Louisa May Alcott, the author of the novel Little Women, was transgender
Yes, Louisa May Alcott identified as a man.
Trans people have always been around, and there are quite a few famous authors among them. It seems pretty clear that Ernest Hemingway, for instance, who did his best to presents as a “manly man”, was some shade of transgender.
Anti-trans activists find this hard to handle, as every story about transgender people from history proves that transgender identities are not the end result of postmodernist/liberal gender theory propaganda.
They therefore try to come up with alternative explanations, as in “this person was gay” or “they just explored alternative gender expressions.”
And it is true that for gender variance does not necessarily equals a transgender identity or gender incongruence as we understand these phenomena today.
Still, if someone openly tells the world that they would rather be a person of another gender, it makes sense to respect that identity. Moreover, the term transgender is open enough to encompass a lot of gender variance.
Louisa May Alcott
In a piece in the New York Times Peyton Thomas argues convincingly that Louisa May Alcott (1832 - 1888) was transgender. Louisa May Alcott was an American author and poet best known for the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo’s Boys.
Thomas discusses to the pros and cons of assigning gender identities to dead people and concludes:
In the absence of necromancy to really settle the question, we must base our understanding of Alcott’s identity on her writing. “I long to be a man,” she wrote, in one journal entry. “I was born with a boy’s nature,” she added, in that letter to Whitman, and “a boy’s spirit” and “a boy’s wrath.” As a child, she didn’t “care much for girls’ things.” As an adult, just a few years from death, recall that she saw herself as “a man’s soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body.” Why not take Lou at his word?
Indeed, why not?
Read “Did the Mother of Young Adult Literature Identify as a Man?” here.