Trans History: Colonial Era

CONTENT WARNINGS: ⚔️ Colonization, 🚻 Misgendering, 🙅 Lack of Consent

Native American History & Colonial Attitudes

Europeans were far from the first people in the Americas. Some scholars believe up to 18 million Native Americans populated North America alone before Columbus made contact with the Bahamas, known to the Indigenous people as Guanahani. Colonialism marks the exploitation and settlement of Europeans in North America from 1607 to 1765 through the overseas powers of Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Russia, and Sweden.

Native American cultures have a rich history in oral storytelling – which is why little of their history was formally written down. History was taught to new generations through spoken narratives that also brought lessons about cultural beliefs. However, when the unthinkable happened and Europeans warred with Native Americans over land, slaves, and wealth, histories were lost to time. Instead, we are left today with fragments retold by surviving tribes alongside the revised history told by European colonists.

Fragmented history informs us that, by our modern understanding, Native Americans were definitely queer. The term used today to refer to third-gender individuals in Native communities is two-spirit, a pan-Indian word that applies to any tribes when they lack the language in their Indigenous tongue to describe the experience. Researching the two-spirit identity is the best way to start learning about pre-colonial LGBTQIA+ history.

“It is estimated that 155 tribes across Turtle Island [North America] embraced a multi-gendered culture. The expanded conceptions of identity in these societies seem to have overshadowed sexuality. While homosexual relationships were common, they were not inherent.” – PRISM, “Homosexuality in the Pre-Colonial Americas.” June 11th, 2024.

The rest of our current knowledge of Native American history and attitudes towards LGBTQIA+ ideas comes from the European colonizers who wrote down what they saw, heard, and interpreted. These writers called Native Americans who transgressed traditional gender roles “berdache” and “passing women” offended when they witnessed both men and women live outside of their small-minded norms on gender. These terms are outdated and considered deeply offensive – they were used negatively against Native Americans as Europeans forcibly converted them to Christianity. Still, these accounts affirm the existence of transness even when it is written out of history – from the Navajo nádleehi to the Zapotec muxe, transgender people have always persisted.

*Photo of Hastiin Klah of the Diné or Navajo, who lived in the 1800s as a nádleehi person.*

*Vogue México 2019 cover featuring Estrella Vazque, a self-identified muxe.*

More interestingly, European accounts condemning two-spirit Native Americans tell us more about Europeans during the colonial period. Beyond these condemnations, there is no evidence of transness in early America. Fixated on their survival, most colonists made poor history writers – but most of these settlers were deeply religious, pushed into sailing across the ocean in pursuit of religious freedom separate from the dominating Church of England and Catholic Church. The repulsion documented most by British and Spanish colonizers affirms that they knew of transness – settlers were morally outraged by the deviants that claimed the Americas home since they were informed of the immorality of transness and other LGBTQIA+ identities by religion overseas. It was during this same period that molly houses flourished in Britain – taverns, public houses, and coffeehouses where queer and gender-nonconforming people met to socialize and meet possible sexual partners. LGBTQIA+ relationships were deemed illegal as a capital offense from 1533 onwards from the Buggery Act passed by King Henry VIII, which is why British molly houses were the frequent targets of raids and blackmail during the 1720s like queer bars were in 1960s America. European colonizers knew of transness, and they learned to keep accounts of gender-diverse behavior as sparse as possible when writing down history.

“We know and have been informed without room for doubt that all [the Indigenous people] practice the abominable sin of sodomy.” – Hernando Cortés in his first letter back to Spain in 1519, translated by Bayard J. Morris.

“Young men must cease to go about in female garments, to make a livelihood by such cursed lewdness.” – Bernal Díaz del Castillo on the demands made by Cortés to the Native Cempoala, translated by John Gibson Lockhart.

“The sodomite is an effeminate – a defilement, a corruption, filth; a taster of filth, revolting, perverse, full of affliction. He merits laughter, ridicule, mockery; he is detestable, nauseating. Disgusting, he makes one acutely sick. Womanish, playing the part of a woman, he merits being committed to the flames, burned, consumed by fire. He burns; he is consumed by fire. He talks like a woman, he takes the part of a woman.” – Friar Bernardino de Sahagún on the local Nahua he was trying to convert to Christianity in the Florentine Codex, translated by Arthur Anderson and Charles Dibble. Sahagún wrote the passage stating the above is what the Nahua did to queer people, although later revisits to the texts Sahagún based his information on show he purposely mistranslated the Nahau as shown by Kimball’s translation of the same passage in 1993.

TRANS HISTORY KEY POINT
History is censored. History is written by a minority who control the narrative. If the writers disagree with reality, they can literally rewrite history – after a certain point in time when no one is around to remember reality, their revised history will be left to tell the story. Remember this point when considering that primarily white cisgender heterosexual men of relative wealth were the only ones writing for much of history – the lack of transgender history in their books does not disprove transness, but rather affirms that they purposely censored reality.

The European settlers of North America were deeply religious – the contract agreed upon by the men on the Mayflower stated their journey was “for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith.” As a result, colonial America was founded largely on the Puritan faith and their idea of the heterosexual cisgender nuclear family. Colonists had strong beliefs on gender and what they assumed to be natural and moral order of the world – early Puritans used gender norms as the basis for the governments created in North American colonies, pushing men to leadership positions and women towards submissive roles to “please [their] husbands and make him happy.”

*The current most common two-spirit flag*s

Colonizers were distraught by Native Americans’ fluid gender roles and society that included third genders. Further evidence that Europeans were knowledgeable on gender diversity comes from the Bible – while European Christianity punished queerness, third-gender roles have been documented as part of the innate human experience. Isaiah 56:3-5, Matthew 19:10-12, and Acts 8:26-40 relate to eunuchs, individuals who were traditionally assigned male at birth but were accepted in society similar to two-spirit folks since they held roles within their pre-Christian religions. The power that eunuchs held during Biblical times directly relates to the verses written in the Bible to condemn them since those holding the pen wanted to demean their power and claim it for themselves.

In La relación de Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, explorer and colonizer Cabeza de Vaca wrote of his overland journey from Florida to Mexico from 1528 to 1536 – this became the first published narrative of European exploration within the modern United States. He describes several encounters with what he referred to as hombres amarionados impotente, or impotent effeminate men – Native individuals who were biologically male but lived and worked as women. These encounters are further affirmed by the writings of Jacques Marquette, the first European who visited the Upper Mississippi when he observed “men who do everything women do” while traveling in modern Illinois between 1673 and 1677. Marquette wrote, “I know not through what superstition some Illinois, as well as some Nadouessi, while still young, assume the garb of women, and retain it throughout their lives. There is some mystery in this, For they never marry and glory in demeaning themselves to do everything that the women do. They go to war, however, but can use only clubs, and not bows and arrows, which are the weapons proper to men. They are present at all the juggleries, and at the solemn dances in honor of the Calumet; at these they sing, but must not dance. They are summoned to the Councils, and nothing can be decided without their advice. Finally, through their profession of leading an Extraordinary life, they pass for Manitous,-That is to say, for Spirits,-or persons of Consequence.” At the same time, Spanish missions in the Southwest were committing a “gendercide” of all Indigenous people who failed to conform to Eurocentric gender norms (United States National Park Service, 2016) as written by Deborah A. Miranda in “Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California.”

Jacques Le Moyne gives us another perspective on the Native American culture – he was an artist who arrived in Fort Caroline in 1564 to help René Laudonnière colonize Florida. Although Laudonnière failed, Le Moyne succeeded in his own way by depicting Native American life and culture through his drawings. One of these drawings was “Enjoyments of Hermaphrodites,” where Le Moyne wrote a travel memoir of his journey – although the engraving was nearly lost to history. It remains one of the earliest known depictions of Native Americans, yet it presents gender-diverse and intersex individuals in a more positive light that Indigenous communities would have seen them at the time.

While these are some of the notable examples, they are far from the only ones – Hernando de Alarcon wrote of “three or foure [Native] men in womens apparell” while surveying California in 1540. Renne Goulaine de Laudonniere wrote four accounts from 1562 to 1567 of intersex or two-spirit Native Americans he came across in Florida, like Le Moyne. Nearly all written retellings of the transness that colonists encountered are condemnation: Juan de Torquemada (1609), Francisco Coreal (1666), Pierre Liette (1702), Joseph Francois Lafitau (1711), Pierre Francois Xavier de Charlevoix (1721), Pierre Francois Xavier de Charlevoix (1721), Georg Heinrich Loskiel (1750), and Jean-Bernard Bossu (1751) all write similar versions of history over the great depths of sin that Indigenous Americans are addicted to as they engage in gender-diverse behaviors incompatible with European norms.

The Case of Thomas(sine) Hall

Civil documents dating to the 1620s tell the story of Thomas(sine) Hall, an indentured servant who caused a scandal in Jamestown due to their purposefully genderfluid expression. The Spanish wrote significantly more than British colonizers, but Hall’s story was committed to history when they were accused of sexual misconduct – their biological sex became a focal point when rumors circulated of them having an affair with Virginia’s former governor’s maid, which was punishable as a criminal offense if Hall was biologically male. In response to being asked why they wore feminine clothing, Hall replied, “I goe in womans apparel to get a bitt for my Catt.” (Brown 1995)

Once the accusation was made, residents claimed that Hall’s gender expression and tendency to have sex with people of all genders were causing disorder in the community. However, the community lacked an official local court or church to determine Hall’s biological sex, so the authority to determine Hall’s sex assigned at birth was left to married women of the village who came to Hall’s home at night multiple times while they slept to observe Hall’s genitalia.

These married women determined that Hall lacked a “readable set of female genitalia,” giving the responsibility instead to Thomas(sine) Hall’s plantation master, John Atkins. After inspecting Hall while they slept, Atkins agreed with the women that Hall was biologically male since they had “a small piece of flesh protruding from [Hall’s] body” (Brown). Atkins directed Captain Nathanial Bass to punish Hall – but Bass confronted Hall directly and asked bluntly if they were a man or a woman.

Hall responded that they were both but admitted they had a non-functional 2.5-centimeter penis. In today’s terms, this means Thomas(sine) Hall was intersex and would have likely identified with terms like nonbinary and genderfluid. In colonial terms, Hall was legally protected since male incompetence was classified as being the female sex and not being a “proper man,” so they could not be prosecuted for allegedly having sex with the governor’s maid.

However, the villagers of Jamestown were not pleased with this decision. They argued Hall should be treated like similar individuals of “dual nature” sex in Europe, where Hall would be forced to choose to be a man or a woman as their gender regardless of biological sex. Hall’s case was sent to the higher Quarter Court, presided over by Governor John Pott on April 8th, 1629. While previous individuals classified as “dual nature” or intersex were forced to adopt either a permanent male or female identity, Hall was a new and truly unique case for colonial America. As the court ruled, “hee is a man and a woeman” – Hall had dressed as both genders throughout their entire life, and the Quarter Court could not determine if Hall was “more male” or “more female.” Instead, the court ruled that Hall was to dress in clothing that symbolized this confusion: “Goe clothes in man’s apparell, only his head to bee attired in a coyfe and crosscloth with an apron before him.” In the end, Hall proved that intersex people existed both in Europe and North America – while Hall was the first to be given the ruling to dress androgynously, they were certainly not the first individuals of “dual nature sex” to be seen in court. After the ruling in 1629, nothing further is known of Hall’s life.

Crossdressing Colonists

Hall was far from the only American settler that caused panic due to gender-diverse behavior. Later, in 1652, Joseph Davis was charged by the court of New Hampshire for “putting on women’s apparel and going from house to house in the night time with a female.” Massachusetts summoned Dorothie Hoyt to the Salem Court “for putting on man’s apparel,” but fled from the county before being caught and didn’t appear in court. These cases pepper the civil documents of colonial America – Mary Henly’s case in 1692 directly contributed to the anti-crossdressing law Massachusetts passed in 1696. It’s also worth noting that Massachusetts, and specifically Massachusetts Bay Colony, were established because the colonists firmly believed they made a “covenant with God to build an ideal Christian community,” – which is why they were among the first to criminalize sodomy by whipping, banishment, and execution as a sex crime in 1631.

“The cultural inclusion of individuals who assumed different genders in some Native American societies stands in contrast to the general lack of recognition within the white-dominated American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries. To the extent that individuals who cross-dressed or who lived as a gender different from the one assigned to them at birth were acknowledged in the colonies, it was largely to condemn their behavior as unnatural and sinful…

“Relatively few instances of gender nonconformity are documented in the colonial and postcolonial periods. A number of these cases that became known involved female-assigned individuals who lived as men and whose birth gender was discovered only when their bodies were examined following an injury or death. Fewer examples of male-assigned individuals who lived as women are recorded, perhaps because they had less ability to present effectively as female due to their facial hair and physiques.” – “Trans Bodies, Trans Selves” on transness in early America by Genny Beemyn in 2014.

In 1637, Massachusetts brought Anne Hutchinson to trial for hosting regular religious meetings in her home despite the protocol for such to be held in male-controlled churches. Her trial lasted until 1648, ending with Hutchinson being banned from her community. While her story fits strongly within feminist history, it’s also worth including with transgender history – there is no way to fully know how, in the modern day, Hutchinson would have identified with modern gender. At the very least, we know from court records that she defied the established gender norms that rooted her during the 1600s through her work preaching to locals in her community regardless of gendered requirements. Today, Hutchinson’s act of defiance to lead in faith would still cause trouble in conservative religious circles that hold strict beliefs on gender roles – making her act to purposely lead meetings in her colonial period revolutionary.

Massachusetts is the stage for many traces of LGBTQIA+ history in early America. The religious objection that manifested during the Great Awakening obstructed history elsewhere in the colonies, which will be covered in a later article. In comparison, Massachusetts wasn’t particularly remarkable to hold so much of transgender history during this time – it was overwhelmingly Puritan and actively persecuted non-Puritans from their colonies, such as the dissenting Quakers who were whipped, executed, and driven out. Despite this, Thomas Morton called Massachusetts home when he founded the colony of Merrymount that would become Quincy. It may have been the 1620s, but Merrymount celebrated both interracial marriage and same-sex desire – and fostered near atheist ideas in published anti-Puritan work Morton wrote like New English Canaan, which became the first banned book in the present-day United States.

Considered the first school textbook of colonial America, the New England Primer (1687) was published with approved religious-based prayers and instruction for students, stating that “God created man, male and female, after his own image, in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, with domination over the creatures.” Relatedly, sodomy laws were written and enforced throughout the American colonies and militia by 1714, which would remain in place entirely unchallenged until 1925.

While not as common as in later American history, individuals assigned female at birth joined male trades under masculine identities – the following newspaper clipping details one such case in a Massachusetts port in 1756. The clipping also mentions Hannah Snell, an English soldier who joined the British army as a man under their brother-in-law’s identity of James Gray in 1747. Snell’s military career took off after joining the Royal Marines as a cabin boy and came out willingly later before petitioning the Duke of Cumberland for their military pension. Not only was Snell honorably discharged, but the Duke agreed to officially recognize their military service and grant their pension.

The time difference between Snell and the story in Massachusetts further implies that Snell’s adventures as “The Female Soldier” inspired many individuals assigned female at birth to pursue similar paths under male identities. While not all of these individuals would have identified as transgender today, such as Snell themselves, since they openly identified as a woman outside of their military career, some of them certainly would have – and this tradition dates thousands of years, as evidenced by would-be transgender men who purposely lived their entire lives under male identities as monks during the Medieval period.

In 1764, we have evidence of another American tradition that would become common later on through the story of Deborah Lewis. An article was published in Newport Mercury in Rhode Island, detailing a warrant issued by the governor due to Lewis being assigned female at birth but began openly dressing as a man in public and aiming to marry a local widowed woman. Compared to later cases, Lewis caused a stir due to remaining in the community they grew up in – other stories often circle transgender men who traveled far from home under new identities.

Language Matters

Overseas, William King authored the mock-heroic poem The Toast in 1732 – which he originally wrote to demean his opponents suing him over a Galway estate. By 1736, The Toast was being published throughout Great Britain in four books. Even though it’s unlikely The Toast ever made it to the colonies, it currently holds the title as the first published work to contain the word “lesbian” since King used the work to allude to the story’s heroine Mira being the Countess of Newburgh and a woman attracted to other women. Culture is flexible, and the relationship between Great Britain and the American colonies meant settlers surely knew of the word if it was common enough for King to use it in a published work, even if it wouldn’t be published in American literature until later.

Knowledge Check

Thomas(sine) Hall was a genderfluid colonist who caused local scandal in _____.
a. Virginia
b. Pennsylvania
c. Massachusetts
d. Maryland
–
The modern term used to describe third-gender Native American identities is _____.
–
‘The Female Soldier’ centers on the adventures of Hannah Snell, who was a…
a. lesbian spy working against the French government.
b. crossdressing sailor for the Royal Marines.
c. intersex merchant under the East India Company.
d. literate female journalist reporting on important military battles.
–
True or False: The Quarter Court ruled Thomas(sine) Hall was truly both man and woman but required Hall to dress androgynously.
–
Who wrote the following quote: “Womanish, playing the part of a woman, he merits being committed to the flames, burned, consumed by fire. He burns; he is consumed by fire. He talks like a woman, he takes the part of a woman.”
a. Bernal Díaz del Castillo
b. Hernando Cortés
c. Jacques Marquette
d. None of the Above

ANSWER KEY

1. A / 2. TWO-SPIRIT / 3. B / 4. TRUE / 5. D

Trans Solidarity Project