More history on threat pictures: Fanny and Stella were arrested for "female impersonation"in Essex, 19th century.
https://www.alamy.com/english-female-impersonators-frederick-park-and-ernest-boulton-this-photograph-taken-less-than-a-year-before-their-arrest-by-the-metropolitan-police-for-conspiring-and-inciting-persons-to-commit-an-unnatural-offence-the-original-photograph-is-held-by-the-essex-record-office-and-an-un-restored-scan-made-available-on-their-blog-in-february-2013-the-photograph-was-used-as-a-full-page-spread-in-attitude-a-uk-gay-lifestyle-magazine-in-august-2013-issue-234-and-appears-in-a-cropped-form-but-otherwise-unaltered-in-the-book-fanny-stella-the-young-men-who-shocked-victorian-england-2013-image211192681.html?irclickid=yId0fixmAxyLTWk0EOSREQreUkExCO0xnxDMTo0&irgwc=1&utm_source=77643&utm_campaign=Shop%20Royalty%20Free%20at%20Alamy&utm_medium=impact https://twitter.com/VillaNg2/status/1319323014018859008

*these pictures. Unfortunate autocorrect

More on them here
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Fanny_and_Stella

Stella (Boulton) had cards made up calling herself the wife of her partner, Lord Arthur Clinton, styling her name "Lady Arthur Clinton". Boulton and Park were "indiscreet" in that they went around in public dressed as women. Were eventually arrested and..
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulton_and_Park

.. tried still in the dresses they'd been arrested in, "invasively" examined by the police surgeon. The case hinged on whether it could be proven they'd been engaged in sodomy (hence the inspection) and whether it was illegal to be crossdressed.

Stella's masc aesthetic was really something.

I fucking hate cis historians.

Someone slipped up and put a "her" in there on the mention of the habitual use of female name day to day.

So, Fanny in man drag. This photo really says "I didn't have much choice in this"

More on a trans reading of the history here

(Obviously there are layers to this, not trying to read modern trans identity onto the participants)

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/726576 

Istg, if I could look like this in a suit I'd wear them more often https://twitter.com/Chican3ry/status/1319363095110815744?s=19

We just want to pee 1870!!

Attorney General said their butch drag was unconvincing.

So one way I see this is, if the LGB Alliance type gays want to argue that being trans is nothing at all to do with being LGB, and therefore we should separate gender from sexuality, then Fanny Winifred Park is one of our older sisters for sure.

Trans girls living off of pay pigs since the 19th century.

Trans* folks are brave and bold.

Wow, one of the19th century medical manuals which features a trans lady called Eliza Edwards is available free in pdf scan if you Google
"A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence Alfred Swaine Taylor book"

Sorry rabbit hole thread

Ok the actual story of Eliza Edwards is in Volume 2 which is on http://Archive.Org 

[CW, transphobic pathologist searching for gay anus, misgendering a transitioned lady]

"Patient or succubus"

LMFAO

Also the Victorian description of bussy and tucking.

Source here:
https://archive.org/details/principlespracti02tayl

Just as a slight aside, I just want to note how the clearest social, medical, frankly any sort of evidence we have of transgender lives and practices during this era is from people trying to prosecute them out of existence.

I keep hammering how the roots of sexology are based in finding ways to make sex and gender variant life within the control of heterosexual power structures, but I really do not trust the entire endeavour.

Pronoun game 19th Century edition.

Taylor gives us a comparative example, spending most of his paragraph on Eliza Edwards referring either indeterminately to her appearance as "the [organ]", avoiding pronouns got her, or calling her "him".

Whereas James Barry somehow doesn't pass, and is belittled and emasculated in death but is still referred to consistently as "he" and "him".

Don't get me wrong, our man Taylor is outright transphobic about Barry, makes him out to be petty, vain, narcissistic, shrill, squeaking, effeminate, inadequately manly.

It's kinda grim either way. It's just also quite different the degree of respect offered while degrading both

The other thing that's fascinating about this stuff is that Victorian medics like Taylor are so blazé about it. Like "yeah we keep seeing these fucking trannies, they turn up dead on the slab and we find out they were really X/Y, it hardly deserves listing all of them"

Also the vileness of the ways he simultaneously treats Barry as a man but belittles him as an inadequate one. It keeps hitting me thinking about that. The feminist account of Barry has him as a plucky woman taking fate in her own hands, but it sounds like Barry would have been..

..treated like a piece of shit as a man, who may have been clocked by a lot of men, who's orders to not undress him in death were counteracted not just by mean people in his life but by a special order from on high by people who it seems already suspected he was transmasc.

To which end it feels (at least reading this account) like it must have been fucking hard to be a trans man in the 19th Century. Not walking the easier path that it's presented as, the same as there are really good reasons to be suspect of present day narratives that trans men..

..are somehow just fleeing misogyny at record rates in a period of historically exceptional women's equality.

I'll end on that note

If you want further reading on Trans Victorians, this special issue of Victorian Review is the place to look. You can download/read free articles right here:

https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/40485 

Particularly the introduction touches on these points of interest about James Barry.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/726572#b3