In her new book, Jen Manion notes that there’s a tendency today to think transgender people are somehow brand new, or that gender was always stable until now. But in “Female Husbands: A Trans History,” Manion examines cases as far back as nearly 300 years in which people who were born biologically female presented themselves as men and married other women.
As she writes in a preface, “female husbands” was a term “that persistently circulated throughout Anglo-American culture for nearly 200 years to describe people who defied categorization…. Female husbands — people assigned female who transed gender, lived as men, and married women — were true queer pioneers.”
“Female Husbands” also offers a broader analysis of how social, economic and political developments influenced popular attitudes toward, and the treatment of, these unconventional couples from the 1740s to the 1920s. More widespread gender-nonconformity, and the emergence of women’s rights and queer subcultures, led to the end of the “female husband” moniker in the first half of the 20th century, Manion notes.
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