So too, I think, with ourselves, we men who would rather be women, we women who would prefer to be men, we people of either sex who want to partake of what "belongs" to the other. We too have a past worth the knowing.
I'm a professional historian. That doesn't give me any exclusive right to talk about the past. Unlike Sheila Kirk, M.D., I have no license to practice, endowing me with privileges over my subject that others do not enjoy. Whaever used to be belongs to all of us who are its heirs. But I do want to venture some thoughts about the past of transgendered people, over a series of essays.
This first time around I want to consider one of the major figures in the transgendered past, Lord Cornbury. He was Royal Governor of colonial New York early in the eighteenth century. Supposedly he was the subject of a famous portrait (on display for decades at the New-York Historical Society) that shows him in female garb. Later he would succeed his father to the title of Earl of Clarendon in England.
Cornbury ranks with the Chevalier/e d'Eon and the Abbe de Choisy among the figures whom we turn to seeking our own past. There is a cross-dressing group in Canada named after him. Those of us who have seen the portrait have recognized ourselves in it. I've stared at it with fascination. I used to use it in class, joking (a little nervously) that Cornbury marked the start of a great New York tradition. But, alas, there is good reason to think that Cornbury is not the figure in the portrait, though I do think that it shows a man cross-dressed. Worse, it doesn't seem that the noble lord is a figure most of us would want to honor.
I'll explain why. I also want to suggest that in the early American past we can find a figure who sets out much better than Cornbury the problems that we transgendered people face, both within ourselves and in dealing with the world.
The point of any serious study in any discipline is to ask what does not fit, what tickles the imagination, what suggests that a different answer may be needed, for an old question, or that a fresh question needs to be asked.
Drawing on this, Patricia Bonomi of New York University began thinking about the Cornbury legend. She published her thoughts in the professional journal THE WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY, in January 1994. She doesn't absolutely destroy the Cornbury story, but she gives good reason to doubt that it is true.
I'm not going to try to go through Bonomi's argument. I will say that is seems pretty well-founded. She checked documentary sources, and she could not find any good evidence from Cornbury's own time that proved the Governor cross-dressed. She looked at evidence from London, where an active transgender community existed in Cornbury's time around Holborn. She finds nothing to link him to the people there. She finds nothing either in the Clarendon family's portrait collection. She points out differences between known likenesses of Cornbury and the figure in the painting. At her request, the portrait itself was taken down and put through rigorous scientific examination by the best art-history standards. It dates from Cornbury's time, but the evidence seems strong that it was not painted in the colonies. It is a technically sophisticated piece, and nobody with that level of skill was working in American then.
The point is not absolutely proven, but I don't think any longer that the portrait shows the noble lord. One of us? Yes. The figure in the portrait sits with her legs well apart. There is a hint of a beard shadow too. But there seems to be no reason other than tales that are decades from the fact to think that it is Queen Anne's noble cousin, Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, Her Majesty's governor in and over New York.
Maybe that's a good point. The real Cornbury seems to have been a colonists' nightmare, making the fullest use of his powers in order to enrich himself at their cost. When he was relieved as governor and lost his legal immunity from prosecution, he was clapped in jail, lest he escape before his debts were cleared. If Cornbury did cross-dress, more power to him for it. But ripping off the people he was sent to govern was quite another matter. It would be now, too. Whatever the truth about the cross-dressing, Cornbury was not alone at all among British officials who abused their powers in America. But he seems to have been among the worst.
Fortunately, early America offers us a much better model, whose cross-dressing cannot be doubted and who might have been a good candidate for SRS now. Now that I've learned about her, I can identify with her readily. The evidence about her is unimpeachable. I called Cornbury "he" consistently. But Thomas/ine Hall surely earned her entitlement to be called "she."
In Hall's case we find a genuine transgendered person, at least as far as I can see. Historian Kathleen Brown of the University of Pennsylvania has recovered her life as one small story in a quite splendid book called GOOD WIVES, NASTY WENCHES, AND ANXIOUS PATRIARCHS, that deals with gender and women's experience in colonial Virginia. Maybe Brown's terrific title will attract some readers to it. If so, be warned: Thomasine Hall is the only transgendered person who appears. But I still think the book is worth the read for anybody who thinks about gender, because it does tell us a lot about the subject in another time.
Hall was a very ordinary white person who went to Virginia as an indentured servant. She's not a historic figure in the Cornbury sense of taking part in public events or even in the--say--Christine Jorgensen sense of acquiring a large symbolic resonance but Brown found in Hall a really remarkable example of a publicly TG person who bravely crosses the line without any support network at all. In this sense she is a pioneer and a precursor
There is not an awful lot of evidence about Hall. What seems clear is that both in the seventeenth-century England that she left and in the Pocohontas-era Virginia to which she migrated, she crossed back and forth across the gender line. Here he is called Thomas; there she is Thomasine. In one place Thomas is in breeches; in another the costume is skirts. The gender confusion seems total, perhaps to Thomas/ine herself, and certainly to the people around her, in Virginia and England alike. There even came a point when a crowd of Virginia women set out to resolve the question by direct examination. It cannot have been easy for Thomasine.
Hall's Virginia was based on absolute certainty. A person was among the masters or the servants, the owners or the owned, the English or the natives, the men or the women. In Thomasine's own time there were hardly African people there, a few dozen at most. But the deepest and most wounding line of all was already being inscribed, the one that would separate white and black, free and slave, to the shame and the torment of American society ever since.
In her small, nearly silent way, Thomasine Hall speaks to another possibility, in which such lines may not have cut so deeply, or separated so entirely. Thomasine Hall did try hard to straddle the gender boundary, bringing about a personal liberation. We cannot know her thoughts. Quite possibly she just knew that she felt a mysterious compuision to dress as she did. Most of us have gun that way. Almoost certainly, she felt absolutely alone in her desire. But whatever she thought, what she did suggests that all such boundaries are open to negotiation rather than fixed. She claimed the freedom to negotiate and to blur what her world thought she was and had to be. That be may be the greatest freedom of all. We are still working to achieve it.
On balance, Lord Cornbury does not seem a very attractive person, whether or not he cross-dressed. But Thomasine Hall does, at least to my eye. So, perhaps, do those transgendered people on Holborn, daring in a much more difficult time than ours to do what all of us desire and what only some dare, even now.
I first heard of the "Cornbury" portrait when I was a graduate student. I knew by then that there were other people like me, but I had never met one. The fellow student who mentioned it laughed nervously, as if to say "this is wierd." My own graduate students discussed Hall this past autumn, when they and I read Brown's book together. "It can't have been easy to be like that then," said one, adding that "it can't be easy now either."
There is a world of difference between the two reactions, and it shows how far we have come during the quarter century that lies between. That twenty-five years is our own history, that we have lived ourselves, as we have found one another, learned that we do not have to be ashamed of ourselves, and begun claiming a public right to be ourselves.
We who cross the boundary of male/female do have a history, whichever way we make the journey and however long we stay on the other side. Our long-term past, to which we owe respect, is only beginning to be found. Patricia Bonomi may have debunked the Cornbury story, but if her account is correct she has done us a service. So has Kathleen Brown. We do not need false heroes or heroines. We do need more Thomasine Halls, if we can find them.
I'll be back with some more ideas about what we might find if we are willing to keep looking.