Life as a Trans Man in Turn-of-the-Century America

In 1902, 33-year-old Harry Gorman was hospitalized in Buffalo, New York, after he suffered a serious fall that broke one of his legs. While on the surface this event sounds inconsequential, it prompted a firestorm of media coverage. Indeed, on his hospital bed, it was revealed that Gorman lacked the anatomy generally associated with maleness—despite having lived as a man for more than 20 years. This revelation drew attention from newspapers across the nation, from Tucson to Boston and Fort Worth to New York City.

Gorman explained that his decision to dress as a man had been made in his youth, motivated by both a desire for freedom and a frustration with the limited opportunities available to women. He told the New York World, “I wanted to be a man, and since I reached my 13th birthday[,] I have worn male attire. I landed in New York 20 years ago. I have worked in all the large cities of the United States and Canada as a man. People think they are so smart. Why, I fooled them all, and if it had not been for my accident when I fell and broke a leg[,] I would still be a man.” Gorman went on to explain that, as a man, he took advantage of all the opportunities with which men were provided, including getting married to a woman. He also voted, telling the New York World, “I’m a good democrat . . . and have voted the straight ticket for the last seven years.”

Perhaps most sensational of all, however, was Gorman’s revelation that he was not the only trans man to call Buffalo home. In fact, he claimed that he knew at least “ten women right here in Buffalo who wear men’s clothing and who hold men’s positions.” He went on to explain, “Did we have an organization? No, hardly an organization, but we run across each other once in a while[,] and over our beer and cigars in saloons[,] we have had many a good hearty laughs at the expense of the men.” In this way Gorman suggested to readers that though his “true sex” may have been discovered, there were many more individuals like him who still roamed the streets, undetected. Indeed, the headline of Indiana’s Logansport Journal worried, “Ten Women Masquerade as Men.” Furthermore, and perhaps more unsettling to some readers—especially cisgender men— those undetected trans men were frequently in saloons, one of the most hallowed male institutions in the early 20th century, mocking and having “many a good hearty laughs at the expense of the men.”

Just as the brief story of Gorman initially may appear inconsequential, the revelation of Gorman’s “true sex” might, at first glance, similarly seem unimportant to the history of the United States at the turn of the 20th century. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Newspapers across the country discussed Gorman’s case in articles under flashy headlines such as “She Was a Man for 20 Years.” The blitz of newspaper coverage about Harry Gorman illustrates that Americans at the beginning of that century were fascinated with gender—particularly its permeability, its elasticity, and the ways it intersected with race, class, and sexuality. Even though the disclosure of Gorman’s “true sex” was described by some newspapers as “startling,” it is likely that this was not the first story of a trans man that newspaper readers had encountered. In fact, newspapers around the country regularly reported stories of individuals who had been assigned female at birth but chose to live as male; at least 65 cases appeared in U.S. newspapers between the 1870s and 1930s.

For example, in 1883, Frank Dubois gained national attention when his “true sex” was discovered. Anatomically female (and the birth parent of two children), Dubois abandoned his family in Belvidere, Illinois, to start a new life in the small town of Waupun, Wisconsin. Once in Waupun, Dubois made a name for himself as a hardworking man, and he quickly settled down and married a young woman named Gertrude Fuller.

Dubois fit so well within the small community that the townspeople only discovered his “true sex” when his former husband and their two children arrived in town searching for their departed wife and mother, attracting widespread attention in the nation’s newspapers. And while Harry Gorman portrayed Buffalo’s trans men in an antagonistic relationship with cisgender men, mocking them from the corners of saloons, it appears that many trans men sought to live normative lives—just as Frank Dubois had done in Waupun—supporting wives, earning respect as hard workers, and flying under the radar as much as possible.

The stories of Harry Gorman and Frank Dubois are illuminating in that they provide a far more complicated vision of the American past than the one historians have previously accepted. Gorman’s comments about there being ten other trans men in Buffalo are suggestive not only in what they reveal about that city but also in what they imply about everywhere else in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. His comments intimate that if Buffalo—a city not commonly thought of as the bedrock of the queer community—had at least 11 trans men in 1902, than surely so did Tulsa, Saint Paul, Jackson, and Reno. In short, his remarks reveal that our nation’s past is far queerer than is generally discussed and that queer history penetrates beyond the coasts and into the nation’s interior.

Gorman’s depiction of the community of trans men is revealing. Rather than being part of a tight-knit community that shared an underground lifestyle, trans men existed out in the open, living and passing as normative men, and only on occasion encountered one another. While perhaps some urban enclaves did exist, Gorman’s comments anticipate a great deal of what this book reveals: that trans men at the turn of the 20th century were not always urban rebels who sought to overturn normative gender roles. On the contrary, they often sought to pass as conventional men, aligning themselves with the normative values of their communities. When mixed-raced Milwaukee resident Ralph Kerwineo’s “true sex” was revealed in 1914, the local papers were full of testimonies attesting to how conventional Kerwineo’s life as a man had been. His neighbor Joseph Traudt told the Evening Wisconsin, “In the neighborhood it was frequently remarked what a nice married couple [Kerwineo and his wife] were. After having seen the ‘husband’ help his ‘wife’ across a muddy street[,] my mother said to me: ‘How nice he is to his wife.’”

Like many of the other trans men at the time, Kerwineo, Gorman, and Dubois lived lives marked by movement. However, their trajectories challenge the dominant narratives about queer history. Although Gorman claimed that he had “worked in all the large cities of the United States and Canada as a man,” many of his contemporaries chose to move not from large city to large city but rather from small town to small town, often living in rural outposts like Manhattan, Montana, and Ettrick, Virginia. For his part, Kerwineo’s life as a man began once he had moved away from Chicago—a city with a burgeoning queer subculture—to the relatively sleepier city of Milwaukee. Frank Dubois also began his male life after a move; he had left his family in Belvidere, Illinois, to start over not in Chicago (the nearest large city) but in the tiny hamlet of Waupun, Wisconsin. Trans men seemingly chose these out-of-the-way places in order to make quite regular, maybe even ordinary, lives. They were, in a word, unexceptional.

The newspaper narratives produced around the moment of “discovery” when a trans man’s “true sex” was revealed to his community in the period between the 1870s and the 1930s provide a unique window into the ways individuals and communities made sense of national discourses about proper gender embodiment and the emergent medical literature on homosexuality. Indeed, this period witnessed the emergence of sexology, or the study of human sexuality, in the United States. A field of inquiry first established in Europe, sexology gained a foothold in the United States in the late 19th century with the publication of several important works, most notably Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis and Havelock Ellis’s 1895 “Sexual Inversion in Women.” Both of these works defined homosexuality as pathological and degenerative and argued that in women, samesex desire was most often signified by inversion, or the predilection toward masculinity and crossdressing.

Scholars for three decades have been attempting to understand the relationship between sexological theories on gender and sexuality and popular understandings of the same. While Michel Foucault has famously argued that sexologists created the “species” of the homosexual, other scholars have been more tepid in their analyses. George Chauncey warned in 1982 that “it would be wrong to assume . . . that doctors created and defined the identities of ‘inverts’ and ‘homosexuals’ at the turn of the century, that people uncritically internalized the new medical models, or even that homosexuality emerged as a fully defined category in the medical discourse itself in the 1870s.”

One challenge scholars have faced is a methodological one: How can we recover the ways everyday Americans embraced or rejected medicalized understandings of sexuality and gender? Lisa Duggan’s Sapphic Slashers, which focuses on Alice Mitchell’s 1892 murder of her female lover, Freda Ward, provides useful insight in this arena by tracking the emergence of “a recognizable American type—the mannish lesbian or invert, a prosperous white woman whose desires threatened the comfortable hegemony of the white home.” Duggan argues that the emergence of this recognizable “type” occurred in the 1890s through the development of the cultural narrative of the “lesbian love murder”—a form that developed in sexology, the sensational press, and literature. These accounts portrayed lesbians as masculine women who were violent, dangerous, and a threat to white domesticity. However, even Duggan acknowledged that her study was limited and analyzed only one of the many cultural narratives of lesbian identity that had been circulating at the turn of the 20th century.

A wider optic reveals that Americans, from small towns to big cities, often questioned proper “male” and “female” behavior and that the newspaper-reading public came face to face with stories of crossdressers, “female husbands,” and “sexual inverts” with surprising regularity. This discourse was not isolated to metropolitan areas but instead could be found within the most rural frontier outpost. For example, in the summer of 1901, newspapers nationwide breathlessly reported on the Parkersburg, West Virginia, trial of Ellis Glenn. The objective of the trial was to determine Glenn’s “true” identity; an individual named Ellis Glenn had committed several crimes in West Virginia and Illinois, but upon arrest it was discovered that he was anatomically female. When asked to clarify this turn of events, the suspect explained that he was not actually Ellis Glenn but rather Glenn’s twin sister—and that the pair had switched places just prior to the arrest.

According to the story, a deep sisterly devotion motivated her to take the fall for her persecuted brother. Thus, a lengthy trial took place centered wholly on determining Glenn’s true identity as either (as the Chicago Tribune described it) “a latter[-]day martyr or . . . an adventuress so exceptional as to lack a class.” In other words, the prosecution was charged with proving that the Glenn who had committed the forgeries—the Glenn previously known as a man—had actually been a woman posing as a man.

For several weeks in July 1901, Ellis Glenn’s trial was featured in newspapers across the country, from Anaconda, Montana, to Montgomery, Alabama. Glenn’s story, and those of many others, reveals a past during which gender norms were consistently challenged, questioned, and, most significant, in process. Whereas historians have traditionally credited only certain decades as being moments of “gender trouble” (the 1920s being the most common example), the truth is that gender is always in crisis and that crossdressing figures have often been the site on which debate about gender norms has taken place.

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Adapted from True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Used with permission of NYU Press. Copyright © 2017 by Emily Skidmore.