![]() ![]() Rarer still: boy consigned to girlhood in a cockeyed, befuddled moment by a Very Important Person whom no one dares to contradict. Literature, too, has girls donning breeches to take up the sword, dames donning mustaches to cross enemy lines and even a Shakespearean heroine passing herself off as a stout-hearted shepherd.īut history and literature seldom have it the other way around: boy passes as a girl. History abounds with women who lived as men: Charley Parkhurst, for instance, the hard-bitten, one-eyed, whip-snapping coachman of the gold rush days who may have been the first woman to vote in a California election or Marina the Monk, who dodged marriage by hieing to a monastery, persuading its brothers she was a man and dying repudiated, in penury, because she was falsely accused of fathering a child or Billy Tipton, the jazz musician who found love with a stripper named Kitty Kelly and wasn’t found out until one of their adopted sons spied incontrovertible evidence of gender in Billy’s deathbed. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |