This study of legal records from London that mention women cross-dressing as men is an interesting comparison with the article from last month about how cross-dressing in medieval Baghdad revolved around men's sexual tastes. Nearly all of the women discussed in this article came to the attention of the law due to engaging in "ungoverned" sexual activity, that is, any sort of sex outside of marriage. But with a single exception, their cross-dressing appears to have been in service to heterosexual liaisons: either to facilitate free movement in the city, or to enable them to cohabit with a male lover and escape comment from neighbors, or in some cases, because their male lovers found a woman dressed as a man to be sexually stimulating. In only one case is there evidence--and it seems to be the most straightforward interpretation rather than a bit of a stretch--that the cross-dressed woman was engaged in a sexual relationship with another woman. When using cross-dressing as a trope to create opportunities in a historic fiction for same-sex relations, it can be useful to keep in mind that this was not the only reason why women might cross-dress. Most of the women in this article were not motivated by gender identity, or by same-sex desire, but simply by the practical motivation that men were able to more more freely in early modern London than women were. And within this context, it should be noted that the women in these records came to the attention of the law because of their sexual misconduct (with the cross-dressing being noted in passing) and not solely because of cross-dressing. So it's unlikely that they represent the full range of experiences of cross-dressing women in early modern England.
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