History

It’s difficult to think of a world with clearer gender roles than the Old West, or at least the Old West as we know it from movies, television shows, and genre novels. But when historian Peter Boag studied the real nineteenth-century American West, a different narrative emerged. For one thing, hundreds of people lived as the opposite gender from the one they were assigned at birth—and that’s just counting the people whose stories were reported in newspapers.

In many cases, Boag writes, cross-dressing served practical purposes. It was a disguise for criminals on the lam, a safety device for traveling women, and a necessity for taking jobs reserved for the other gender. But, he argues, in many cases Old West “cross-dressers” were probably people who we would identify as transgender today.