American History Corner: The Story Of Thomas(ine) Hall
It's a Colonial tale you probably haven't heard yet!
Hello, happy Thanksgiving week, dear readers!
How about a seasonally appropriate story, one about a pilgrim! Actually, not technically a pilgrim, but an American immigrant indentured servant, born in 1603 in Newcastle upon Tyne, England.
Thomasine Hall was christened as a girl, raised as a girl, and as a child enjoyed girlish things, like sewing and making lace. But at some point as an older teenager, she cut her hair, called herself Thomas, and served in the military as a man, fighting for the French Huguenots. Then after a few years of that, Thomas returned home, and went back to doing needlepoint and presenting as Thomasina, or as a court later put it, “Hee changed himselfe into woemans apparel and made bone lace nd did other worke with his needle.”
Then in 1627, Hall went back to going by Thomas, and indentured themselves to work in the New World, serving on a plantation near Jamestown, Virginia, in a new settlement, Warrosquyoacke village, named after the Warraskoyak tribe of the Powhatan Confederacy, who were already living there.
Anyway, after getting settled in Virginia, Hall did not feel like going about as Thomas or Thomasine all the time. Sometimes they would breech up as Thomas, and other times in a ladies’ hat and apron as Thomasine.
None of the colonists knew what to think about this, but they were sure it had to be something bad and probably sexual. Was Thomas pretending to be a woman to sneak into private female spaces and have a debaucherous affair with a maid named Great Besse, which would have been against the law? Or, was Thomas pretending to be Thomasine to seduce men into accidentally having gay sex, which would have been maybe worse? The villagers had to know. So they sent three busybody matrons — Alice, Dorothy and Barbara — to go check out Hall’s genitals while they slept, and also to look for signs of witchcraft, as was the style of the time.
And check genitals the matrons did, more than once. It seems NOT LIKELY that Hall slept through all this, but that is what our story says. Anyway, after multiple late-night peeps, Alice, Dorothy, and Barbara could not figure it out, and appealed to Hall’s master, John Atkins, to also take a look.
And then they all went to look at Hall’s genitals together, and after staring for what had to have been a very long and extremely uncomfortable while, Atkins decided that he saw something protruding, about an inch long. So he declared Thomas was actually a man, and ordered him to wear men’s clothes. And that meant Hall could also be punished for debauching Great Besse, and also that Hall was now fair game for other volunteer male genital inspectors of Warrosquyoacke. Two of them, Francis England and Roger Rodes, confronted Hall, and forced down their breeches, hollering “Hall thou hast beene reported to be a woman and now thou art p[ro]ved to bee a man, I will see what thou carriest!” And then those two assholes said that they saw a male part too.
So, Atkins appealed to his higher-up in the colony, Captain Nathanial Bass, to punish Hall. To his credit, Bass seems to not have demanded a genital inspection, and instead like a not-crazy person just asked Hall, were they a man or a woman? Hall said they were both. So Bass decided not to punish Hall, on the grounds that the alleged man-parts they were packing were not sufficient to debauch anybody. Back then, somebody who was not man enough to be a man was legally a woman, and Captain Bass ordered Hall to go back to dressing like a woman.
But the “there’s only two genders” angry villagers were not satisfied with that, either, and in 1629 they went all the way to the Quarter Court of Jamestown, presided over by the governor, John Pott, demanding that Pott decide a gender for Hall, and force Hall to stick to it, once and for all. Pott took testimony from witnesses and Hall, which is how we know all of this. In court Hall explained, mysteriously, “I goe in weomans aparell to gett a bitt for my Catt.” What did that mean? Who knows? Your guess is as good as anybody’s. Sounds kind of cool, though.
Anyway, in the end, Pott concluded that Hall was both a weoman and a hee, with a “dual nature”:“hee is a man and a woeman, all the Inhabitants there may take notice thereof.”
Pott ordered Hall to “goe clothed in man's apparell, only his head to bee attired in a coyfe and croscloth with an apron before him.” So ladieswear on top, and menswear on the bottom, kinda. This apparently satisfied the colonists’ concern that somebody might be misled into debauchery.
The coyfe (coif) is the bonnet-ish head wrap up there. And the men’s apparel would have looked like what the people getting stabbed down below are wearing, those poufy breeches.
Did we mention the Powhatan were not happy to have the English there? In between warring with Opechancanough, typhoid, dysentery, starvation, and the miserable toil of growing and curing tobacco in a brackish, malarial marsh, you’d really think the colonists had bigger worries than spending months thinking about their neighbors’ breeches-contents. But they didn’t!
And they still don’t, apparently, even though before there was an America, one of the earliest white-people legal decisions ever here recognized that gender can be a nonbinary thing. And at least 1.5 percent of people are born with intersex traits, which is three times as many as people who identify themselves as trans. Some people may never even know they have intersex traits, and some people have ambiguous genitals. Where do Nancy Mace and Mike Johnson think they are supposed to use the bathroom? Do they want to use the Bass legal standard that a dick must be at least debauchery-sized to make somebody count as a man? How about just worry about your own dysentery?
What happened after to Hall, and what they thought about all of this, has been sadly lost to time. But Hall is far from the only gender-bendy person from early American history! For instance, the first native-born American to found a religious community in 1780 was also a non-binary person. But that is another story, for another day.
Happy almost-Thanksgiving!
[Wikipedia/ World History/ Brown, Kathleen. “‘Changed... into the Fashion of Man’: The Politics of Sexual Difference in a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Settlement.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 6, no. 2 (1995): 171–93. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3704121].
Somehow, I doubt this historical legal precedent will be quoted by Alito.
Sherrod Brown tells Manu Raju "do NOT congratulate the GQP because their lies worked, and got them elected. It's YOUR job to expose their lies." Amen, Sherrod!