Female Husbands: A Trans History

An absolutely stunning deep-dive into historical transgressions of gender. Female Husbands: A Trans History is one of the first in a hopefully long and noted trend of research into gender. Author, professor, researcher, and activist Jen Manion has done extensive work for the LGBTQ communities throughout the country during their career, and this latest book serves as an extension of that. Manion takes the readers through an empathetic yet thoroughly researched journey through the lives of historical queers. Female husbands—those that were assigned female at birth but lived their lives as men and married women—were people who defied gender norms in a time when those norms could not have been more suffocating and all-consuming. However, what makes this such a pivotal literary development is that this book contains stories of people who lived full and happy lives as men, sometimes for the entirety of their adult lives.

The predominance of trans history has come from a place of asylum records and violent newspaper headlines. This inherited trauma is still being incrementally rewritten in the LGBTQ community today, and Manion’s literary treatment of the historical figures found in the pages of this book I believe will serve as a crucial continuation of that healing. The importance of knowing that there are also trans stories of success, bounty, and love is one that cannot be measured in real time but I urge you to get the word out about this phenomenally written piece of LGBTQ historical research.