From Atlas Obscura
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camwynThe Forgotten Trans History of the Wild West
It was a frontier in more ways than one.
by Sabrina Imbler June 21, 2019
From 1900 to 1922, Harry Allen was one of the most notorious men in the Pacific Northwest. The West was still wide and wild then, a place where people went to find their fortunes, escape the law, or start a new life. Allen did all three. Starting in the 1890s, he became known as a rabble-rouser, in and out of jail for theft, vagrancy, bootlegging, or worse. Whatever the crime, Allen always seemed to be a suspect because he refused to wear women’s clothes, and instead dressed as a cowboy, kept his hair trim, and spoke in a baritone. Allen, who was assigned female at birth, was actually far from the only trans* man who took refuge on the frontier.
Despite a seeming absence from the historical record, people who did not conform to traditional gender norms were a part of daily life in the Old West, according to Peter Boag, a historian at Washington State University and the author of Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past. While researching a book about the gay history of Portland, Boag stumbled upon hundreds and hundreds of stories concerning people who dressed against their assigned gender, he says. He was shocked at the size of this population, which he’d never before encountered in his time as a queer historian of the American West. Trans people have always existed all over the world. So how had they escaped notice in the annals of the Old West?...
... From 1880 to 1930, Seattle’s population ballooned from around 3,500 to more than 350,000, a testament to the opportunities the town presented. According to Boag, local papers offer some of the most thorough, extensive records of people who were likely trans on the frontier. Naturally these publications lacked the language or understanding of gender we have today, and the papers paid their bills with sensation, scandal, and shock. So they got a lot of milage out of encounters between “civilized” society and gender non-conforming individuals.
Allen’s identity was notable for how public it was. On the other hand, many trans people lived out their lives without drawing the attention of local papers. In Boag’s research, a trans person’s assigned sex was most likely to be discovered upon death or serious illness. When 80-year-old lumberjack Sammy Williams died in Montana in 1908, the undertaker discovered his assigned sex, dumbfounding the community that had only ever known him as a man....
*As the term “transgender” did not emerge until the late 20th century, it was not a category these people would have used themselves, writes Emily Skidmore in True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. But Skidmore sees trans, rather than transgender, as a helpful umbrella term to acknowledge and encompass the gender variance expressed by historical individuals, and so we use the same terminology in this article.
It was a frontier in more ways than one.
by Sabrina Imbler June 21, 2019
From 1900 to 1922, Harry Allen was one of the most notorious men in the Pacific Northwest. The West was still wide and wild then, a place where people went to find their fortunes, escape the law, or start a new life. Allen did all three. Starting in the 1890s, he became known as a rabble-rouser, in and out of jail for theft, vagrancy, bootlegging, or worse. Whatever the crime, Allen always seemed to be a suspect because he refused to wear women’s clothes, and instead dressed as a cowboy, kept his hair trim, and spoke in a baritone. Allen, who was assigned female at birth, was actually far from the only trans* man who took refuge on the frontier.
Despite a seeming absence from the historical record, people who did not conform to traditional gender norms were a part of daily life in the Old West, according to Peter Boag, a historian at Washington State University and the author of Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past. While researching a book about the gay history of Portland, Boag stumbled upon hundreds and hundreds of stories concerning people who dressed against their assigned gender, he says. He was shocked at the size of this population, which he’d never before encountered in his time as a queer historian of the American West. Trans people have always existed all over the world. So how had they escaped notice in the annals of the Old West?...
... From 1880 to 1930, Seattle’s population ballooned from around 3,500 to more than 350,000, a testament to the opportunities the town presented. According to Boag, local papers offer some of the most thorough, extensive records of people who were likely trans on the frontier. Naturally these publications lacked the language or understanding of gender we have today, and the papers paid their bills with sensation, scandal, and shock. So they got a lot of milage out of encounters between “civilized” society and gender non-conforming individuals.
Allen’s identity was notable for how public it was. On the other hand, many trans people lived out their lives without drawing the attention of local papers. In Boag’s research, a trans person’s assigned sex was most likely to be discovered upon death or serious illness. When 80-year-old lumberjack Sammy Williams died in Montana in 1908, the undertaker discovered his assigned sex, dumbfounding the community that had only ever known him as a man....
*As the term “transgender” did not emerge until the late 20th century, it was not a category these people would have used themselves, writes Emily Skidmore in True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. But Skidmore sees trans, rather than transgender, as a helpful umbrella term to acknowledge and encompass the gender variance expressed by historical individuals, and so we use the same terminology in this article.
