NEW^YORKPUBLICLIBRARY^ DIGITAL^ COLLECTIONSevent of murder, negligence or other wrongful death. In this
case, Shelton believed that a marriage certificate carried more
weight than a medical report. He declared: “I considered it
impossible for him to be a woman, as he had a wife.” While
others were flabbergasted at the development, and reporters
began using feminine pronouns in reference to Allen, Shelton
stood fast in his view of Allen’s manhood.Gender and danger
For those assigned female at birth, living as a man was never
without risk; for some, it was filled with hardship and danger.
Such was the case for Joseph Lobdell, a hardworking and
resourceful person who grew up in Westerlo, New York state,
outside Albany. Lobdell had considerable responsibility in their
family from a young age, working on the farm, tending the ani-
mals and hunting game in the surrounding woods.
As someone who was perceived as a young woman, Lobdell
was celebrated for their devotion and many talents, including
a knack for hunting, farming, reading, writing and teaching. In
Lobdell’s 1855 memoir of these early years, The Female Hunter
of Delaware and Sullivan Counties, NY, they complain of thequeerness – especially for someone like Mary who chose to
marry a female husband.
And yet sometimes circumstances required female wives
to do just that: deny their difference and claim that they
didn’t even know that their husbands weren’t male. In 1829,
James Allen lay dead on a table at St Thomas Hospital, as the
senior medical student, John Martin, undertook an autopsy.
Martin declared Allen dead upon arrival, and determined
the cause of death as blunt trauma to the head, reporting, “the
whole of the bones of the skull were fractured”. Unexpectedly
for all involved, Martin had more to report, declaring: “the
dead is a woman”.
Though Martin reported his news rather matter-of-factly,
the room was filled with those who knew James Allen to be a
man: co-workers, boss, neighbours. Even the coroner, Thomas
Shelton, had to reckon with the conflict: the marriage certifi-
cate declared James a legally married man, whereas Martin had
created a medical document that designated them a woman.
Shelton was a lawyer, not a medical man. His work as
coroner was about making sure that cause of death was properly
designated, and holding appropriate parties accountable in the
Portraits of a relationship
An account of the story of James Allen,
whose sex at birth was revealed only
by an autopsy conducted after their
death. Again, the account suggests
that Allen’s wife was unaware,
even after 21 years of marriageTransgender history