Go West Young Man, Go East Young Woman: Searching for the Trans in Western Gender History

Abstract

Feminist scholars and popular writers of women's history have traditionally ignored the possibility of transgenderism among “female-to-male” cross-dressers of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century West. This article examines the multiple reasons for this, including the role that the taint of western myth and the frontier thesis had in coloring available evidence.