By Cristina Cabrera-Ayers (they/them)
This article was constructed from research I understood during my thesis on transgender-lead activism in Queensland, and been written in recognition of the Day of Transgender Visibility, 2022.
To talk about queer history in Australia, we must first be sure of which phase of history we’re talking about. Settler and First Nations concepts of queerness, gender, and/or sexuality were then, and are now, different things, although much of traditional knowledge has been interrupted or repressed by colonisation. The gender binary, as it exists in Australia today, is a very recent addition to the land. Furthermore, the First Nations themselves are just that - nations, each with their own concepts of gender and sexuality. Referring to these varying identities as though they are monolithic, is a form of erasure.
This article will be looking at a case of gender disruption, which occurred in a settler society, using a gender binary. Any expression of sexuality other than heterosexuality was approached as an illness. The individual addressed in this article certainly was not the first ‘transgender’ Australian or the only person disrupting the gender binary at the time. Plenty of other people would have also been living and presenting in ways that defied the settlers’ gender-binary. Edward De Lacey Evans just happened to be an example who gained notoriety, because he had presented himself as a respectable member of the mainstream, cis-heterosexual culture settler Australians had imported.
Cross-dressing as a means of economic freedom and a fictional trope
In the later parts of the 1800s, white Australia had well and truly established itself on the continent through the formation of ports, cattle stations, farms, and other heavy industries. The continent was treated as a ‘frontier’, being remote from other white-majority and Western nations (save Aotearoa/ New Zealand) and still lacking the connecting infrastructure between settlements. Most of the job market back then would have been in heavy, manual labour, which could pay well and allow a lot of freedom of movement between the urban, rural, and remote outback arenas. That is, if you were a man. If you were a woman, you were limited to domestic work if you could get it, and sex work if you couldn’t, most of which would have been concentrated in urban centers. Women dealt with more sever versions of the same problems that restrict their movement today: poorer wages, a male-dominated workforce closed off to them, being predated upon by employers, or rigid societal expectations of femininity and behaviour limiting everything a woman did.
So, naturally, some women adapted by dressing as men to gain access to financial and personal freedom. This was a form of ‘cross-dressing’ separate from the kind you would find in popular theatres and club scenes, where (mainly) cisgender gay men dominated the drag circuits. Rather, women who lived as men were doing it to be permitted into more social arenas. Women dressing as men to achieve greater freedom, is a common trope in popular cultures all over the world: it’s a whole genre of ballads in some regions of China, and Western literature, folklore, and literary works alike are rife with examples of these characters.
In the Australian imagination of the time, women who dressed as men were tragic heroines compelled to do so for survival. As we will see, however, that sympathy had its limits, and the maintenance of the cultural status quo would always take priority.
Evans: the man, the myth, the mortifying ordeal of being outed
Edward De Lacy Evans’ early life is a bit of a mystery. After immigrating from Ireland by boat, Evans lived and worked as a man, managed three different marriages, and even had a daughter with his third wife, before being rumbled as having female gonads. Evans’ case came to public knowledge in 1879. Australian historian and queer theorist, Lucy Chesser, has written a lot of material on Evans and imagines the scene as something cinematic. Evans had been sent from a facility in Bendigo to one in Kew, and was discovered in the process of being forcibly bathed by the orderlies, since he hadn’t bathed since he was taken in six weeks earlier. It’s an easy scene to imagine - and a nightmare scenario for transgender people and cisgender people alike, especially for women of either category. As an AFAB (assigned female at birth), Evans’ treatment and exposure certainly inspired horror in me. So, too, did the descriptions of his subsequent ‘examinations’.
Evans was sent back to Kew and underwent a series of ‘thorough’ medical exams to prove he did, in fact, have female anatomy. The attending doctor’s report would eventually make its way into the papers and describe how Evans fought and cried throughout the process. One of Chesser’s articles suggests the exam was designed as a deliberate violation and humiliation, meant to dominate Evans’ body and make it easier to realign him with his assigned gender.
But before he was ‘discovered’, Evans lived as a man in Australia for just under thirty years. The following flow chart contains some of the milestone events of his life:
It is also interesting to note Evans announced his intention to marry his cabinmate on the ship. He was dressed in female clothing at the time and used his given name, while flirting with other women onboard as well. This, in public view, on an enclosed environment like a ship, he could have easily been attacked or otherwise punished for straying from the norm. But there is no record of Evans being reported or penalised for his behaviour. Indeed, before his outing, the only time in Evans’ case where he appears to receive a punishment for disrupting gender and sexuality norms by pursuing women, might be a bit of a tall tale to add to the scandal. One record of his life claims that, while Evans was working the only job he ever took as a woman, the boss caught him in bed with his wife. For that transgression, he was apparently horse-whipped and fired.
The contemporary media, which framed Evans as a tragic heroine, often pointed to this event as the turning point: Evans had to adopt a masculine identity to find work again. While presenting as masculine, Evans worked in industries that were exclusively male, such as mining and blacksmithing. Framing him as a woman in distress with few options, may have been a way of removing agency from his choice. There was no infrastructure in the settler imagination that could rationalise a person identifying with something other than their assigned gender.
Evans’ three marriages proved challenging too. The third marriage, especially, which produced a child, who his third wife initially claimed was his. As dire as sexual education must have been back then, a married woman would have been expected to understand the mechanisms that lead to a pregnancy. Marquand’s claim suggested she had undertaken some kind of sexual activity with Evans. During the subsequent trial to establish the parentage of Marquand’s child, she attempted to persuade the jury she was convinced Evans was a man, because they had only ever made love in the dark. There was some skepticism, of course, but this was not necessarily pursued at the time. Women and assigned-women were not considered to have sexual drives of their own, so it was not thought that two women (with Evans, of course, counted as a woman at the time) would actively seek out a sexual relationship.
Interestingly, Evans was not constructed as a sexual deviant for his gender presentation. Rather, for Evans, the media were “…concerned for the poor woman’s recovery” (Chesser, 2009, p.383). Some papers proposed that Evans initially adopted a male identity for economic society, but began to ‘believe’ himself to be male and act as such, because the strain was too much for his inferior ‘female’ body. Furthermore, Evans’ pursuit of three marriages was not constructed as a sexual desire for women, but rather a symptom of the accumulating stresses and ‘insanity’ that had caused the adoption of a masculine persona.
Edward De Lacy Evans, pictured with his third wife in a formal portrait. Source: public domain via the State Library of Victoria
Chesser’s academic material suggests that Evans was accepted as a man by his peers, describing the concept of ‘female husbands’ to do so. She defines the term as any historic assigned-woman who presented as masculine and acted as breadwinners and husbands, and were largely accepted by a public that may have been aware of their assigned genders. It is a contested ground in which both transgender men and cisgender lesbians might find representation. The partners of these husbands, too, are contested: were they heterosexual women with transgender men, or lesbians? How did women like Evans’ wives rationalise the anatomical sex of their partners? Chesser also stressed the importance of the informal tolerance for ‘female husbands’. In Evans’ case, he lived and worked for years without being confronted. Once the news broke in the media, acquaintances, colleagues, and neighbours rushed to report the suspicions they had entertained about his ‘true sex’ for years. His face was splashed across papers, including an early photoshop job, which placed two Evanses next to each other: Evans on his arrival, in female clothing, and Evans in a formal portrait taken with his third wife, in male clothing.
Returning to a masculine presentation was impossible. Evans attempted to support himself by capitalising off the novelty of gender disruption in side-shows, but eventually moved into a poor house. He was known there by his given name, lived presenting female, and died there in 1901.
Why did he do it and what does Evans mean for Australian queerness?
Retroactively assigning genders and sexuality to people from the past is a weird subject. On the one hand, contemporary queer communities want to see themselves in the disruptive figures of yesterday. Rarely are we granted the opportunity: there is always some excuse as to why a person couldn’t have been like us, as a woman who loved other women, or a man who did not feel at home in his assigned gender.
On the other hand, these people did not have the vocabulary or context modern queer communities do today, and so attempting to align them with these concepts misrepresents their experience.
Evans fought his outing from the beginning. He concealed it in the asylums and went on a brief hunger strike to be allowed to wear clothes again. Ultimately, he could not find a way to continue presenting as masculine. His society simply would not permit it. But Evans wanted to be perceived as a man, whether or not he felt he was a man.
References:
L, Chesser. “ ‘A woman who married three wives': management of disruptive knowledge in the 1879 Australian case of Edward De Lacy Evans’. Journal of Women’s History, 1998
Ellen Tremaye, alias Edward De Lacy Evans, the Female Impersonator. - Australian Town and Country Journal (Sydney, NSW : 1870 - 1919) - 11 Oct 1879. Trove. (2022). Retrieved 9 March 2022, from https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/70973757.
L, Chesser.“Parting with My Sex for a Season": Cross-dressing, Inversion and Sexuality in Australian Cultural Life, 1850-1920’. La Trobe University