Cross-dressing in another time

What do we know of the experience of cross-dressers and transgender people in Australian history? Not a lot, however a remarkable new book launched tonight fills many of the gaps.

Written by Lucy Chesser, an honorary research associate at La Trobe University, the book looks at cross-dressing and gender inversion within Australian cultural life before the 1930s.

Chesser examines life-long impersonations where women lived, worked and sometimes married as men, and other forms of cross-dressing such as public masquerades, on stage, and men who sought sex while disguised as women.

Titled Parting with my Sex: Cross-dressing, Inversion and Sexuality in Australian Cultural Life, the book centres around the amazing story of Edward de Lacy Evans who arrived in Melbourne in 1856 as a female emigrant.

Adopting a male persona, Evans married Mary Delahunty, who came out on the same ship. The two settled in Bendigo and the relationship lasted several years before ending.

Evans went on to marry two more women and a daughter was born in his third marriage. In 1877 Evans had a breakdown, ending up in the Kew Lunatic Asylum where it was discovered he was biologically a woman.

I make the point that the experience of Evans is incomparable [with today]. The treatment Evans got once he was uncovered was so demonising and horrendous, it’s almost impossible to imagine when we live in the kind of world we live in today, Chesser told Sydney Star Observer.

Chesser pointed out, however, that the past is often misrepresented as a place that was instantly reactive to transgendered people.

The world is so different from what it was, but to see that world as being this wholly repressive, evil place, I think misses a lot of the subtlety that was there as well.

Evans and many other people lived for 20 or 30 years in small communities where there is a lot of evidence to say that their transformation was known of, but often wasn’t pursued in an official way.
Often people didn’t really feel the need to interfere or get the police involved.

Parting with my Sex was launched last week by Lesbian and Gay Archives president Graham Willett at Melbourne’s Hares and Hyenas Bookshop.

Australia is already kind of an inverted place, we’re the bottom of the world, the seasons are inverted, the trees keep the leaves and lose their bark, the black swan and all those kind of tropes. One of the ways people try and fit these revelations in is to say, isn’t Australia a kind of funny place? he said.

Chesser trawled through newspapers, court notes and historical accounts to find the stories.

One of the fascinating things of the project is that I’m looking for something that, in its perfect form, is invisible. I’m only really finding the cases where the intention to live as the other sex or pass as the other sex has come unstuck in some fashion, she said.

People who actually manage to carry it off, well, they’re invisible because no-one’s noticed or nothing has happened to them to come to the attention of newspapers.

info: Parting with my Sex is published by Sydney University Press.