I’ve noticed a trend in most folks who write about white women in 19th century American and British cultures that I don’t really understand. I’m reading Imperial Leather by Anne McClintock, and she makes a move in one of her chapters that I’ve seen a lot of folks make—assuming that female folks who live as men identify as lesbians or women who love women.
A lot of folks do this—I can’t think of people off the top of my head but I’ve seen the same sort of treatment applied to Stephen from The Well of Loneliness (which admittedly I haven’t read) and Willa Cather (who went by Charles among their peers). You can see a popular representation of this idea in Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet. There’s a pretty thick history of white women living as men in the 19th century, and it makes me uncomfortable how quickly they’re categorized as lesbian.
And that’s not because I think they thought of themselves as men per se—meaning that they were trans men. But I also think this is just a weird move to make when there’s this even thicker trend of love between women as necessary for the creation of codified gender identities for women, particularly middle to upper class women.
I don’t know; I’m just uncomfortable in general with applying the category “lesbian” to this particular situation especially given that this was all happening when lesbian as a category of identity was first forming. I’m equally uncomfortable applying the term “transgender” for similar reasons. But it’s disconcerting to me that many folks think that the motivations behind female folks living as men in 19th century U.S. and British cultures is about sexuality and not about gender identity (and/or both).
