One of the topics looming over this blog (though likely to be addressed in the podcast) is the historic ambiguity between the expression of gender identity and the use of gender presentation to accommodate heteronormative expectations in the context of same-sex desire. Or, to put it in less academic terms: the conflict between interpreting a historic individual as a trans man or a cross-dressing lesbian. One of the approaches to mapping out this territory is to gather individual life histories that provide examples of how people on the gender/sexuality spectrum behaved and discussed their lives, as well as exploring the social structures and attitudes that they were inhabiting and engaging with.
Thomas(ine) Hall provides one of those stories, all the more interesting for occurring in the early colonial history of North America. Hall’s case also provides a context for examining the phenomenon of modern individuals desiring to “claim” historic persons for a specific gender or sexuality category. Depending on which parts of the story and testimony one finds most compelling, Hall could be seen as a trans man who had been assigned female at birth, as a cis woman who sometimes passed as a man for economic and sexual purposes, as a trans woman (who somehow escaped being assigned male at birth), as a cis man who had been raised in a female role and was comfortable returning to that role at times, as an intersex person who was trying on various gender presentations to see what fit, or as someone (regardless of anatomy) who had a non-binary gender identity and was struggling to express that in a society that required a fixed binary identity. Although some of these possibilities don’t fit as well with the evidence as others, trying to come up with a single, definitive classification inevitably requires erasing key aspects of Hall’s life history and self-expression--much in the way that Hall's contemporaries erased key aspects in order to assign a gender category. Lives like Hall’s may be a better context that simple sexual orientation for considering the changeability of gender/sexuality categories over time.
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