19th-century female husbands | Hacker News Reader

19th-century female husbands

aeon.co

67 pointssamclemens27 comments

One of the things that I've learned from historians is how often they have to teach people empathy. From Brett Devereaux having to explain to students that people from other religions actually believe their own religion[1] to Jen Manion explaining in this post that people defined their gender in relation to their own upbringing, students don't naturally just know how to empathize. It's really a difficult thing to put yourself in the shoes of another human being.

I ran into this myself when discussing historical experiments with regard to cholera. The person I was discussing was arguing that certain experiments were unscientific, based on the fact that they weren't eliminating the proper variables. I'm not sure I really ever got him to understand that the scientists at that time didn't already know what caused cholera--that they were asking questions of nature because they really didn't know the answers.

It is cliche that if you don't know history you're doomed to repeat it, but I think it goes deeper than that: if you can't empathize with history, you're doomed to repeat it. It's tempting to look at people from the past as quaint and stupid, but the fact is, evolutionarily, people from 1000 years ago are barely distinguishable from us: their brains are as developed as ours. If they are quaint and stupid, then we are quaint and stupid--just as enslaved by our fears, superstitions, nationalisms, and enmities as they were. History should teach us to be humble.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2019/06/04/new-acquisitions-how-it-wasnt-...

I liked your example of scientists from history. One of the things I'm minorly obsessed with is the idea that we've gotten better at science itself recently. So not only did they not know they weren't eliminating the proper variables, they had fewer techniques to know which variables to eliminate. This is similar to the application of statistics. We're just now realizing issues with publication bias and how to properly due meta-analysis that can help identify those problems. Think about not knowing how to apply even simple statistics to science.

But that's exactly my point: we still are groping around in the dark on a lot of issues. Can you explain to me why P=.05 is the ubiquitous standard for statistical significance? No? Neither can anyone else I've come across. It doesn't get much more basic than that--we still don't know how to apply even simple statistics to science.

And what we as a species know, we as individuals don't know. It's true that the knowledge of the human race has moved forward with regard to applying statistics to science, but if you make a habit of reading scientific papers and checking their math, you'll quickly realize that there are critical errors in lots of papers. And even if the scientists get the math right, the journalists and marketing teams who publicize their results rarely do. Better tools don't do us much good if we don't use them.

I often think of this when people say something along the line of "the first person to ever eat that must have been brave", or "how did they even know ..." . If you spend a lot of time outdoors in a preindustrial world, wouldn't a lot of this stuff would just be second nature? Life in contemporary cities and that of most of human history is so different people can't empathise very well.

Most critical paragraph IMO:

> When I share news clippings of so-called ‘female soldiers’ or ‘female sailors’, students are quick to say that these people were not ‘really’ trans. When I ask why they think this, students offer two reasons: the soldiers and sailors were motivated by some other need (patriotism and/or poverty) or they didn’t live as men for very long. It is my job, of course, to help students unpack and contextualise these newspaper accounts [...] I think one of the most powerful insights is the absence, for the most part, of a concept of ‘gender identity’ in the 19th century. Distinguishing ‘trans’ from ‘not-trans’ is futile and, in many ways, the least interesting route to approach this rich and varied material. What can we – in our ‘cisgender’ and ‘transgender’ 21st century – learn from an era when this distinction was murkier?

I sometimes wonder if, in some ways, the emphasis we place on gender today is actually putting people in more of a box. Identifying as "non-binary" is one way out of that—but why should it even need a special designation? People—everyone—should dress and act as they wish.

Special designations evolved as they always do. Initially by those who sought to insult. There is a wide collection of vulgar terms for what we now refer to as trans, lgbt, etc. if you do not choose a name, someone will choose one for you.

But imagine a world in which a boy who wants to wear a dress one day can just go ahead and do that, without it saying something critical about their identity. It shouldn't matter whether the child feels innately feminine, or isn't sure yet, or just wants to try on a damn dress because why the hell not?

It seems to me that transgender labels preclude such a society, where you are whoever you're presenting yourself as at that moment.

We can prefer a world world without labels, but we have to live in this one. Ripping off the label someone else applied to make room for self-definition is a way to deal with reality.

You don't need to be LGBT to wear a dress. I (Male) wore calf-length skirts for a good chunk of my 20s and didn't need a label. There are ways of feeling out who you are and what you're about without labels, privately or within your peer group. But when you want to live publicly that way. When you want your boss, store clerk, principal to know you as that then someone, anyone, will find a word for you unless you have one for yourself. Especially if your public transition is a rarity in the community you live in.

I don’t think the label “trans” precludes that society. Most trans people I know recognize that there’s a distinction between acting feminine and being a woman.

It’s people with conservative views about gender who use trans people to justify traditional gender roles when relatively few trans people even want to fit into those roles.

In more a box compared to what? Because if you check the past, the female husband was at risk of getting criminal charges.

A lot of non-binary people I know have brought this issue up. Non-binary has become its own box in certain areas of society. Non-binary means being stereotypically androgynous, and androgyny means having no breasts, no beard, no make-up, and “boy” clothes.

In certain social circles, well intentioned people will assume that anyone who looks like a flat chested woman dressed in men’s clothes is non-binary. Meanwhile, they’ll assume that anyone who looks like a man wearing women’s clothes is a trans woman. In reality, the “man in a dress” could be non-binary and the flat chested woman could be a trans woman.

I don’t really have a proposed solution to this problem, I just think it’s interesting to note how gender roles can shift so much over time but in other ways remain so rigid.

The response to the students is really weird. We already have a separate term that separates the two: Crossdressing. Transgender specifically refers to when some sort of body-image dysphoria is involved. The students have it right, crossdressing for patriotism or poverty isn't transgender in and of itself.

Lobdell wound up in the poor house in Delhi, New York state where they met their love – Marie Louise Perry – in 1860 or 1861, and partnered with her for nearly 20 years.

Currently, being LGBTQ puts one at high risk of being homeless. Perhaps not a new phenomenon.

Relatives and neighbours began citing Lobdell’s gender and marriage to a woman as evidence of their insanity.

Calling people "crazy" is a frequent means to invalidate everything about them. It was done to Semmelweis, though he had studies to back up his claims, and it is a common meme that "homeless people are all just junkies and crazies."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

Here we see their neighbours and community members turning on them and describing them in the harshest possible light before a judge who held the power of life (freedom) and death (forced institutionalisation) over them.

Claims that someone is insane seem to frequently be a means to de facto justify atrocious treatment of them which would be deemed abusive if their claims were viewed as valid in some manner.

Also for a long time women used to dress as men and pretend to be one when travelling alone. It was perfectly admitted and the polite thing to do when you had a doubt (or accidentally discovered it) was to simply pretend to be none the wiser.

This is one of the things described in the article.

I didn't realize from the article that it was so commonplace, though!

I find it continually frustrating that there is a perceived, or sometimes enforced, idea that there are rigid or binary rules around cultural constructions such as race and gender, and that questioning those constructs somehow denies the harm done to people who were on the “wrong side” of the power imbalance these constructs enabled.

I'm not sure how to interpret this comment... it seems to me people on the "wrong side" of a constructed power imbalance are often the first to question the validity of the construct.

Can you elaborate?

Also Albanian sworn virgins, and in the Hebrew bible intersex people had to follow both the commands for men as for women.

The idea that we were "born this way" has never sat right with me for a number of reasons, so I'm glad to see this article call some attention to it. In particular, the insistence that we were "born this way" and thus our gender or sexual orientation cannot be changed is underlined by the idea that being queer is a negative thing. I see no inherent reason for that to be the case, and would prefer to live in a society that didn't really care what gender people identified as, nor what genders/sexes they're attracted to. What does it matter whether we were "born this way" or not? What's wrong with choosing to be this way?

n.b. as the article noted, we obviously can't change our gender and sexual orientation at will; I want to be clear that that's not what I'm claiming.

A lot of these issues haven't gone away. There are still plenty of people, worse doctors, who hold the theory that a trans man is just a homophobic lesbian. But the fact that there are trans men and women who are gay, bi, and ace you would think speak to the fact that such a theory can't hold absolutely. Oh well.

I think it's a bit of a cop-out to just say something like "gender was just different in the 19th century" when gender dysphoria is a very real thing that people suffered from long before it had a name. Just because the language to talk about these things developed isn't inherently a reason to say that the idea of gender changed. It's incredibly common for trans men and women, before they're out to themselves, to just grope at their dysphoria not knowing why their body repulses them, or why being reminded of their assigned gender causes them pain, or why certain activities give them this comforting peace. That kind of stuff is only obvious in hindsight when you have the experiences of other people who've gone through the same thing.

The author Terry Pratchett collected a lot of material on this topic, and eventually wrote the novel Monstrous Regiment about it.

This could be construed as an attempt at the normalization of abnormal human behavior. People 500 years ago did “x”, so you’re opinion on that now should be dictated as such.

I this see across media platforms. Not blatant support of an idea, but a perspective on it that assumes a specific reality. Not that this is necessarily what is going on here, but I am seeing it everywhere. Call me crazy...

I'm getting an "Infinite loop detected in logic" error trying to understand your point here.. Normal is just what most people are doing at the moment?

GP is referring to the "argument from age" fallacy, the belief that prior generations had better knowledge/wisdom on certain topics simply because it lasted for so long before it disappeared in the modern age.

also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_marriage

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