Overview

Winner, 2018 U.S. History PROSE Award The incredible stories of how trans men assimilated into mainstream communities in the late 1800s In 1883, Frank Dubois gained national attention for his life in Waupun, Wisconsin. There he was known as a hard-working man, married to a young woman named Gertrude Fuller. What drew national attention to his seemingly unremarkable life was that he was revealed to be anatomically female. Dubois fit so well within the small community that the townspeople only discovered his “true sex” when his former husband and their two children arrived in the town searching in desperation for their departed wife and mother. At the turn of the twentieth century, trans men were not necessarily urban rebels seeking to overturn stifling gender roles. In fact, they often sought to pass as conventional men, choosing to live in small towns where they led ordinary lives, aligning themselves with the expectations of their communities. They were, in a word, unexceptional. In True Sex, Emily Skidmore uncovers the stories of eighteen trans men who lived in the United States between 1876 and 1936. Despite their “unexceptional” quality, their lives are surprising and moving, challenging much of what we think we know about queer history. By tracing the narratives surrounding the moments of “discovery” in these communities – from reports in local newspapers to medical journals and beyond – this book challenges the assumption that the full story of modern American sexuality is told by cosmopolitan radicals. Rather, True Sex reveals complex narratives concerning rural geography and community, persecution and tolerance, and how these factors intersect with the history of race, identity and sexuality in America.

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9781479870639

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Reviews

The best sort of history - surprising and delightful. Emily Skidmore's True Sex reveals ordinary American communities at the turn of the twentieth century to have been much queerer than commonly imagined. By reconstructing the lives of trans men whose stories appeared in newspapers between 1870 and 1930, Skidmore makes a major contribution to our knowledge of queer history.-Rachel Hope Cleves,University of Victoria Tracking revelations of true sex in the decades around the turn of the twentieth-century U.S., Emily Skidmore recovers a history full of surprises: one in which people assigned female at birth lived ordinary lives as men, often in small towns and rural outposts. Newspaper revelations about trans men, Skidmore proposes, invited debate about queer embodiment and the porous boundaries of the gender binary. True Sex contains provocations and insights for queer history, for trans history, and for American history.-Regina Kunzel,author of Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality True Sex is a truly phenomenal book. Expansive in scope and implication, Emily Skidmore's meticulously researched study of gender non-conformity in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century United States is all the more impressive for its dogged instance that local entanglements often mattered more than expert opinion where Americans' shifting beliefs about gender and sexual difference were concerned. A major contribution to the study of rural and small-town America's little explored queer history, and an equally significant contribution to our understanding of rural and small-town America's crucially important place in the history of queer life in the United States.-Colin R. Johnson,author of Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America A lucid, compelling, and counterintuitive exploration of transmen at the turn of the twentieth century. In showing that many transmen were accepted by their communities, both in life and in death, Skidmore complicates a number of the accepted tenets of queer historiography: that queer people were persecuted, that sexology informed that persecution, and that queer people necessarily flocked to places where they might find community with people like themselves.-Nicholas Syrett,Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Kansas

-The best sort of history - surprising and delightful. Emily Skidmore's True Sex reveals ordinary American communities at the turn of the twentieth century to have been much queerer than commonly imagined. By reconstructing the lives of sixty-five trans men whose stories appeared in newspapers between 1870 and 1930, Skidmore makes a major contribution to our knowledge of queer history.--Rachel Hope Cleves, University of Victoria

Tracking revelations of true sex in the decades around the turn of the twentieth-century U.S., Emily Skidmore recovers a history full of surprises: one in which people assigned female at birth lived ordinary lives as men, often in small towns and rural outposts. Newspaper revelations about trans men, Skidmore proposes, invited debate about queer embodiment and the porous boundaries of the gender binary. True Sex contains provocations and insights for queer history, for trans history, and for American history.-Regina Kunzel, author of Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality

Author Information

Emily Skidmore is Associate Professor of History at Texas Tech University.

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