Trans men in history: the lives behind the firsts

Trans men, and people assigned female at birth who lived as men, turn up in the records of many centuries, from the Spanish Empire in the 1600s to Brazil under military rule. Some left their own words; others are known only through what courts, doctors, neighbours and newspapers wrote about them. This page follows eight of those lives with their dates and sources, and says plainly where historians disagree about how to describe them.

Before you start: names, words and what we cannot know

Most of the people below never used the words trans man, transmasculine or FTM, because those words did not exist yet. A profile of Alan L. Hart on the Connecticut History site notes that he did not call himself transgender, because the word only came into use in the 1960s. So each portrait says what the record supports: that someone lived as a man, described himself in a certain way, or is read as a trans man by historians, and where that reading is disputed.

We use the names and pronouns each person lived by, and we leave out birth names, which the sources give for anyone who needs them. We also leave out medical details. Where someone's transition made medical history, we say so and stop there.

Several of these men were outed, by newspapers, by doctors, or by the staff of a hospital that cared for them in old age. That is often why we know about them at all, and it is worth remembering that much of this record exists because someone's privacy was broken. For the wider question of who came first, see who was the first transgender person?

Antonio de Erauso: the soldier historians still argue about

Antonio de Erauso was born in San Sebastián, in the Basque Country, in 1592 according to a baptismal record (other accounts say 1585), and was placed in a convent as a small child. At about fifteen Erauso ran away, and from then on lived as a man under a series of male names, among them Alonso Díaz and, later, Antonio de Erauso. Erauso is widely known by a nickname, the Lieutenant Nun (la Monja Alférez).

Erauso sailed to Spanish America and served as a soldier in Chile, in the Spanish Crown's war against the Mapuche, reaching the rank of alférez, a junior officer. The accounts of those years are full of duels, brawls and killings, and this is not a life to turn into a simple hero's story. In 1623, arrested in Huamanga, in what is now Peru, Erauso told a bishop about being assigned female and having lived in a convent. Back in Europe, the usual account is that Pope Urban VIII granted permission to go on dressing as a man, although scholars disagree about whether the two ever met. From 1630 Erauso lived in New Spain, now Mexico, working as a muleteer, and died there around 1650.

How to describe Erauso is a live debate. The scholar Sherry Velasco has argued for reading Erauso as transgender, and also as lesbian; others read Erauso as a lesbian who used men's dress to avoid the attention of the Church, and others again conclude that Erauso identified as a man. Even the autobiography, first printed in Paris in 1829, is disputed, because researchers cannot agree on who wrote it. The sources we used do not even agree on pronouns, which is why we have written Erauso's name rather than he or she.

Albert Cashier: a Union soldier who stayed a man

Albert Cashier was born in 1843 in Clogherhead, County Louth, Ireland, and made his way to Illinois. On 6 August 1862 he enlisted in the 95th Illinois Infantry, and served three years with the regiment, which fought in more than forty engagements, including the siege of Vicksburg and the Battle of Nashville, until all its men were mustered out in August 1865.

His story does not end with the war. He settled in Saunemin, Illinois, and worked as a farmhand, church janitor, cemetery worker and lamplighter. He voted and drew a veteran's pension, both at the time open only to men, and belonged to the local post of the Union veterans' association, the Grand Army of the Republic.

Late in life, after he was hurt in an accident, hospital staff learned that he had been assigned female at birth. When failing health took him to a state hospital, the staff there made him wear a dress, newspapers took up the story, and his pension was challenged. Men who had served with him, and his neighbours, vouched for him. He died in 1915 and was buried in uniform, under a headstone with his name and his regiment.

A post on the blog of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, which holds the records of that veterans' post, calls him he, because that was the name and identity he appears to have preferred for the rest of his life. He lived as a man for more than fifty years, and that consistency is why several historians and writers describe him as a trans man.

Amelio Robles Ávila: a colonel of the Mexican Revolution

Amelio Robles Ávila was born on 3 November 1889 in Xochipala, in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. As a young person he learned to ride and handle weapons, skills his society associated with men. Around 1912 he joined the Zapatista forces of the Mexican Revolution, and it was in the army that he took on his identity as a man, openly, among his fellow fighters.

Mexico's National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) stresses that this was not a disguise, as it was for many women who wore men's clothes during the war to protect themselves. He fought with the Zapatistas for several years and rose to the rank of colonel. Afterwards he farmed, joined agrarian and veterans' organisations, and made a life with his partner Ángela Torres, with whom he adopted a daughter.

In the 1970s Mexico's Ministry of Defence decorated him as a Veteran of the Revolution, recognising him as a man, though it did not recognise his rank of colonel (the CNDH dates the decoration to 1974). He died on 9 December 1984, having kept his identity to the end.

The historian Gabriela Cano, of the Colegio de México, whose research helped restore his identity as a man to the record, describes his masculinity as the result of a deep personal desire rather than a strategy for survival. The CNDH now writes that historians agree he should be recognised as a transgender man. His memory is still contested all the same: in Xochipala, a museum opened with the support of public cultural institutions bears the feminine form of his name.

Two doctors who made medical history

Alan L. Hart

Alan L. Hart was born in Kansas in 1890 and grew up in Oregon. He graduated from the University of Oregon's medical school in 1917 and, that winter, became one of the first trans men in the United States known to have had gender-affirming surgery. He then legally changed his name and began living openly as a man.

In February 1918, while he was working as an intern in San Francisco, a former classmate recognised him, the San Francisco Examiner ran the story, and he had to resign. Soon afterwards he told the Albany Daily Democrat: "I have been happier since I made this change than I ever have in my life, and I will continue this way as long as I live." Press exposure forced him to move several more times.

His career made history of another kind. Hart pioneered the use of chest X-rays to find tuberculosis before symptoms appeared, and ran statewide screening programmes, the last of them for Connecticut's State Tuberculosis Commission, until his death in 1962. He also wrote novels.

Michael Dillon

Michael Dillon was born in 1915 in England and studied at Oxford. He transitioned between 1939 and 1949, becoming one of the first trans men known to have had gender-affirming surgery, and in 1946 published Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology, an early book arguing for more understanding towards people who wanted to change sex. He qualified as a doctor and worked as a ship's surgeon.

In 1958 a cable from the Daily Express reached him on board ship, asking about his "change-over". The story that followed, prompted by his place in the line of succession to an Irish baronetcy, made public a history he had kept private for fifteen years, six years after Christine Jorgensen's transition had become world news.

He left the sea, went to India and became a Buddhist monk under the name Lobzang Jivaka; his publisher notes that his novice ordination made him the first white European man to be ordained in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. He died in 1962. His autobiography, Out of the Ordinary, was blocked from publication in the 1960s and only appeared in 2016.

Building a community: Reed Erickson and Lou Sullivan

Reed Erickson

Reed Erickson was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1917 and trained as a mechanical engineer at Louisiana State University. He expanded the family's lead-smelting business, became very wealthy, and in 1964 founded the Erickson Educational Foundation.

The foundation funded early research on trans health, provided education and referrals for trans people who needed transition care, and supported gay and lesbian causes. It also paid for the National Transsexual Counseling Unit (its name uses the clinical word of the time), founded in San Francisco in 1968 and described as the first peer-run counselling programme for trans people; our history of the Compton's Cafeteria riot explains the world it grew out of. Erickson moved to Mexico in the 1970s, and his later years were marked by drug use. He died in 1992.

Lou Sullivan

Lou Sullivan was born in Wisconsin in 1951 and kept diaries from the age of eleven until his death. He was gay, and in the 1970s a gender clinic turned him away because of it: the medical rules of the time expected trans people to be heterosexual after transition. He found other doctors, and spent years persuading clinicians to stop treating sexual orientation as a reason to refuse care.

In 1986 he founded FTM, a Bay Area group for trans men that grew into FTM International, and he was a founding member of San Francisco's GLBT Historical Society, which holds his papers. After his HIV diagnosis he remarked, in words that are quoted in slightly different versions, that the clinic had told him he could not live as a gay man but it looked as if he would die as one. He died in 1991. His selected diaries were published in 2019 as We Both Laughed in Pleasure and won a Lambda Literary Award.

João W. Nery: a first in Brazil

João W. Nery was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1950 and trained as a psychologist. In 1977, under Brazil's military dictatorship, he became the first trans man known to have had gender-affirming surgery in Brazil, carried out in secret. He then had his documents changed, also in secret, and in doing so lost the rights attached to his old identity, including his psychology diploma.

He told his story in two memoirs, Erro de pessoa (1984) and Viagem solitária (2011), and spent his later years as an activist. A gender identity bill introduced in Brazil's Congress in 2013, which would let trans people change their name and sex on civil records, is known as the João W. Nery law. He died in October 2018, aged 68. Our list of books by trans and non-binary authors has more on Viagem solitária.

Where to go from here

These eight lives are a starting point, not a complete list. They lean towards Europe and the Americas, where the records we could check in English, Spanish and Portuguese were kept, and they leave out many people whose stories are told in other languages or were never written down.

Some other trans men already appear on this blog. The jazz musician Billy Tipton, and Robert Eads, whose last year of life is filmed in Southern Comfort, are both in our list of trans films and series.

For more trans history, our guide to LGBTQ+ History Month is a good place to continue. And if you are a trans man more interested in your own dating life than in the past, what dating is like as a trans man is the next read.