LHMP #485 Vaughan 1978 The Sad Case of Thomas(ine) Hall

I’m inadvertently continuing my theme of publications where I’ve already covered a more extensive version of the same material, though in this case by a different author. (Brown, Kathleen. 1995. “’Changed...into the Fashion of a Man’: The Politics of Sexual Difference in a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Settlement” in Journal of the History of Sexuality 6:2 pp.171-193.)

The article opens with a discussion of how Colonial courts seemed to be fond of inscribing penalties for crimes (especially moral crimes) onto a person’s visible presentation, noting that the “scarlet A” that is central to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter was only one of a variety of alphabetic penalties in Massachusetts law. He connects this practice with the unique penalty applied to Thomas(ine) Hall in Virginia in 1629. Hall’s offense was not one of commission but of existence: being intersex and failing to choose one binary gender presentation and sticking with it. (Please see Brown 1995 for the details. Vaughan’s discussion is more scanty and less analytic.) Hall’s sentence was to wear clothing that combined male and female garments, as a visible sign of their transgression. Note that although Hall presented variously at times as male and female, when they had a sexual relationship with a woman, it was when presenting as male.