Ill with History: Pathologising and Policing Gender Transgression in Late Nineteenth–Early Twentieth Century Australia

Abstract

This is a trans history, but not necessarily a history of trans people. This thesis examines gender crossing in Australia between the 1860s and 1940s, focussing on medical and carceral interactions, economic life, community relations and newspaper scandals. Cases of gender transgression provide a unique window into culture and domestic life in Australia, and the ways that social aberrance was mediated through (and constructed by) medical, psychiatric and carceral institutions. My research comprises detailed case studies and broader comparative analyses of cases of gender crossing from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. I consider narrative cycles of perpetual recency; the role of community complicity and social memory; the categorical constructions of vagrancy and offensive behaviour; and legacies of resistance, liberation and change. Gender crossing was consistently represented as unusual and singular, even in cases where people lived very ordinary lives and were known in their communities. Nonetheless, gender deviance was understood to be common and widespread, though disciplinary legislation and medical diagnostic criteria were applied unevenly depending on context. If gender transgressors were seen to be contributing to the colonial regime (for instance as part pf the productive workforce), they were less likely to be institutionalised or incarcerated. Conversely, gender crossing that was seen to destabilise colonial norms was met with harsher punitive measures. My research draws on archival material including lunatic asylum casebook records, police and court records, will and probate records, shipping lists, memoirs and photographs. I have also made extensive use of historical newspaper records, reaching beyond the courts and the asylums and into communities and broader social worlds. By reconnecting these dislocated lineages, I hope to restore a sense of history and ancestry to trans communities in the present.