Female Husbands - a trans history

[ShootsFruitsAndLeaves]

Guardian review www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/10/female-husbands-by-jen-manion-review-a-trans-history

Ah, I see that according to newspaper reports cited in the review, these people wore trousers, chewed tobacco, and swore! So they must have been men! I require no further evidence. Why even bother analysing the circumstances these women lived in, where in up to 1887 a third of states denied married women the right to their own earnings. That is clearly irrelevant.

Clearly they secretly longed for testosterone shots and a double mastectomy.

I read Selina Todd's review of this
thecritic.co.uk/author/selina-todd/

I've just become aware of this book, and was going to start a thread, but I see this one exists.

The description on Amazon begins as:

Long before people identified as transgender or lesbian, there were female husbands and the women who loved them. Female husbands - people assigned female who transed gender, lived as men, and married women - were true queer pioneers.

Is the definition of 'transgender' now purely 'someone who lives according the social stereotypes reserved for the opposite sex'?

According to genderism, a transgender man is a man, not a woman.

That means a woman who wants to live in the male cultural role, for whatever reason - perhaps to escape poverty and oppression, perhaps because she's attracted to women, perhaps because she's a free spirit - is not actually a woman. How you act determines your gender. A woman can't challenge gender stereotypes and remain a woman.

Isn't that incredibly regressive and anti-feminist?

Erm, surely the women described here were lesbians??

I got up to the reviwer’s use of “birth-assigned gender” and gave up reading the article.

Reviewer

It looks like 'transgender' now means 'adopting the stereotypes associated with the opposite sex'.

I read a fascinating book a while back about a girl in Afghanistan who disguised herself as a boy so she could support her family by working. She carried on in that guise for years and enjoyed the status and freedom it gave her. She didn't actually believe she was male and she wouldn't have done it if her family weren't in such a desperate situation. But - a genderist writing up her story would have classed her as trans. Because she 'transed gender' as the Amazon write-up says. And a trans man is a man. So by stepping outside of gender stereotypes, she actually became male, according to genderism.

The best book I've read about a woman crossdresser was Neverhome by Laird Hunt:

www.littlebrown.com/titles/laird-hunt/neverhome/9780316370127/

Published in 2014, before the madness hit so it's about a woman who is aware she's a woman but for complicated reasons goes to (the American Civil) war presenting as a man. I'm very likely to have recommended this before.