I have written about the subject of this nook, Albert D. J. Cashier, for various sites dedicated to transgender figures in history. Albert was born Jenny Hodgers in Northern Ireland and emigrated to America in about the mid-1800s. He lived as a man for over 60 years and served with the Illinois 95th as an infantryman during the American Civil War, fighting in the siege of Vicksburg under Gen. U. S. Grant. His biological gender was only found out when after he broke his hip in an accident the doctor and nurse examining him removed his clothing.
When I bought this book I was under the impression it was an autobiography. That was what I had gleaned from sources and passed on in my own articles. I was disappointed while reading it to discover that it is at best a fictional "autobiography", a novel really penned by Lynda Durant. Before I go on to explain how much this disappointed me, I will say that the book is very well written, engaging, and offers what appears to be a terrific eyewitness account of the lives and battles of Civil War foot soldiers. As fiction, the author tries hard to create a more complete story than real life can provide, giving Jenny a credible story and a love interest. I appreciated the battle scenes enough to recommend the book to my friend and battle consultant Jack.
But... but.. it is fiction. How much I can't tell by the afterword. The love interest is a fictional character based on a real person, a man who wrote detailed accounts of his comrades in the battles pictured in the novel.
The problem is that it is part of the fate of so many GLBT people in history to have their lives reinterpreted by historians as much as historical novelists to "clean them up", make them not GLBT and even inventing sweethearts to prove the person did not in fact lean toward same sex relationships or an alternate gender identity. Perhaps the authors don't approve of who these individuals may actually h ave been, or they want to identify with them, or maybe they just want to sell books and feel they must gloss over the less seemly issues. I just hate that. The whole reason I have been writing GLBT historical fiction is to repair just this erasure of people's lives from the record, if b no other means than, as Mnique Wittig wrote, "invent" plausible interpretations. It reminds me of all the stories I read as a teen of women who fought as knights, hoping against hope to find a heroine I, as someone who believed she was female, could regard as a role model, someone I could relate to. It never happened. All I found were stories of women who lived as knights until the right man came along to show them being loved by a real knight was better than being one. Now that I am living as the transgender man I am, finding this reinterpretation of Albert Cashier was an even worse disappointment.
Before I realized the book is a novel and not a true biography I started to question whether "transgender" was the right term for Cashier's gender identity. I have been leaning to a definition of someone who at least chose to be believed to be identified as the opposite gender from their bodies. How can we really know except in rare cases what the individual him or herself intended? It seems clear that the Chevalier d'Eon by her own insistence saw herself as female, and Billy Tipton went so far as to marry a woman long before same sex marriage was legal anywhere. But did surgeon James Barry who passed as a man to gain entrance to medical school and continued to identify himself to others as male until his death actually believe himself to be male, somehow accepting as valid what we now know is truye for transgender people, the gender of one's brain being the factor rather than the genitals? In Cashier's case I was about ready to throw in the towel and admit he was not, in fact, a transman but a woman masquerading as a man.
Now I am not so certain. I now know that the conditions that influenced me were Durant's invention.
Just as Durrant may have wanted to write about someone with whom she could identify, I want to identify with him as well. I want to write about him as a transman. Which is more valid? Probably neither and both.
I will however quibble with the details imposed on Cashier's story, in particular the love interest and also the guilt Cashier feels for pretending to be a man, lying to everyone, regretting how lying separated him from others. Then in the Afterword the author philosophizes about how isolated Cashier must have felt, lonely hiding her true nature from others. Well, yeah, especially if he was a transman and his "autobiographer" chose to cram him into the trappings of a heterosexual female, never even considering , for so it seems, that Cashier may have been transgender. Shades of all the gay men in history who have had their stories retold so they could fit into "acceptable norms".
I also regret that Durant's novel is lost to transgender youth and adults as a story of someone who lived true to his inner nature bravely and without hiding from the life he wanted to live. Like biographers who insist that Pres. James Buchanan was either thwarted in his love for a woman or was actual asexual in spite of fifteen years living with another man wand together called "Mr.and Mrs. Buchanan as well as "Aunt Nancy and Uncle Fancy"", I find myself angry that GLBT people's lives can only fall into two categories, utterly overlooked or in fact fraudulently reinterpreted. It just makes me sad, as I felt in a novel where a character who committed suicide because she could not live the life she preferred as a transwoman is completely reinvented by the male name on her headstone. It is, as Shakespeare wrote, "the unkindest cut".
When you consider all the historical figures who have been "cleaned up" to make them safely heterosexual and cisgendered, I call this just plain mean-spirited. Do historians and novelists insist all great women were really men and all great members of other races really white?
