A few cases of individuals who were assigned female at birth who lived as men in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth have become widely known by being often cited in LGBTQ histories. But, as Emily Skidmore shows in her well-documented history, these instances were surprisingly common. Newspapers across the country regularly ran stories of men who were “discovered” to have been assigned female, such that she was able to find sixty-five examples from the 1870s to the 1930s. Also contrary to expectations, many of these trans men lived in nonmetropolitan areas or small cities, instead of the major urban centers associated with queer people, and the coverage of the disclosures in the trans men's local newspapers was often remarkably understanding and supportive, rather than being lurid and sensational.

Skidmore uses these findings to persuasively argue that LGBTQ history, with its focus on the formation of urban queer subcultures, needs to be rethought, with trans history (or at least trans male history) being conceptualized differently than lesbian and gay history. At a time when many lesbian and gay individuals moved to major cities to lead “queer” lives – to find others like themselves and establish communities of individuals who violated hetero-gender-normativity by pursuing same-sex sexual relationships – many trans men were doing the exact opposite. As Skidmore documents, trans men did not seek out “queers” or seek to be “queer” themselves; they mostly remained in small towns and more rural areas, where they lived as many other men, aligning themselves with the hetero-gender-normative values of their communities.

Skidmore contends that it was because trans men were seen as upholding community virtues like working hard and being good family men that they could find support, tolerance, and sometimes even acceptance from their rural neighbors when they were discovered to have been assigned female. The nature of familiarity in small communities, in which people all know each other and often each other's foibles, also meant that trans men's gender transgression was typically framed as just another eccentricity, even as much of the psychological literature and national sensationalist newspapers were representing gender nonconformity as deviant and pathological. This difference in the reception of trans men provides convincing evidence for Skidmore's conclusion that local beliefs about social norms and community membership were more influential than sexological theories in determining how gender was understood well into the twentieth century.

Skidmore further argues that race and citizenship also had far more influence than sexology on how trans men were viewed in public discourses in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. In order for many members of predominantly white, rural communities to tolerate individual differences, the person in question had to be seen as “one of us,” and people of color and noncitizens were cast as permanent outsiders. While this thesis seems intuitive, Skidmore does not provide much evidence to support it. She offers examples of how a Russian immigrant, a New Zealand immigrant, and a multiracial US citizen who often represented himself as South American were portrayed as a foreign threat to the country's racial and gender order, especially as a danger to white women, by newspapers in the early twentieth century. However, she fails to offer cases of people of color who were recognized as citizens but, at the same, were also considered beyond the bounds of proper citizenship. Even the person who indicated that he was South American was characterized positively by his local press and discussed favorably by local officials, despite national coverage depicting him as a predator on unsuspecting white women. I do not doubt that trans men of color faced greater hostility from the dominant society in that era, just as they do today, because of racism and white supremacy; I just wish that she had been able to find and present newspaper stories that could bolster this argument.

While the apparent lack of press coverage of trans men of color presumably accounts for the paucity of comparisons across race, the absence of any mention of individuals who lived as women but were assigned male is a weakness of the book. Other histories of gender transgression, most notably Peter Boag's Re-dressing America's Frontier Past (2011), have shown that the public “discovery” of trans women was not uncommon in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth. Even with its focus on trans men, True Sex would have benefited from making comparisons to the reception of trans women, who, because of misogyny and male privilege, were less likely to be considered upstanding members of their communities.

But these weaknesses aside, True Sex is a groundbreaking work that not only fills in some critical gaps in LGBTQ history, but also demonstrates that the dominant narrative of this history has to be reconceptualized. It should be a required text in courses in LGBTQ history and trans studies and on the reading list of anyone wanting to understand how gender in the past was more complicated than we have been led to believe.