This post is sponsored by Laura “Laura47” Boylan, with our great thanks.
In 1629, a servant in colonial Virginia came to the local court’s notice for allegedly fornicating with a fellow servant. Although the initial charge was fornication, things rapidly got more complicated as the authorities realized they had no idea whether Thomas – or Thomasine – Hall was male or female, and witness accounts conflicted. They called for an examination by several women, who agreed that Hall was female; later, a group of men examining Hall came to the opposite conclusion.
By now, fornication was the least of the town’s worries. They demanded an answer from Hall, who refused, replying that “he was bothe only hee had not the use of the man’s parte.” Eventually, Hall explained that they had been raised female, but their body and gender had both been ambiguous from youth. They had dressed as a man to join the Navy, a woman to live with their aunt and learn sewing, and a man as a servant in Virginia…sometimes.
Despite a maddening lack of full information – a fire during the Civil War destroyed many of the case details – this account is near and dear to my heart, since my gender and sex are very similar to Hall’s. Much like colonial Virginian society, twenty-first century Americans have the tendency to continually ask: but which are you, really? There is a continual assumption that genderfluid is merely a phase of coming out as trans, or the same maddening nonsense that bisexuals get all the time – you’re doing this to get attention, to be contrary, to rock the boat for its own sake, etc.
What’s most frustrating about this status really is that premise: if one is genderfluid, it must be by some sort of choice. Our understanding of gender is that bodies come in male or female, and minds tend to be more fluid. That, on some level, nonbinary identity is a sort of “special snowflake” designation, and if you factor sex into the equation, you must pick from male/female and cis/trans. Our society has such a problem with even considering that bodies are not, and never have been, binary — which makes coming out as intersex or genderfluid a complicated, and often humiliating, conversation. It is, however, a necessary one, because the fact is that putting physical sex into the equation of gender leaves us with more sexual ambiguity, not less.
“But what are you really?” “No, seriously, I was born neither.” It sounds like a political statement. Our intersexed bodies are inherently politicized from before our births. On particularly angry days, this is a comfort. I didn’t have to choose to rebel against the gender binary, against society — that choice was made before I was conscious of it. Other days, as any LGBTQ person knows, your identity is not meant to be a statement, but you cannot escape it.
Perhaps as frustrating is the way in which this assumption invalidates fluidity in and of itself. Hall, and genderfluid persons today, face the constant pressure to “choose.” The assumption, insofar as I can make sense of it, is that we are all merely gathering our courage to declare a transition. Sex and gender are, as anyone who has experienced dysphoria can attest, are not homologous, but are certainly linked. To say that gender is non-binary, we must admit as a society that sex is also non-binary. This is not a case of some species of whip-tail lizards or banana slugs, where we point out the alien possibilities to middle-class liberal moderates and beg them to take us seriously — this is a case of finally, finally imposing the understanding on society that sex really actually is a spectrum, and always has been, and always will be. If you want this species to be binary, be honest and declare yourself for reassignment surgery at birth, and admit that it is your system that is unnatural, not our existence.
This issue is tied directly to sex education, or more accurately the utter lack of sex education. To come out as genderfluid invites speculation, eye-rolls, and a frustrating conversation about what is sex, what is gender, what is nature. To come out as intersex is a different conversation, one that automatically crosses the boundaries of polite conversation. The taboo around asking, discussing, or speculating about someone else’s genitals is a comfort that trans and intersex people are both denied outright. Yet to try and explain this to people, unsolicited, is seen, as the height of ill manners. It’s a catch-22. Those who ask are the last people in the world you want to explain to, and there is no way to bring such a subject up casually. Yet we are still romantic, sexual beings – at least, in the same ratio as the rest of the population. Sooner or later it will come up.
Throughout Hall’s trial and complications, the authorities continually asked them to choose one or the other. When Hall refused, they were confused and angry. Why did they keep switching back and forth? Hall’s response is probably my favorite line in any historical case ever:
“I goe in weomans aparell to gett a bitt for my Catt.”
The argument for reassignment surgery on intersex infants usually has something to do with normalcy, mumble-mumble choice, mumble-mumble bullying, mumble-mumble sex life — and hanging over it all, this established, unstated fear that an intersex person will never be accepted in society, never have a healthy sexuality, always be a freak. Dear readers, I submit to you Hall’s response, and assert that, if T. Hall could get a bitt for their catt in veering back and forth between breeches and frocks, we modern freaks are perfectly capable of finding lovers in both, or either, or neither and naught.
In a decision that is both terribly familiar and uncannily progressive, the authorities imposed a unique decision on Hall’s body and identity: they were to go about in men’s clothing, but with a woman’s bonnet and outer frock. The main transgression here was not the non-binary, but the fluidity. Despite the clear understanding of a handful of Virginian colonists — that, in fact, Hall was neither male nor female, nor simply faking it — modern American society seems to have a serious problem with the conversation, and maintains a strange and unrealistic premise that there are two factors that compose our identity: sex, and gender. It does not ever seem to occur to most people that, in fact, there is a vast difference between physical sex and sex assigned at birth.
Hall was raised female, as was I. It was only during puberty that the difference became clear between the line-drawing diagrams in the health books and the very complicated nature of my own body, and not until years later that I realized what this meant. I often wonder how Hall figured out their sex, and how the subject came up with their first partner. Hall left home fairly young, and so there was never the deeply unenviable, yet probably inevitable, conversation with family members who distinctly remember, for example, changing diapers. To explain all of this invites questions; almost — as in Hall’s case — invites inspection. Maybe it just didn’t matter – maybe when Thomasine decided to be Thomas for a while, and joined the navy, and learned the phrase “To get a bitt for my catt,” they realized pretty quick that none of the men nor women cared one way or another, and neither did they.
In further researching this case, I have found a number of wonderful, agency-giving, progressive scholarly articles that close Hall’s account with a head-shake and a sigh, lamenting the fact that Hall, after the General Court in Jamestown handed down a decision that their identity would henceforth be “both and neither,” must have lived a miserable, lonely life until either death or leaving the community upon finishing their indenture. This, to me, seems similar to the sigh and head-shake that leads to reconstructive surgery for intersex infants. How can genderfluid people live normal, healthy lives when everyone knows we’re freaks? Easy. We do. And I think that starts with pointing out the obvious: that gender is not binary, and neither is sex.
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image via
Thank you for writing this. The Thomas/Thomasine story is fascinating, and overall, I learned from this piece. Thanks.
Oh man this was so interesting! I wish we talked more about how things like this, how people with non-typical genders and sexualities lived and existed historically. It drives me up the wall when people act like it’s something new or “trendy” (ugh).
But thank you for writing this article and taking a step towards reclaiming some of that history!
Yes! I don’t know why there isn’t more discussion about this! It’s not like LGTBQI+ people just popped up one day in the 18th century like a Cabbage Patch kid- humanity has always had a diversity of sexuality and gender, and treating it like some new phenomena is inaccurate.
Do you know Alice Dreger’s work, particularly her first book, “Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex?” She explores a number of cases similar to this in nineteenth-century Europe and the medical establishment’s responses.
(Side note, which I know I don’t need to make for Toasties but will just for good practice in clarity: The use of “hermaphrodites” in the title is historically accurate and contextually significant. Dreger is widely known [an understatement] for her advocacy on behalf of DSD individuals and the ISNA, and the use of the term does not reflect either her stance or current medical vocabulary.)
There’s an article that does similar analysis on a few American cases, though it is much less focused on the lives of the individuals and more an analysis of how surgery came to be first encouraged and then standard for individuals with DSD. Short version is, in the Unitef States, the emphasis on You Must Have Genitals That Are Exclusively And Identifiable Male Or Female overlaps with the increasing medicalization of homosexuality. Because god forbid you do anything with your weird, ambiguous genitalia, amirite? (Sigh.)
Thank you for this. As a nonbinary person constantly a) trying to figure out What Is The Deal with their gender and b) not really caring very much one way or the other, it’s so important to be reminded that people have not given a fuck about society’s binary gender expectations throughout history.
i am fond of the term ‘gender-meh’, personally
A friend of mine uses the term “gender fabulous” to describe themselves.
i love that. i don’t put anywhere near enough energy into my own gender expression to co-opt it, but i love that it exists.
Really, there’s only so many ways you can describe opera gloves, a sparkly purple dress, combat boots, and a goatee.
Whatever T. Hall identified as, it sure sounds like zie was living hir best life in the process.
Just hip-deep in consensual genital touching.
Sorry if I am being really dense – but not fully understanding the bitt for my catt line. Could someone please explain!?
Yeah, I had to resort to wikipedia for this, too:
When queried about wearing women’s clothes, Hall replied: “I goe in womans apparel to get a bitt for my Catt”,[2] apparently meaning that it allowed him to have sexual relations with men.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas(ine)_Hall
Thanks, I thought to look that up myself as well right after posting (which I should have done first!)
Bite is a slang term for penis in French, and catt is the second half of the word pussycat so I guess euphemistically and argotically it all makes sense?
It’s interesting that euphemisms for genitalia are consistent though the centuries, for sure.
it’s shakespeare’s fault. probably.
even for euphemisms predating him. (timey-wimey yanno)
Run through all the synonyms for “cat” and you’ll figure it out.
This confused me too! I think this is the interpretation the article-writer was using: https://books.google.com/books?id=_Li6BwAAQBAJ&am…
Although I’m sitting here cracking myself up thinking that Thomas(ine) just liked to wear a dress when they went to buy cat food, because buying cat food is obviously dress-wearing time.
That is DEFINITELY what I thought at first lol, especially because I was just watching a very interesting video on why Asian women are often hypersexualized while Asian men are often thought of as less masculine. One of the reasons for this is that Asian men emigrating to the United States in the 19th/18th centuries were in many cases not allowed to operate machinery or work in factories and were thereby relegated to more stereotypically “feminine” professions like working at laundries or cooking at restaurants.
Anyway, this is all a long-winded way of saying that going to buy cat food fit right into this narrative of “feminine” pursuits so I was very confused!
I read through about 3/4 of the essay believing that T. Hall had just decided that a dress and bonnet was the proper attire for acquiring cat food.
It didn’t occur to me otherwise until olive_cat explained it above. I guess I was thinking Hall was going to the butcher to get some chicken bones (or something) and wore a dress so zie could flirt for a better deal?
It’s peen.
Oh yeah, I really should have put in an explanation. My mentor pointed that out this morning. “A bit for my cat” was Navy slang for sex, and as Hall had served there (I believe both saying and Hall’s experience were French), it was probably an in-joke. Some people do argue for the cat food thing, but I think with the fornication charge and Navy experience, it doesn’t hold much water. And it especially doesn’t when it reads like desexualization of a healthy intersex person.
Thank you for writing this! I wrote a paper last year about infant genital “normalization” surgery as a human rights violation. I feel like so many people don’t know that sex is not binary! I hadn’t really thought about it until I read Middlesex, which is both wonderful and problematic, imo.
What did you find problematic about Middlesex? I didn’t like the book at all. I don’t remember specifically why anymore, but I read it after I’d done a fair bit of work on non-binary anatomies, and even though it reflected well what a lot of John Money’s patients have said about their interactions with him, I think I thought it was too…anvilicous. Like, yeah, I get it; there’s really no need to have the kid’s family move to Middlesex Drive to make clear that zie is existing between categories. There were some other allusions that I think were supposed to be all dramatic and mystical and I just thought they were too obvious, though I can’t remember offhand and I gave my copy away long ago.
Haha, I had to look up anvilicous! Yeah, sometimes I’m a bit too much of a fan of the heavy-handed symbolism…
I read *about* the book after I’d read it, and the author had said some stuff about how he’d read the story of Herculine Barbin and wasn’t satisfied with it so he wanted to write a book about how he thought it might feel to go through that experience… purposely not interviewing anyone who had. That rubbed me the wrong way, like his big artistic metaphor idea was more important than people’s actual experiences. The other thing was the implication that 5-alpha-reductase deficiency is the direct result of incest. Inbreeding makes the genetic mutation more likely in population, but incest doesn’t *cause* intersex children. The book acknowledges this, of course, but there seems to be a strong incest–>intersex thing going on.
All that being said, I couldn’t un-like the book, and it raised a lot of the ethical issues, especially around Dr. Money’s practice (ugh), so… ambivalent.
I recommend this essay for anyone curious by most trans and intersex people hate Middlesex (including me): http://thewalrus.ca/rise-of-the-gender-novel/
Loved this, love them, love you. Thanks for sharing this!
Yes, I also assumed that maybe a man going out to get cat food would be weird, unmanly perhaps, hence the women’s appearal? I’m actually slightly disappointed by the other interpretation.
I thought it was dry humor, like the joke about the gay agenda being cleaning the toilets, buying milk and peanut butter, etc. “What on earth did you wear a dress for?” — “For getting cat food.”
I think that an important aspect of this community’s acceptance of Thomasine/Thomas’s non-binary gender was the early modern European understanding of gender as a progression between male and female and not a strict binary. The idea of two distinct biological sexes didn’t emerge until the late 18th century.
Scholars have uncovered a number of cases in which individuals were alleged to have switched sexes. There are other evidence that this change thought to be possible, including a serious (but amusing) suggestion that it would be useful if either Mary Queen of Scots or Queen Elizabeth could become a man and the two could marry.
Also, "ma chatte" has been slang for "pussy" forever (or a good long length of time), and it's highly likely it filtered into the Navy slang.
brb, checking out MQoS and QEI slash
YAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSSSS haven’t even readit and scrolled down to say THOMAS(INE) HALL IS MY EARLY MODERN FAVE
Okay I commented with my joyous flail a bit earlier but I think I was accidentally not signed in, so let me just say now ETERNAL LOVE FOR THOMAS(INE) HALL
My fave aspect of this story is that all these other people are going around blithely assuming that the clothes one wears automatically correspond 1:1 to a real and obvious fact about you, and our hero was just like… actually… I can put on any clothes I want. And because gender roles were not routinely flouted, they got away with it for so long! If there had been more androgynous looking people hanging around, people would have looked more closely at them and tried to puzzle them out before they got arrested for fornicating. And that allowed Thomas(ine) to not be read as androgynous in their daily life pre-trial but to be either/or as it suited them. Being freer because you’re invisible.
Also, that what really bothered people was Thomas(ine) switching back and forth. Like Thomas(ine) was not just transgressing a boundary by dressing in the wrong clothes, but was just off on a different axis acting like there was no such thing as clothing wrongness. And that’s the real issue. Like it’s perfectly fine hanging around here being a weirdo but you have to be a legible weirdo. foucauldian af.
ILU Thomas(ine)