Two Women Walk into a Theater Restroom

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter begins by returning to Chapter 2 and the basis we find in Ulrichs for a common interest that could fold transgender and intersex people into a coalitional politics aiming to justify same-sex desire. As a test-case, this chapter focuses on the 1870–71 trial of Stella Boulton and Fanny Park, who have been positioned by gay historians mainly as (male homosexual) “cross-dressers” whose failed felony prosecution for inciting others to commit sodomy anticipated the more spectacular prosecution of Wilde a quarter century later. Against this narrative, I read the evidence presented at the trial and what we have come to know of their lives—including the prominence given to Fanny and Stella’s bathroom use, preferred names and pronouns, and physical anatomy—as pointing to a different form of anticipation: Stella in particular becomes more legible as the prefiguration of the modern trans woman, and her example helps to bring into focus similar precursors, including Frederike Blanke who functioned in Ulrichs’ work as a limit case of the Uranian/Weibling. In addition to rereading the trial transcripts, letters, and press coverage to excavate an emergent trans subjectivity, this chapter also highlights similar legal defendants in nineteenth-century Britain who might also have been mischaracterized as gay men or cross-dressers, and suggests that Fanny and Stella’s sustained interests in photographic self-representation indicates how visual depictions have helped to anchor narratives of transsexual transition.