When I was younger and read these articles. I was so stupid. Like, the articles were like, “she was pretending to be a man all this time!” I was like, “omg, she must have tricked that poor woman in a relationship all that time, how sad” in my defense these articles danced around the fact that they likely had to hide this due to prejudice or whatever.
I’ve been reading True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the 20th Century. The pattern seems to be that the “tricked the woman into a relationship” thing would come up after the guy had been outed by police or something - throwing your husband under the bus to not be tarred by the association with queerness. Or a couple of cases where a jilted lover got revenge by revealing the “secret.”
When I was younger and read these articles. I was so stupid. Like, the articles were like, “she was pretending to be a man all this time!” I was like, “omg, she must have tricked that poor woman in a relationship all that time, how sad” in my defense these articles danced around the fact that they likely had to hide this due to prejudice or whatever.
I’ve been reading True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the 20th Century. The pattern seems to be that the “tricked the woman into a relationship” thing would come up after the guy had been outed by police or something - throwing your husband under the bus to not be tarred by the association with queerness. Or a couple of cases where a jilted lover got revenge by revealing the “secret.”