Insisting that a woman who lived her whole life as a woman except for dressing up as a man back when that was the only way to do a traditionally masculine thing (like join the army) must have actually been a trans man isn’t true, and doesn’t help trans men. It just denies the lives of women in a sexist society who had ambitions other than cooking hubby’s dinner.

pervocracy:

The issue of historical maybe-trans people is complicated, probably impossible to fully understand from a modern perspective, and I don’t think it serves them well to declare that they definitely were or definitely weren’t trans.

I’m a little bit prickly about this because one of the things people do to delegitimize trans people is imply that being trans was invented by Christine Jorgensen circa 1951.  (Or by Tumblr kids circa 2007, if they really have no historical context.)  It’s important for trans people to maintain a deeper sense of history.

And that history includes the fact that current trans nomenclature and taxonomy is mostly very recent, and that people who would call themselves trans now may have called themselves “transvestites”, “female/male impersonators,” etc. in the past.  Being trans does not come packaged with a 2017 understanding of gender theory, and when a historical person was thinking “I should dress and live as a man… so I can join the army!” it’s very hard to tell which half of that sentence was louder in their mind.

All of which is not to push the position that they’re all trans and there’s no such thing as a cis person who cross-dresses for other reasons.  Just… they’re both real scenarios, and in most cases we’re in no position to know who was which.

This.

Like, there are cases when we can say someone was pretty much certainly transgender (like if we know he sought medical advice about masculinizing his body and took great care to be seen as a cisgender man even by his friends or even after his death) and there are cases when we can say someone was pretty much certainly not transgender (like if we know she wrote letters to her friend complaining that she had to hide who she was to join the army and wishing she could join the army as a women).

But in many cases we can’t ever know for sure how someone felt and it doesn’t matter. We can treasure individuals who challenged the notion of what kind of lives one can lead without bickering over whether they ‘belong’ to transgender history or to women’s history. We can share our excitement about an awesome historic person without limiting what their life can mean to us.