‘Some Very Queer Couples’: Gender Migrants and Intimacy in Nineteenth‐Century America

Abstract

This article contends that the term gender migrant – which describes a person who changed gender on a long‐term basis in their everyday life – offers a useful tool for grappling with the ambiguities of nineteenth‐century transgender history. Examining four cases of gender change that circulated in the popular press between the antebellum era and the turn of the twentieth century, the article brings to light intimate relationships that do not fit within the categories of female husbands or sexual inverts that have become familiar to historians of sexuality. Some female‐assigned gender migrants lived as men and sought same‐gender intimacy in the company of other men. Reading ambiguous cases of love and marriage from multiple angles provides insight into the strategies that resourceful gender migrants used to legitimise their public gender identities.

Defeating the ‘social danger’ of homosexuality while ‘forging the fatherland’: Sexual science and biotypology in Mexico’s national development, 1927–57

“…Read sympathetically, transitioning ‘did justice’ by revealing Marta’s true self: Marta herself proclaimed satisfaction with the outcome (International News Service, 1954: 8; Viniegra, 1954: 3). She had ‘migrated’—to use Jesse Bayker’s term—her gender and sexuality in order to become her true self (Bayker, 2023; Jones, 2023).…”