In True Sex, Emily Skidmore illuminates little-known lives of trans men from 1870 to 1940 largely through newspaper accounts and makes two sets of arguments—one around the trans community and the other on their representation. Skidmore details how trans men more often chose to live in small towns and hoped to pass as normative men, diverging from our current understanding of LGBT community building and history in which queers congregated in urban spaces to carve out non-normative lives. Additionally, Skidmore notes that sexological theories played a limited role in depictions of trans men. Particularly at the local level, representations appeared sympathetic and tolerant, if not accepting, so long as their existence did not challenge patriarchy, white supremacy, and appropriate citizenship. True Sex makes an important intervention in queer studies by illuminating how trans men embraced rural environments and homonormativity in the years after the Civil War and before World War II.

True Sex details wonderful stories of trans men in five chapters that deal with “female husbands” versus “lesbians,” rurality, whiteness, empire building, and finally marriage. In Chapter One, Skidmore asserts that a discursive shift took place in the popular press from the use of “female husband” to “lesbian” to describe trans men, as new awareness arose around same sex intimacy in the 1870s and 1880s within the backdrop of “romantic friendship.” Chapter Two highlights how small-town communities policed gender transgressions through regimes of familiarity, thus providing more tolerance than an urban environment that disciplined deviant behavior through more impersonal means. Chapter Three details the power of whiteness in tracing the four most widely circulating trans men, who were all white. The press lauded their successful mastery of appropriate masculinity. Chapter Four situates representations of trans men in the context of turn-of-the-century U.S. expansionism and details how for four other immigrant, mixed heritage, or racialized trans men, “foreignness” became a liability. Queer embodiment was all too often a privilege of whiteness according to Skidmore. Chapter Five asserts that many trans men sought to marry to demonstrate their status as “good men,” and additionally details how the local press, more than the national press, looked favorably upon these matrimonial men.

Skidmore's book aligns with a number of existing works in queer and trans history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She argues for the centrality of rural spaces for trans people alongside historians such as Peter Boag. She details how the policing of gender transgressions solidified, if not defined, other forms of acceptability in line with sociologist Clare Sears. And she shows how whites enjoyed greater privilege to transcend conventions of gender than did non-whites.Footnote ¹ True Sex most significantly adds new insight to the current scholarship in its nationwide scope as well as its assertion of differences in how the local versus national press depicted trans men at the turn of the century.

What I found most interesting about Skidmore's work was her numerous stories of vastly different trans men. Jack Bee Garland, a veteran of the Spanish American war, whose father was the Mexican Consul in San Francisco and whose mother was the daughter of a Louisiana congressman, may be one of the more famous people in True Sex. Garland, who was considered a patriot and who lived for some time openly as a trans man, appears side by side with Nicolai De Raylan, whose assignment as female at birth came to light only after his death, at which time the press accused him of being a Russian spy. Skidmore also fleshes out lothario Ralph Kerwineo, of African American and Native American heritage, who, like Garland, has appeared previously in publications, and couches him among the less law-abiding such as forger James William Hathaway and deadbeat or “lazy husband” Robert Gaffney. In the midst of these extremely different trans men, Skidmore successfully points to how they collectively illustrate the centrality of marriage in trans men's personal lives as well as their choice of small towns as a place of belonging.

Perhaps as any historical work should, True Sex in its collection of fascinating narratives raises more questions even in its convincing synthesis. A number of the men appeared to be outed by the coroner, which made me wonder whether trans men were represented differently when outed while deceased than while alive. Additionally, stories of criminal activity committed largely by white men especially compelled me. Would an argument more centrally focused on criminality and whiteness change Skidmore's broader organizing theme of trans men's pursuit of normativity through the vehicle of marriage? Moreover, Skidmore notes that “almost half of the newspaper articles” on trans men cited them as married (13). Does that percentage mirror national rates of marriage for non-trans men? And if not, would it in fact still point to trans men's pursuit of normative values?

In fact, the linking of marriage to homonormativity provoked the most reflection for me, particularly for this time period. Indeed, Skidmore trod cautiously when she stated her aim to “lay bare [homonormativity's] deep roots,” though it is more often thought of as a “formation specific to neoliberalism” (8). Would seeking out marriage still be an act of normativity if it meant the loss of citizenship, decrease in capital, and an increase in the possibility of physical assault, imprisonment, or separation from your family? For the largely-male Asian immigrant population who arrived before 1908 and their white wives, marriage would involve first fleeing to a state that did not ban unions of whites with “Mongoloids,” daily denigration, a loss of citizenship for the woman, and heightened economic insecurity again for the woman, since Asians systematically faced employment discrimination. Interracial Japanese-white couples later endured separation, if not joint imprisonment, when the U.S. government incarcerated Japanese in America during World War II. What might be more widely known are the numerous interracial couples of African Americans and whites who faced difficulties under the brutalities of racism and white patriarchy, as Martha Hodes has documented in the nineteenth-century American South. Perhaps socioeconomic status improved for trans men through marriage in a way that it did not for interracial couples. Still, I suspect that passing as male for someone anatomically female caused immense stress and limited male and heterosexual privilege in any normative form.

Within an explicitly queer or lesbian context, interpreting trans men who marry as homonormative reminded me of the lesbian culture wars of the 1970s and 1980s when self-declared “feminists” accused butch/femme couples, sex with dildos, and female transsexuals as mimicking heterosexuality, replicating gender norms, and therefore aligning with conventions of patriarchy. For much of True Sex, I often saw marriage as risky defiance rather than homonormativity, particularly in the case of a number of men who felt compelled to have multiple wives either simultaneously or successively. Skidmore, too, suggests that these marriages appeared as one in a series of confidence games that more unlawful trans men and likely their wives successfully implemented. I am curious to see how Skidmore's narrative may have shifted if she had positioned marriage as a criminal rather than a normative act.

True Sex is clearly written with fascinating stories of trans men contextualized within a larger frame of queer historiography and would be appropriate reading for graduate and undergraduate students alike for classes on gender, sexuality, whiteness, as well as empire building. Her work pushes back against assumptions of historical progress, asserting that widely circulating stories of trans men in the first few decades of the twentieth century did not pathologize them but instead celebrated their success in embodying ideal masculinity defined by hard work, economic productivity, independence, and service. Perhaps what might come as most surprising is that national stories of trans men during the 1910s were unremarkable and relatively commonplace, that white trans men could be seen embodying ideal masculinity, and that some cis gender communities in the 1920s could see sex and gender as two distinct things in that they could continue to acknowledge someone such as Ken Lisonbee as a man even as they knew he was anatomically female. True Sex is a captivating read that contributes immensely to the burgeoning field of trans history.