On the occasion of the 7th London Trans Pride march I would like to present a guide to a millennium of gender-bending in the British Isles.
Trans roots are deep! They go way back into ancient times – as demonstrated by the gender fluidity of certain deities and the existence of genderqueer priesthoods who had been serving the Goddess for millennia – but for now I am keeping to the anglo-saxon culture…
In 1192 Chronicler Richard of Devizes wrote a description of London which listed ‘effeminate sodomites’ and ‘ganymedes’ (young men looking for sex) among its deviant characters. Was there already a queer subculture in London nearly a thousand years ago? Very much so!
The royal court was notoriously ‘gay’ during the reign of William II 1087-1100. The young men in his court wore fashionable pointed shoes and grew their hair long, and he was said to promote these men on the basis of their performance in bed, rather than their talent. The year after his death a Church Council in London proposed that it be declared by every priest in every pulpit that sodomy is the worst possible sin. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm, prevented this measure going forward, writing in a letter:“This sin has hitherto been so public that hardly anyone is embarrassed by it, and many have therefore fallen into it because they were unaware of its seriousness”.
The court was rather gay again under King Richard I (1189-99), who was rarely present in England due to his military activities, and who was known to have a close relationship with Philip II of France – an observer noted that they ate from the same plate and their beds were not separated. Edward II (1307-1327) is probably the most famously gay monarch of the Middle Ages, known for his relationship with his favourite Piers Gaveston, but later in the 14th century Richard II (1377-1400) also got in trouble with the nobles because of his gay manners and behaviours.
These royal courts didn’t just fill up with effeminates and favourites out of nowhere! It was during Richard’s reign that John/Eleanor Rykener was arrested in 1395, while dressed in women’s clothing, for sodomy His interrogation documents reveal that he/she had lived and worked as Eleanor in London and Oxford, doing needlecraft and barwork as well as selling sex. Rykener told of sex with men and women, with monks and nuns, but there is no record of a prosecution taking place.
American historian Judith Bennett considers that the frequency with which hermaphroditism is mentioned in medieval texts indicates an acceptance of the condition. “Hermaphrodite” is a truly ancient term, historically used to describe someone possessing both male and female anatomical characteristics from birth. This was even recognised in law – 13th century jurist Henry de Bracton discussed it in his Laws and Customs of England, saying: “Mankind may also be classified in another way: male, female, or hermaphrodite.” English historian Ruth Evans, in a book on Chaucer’s era, described London as “a place of unrivalled sexual and economic opportunities” and Judith Bennett suggested “Rykener’s repeated forays into the space between ‘male’ and ‘female’ might have been as unremarkable in the streets of fourteenth-century London as they would be in Soho today.”
Bennett, J. M. (2003). “England: Women and Gender”. In Rigby, S. H. (ed), A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages.
Evans, R. (2006). “Production of Space in Chaucer’s London”. In Butterfield, A. (ed), Chaucer and the City
The first English translation of the Bible, by Lollard heretic John Wycliffe in the late 14th century, has a different translation of the word in Leviticus that became ‘sodomites’ in the King James Bible of the 17th. The original word, Qedesha, which referred to male priests serving the Goddess Asherah, who were considered holy and part of an ancient tradition, was translated by Wycliffe as ‘womanish-men’, pointing to his awareness of such people in society. During the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I the royal court once again filled with gay vibrations, but the focus was more on men with male lovers rather than gender-bending, though that was certainly going on too:
In the Middle Ages and Early Modern times when women were forbidden from becoming actors, men taking female roles in mystery plays and stage performances was the norm. Historian Katie Normington in a book on Gender and Medieval Drama demonstrates that even in the era before the rise of the Renaissance theatre, Christian mystery plays provided an occasion “where gender identity could be tested or disrupted.” Young male actors playing female parts became celebrities in Shakespeare’s early 17th century England.
The most well-known manifestation of men-behaving-as-women in early modern times are the Mollies of 18th century London. Journalist Ned Ward’s The Secret History of London Clubs, published in 1709, described The Mollies’ Club as a place where a “curious band of fellows,” who called each other sister and used feminine pronouns, met and held parties. The mollies, he said, “rather fancy themselves women, imitated all the little vanities that custom has reconcil’d to the female sex, affecting to speak, walk, tattle, curtsy, cry, scold, and mimick all manner of effeminacy”. Police raids on Molly houses began in the 1720s, most famously on Mother Clap’s business in Holborn, resulting in prosecutions and executions but the culture survived underground into the 19th century. In 1810 a police raid led to twenty-seven men being arrested at the White Swan in Vere Street, Covent Garden
A description of the White Swan by Robert Holloway can be found in ‘The Phoenix of Sodom or the Vere Street Coterie’, published 1813, which relates the story of the conviction of James Cook for permitting his pub to become a queer rendezvous. He writes of the mollies: “It seems the greater part of these reptiles assume feigned names, though not very appropriate to their calling in life: for instance, Kitty Cambric is a Coal Merchant; Miss Selina, a Runner at a Police office; Black-eyed Leonora, a Drummer; Pretty Harriet, a Butcher; Lady Godina, a Waiter; the Duchess of Gloucester, a gentleman’s servant; Duchess of Devonshire, a Blacksmith; and Miss Sweet Lips, a Country Grocer.” The author seeks to correct the “generally received opinion, and a very natural one, that the prevalence of this passion has for its object effeminate delicate beings only” with examples of masculine types also found in the molly mix. “Fanny Murry, Lucy Cooper, and Kitty Fisher, are now personified by an athletic Bargeman, an Herculean Coal-heaver, and a deaf tyre Smith: the latter of these monsters has two sons, both very handsome young men, whom he boasts are full as depraved as himself.” He also points out, “these odious practices are not confined to one, two, or three houses, either public or private; for there are many about town: one in the vicinity of the Strand; one in Blackman-street in the Borough; one near the Obelisk, St. George’s-fields; one in the neighbourhood of Bishopsgate-street, kept by a fellow known by the title of the Countess of Camomile…”
The late 18th century was also the time of the Macaroni, a high class queer, a fop or dandy with an extravagant hairstyle and affected mannerisms. More literally, a ‘macaroni’ was a small tricorn hat placed on top of a high wig. (Hence, when Yankee Doodle ‘stuck a feather in his cap, and called it macaroni’, it was the entire cap, not just the feather, that constituted a ‘macaroni’, and which symbolized him as a Dandy and a bit of a buffoon.)
The earliest reference to the Macaroni Club occurs in Horace Walpole’s letter of 6 February 1764 to the Earl of Hertford. He mentions: ‘The Maccaroni Club (which is composed of all the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses).’ Satires about macaronis appear in the 1770s and 80s, with lines such as,
But Macaronies are a sex
Which do philosophers perplex;
Tho’ all the priests of Venus’s rites
Agree they are Hermaphrodites. (‘The Vauxhall Affray’, a 1770s print)
In the 1850s, a publication called ‘The Yokel’s preceptor: or, More sprees in London! Being a … show-up of all the rigs and doings of the flash cribs in this great metropolis’ reveals the fear was now directed at ‘marjories’ and ‘pouffs’:
“The increase of these monsters in the shape of men, commonly designated Margeries, Pooffs, etc., of late years, in the great metropolis, renders it necessary for the safety of the public, that they should be made known. The punishment generally awarded to such miscreants is not half severe enough, and till the law is more frequently carried to the fullest extent against them, there can be no hopes of crushing the bestiality…Will the reader credit it, but such is nevertheless the fact, that these monsters actually walk the streets the same as the whores, looking out for a chance!
“Yes, the Quadrant, Fleet-street, Holborn,the Strand, etc., are actualy thronged with them! Nay, it is not long since, in the neighbourhood of Charing Cross, they posted bills in the window of several respectable public houses cautioning the public to “Beware of Sods!”
“They generally congregate around the picture shops, and are to be known by their effeminate air, their fashionable dress, etc. When they see what they imagine to be a chance, they place their fingers in a peculiar manner underneath the tails of their coats, and wag them about – their method of giving the office. A great many of them flock the saloons and boxes of the theatres, coffee-houses, etc.”
Late 19th century brings along Fanny and Stella, two young upper-middle-class gay men socialising around the city in female attire. Thomas Ernest Boulton and Frederick William Park were indiscreet in their public appearances and came under police surveillance and were eventually arrested and prosecuted for conspiracy to commit sodomy, but the case did not succeed and the judge was critical of the way the police treated the suspects on their arrest. Without doubt there was a blossoming queer subculture in London through the 19th and early 20th centuries, but the effect of the Labouchere Amendment in 1885, criminalising all sexual acts between men, and the Oscar Wilde (and other) trials was to keep that culture subdued, unlike in Germany where queer people enjoyed a greater degree of visibility and freedom until the 1930s. In Britain, Edward Carpenter was one of the few voices advocating for acceptance of same sex loving and gender-variant people – he called them ‘intermediate types’ – in his writings.
But from 1918 we also have The Autobiography of an Androgyne by Ralph Werther aka Earl Lind,, female name Jennie June, detailing his life in New York City. The book charts his emerging self-understanding as a member of the “third sex” and documents his explorations of queer underworlds in turn-of-the-century New York. Starting from a youthful realization of his difference from other boys, he concludes with a decision to undergo castration. Along the way, he recounts intimate stories of adolescent sexual encounters with adult men and women, escapades as a reckless “fairie” who trolled Brooklyn and the Bowery in search of working-class Irish and Italian immigrants, and an immersion into the subculture of male “inverts.”
The Autobiography includes a historical overview and an important perspective on the term hermaphrodite:
“An “ hermaphrodite,” according to the original Greek signification of this term, was not an individual — in the modern sense — having both the male and the female organs of reproduction in whole or in part, or a curious fusion of the two, but only those of the male. In other respects, however, the bodily form was that of a female. The hermaphrodite was thus, according to the Greeks a female with male genitals. Because modern usage has diverted the term “ hermaphrodite ” to a different signification, the word “ androgyne” has come into use to denote an individual with male genitals, but whose physical structure otherwise, whose psychical constitution, and vita sexualis approach the female type.
“Androgynes have of course existed in all ages of history and among all races. In Greek and Latin authors there are many references to them…About the middle of the 16th century, the celebrated theologian Beza… wrote : “ What shall I say of these vile and stinking androgynes, that is to say, these men-women, with their curled locks, their crisped and frizzled hair?” As is evident in this passage, these men-women, because misunderstood, have been held in great abomination both in the middle ages and in modern times, but the prejudice against them was not so extreme in antiquity, and a cultured citizen having this nature did not then lose caste on this account.
“The “ fairie ” is a youthful androgyne or other passive invert (for they are perhaps not all members of the extreme class of androgynes) whom natural predestination or other circumstances led to adopt the profession of the fille de joie. The term “fairie” is widely used in the United States by those who are in touch with the underworld. It probably originated on sailing vessels of olden times when voyages often lasted for months. While the crew was either actually or prospectively suffering acutely from the absence of the female of the species, one of their number would unexpectedly betray an inclination to supply her place. Looked upon as a fairy gift or godsend, such individual would be referred to as “ the fairy.
“Contrary to the ordinary view, there exists, in the human race, no sharp dividing line between the sexes, just as there exists none between the vegetable and the animal kingdoms. The two sexes gradually merge into each other. Between the complete physical and psychical man and the similarly complete woman, there are innumerable stages of transitional individuals. As there are organisms which the novice would be puzzled to classify as animal or vegetable, so there are human beings who have a just claim to be classed with the sex other than that with which they are commonly classed. Some examples of these transitional individuals are the psychical hermaphrodite, the pseudo-hermaphrodite, the mujerado of the Mexican Indians, the man-woman of East India, and the virago or amazon, as well as the fairie, already mentioned.
“Besides the fact of the existence of the decidedly hermaphroditic or androgynous types named, there exists a continuous scale of mental sexuality along which all human beings might be arranged, the poles of which are thorough masculinity and thorough femininity, respectively.
“…the participation of the transitional individuals in the characters of the two sexes varies in all degrees. There may be simply a union of the perfect body of one sex with the susceptibility to such sexual charms as ordinarily attract the other sex alone, or with the mental traits of the other sex. Or the individual may possess the male genitals, but be beardless, or else possess mammary glands, broad pelvis, and sacral dimples ; or possessing the female genitals, have a rudimentary moustache, or else meagrely developed breasts, narrow pelvis, etc…
“As to my own feminine characteristics, I have been told by intimate associates from boyhood down to my middle forties — when this book goes to press — that I markedly resemble a female physically, besides having instinctive gestures, poses, and habits that are characteristically feminine. My schoolmates said that I would make a good-looking girl and that kissing me was “ as good as kissing a girl…”
This book is really worth a read and is available for free online: https://archive.org/details/autobiographyofa00lind
In the 20th century the emergence of hormone treatment and surgery made it possible for people who wish to change their gender presentation to do so more thoroughly than ever before. The explosion in transgender and non-binary identities is human consciousness playing catch up : we’ve evolved a high tech civilization but our understanding of our spiritual nature is limited by the materialist, scientific paradigm that has deluded the world into believing that gender is a fixed and binary thing, emerging as it did in Christian cultures that had been trying to suppress gender-fluidity, and same sex love as an inversion of gender norms, for centuries.
Wisdom traditions of the world, for thousands of years, have recognised a third gender and taught that the soul reaches wisdom through marriage of the inner genders, through achieving a state of androgyny. Edward Carpenter was pointing out over a century ago that ‘intermediate types’ had often performed spiritual roles in tribal settings. In Native American cultures, also African, Asian and Oceanic cultures, ‘third-gender’ people were seen as part of the great diversity of life, born with special gifts and purpose. This understanding has been long lost in white cultures, but people ‘born that way’ have always been born, always been around, and will continue to be.
rainbow messenger 