President Trump’s proclamation by tweet Wednesday that he was banning transgender people from serving in the military in “any capacity” is the latest twist in a thoroughly modern controversy. Trump’s declaration would overturn a policy only recently put in place by the Obama White House as the armed forces continue to grapple with modern issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. But behind the 21st century contretemps is a history that predates the musket.

“They wouldn’t know what in the world you meant by the world transgender, but there have women serving in men’s dress in armies since the beginning of wars,” said Elizabeth Leonard, a professor of history at Colby College. “It’s a story that we keep losing sight of.”

Cross-dressing has roiled the ranks of armies at least as far back as Joan of Arc, the 15th century military genius who was burned at the stake for heresies that included wearing a man’s uniforms. Leonard’s own expertise is the Civil War, a time when the ranks were filled with hundreds of women who cut their hair, put on pants and took up arms on both sides of the War Between the States.

Researchers at the National Archives have found evidence that at least 250 women dressed as men to fight in the 1860s, some motivated by ideology, some by a taste for adventure and some by the need for a job. Most of those who survived presumably returned to their lives as women. But others continued to live as men after the war.

Albert Cashier was born Jennie Hodgers in Ireland, immigrated to the United States as a stowaway and, at 18, enlisted in the Illinois Infantry Regiment as a man. After the war, in which he fought in some 40 actions, Cashier continued to dress in trousers and, in the modern parlance, identify as a man. He worked as a farmer and handyman for decades and missed out an army pension after refusing to take a required physical exam, according to scholar Jason Cromwell, the author of “Transmen and FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders and Sexualities.”

Cashier’s anatomical secret only came out after he was injured in a 1911 car wreck and treated by doctors. He was committed to an insane asylum but when his story was reported in newspapers, his former army comrades rallied to ensure he was buried as a soldier and recognized on a monument at Vicksburg as one of the Illinois soldiers who fought there.

Sarah Rosetta Wakeman was driven by poverty to work as a male canal boatman and then sign up with a New York unit to fight for the Union Army. The teenage girl passed as a 21-year-old man named Lyon Wakeman and bagged a $154 signing bounty. Recruits were not always closely examined, Leonard said, particularly toward the end of the war when armies on both sides were desperate for “men” of any kind. Among boys barely past puberty, the smooth face of a female impostor could easily have passed without remark.

“If you had teeth to tear open a cartridge and a working thumb and forefinger, that was enough,” Leonard said.

Wakeman died in New Orleans of dysentery after the Red River Campaign and was buried under a stone monument to “Lyon Wakeman.”

In addition to women who concealed their true gender, others created their own. Leonard’s favorite example is Mary Edwards Walker, a New York physician who served as the only woman surgeon for the Union Army.

During a remarkable career (which included being arrested as a spy for treating the wounded behind enemy lines), Walker never claimed to be a man, but she insisted against all custom on dressing as one. She was known as the Little Lady in Pants in her army years, and she adopted more masculine garb as time went on. By the end of her life, she wore a top hat and tails.

That proved even more controversial than the cross-dressers who completely adopted a male/soldier identity, who were often hailed as heroes when their story was uncovered.

“People tended to celebrate the courage of the women who cut their hair and passed as men,” Leonard said. “But they had no idea what to do with Mary Walker. She really was the precursor for the idea of ‘I am just going to be who I am.’”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3686069&forum_id=2#33865246)

Sounds like they were very accepting of the transgenders back then, thanks WaPo!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3686069&forum_id=2#33865248)

WHOA, this is NAZI HATE SPEECH AND TOTALLY NOT OKAY, cancel New Yorker NOW

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3686069&forum_id=2#37661358)

In 1863, a regiment of volunteer infantry was raised in Boston, Massachusetts. At the time, the soldiers of the 63rd Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry were euphemistically referred to as "effeminate men," but today they would almost certainly identify, and be recognized as, transsexual. Despite the crucial need for soldiers following a bloody 1862 campaign, Army of the Potomac commander Joseph Hooker refused to accept the 63rd into service. Hooker was put off by what he called their "faerie-like" appearance (apparently one of the first uses of the term to describe LGBT individuals) and by their request to have 20 minutes set aside each morning and evening for special "maintenance," apparently a reference to the dilator time the women needed to maintain their primitive surgically-created vaginas.

Following the Union's crushing defeat at Chancellorsville, though, and Lee's subsequent invasion of the North, Hooker resigned and was replaced by George Meade only three days prior to the Battle of Gettysburg. Meade was more liberal than Hooker in his willingness to accept soldiers, however unusual they might be, and memorably declared "having a regiment for 23 hours a day is better than having nothing for 24."

The 63rd Massachusetts, with its dilators, was accepted into W. S. Hancock's II Corps on July 1, 1863, as it raced north to join in the Battle of Gettysburg. On July 2, the women of the 63rd completed their dilator maintenance just in time to join in the defense of Cemetery Ridge, where they suffered 68% casualties halting a Confederate breakthrough. In a glowing dispatch after the battle, Meade referred to the 63rd as "the gallant lady-boys who saved the Union."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/07/26/the-forgotten-trans-soldiers-who-saved-the-union/?utm_term=.fe4cef7baa4d

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3686069&forum_id=2#33867646)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3686069&forum_id=2#33867650)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3686069&forum_id=2#33868123)

Saved China, bros

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3686069&forum_id=2#37660342)