This biography falls outside the Project’s pre-20th century scope, but I already owned the book and since I featured an interview about a show based on Carstairs’ life on the podcast, it felt like a good excuse to cover it in the blog. The shifting experiences and receptions of Carstairs’s same-sex relationships over her lifetime provide something of a tour through 20th century lesbian history, though of course Carstairs herself was insulated to an astounding degree by her wealth and connections. Carstairs was definintely gender non-conforming and adopted a number of masculine-coded attributes, including a preference for the name Joe. However there seems sufficient evidence in her own writings to conclude that she did not consider herself transgender, and so I have followed the book's lead in using female pronouns.
And not to put too fine a point on it, Carstairs was not exactly a socially and politically progressive icon. While many aspects of her transgressive life appear glamorous, and while she did embrace some improvements with regard to social and economic conditions for “her people” in the Bahamas, she was solidly imperialist, colonialist, racist, and classist and when she was able to, she ordered the lives of those around her in a manner that was autocratic and sometimes cruel. But she is a part of lesbian history as much as more palatable icons are.
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