by Carrie-Anne Brownian

Carrie-Anne is a thirtysomething historical novelist, historian, and lover of many things from bygone eras (except for the sexism, racism, and homophobia). She can be found at Welcome to My Magick Theatre, where she primarily blogs about writing, historical topics, names, silent and early sound cinema, and classic rock and pop; and at Onomastics Outside the Box, where she blogs about names and naming-related issues. Her only “child,” an 18-year-old spider plant named Kalanit, has thankfully never had any issues with her gender identity!

Carrie-Anne has written two other pieces for 4thWaveNow: “The boy with no penis” (about the case of David Reimer) and “Transing the dead,” a companion piece to this article.

She can be found on Twitter @Anyechka

As trans activists have demonstrated many a time, propagating their ideology takes precedence over accurately representing history. They have a long track record of posthumously declaring famously gender-defiant people (many of them LGB)  to be trans, despite a complete lack of evidence (from either primary or secondary sources) to support such an extraordinary claim. Many have also declared old works of literature about LGB people, and women who posed as men to live freer lives and have more opportunities, to be part of a trans canon. Seeing as the modern-day trans umbrella is so broad and vague, trans activists feel confident in including anyone who wasn’t or isn’t one million percent a collection of rigid stereotypes.

Enter the latest trend in this misrepresentation of history: Genderqueering the dead.

In December, Katie Byford, a photographer, filmmaker, and poet, started a Twitter thread about nineteenth century female photographers, such as Eveleen Myers, Emma Barton, Constance Fox Talbot, Minna Keene, and Clementina Hawarden. After this wonderful celebration of female pioneers in photography, Ms. Byford made another thread, this one holding up Claude Cahun, Marianne Breslauer, Florence Henri, and Annemarie Schwarzenbach as “transfemale,” “genderqueer,” “trans,” and “queer.”

These lesbians were referred to with “they” pronouns, in spite of never having claimed to be anything but women, and no other evidence pointing to a trans identity. Like many other lesbians and gender-defiant women throughout history, they had short hair, wore stereotypical men’s clothes, and shunned the role of dainty little ladies immersed in all things domestic and stereotypically feminine.

Before these women’s true stories are presented, let’s look at the history of the term “genderqueer,” and the concept of claiming to be neither male nor female.

According to anthropologist April Scarlette Callis, in “Bisexual, pansexual, queer: Non-binary identities and the sexual borderlands,” people only began “identifying” as homosexual in the nineteenth century, when sexuality was medicalized in the wake of modern scientific developments and the decreased influence of religion. She quotes George Chauncey, a Yale history professor, as saying that gender roles, not sexual partners, were used to determine sexual orientation in the early twentieth century. E.g., only butch lesbians and effeminate gay men had labels attached to themselves, not lesbians and gay men who had less gender-defiant style and behavior. Only in the mid-twentieth century were people officially labeled homosexual or heterosexual.

The first recorded use of the word “genderqueer” is in an article from August 1995 by Riki Anne Wilchins, published in In Your Face: Political Activism Against Gender Oppression. Ms. Wilchins used this word to describe those with unnamed or complex gender expressions. In her 1997 autobiography, Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender, she identified herself as genderqueer.

In June 2001, in The Village Voice, E.J. Graff used the word in “My Trans Problem,” in which she pondered whether trans people belong in the LGB movement:

“Many of us who are homoqueer, or queer in our sexual desires, are also at least a little genderqueer—more butch or sissy than we’re supposed to be…For lesbians as well, genderqueer (a masculine woman) has at times trumped homoqueer (a woman who has sex with a woman) as the defining stigmata…As many gender-passable homos win a place at the Thanksgiving table, our genderqueered sibs are still beaten, fired, harassed, and murdered not for the sex they have but for the sex they appear to be.”

Also in 2001, “GenderQueer Revolution” and “United Genders of the Universe” were founded to fill a perceived gap in the representation and celebration of people who considered themselves neither male nor female. In 2002, the term went mainstream with the publication of GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary, a collection of thirty-eight essays edited by Joan Nestle, Clare Howell, and Riki Anne Wilchins. Ever since, usage of the term and identification with the concept have been steadily rising.

While Ms. Wilchins may have had sincere intentions and a specific identity in mind when she coined the word, as had those who were early adapters of the concept, the explosion of identity politics, queer theory, and postmodernism over the past 5–10 years have rendered it as meaningless and catch-all as “queer.” Today, many consider “genderqueer” an umbrella term which includes identities such as “non-binary,” “demigender,” “trigender,” “bigender,” “agender,” “neutrois,” and “pangender.” Some people involved in identity politics even consider the word offensive and archaic nowadays, and have supplanted it with “non-binary.”

Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun, Self-Portraits Reflected in a Mirror, ca. 1920, Jersey Heritage Collections.

Thus, this concept didn’t exist when the abovementioned female photographers were alive. Claude Cahun, the first cited, was born as Lucie Renée Mathilde Schwob in 1894, and adopted the unisex name Claude sometime between 1917 and 1919. She experimented with several different surnames before settling on Cahun. Historically, it’s hardly been uncommon for lesbians to adopt male names, but this did not mean they were trans men or “genderqueer.”

In 1909, at age fifteen, she met seventeen-year-old Suzanne Alberte Malherbe, who later adopted her own new name, Marcel Moore. They quickly became friends, creative partners, and lesbian partners. In 1917, Moore’s widowed mother married Cahun’s divorced father, making them stepsisters. Their creative partnership may have diverted attention from their lesbian relationship. Both were active in the anti-Nazi resistance movement on the island of Jersey during World War II, and were imprisoned and sentenced to death after being discovered. They were saved by the island’s 1945 liberation (“Acting Out: Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore,” Tirza True Latimer).

Claude Cahun Jersey Heritage Collection

Cahun described Moore as l’autre moi (the other me), and they remained partnered until Cahun’s death in 1954. After Moore’s 1972 suicide, she was buried next to her lifelong partner at St. Brelade’s Church on the island of Jersey. Over the course of their lifetimes, neither claimed to be anything but women; they were gender-defiant lesbians.

The second photographer to be posthumously genderqueered was Florence Henri, born in 1893. Though she was a very prolific, well-known avant-garde photographer in her heyday, her name is largely unknown today. “Meet Florence Henri, The Under-Acknowledged Queen Of Surrealist Photography,” a Huffington Post article by Priscilla Frank, claims she “toyed with gender binaries, using her personal appearance to emphasize the performative nature of gender.”

Florence Henri © Centre Pompidou, Paris

Henri’s 1928 self-portrait is cited as an example of this, because it features herself “dolled up almost as if in drag” (i.e., short hair and a so-called man’s shirt), and two silver balls reflected against a mirror, “equivocal symbols of both testicles and breasts.” Posthumously identifying Henri as “genderqueer” on account of this is a huge stretch. She was bisexual and at times adopted a tomboyish, androgynous style. She never claimed to be anything but female!

Marianne Breslauer Estate/Fotostiftung Schweiz, 2009

The third and fourth photographers cited, Marianne Breslauer and Annemarie Schwarzenbach, were close friends, though not romantic partners. While Schwarzenbach was a lesbian (who entered into a lavender marriage of convenience with bisexual Achille-Claude Clarac in 1935), Breslauer appears to have been heterosexual. Breslauer was born in 1909, and rose to become one of the leading photographers of the Weimar Republic. Her anti-fascist activism and Jewish background eventually drove her out of her native Germany. After World War II, she and her husband became art dealers (“Beautiful Tomboys of the 1930s”).

Schwarzenbach was born in 1908, and dressed and acted “like a boy” from a very young age. She also adopted the name Fritz. Neither of her parents ever forced her to adopt a more stereotypically feminine role. Her own mother was also bisexual, and had a long-running affair with opera singer Emmy Krüger, as well as other women, which her father raised no objections to (“Swiss writer’s life was stranger than fiction,” Isobel Leybold-Johnson).

Annemarie Schwarzenbach, © Marianne Feilchenfeldt-Breslauer

Throughout her life, Schwarzenbach continued dressing and behaving “like a man,” and exclusively had relationships with other women. Many times, she was mistaken for a man. Her attempted suicide, not her personal style, caused a much greater scandal among her family and their conservative circle. Breslauer described her as “neither a man nor a woman, but an angel, an archangel.” She travelled all over Europe and Asia as a prolific photographer and journalist, and tragically died from a bicycle accident at age thirty-four (“Beautiful Tomboys of the 1930s”).

On a related note, LGBTQ Nation and Ha’Aretz recently reported the discovery of alleged trans or “third gender” burials in a 3,000-year-old grave in Hansalu, Iran. This ancient city was almost continuously inhabited from the sixth millennium BCE till the third century of the Common Era. Among its claims to fame are the Golden Bowl of Hansalu and the Hansalu lovers, two male skeletons who seem to be embracing. The city was violently sacked and burnt around 800 CE, possibly by Urartians, which froze one of its layers in time, much like the eruption of Mount Vesuvius did to Pompeii. Thus, researchers have found a wealth of incredibly well-preserved artifacts, buildings, and skeletons (“Iran’s Pompeii: Astounding story of a massacre buried for millennia,” Catherine Brahic).

Biologically female skeletons were typically found with jewelry, needles, and garment pins, while biologically male skeletons were usually found with weapons, metal vessels, and armor. Simply because 20% of skeletons were discovered with objects associated with the opposite sex, or a mixture of objects, art historian Megan Cifarelli has presented this as evidence of “non-binary individuals” and “a third gender.”

Predictably, the Ha’Aretz article goes on to appropriate and misunderstand known “third genders,” such as India’s hijra and the Two-Spirits found in various Native American cultures. The evidence of such social categories doesn’t negate the reality of being male or female, nor does it have anything to do with post-modernist, queer, trans activist theory. On the contrary, they’re based upon a sex binary. People who don’t fit into either role find a place in these “third genders,” and thus are freed from the expectation of heterosexual marriage and sex, childbearing, having to wear certain clothes, accepting certain social and familial roles, and so forth. Most importantly, everyone around these people understands they’re still the biological sex they were born as.

Native Americans have repeatedly asked people to stop claiming to be Two-Spirit when they haven’t any Native American blood. Not only does this appropriate their culture, it doesn’t take into account how diverse Native American culture is. Not all tribes had/have Two-Spirits. For example, the Iroquois, who kept a much more extensive documentation of their people’s history and daily lives than many other tribes, never recorded Two-Spirits among their ranks. The Apache likewise have no records of them, though they were kind and respectful to Two-Spirits from other tribes (ibid).

Both the Apache and Iroquois had very egalitarian societies, in different ways. Apache adults typically had sex-segregated roles, but children were raised to do things associated with both sexes. Because their tribe was almost constantly at war with other tribes, it was essential to know how to do basic life tasks (e.g., sewing, cooking, hunting, construction) in the event of a sex imbalance either at home or in the trenches. Meanwhile, Iroquois women enjoyed great amounts of political power and authority. Hence, there was no need for Two-Spirits (ibid.).

One tribe that does have Two-Spirits is the Lakota Sioux. Their record of such a category extends as far back as their written history. They also had extremely sex-segregated roles from a very early age, and permitted polygyny. Lakota Two-Spirits were always men, never women. Men who didn’t conform to their tribe’s rigid rules about “proper” behavior were put in the camp with women and children, which didn’t enjoy as high a quality of life or social standing as the men’s camp (ibid.).

Another tribe with Two-Spirits, the Dene of Alberta, Canada, historically treated their women horribly. To give just one example, Dene women were forced to go hungry, if their husbands dictated it, during famines and food shortages. They were among the most mistreated, oppressed women among all North American tribes. Thus, the evidence makes it clear that progressive tribes had no need for Two-Spirits, while ones with the harshest, most rigidly-enforced sex roles required this social category as a way to deal with gay and gender-defiant men. In spite of not being regarded as “real men,” they still had the social power to opt out of manhood. Women weren’t allowed to opt out of womanhood. And again, none of these Two-Spirit men ever claimed to be women, nor were they seen as such (ibid.).

To get back to the topic of the grave, it seems more logical to conclude that the presence of stereotypically male or female objects with the opposite sex is evidence of gender-defiant individuals, possibly lesbians and gay men. If there were indeed a “third gender” in this society, it had nothing to do with modern-day views on the subject. It just goes to show that society may have had great acceptance towards non-conformity, so much so they buried these people with said objects. There also may have been other reasons they were buried with those objects; e.g., a soldier wanting to mend his uniform, both men’s and women’s clothes using garment pins, or women passing themselves off as men to fight in a war or rise to a more prominent social position.

The most recent paleoanthropological evidence reveals that our Neanderthal cousins had a very egalitarian society, with women as well as men hunting dangerous game face-to-face and taking equal part in all aspects of their daily lives, far more so than our own direct ancestors in the Homo sapiens sapiens line (The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science Is Rewriting Their Story, Dimitra Papagianni and Michael A. Morse). Does that mean Neanderthals were all “genderqueer” themselves?

By declaring all these people “genderqueer,” part of a “third gender,” and automatically under the trans umbrella, young people who are gender-defiant themselves are being done a grave disservice. When they see no role models from history, in whichever field they may be passionate about (art, photography, music, writing, acting, science, medicine, mathematics, etc.), in addition to a dearth of gender-defiant examples in their own real lives or modern society, they’ll be more likely to believe they must be trans or “genderqueer” themselves. There are almost no available counterexamples to convince them otherwise — to help them see that it’s very possible to be a perfectly normal, happy woman or man who doesn’t behave like a walking, talking stereotype.

Youth in previous generations, not all that long ago, had high-profile gender-bending examples like Annie Lennox, Boy George, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Prince, Marlene Dietrich, and just about everyone with a New Romantic style in the Eighties. Today, however, young people are being sent the message that preferring short hair, trousers, boxer underwear, button-down shirts, and no makeup; or pink, makeup, long hair, stereotypically feminine clothing, and jewelry, means they must be trans or “genderqueer,” instead of simply a normal  tomboyish, effeminate, or androgynous person.

Calling strong, proud women and lesbians “genderqueer” and using “they” pronouns erases, insults, and demeans who they truly were, in addition to doing a disservice to today’s young women. Respect for the dead is a common value across cultures and eras, and this is a painful example of the exact opposite.