Smithsonian, Please Stop Erasing Trans People From History

Recently the Smithsonian posted to their website a story called “The Women Who Fought in the Civil War“. In this piece the author wrote:

One of the best-documented female soldiers is Sarah Edmonds—her alias was Frank Thompson. She was a Union soldier, and she worked for a long time during the war as a nurse.

and then wrote about transgender Civil War veteran, Albert Cashier (who I wrote about here):

One of my favorite stories of the Civil War era is of Jennie Hodgers, and she fought as Albert Cashier. She enlisted in Illinois and she fought the entire Civil War without being discovered and ended up living out the rest of her life as a man for another fifty years. She even ended up receiving a military pension and living at the sailors’ and soldiers’ home in Illinois as a veteran. The staff at the home kept her secret for quite sometime, even after they discovered that she was a woman.

Even though it seems pretty outstanding that women were disguising themselves as men and going off to fight, it seems like actually they were accepted amongst their peers. This kind of loyalty to your fellow soldier in battle did in certain cases transcend gender. It’s pretty amazing; there was a lot of respect.

As I said in my previous post about Albert:

Even a cursory look at his life suggests that he was transgender. The evidence:

1. He volunteered on August 6, 1862 in Boone County. When his regiment was retired in 1865, they were in Belvidere, Illinois. He could have stayed in his home town of Bevidere, if he wished to return to life as a woman. Yet he moved 138 miles southeast of Boone County, to Saunemin, IL and continued to live as a man.

2. It might be argued that he did not live as a woman because he wanted the pension that came with service. But to receive the pension Albert would have been required to take a physical exam. He refused until later in life, when he was assured that his secret would not be made public.

3. At the Watertown State Hospital for the Insane, he had NOTHING to gain from living as a man. Yet even then when forced to wear a skirt he would bring the skirt in with pins to make the skirt into pants.

4. Albert secured his home with a number of locks, changing them  frequently in case someone had somehow gotten a key. If he was going to be away from his house, he nailed the windows shut. Why? Being female bodied, there would be some evidence in his home of this.

It’s obvious that Cashier lived his life as a man. To try and appropriate his life and his history is to erase his gender identity and the life he lived.  It’s one thing to have people with an agenda to try to appropriate transgender people’s life to promote their own agenda, but it’s quite another when it’s the Smithsonian.

Please Smithsonian, stop erasing transgender people’s lives.

Transadvocate contributor: Marti Abernathey  (1925 Posts)

Marti Abernathey is Transadvocate.com's blog editor. She's also a podcaster, activist, and radiologic technologist in Madison, Wisconsin. She's been a part of various internet radio ventures such as TSR Live!, The T-Party, and The Radical Trannies, to name a few. As an advocate she's previously been involved with the Indiana Transgender Rights Advocacy Alliance, Rock Indiana Campaign for Equality, and the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition. She's taken vital roles as a grass roots community organizer in The Indianapolis Tax Day Protest (2003), The Indy Pride HRC Protest (2004), Transgender Day of Remembrance (2004), Indiana's Witch Hunt (2005), and the Rally At The Statehouse (the largest ever GLBT protest in Indiana - 3/2005). She was a delegate from Indiana to the Democratic National Convention and a member of Barack Obama's LGBT Steering and Policy Committee.