It's hard enough trying to untangle the interesections of gender identity, sexuality, economic necessity, and sexism without tossing a completely unreliable narrator into the mix. The narrators of gender-crossing stories already have enough motivations to be unreliable, even setting aside the question of the language and concepts they have to work with. They may be motivated by identifying the narrative that will make their audience most sympathetic (which may change with the audience). They may be motivated by trying to protect a spouse, by presenting her as naive and ignorant. They may be motivated by trying to fit their experiences into existing familiar tropes. (And that's without getting into the motivations that the press and biographiers have for adjusting and modifying their stories.) But sometimes their stories go beyond immediate practicality.
In reading the biography of Albert Guelph (which Manion reveals in a convoluted tangle), I'm reminded a bit of the 17th century biography of James Howard/Amy Poulter and Arabella Hunt. In both cases, a Person Assigned Female initially struck up a relationship with a woman while presenting as female, then claimed that they were a man who had been using female disguise for some strategic purpose and transitioned to presenting as male in order to enter into a marriage. In both cases, the wife's family was actively involved in questioning the marriage when the story started to fall apart. The eventual outcome varied (including different outcomes from Guelph's two marriages).
Guelph presented a romantic back-story: a secret descendent of King George IV and his estranged wife Caroline, forced to live in disguise as a woman for safetey's sake, and supported by income from mysterious benefactors. The themes are less clear in Howard/Poulter's case: a witness at the trial said they had justified the female disguise for reasons relating to a family inheritance which would be resolved when they came of age. In both cases, this raises the question of why the bride and her family would find the story of female disguise so plausible that they were shocked (shocked, I say!) to later discover that the person in question was, in fact, assigned female. The unreliability of all the participants comes into play. Was the bride initially ok with being married to a female-bodied person? (In the case of Guelph's second wife, she continued to support her spouse through the trial instigated by her father, and may well have been a knowing and willing participant.) What role did the parents play either in accepting the original framing or in challenging the marriage after the fact? Can we trust their claims of surprise? (In the case of Guelph's second father-in-law, he does seem to have been opposed to the marriage from the start, and given that he evidently had met Guelph in both gender presentations, one perhaps can't blame him for being suspicious, though one can blame him for not trusting his daughter's choices.)
In any event, if you want some inspirational fodder for plotting the possibilities of queer lives in history, these stories are useful in remembering that truth can be stranger than fiction.
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