore’s observations align with those of Peter Boag’s Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past.2 Chapter 4 extends this analysis through a lens of empire to look at local and national newspaper deployments of the trope of civilization and the frame of “foreignness” to narrate different social evaluations of trans men’s worthiness.

The final chapter comes full circle to describe how discourses of marriage, so central to sympathies for late nineteenth-century “female husbands,” turned on some trans men in the early twentieth century. National newspapers sometimes used the “discovery” of...

pdf