A Gender Variance Who's Who

George Miller was best known a tight rope performer from the age of 18. From 1871 he was with the newly formed P. T. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome.

In later years he also worked as a railroad night-watchman, farmhand and section hand on the Chicago Great Western Railway.
 
It did come out that he was female-bodied, and he was once quoted: "Men have an easier time than women, and get all the breaks".

He continued as a man for sixty years until his death at age 78.

• F. Michael Moore. Drag!: Male and Female Impersonators on Stage, Screen, and Television : an Illustrated World History. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1994: 123.
  

++ Nov 2012, added material from Feòrag NicBhrìde's article.  Shorter version previously published here in June 2008.  Thank you very much Feòrag for your excellent newspaper research.

Mary Anne Walker was raised in Hertfordshire.  Her father Henry Walker was a farmer and landowner, although later in 1853 he became the licensee of a large pub in Westminster, probably The Three Johns in Little Park Street. Mary Anne had been to a first-class boarding school, and was an adept pianist.  She worked in the family pub, and "She showed a fondness for wearing male attire, first by adorning herself with a waitcoat, turn-down collar, fancy tie, and a sort of semi 'Chesterfield', and ultimately she took to the entire paraphenalia of dress adopted by the male sex, and absconded from her home". 

Henry Walker died in 1860.  The three daughters suddenly needed to find work.  One of her sisters found work as a housekeeper for a nobleman, and the other as a governess.  Mary became male full time.  He worked as a porter at Jesus College, Cambridge,  and then as  booking clerk with the London and North-Western Railway, and then an engine cleaner for the Great Northern Railway at King's Cross Station.   He worked two years as a ship's steward for the Cunard Line. He had also worked as a dock labourer and as a light porter at a cheesemongers in London.  He used the names John Walker or John Turner.   Throughout this time Walker's aunt  made repeated but ineffectual attempts to reclaim her.

In 1867, using the name Thomas Walker, he was a barman in Royal Mortar Tavern in the London Road, Southwark.  He was accused of stealing monies in that marked coins were found in his possession. 

Walker was remanded.  The gaoler described Walker: a full masculine face, rather sunburnt, hair cut short and slightly curled and with a masculine voice. No-one at the prison thought they had anything other than a young man in their custody, until he was ordered to take a bath, whereupon he confessed to being female.

 Arthur Munby describes Thomas' appearance in the dock:

"a bluff and brawny young man, of four or five and twenty ... rough dark hair, short as a man's, and evidently worn in a man's fashion for a long time past. Her head was bare, and so was her strong bull neck: about the waist she wore nothing but a blue sailor's shirt, with the sleeves partly rolled up. Standing there, with broad shoulders squared and stout arms folded on the dock rail, she seemed just such a fellow as one may see drawing beer at an alehouse, or lounging about a seaport town; and it was almost impossible to believe that she was a man".

For subsequent court appearances Walker was compelled into a women's blue striped prison uniform, in which he was clearly uncomfortable.  The cheesemonger's son appeared to also accuse Walker of absconding with £30 (close to a year's wages).  Other evidence was presented:  a fiancée, Rosina, who visited him in prison, another fiancée who had had banns read in the local church causing him to flee, and a previous employment as a barmaid when she had been fired on suspicion of being a man.

Walker plead guilty to the two charges of embezzlement, and was sentenced to three month's imprisonment with hard labour.  While he was in prison, another 'female barman' was discovered.  Named as 'Jane Dixon, he had been working at the Jamaica Tavern in Sunderland for two years.

After release Walker was sent to the Elizabeth Fry Refuge in Hackney, but was rejected because of his male appearance.  Using the name Charles Arnold, he obtained work with the Great Western Railway, loading and unloading goods wagons.  One day he fell ill and his landlady sought to help by applying a mustard plaster to his chest.  Although she said that she would not tell anybody, he left the next morning, taking the property of some of the other porters.

In March 1868 Walker, busking, was arrested and charged with placing herself in a public thoroughfare, called Cable-street, Whitechapel, for the purpose of asking and collecting alms.  He was sent to the workhouse in St George-in-the-East.

However three months later he was being advertised as "Mary Walker, the Female Barman" at the Duke's Head in Norton Folgate, where he had a 12-month contract. However in August, the licensee of the pub, after a comment by Walker that was probably misconstrued, first ordered Walker to leave and then punched him in the chest when he attempted to do so.  At the subsequent court case it was ruled that the punch was not enough to be considered assault, and not enough reason to break the contract.

However the court summons that the contract be completed was later withdrawn and in November Walker sang on stage at the Marylebone Music Hall:

"She was dressed in men's clothes, and gave a sort of auto-biographical recitation to the tune of "Champagne Charley," and made a second appearance in naval uniform, and sang another song. The people were, of course, delighted to gaze upon one who has attracted so much attention, and their applause must be regarded as an expression of their pleasure at having curiosity gratified, rather than as a token of their admiration of the performer's abilities as a vocalist."

in 1870, Thomas was working as a barman at a pub in Shoreditch where it was hoped that his celebrity would bring in custom. However they became estranged over a sum of £3 10s, and the case went to court.  The publicity from this resulted in the landlord being unable to complete the transfer of his license as teh Bench felt that "they would be recognising a very immoral act if they were to grant the transfer". 

In later years Walker appeared in other towns, usually working as a barman, and often advertising for such such work: "Miss Mary Walker, the world-renowned Female Barman, begs to inform Publicans &c., she is now open to an Engagement. Terms moderate. Highest references given."  He was in Manchester in 1876, Halifax in 1877, Sheffield, Leeds and Lincoln in 1880, Leicester in 1884 (where he was mentioned in a licence renewal hearing for the Robin Hood Vaults on Gallowtreegate), Derby and possibly Colchester in 1887.  Then Harlepool and Aldershot the next year.  The last mention seems to be Derby again in 1890.
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Thomas was immortalized in the ballad, She-he Barman of Southwark:

You bonny lads and lasses gay,
Who like a bit of chaff,
I'll tell you of a She He Barman,
And I'm sure 'will make you laugh.
She did not like the petticoats,
So she slipped the trousers on,
She engaged herself as a barman,
And said her name was Tom.

At the Royal Mortar Tavern, London Road,
She served the customers all round,
The She He Barman was engaged
By Mr Frederick Brown,

She popped around the bar like steam,
The girls and chaps did wink,
When they went in for a drop of gin,
But little did they think.
That Tommy Walker was a maid,
When they together met,
Last night a costermonger said,
Who'd thought Tom's name was Bet.

In the morning she put on her shirt,
Her trousers, coat, and boots,
She He Tommy Walker
A regular swell did look;
She could drink a little drop of stout,
And smoke a mild cigar,
Tommy Walker, the female barman,
Was a clever chap, oh ! la!

She had neither beard or moustache,
And her belly was not big,
But Tom the He She barman
Turned out to be a prig;
She nailed the sixpences and shillings,
And she prigged the half-a-crown;
She three months was Tom the barman
At Mr Frederick Brown's.

She Tom had been a sailor,
Two years upon the main,
She was dropped from the Royal Mortar,
On board the ship Horsemonger Lane
Three years she doffed the petticoats,
And put the trousers on,
She served behind the counter,
And the people called her Tom.

For years she plough'd the ocean,
As steward of a ship,
She used to make the captain's bed,
Drink grog and make his flip.
She could go aloft so manfully,
This female sailor Jack,
But if she slept with a messmate,
Why of course she turned her back.

Now tired of a sailor's life,
She thought she'd be a star,
She got a crib at Mr. Brown's,
To serve behind the bar,
This pretty female barman—
Her modesty don't shock—
It is better than handling of the ropes,
To be turning on the cocks.

If you'd seen her take them in her hand,
You'd have said she was a caulker,
So nicely she handled them—
She said her name was Walker.
To see her put on a butt of beer,
And when the brewers come,
She nicely drove the spigot in,
And then out came the bung.

The ladies like the trousers,
Of that there is no doubt.
Many would be a barman,
But fear they'd be found out.
Tom was not a handsome female,
She too long had been, adrift,
Since she put on the Gurnsey,
And chucked away her shift,

*Not the crossdressing female doctor in the US also called Mary Walker.

•  See NicBhrìde for a detailed list of 19th century newspaper mentions.
• Curiosities of Street Literature, London, Reeves and Turner, 196, Strand, 1871.
• Derek Hudson. Munby, Man of Two Worlds: the Life and Diaries of Arthur J. Munby, 1828-1910. Abacus 1974: 237-8.
• Julie Wheelwright. Amazons and Military Maids: Women who dressed as men in pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. Pandora 1989: 84,114.
• Feòrag NicBhrìde.  "Thomas/Mary Anne Walker, the 'Female Barman' ". 4th Nov,2012.  http://feorag.livejournal.com/528324.html.

Adélaîde Herculine Barbin was born in Saint-Jean-d’Angely in Charente-Maritime. Her family usually referred to her as Alexina.  Her father died when she was young, which resulted in her being raised in an almost exclusively female and strongly religious environment.

Alexina was chosen for a charity scholarship to study at the school of an Ursaline convent. In 1856 she was sent for teacher training. Afterwards she became an assistant teacher in a girls’ school, where she had an affair with a fellow teacher, Sara.

Abdominal pain and religious guilt led Alexina to a confession with the bishop, and with her permission to break confessional silence, he sent for a doctor to examine her. The doctor found that she had a small penis and testicles inside her vagina, had never menstruated or developed breasts, and shaved facial hair.

In 1860 a tribunal heard evidence from Dr Chestnet of La Rochelle. As a result the register of Barbin’s birth was changed: the sex to male, and the name to Abel. It was deemed that Barbin had always been male. The next Sunday, Abel Barbin, dressed as a man appeared at the church of Saint-Jean between his mother and one of the town’s most respectable ladies.

This did not mean that Abel could marry Sara. The scandal was great and they were kept apart. A family connection secured for Barbin a position of clerk to a Paris railway company. Dr Chestner wrote up the case for the Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale.

Abel committed suicide at the age of 30 by inhaling from his gas stove in his room in the rue de l'École-de-Médecine in Paris. The police doctor, who had been called, examined the dead man’s genitals expecting to find that he was a syphilitic - a common cause of suicide at that time - but finding something quite different. Word spread quickly, and Dr E Goujon at the Faculity of Medicine acted quickly so that the body would not be lost to science. He performed an autopsy and took careful notes, including two detailed drawings of Barbin’s genital area.

In addition Barbin had left memoirs, in which the male persona is referred at as Camille. They were given to Auguste Ambroise Tardieu who published excerpts in his Question médico-légale de l'identité, 1872.

In 1893 the German psychiatrist and novelist Oskar Panizza, wrote a fictionalized version of Alexina/Camille as Ein skandalöser Fall: Geschichten, which is obviously taken from the account in Tardieu but set in the eighteenth century.

Five years later, Armand Ernest Dubarry, a French novelist who wrote several medical pot boilers, published L'hermaphrodite, again based on Alexina/Camille.

In 1908 Neugebauer summarized Camille’s story in his immense inventory of hermaphroditism. Either by his doing, or as a printer’s error, Barbin’s name was affixed to the image of somebody else.

After that interest in Barbin dissipated until, in the late 1970s, the memoirs were discovered in the archives of le département français de l'Hygiène Publique, and were published by the controversial academic Michel Foucault.

The story was filmed in 1985 as Mystere Alexina. To the plot from the book, the filmmakers added an intrigue of being secretive about the gender of the actor who played Alexina: Philippe Vuillemin, a comic book artist, was billed as Vuillemin only.

In 2010 Sarah Leaver, who has a similar intersex condition, performed a one-woman play based on Barbin’s memoires.

• Chesnet. “Question d’identité. Vice de conformation des organes génitaux. Hypospadias. Erreur sur le sexe” . Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale, 2, 14, 1860: .206-9.
• Abel Barbin. Mes souvenirs. 1863-8. Published Paris: Editions du Boucher, 2002. www.leboucher.com/pdf/herculine/xherculi.pdf.
• E. Goujon. “Étude d’un cas d’hermaphrodisme bisexual imparfait chez l’homme”. Journal de l’anatomie et de la physiologie normales et pathologiques de l’homme et des animaux, 6, 1869: 599-616. Reprinted in Foucault 1978/80.
• Auguste Ambroise Tardieu. Question médico-légale de l'identité dans ses rapport avec les vices de conformation des organes sexuels, contenant les souvenirs et impressions d'un individu dont le sexe avait été méconnu,. Paris: J.B. Baillière et Fils,1872. Contains selection from Barbin’s Souvenirs.
• Oskar Panizza. Ein skandalöser Fall: Geschichten. 1893. Translated by Sophie Wilkins and published in Foucault 1980. Reprinted: München: Martus Verlag, 1997.
• Armand Ernest Dubarry. L'hermaphrodite. Paris: Chamuel, 1898.
• Franz Ludwig von Neugebauer. Hermaphroditismus beim Menschen. Leipzig: Klinkhardt, 1908:748.
• Michel Foucault (ed) Herculine Barbin dite Alexina B. Paris: Gallimard, 1978. Translated by Richard McDougall as Herculine Barbin: being the recently discovered memoirs of a nineteenth-century French hermaphrodite. New York: Pantheon Books; Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980.
• René Féret (dir & scr). Mystere Alexina. Scr: Jean Gruault, based on the book by Herculine Barbin & Michel Foucault, with (Philippe) Vuillemin as Alexina Barbin. France 86 mins 1985.
• Alice Domurat Dreger. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. Cambridge, Ma, Harvard University Press. 2000: 16-20, 23, 28-9, 51-2, 76, 239n21.
• Sarah Leaver (writer & performer). Memoirs of a Hermaphrodite, 75 mins 2010. Performed in London, Brighton, Manchester, Liverpool www.decibelpas.com/index.php?id=85.
• “Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite”.  Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculine_Barbin:_Being_the_Recently_Discovered_Memoirs_of_a_Nineteenth-century_French_Hermaphrodite.

EN.WIKIPEDIA     FR.WIKIPEDIA    TRANS.ILGA

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Dr Goujon left us two detailed drawing of Barbin’s genital area, but we have no record of her face.  The drawings may be viewed in Dreger’s book.

The EN.Wikipedia article, in line with its usual practice, retrojects final gender back to birth.  “It's wikipedia policy to use the gender that the person decided upon as the pronoun throughout, not alternate them”.  However it gives not the slightest evidence that Barbin chose to be male, or even accepted the gender reassignment.  Suicide was her method of refusing to be male.  Even stranger, having imposed male pronouns, it names the article with Camille’s birth girl name: “Herculine Barbin”.

Actually the birth name was Adélaîde Herculine Barbin, so if only one first name is given, it should be Adélaîde Barbin.  However it would be better to refer to Alexina, as this is what family and friends called her.  This is one case where the film got it more right than most of the books about this person.

Likewise Abel is a name imposed.  When Alexina uses a male name for herself, she uses Camille.  I have used Camille in the name of this article in that it is the last name that Barbin used for herself.

If Barbin had been born earlier, s/he would have been determined to be a hermaphrodite, and permitted to choose a gender.  This freedom had been gradually reduced since the eighteenth century and by 1860 the church, the state and medicine in alliance took it upon themselves to determine the ‘true sex’ of a person, and compel them into it, without any consideration of the person’s feelings.

Previously to 1860, the major determinant in sexing a person had been presence or lack of a penis or vagina.  Barbin had both and should have been a hermaphrodite.  However the new fashion was that gonads determined sex.  Barbin had testes but no ovaries.  This criterion was the trump until chromosomes were discovered in the twentieth century.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I am not a follower of Michel Foucault.  However I feel that his paragraph from page xiii is certainly worth pondering:

Alexina wrote her memoirs about that life once her new identity had been discovered and established. Her "true" and "definitive" identity. But it is clear she did not write them from the point of view of that sex which had at last been brought to light. It is not a man who is speaking, trying to recall his sensations and his life as they were at the time when he was not yet "himself." When Alexina composed her memoirs, she was not far from her suicide; for herself, she was still without a definite sex, but she was deprived of the delights she experienced in not having one, or in not entirely having the same sex as the girls among whom she lived and whom she loved and desired so much. And what she evokes in her past is the happy limbo of a non-identity, which was paradoxically protected by the life of those closed, narrow, and intimate societies where one has the strange happiness, which is at the same time obligatory and forbidden, of being acquainted with only one sex.

James Johnson was born in Geneva, Illinois, and educated in Wheaton. He majored in political science at Wheaton College, and while a student edited two railroad magazines.

A fan of the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin interurban railroad, he rode the line's last train west from Forest Park. In the early 1960s he wrote a history of Chicago Streetcars and then a history of the CA&E. He worked weekends as the General Manager of the Illinois Railway Museum in Union and helped the museum to significantly expand its operations, spending large amounts of his own money to purchase CA&E artefacts.

He joined the family printing business in 1972 after working for other companies in the same business. In 1988 he became the president of the family business.

At the turn of the century, Johnson transitioned as Julie Ann and became active in the Chicago Gender Society and the Be-All Conference for trans people.

In 2010 she completed a large project of placing her entire collection of CA&E materials online for public use.

She died of cancer at age 68.

• James David Johnson. A Century of Chicago Streetcars, 1858-1958. Wheaton, Illinois: Traction Orange Co, 1964.
• James D. Johnson. Aurora 'n' Elgin: Being a Compendium of Word and Picture Recalling the Everyday Operations of the Chicago Aurora and Elgin Railroad. Wheaton, Ill: Traction Orange, 1965.
• Bob Goldsborough. "Julie Ann Johnson, 1942 – 2011". Chicago Tribune, March 15, 2011. www.herald-mail.com/obituaries/ct-met-julie-johnson-obit-20110315,0,7161924.story.

In John Berger's portrait, with photographs by by Jean Mohr, of John Sassall, an English country doctor in the Forest of Dean, western Gloucestershire, in the 1960s, we are told how one day he visits a retired couple who have lived in the area for thirty years.

A quiet couple who went down the pub once a week but kept themselves to themselves. He had previously worked on the railway, and she had been a maid.

The doctor had been called because she was bleeding from below. The doctor is surprised to find male organs when he examines her, but as they are irrelevant to the condition, nothing is said of them. The trouble is severe piles.

• John Berger and Jean Mohr. A Fortunate Man; the Story of a Country Doctor. Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative 1967:56.

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We  don't know the name of this trans woman who has such a brief appearance in a book about somebody else.  However apparently she had lived successfully as female from at latest the early 1930s. and almost certainly without female hormones.  A successful pioneer, more so than many whose names we know.

William Smith worked in Queensland as a farm labourer, drover, railway navvy and cane cutter in the 1920s. He obtained 851 acres of land, but lost it and his cattle after a severe drought. He returned to labouring and moved with the seasonal farm work.

In 1928 he rode into New South Wales.  He took employment at the Waterside Estates. He agreed to a pay cut in the middle of a drought on agreement of higher wages afterwards. The drought broke in March 1929 but from then on he was not paid at all. He quit in May, and in June took legal action claiming £39 12s 3d.

Thomas Waters, the employer, first avoided the claim by transferring the property to his wife, and declaring bankruptcy, and then by claiming that William Smith was a woman. Smith gave interviews to a few newspapers in which he admitted that he might not be male. He was admired as a “plucky Sydney girl” trying to survive.

The first court case was on 28 August 1929 and Matilda Waters, now the owner of the farm, made a counter claim of £45 12s 3d for the keep of Smith and his horse. The defence solicitor pursued the argument that Smith was a woman based on the newspapers articles. Smith conceded that he he might be a ‘half-and-half’ or a hermaphrodite. The agreed wages had been at a male rate.

There were several adjournments and the second hearing was heard on 13 November. A doctor testified that Smith was a woman but with the muscular development of a man and capable of doing physical work as well as a man.

Evidence was also admitted through cross-examination that Thomas Waters had a previous conviction of obtaining £350 through false pretences, was a declared bankrupt and had been committed for trial on two charges of false pretences. The magistrate criticized Smith as “not an entirely truthful witness”, but but awarded him the full amount claimed plus £1 5s 3d cost. The counter claim was denied.

*Not the jockey, Bill Smith.

• Ruth Ford. “'Prove first you're a male': A Farmhand's Claim for Wages in 1929 Australia”. Labour History 90 2006: 52. www.historycooperative.org/journals/lab/90/ford.html.