Learning History Is a Righteous Form of Resistance
Dr. Joshua Allen Gilbert listened to his patient describe their sexual encounters with women. Gilbert thought highly of this patient, whom he characterized as having a “high degree of intellectuality,” as well as numerous “positive attractions” with women. Gilbert’s patient was assigned female at birth but had been known to act more like a boy than a girl for as long as anyone could remember, wearing men’s clothes, acting assertively, and dating girls. Having graduated medical school at the top of their class, the patient was ready to undergo a transformation. In Gilbert’s words, “Hysterectomy was performed, her hair was cut, a complete male outfit was secured.”
Thus Dr. Alan L. Hart in 1917 became one of the first people in the United States to undergo gender affirming surgery in 1917. Hart’s surgery helped him become more of a man. This process was a private matter, between a doctor and his patient.
Albert Guelph and Miss Lewis of Syracuse, New York, married in the Episcopal Church after a brief courtship. The bride’s father went to the local authorities and reported that he suspected Guelph was not a man. Guelph was detained; Miss Lewis professed her love, despite both her father’s disapproval and the public controversy swirling around them. While Guelph was initially sentenced to 90 days in prison on questionable charges of vagrancy, his lawyer appealed, and the judge acknowledged the overreach: There was in fact no law prohibiting “a person to dress in the attire of the opposite sex.” This was in 1856, before cross-dressing was designated a specific offense in New York. Gender expression was a matter between a person and their lover.
After nearly dying from a fever that swept through their Rhode Island town in 1776, a devout Quaker had a radical religious experience, leading them to change their name and reject gender distinctions. Wearing both men’s and women’s clothing, they refused categorization as either male or female and announced their name as the “Publick Universal Friend.” Though expelled from their Quaker Meeting, they set out on horseback, spreading their teachings as a “resurrected spirit” whose genderlessness heightened their sense of in betweenness and otherworldliness. The Friend attracted followers and was the subject of popular debate. While outsiders and skeptics usually invoked the Friend’s legal birth name and assigned sex, members demonstrated their devotion and understanding by avoiding gendered language and only referring to them as “the Friend.” Gender identity was informed by a radical religious experience, between a person and their God.
The past is a messy place. Trump 2.0 wants to clean it up by banning anything critical of the United States, including references to racism, sexism, and oppression. The executive order for “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” critiques recent developments in historic scholarship, stating, “Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” It is an audacious attack on the most basic tenant of historical practice: revision. Revision challenges historians to ask bigger questions, to find more sources. Sometimes we find sources that evolve into whole new fields of inquiry about the human experience—such as the accounts cited above.
