Trans women getting arrested for petty crime.
On my mind while reading on Liddy Bacroff, who went through multiple Weimar/Third Reich prisons and passed at Mauthausen.
(From "Liddy Bacroff [...], 1908-1943," Room of Names, Deceased of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, Mauthausen Memorial.)
Man-Woman's theft, crossdressing, and forging of papers to avoid police surveillance (nice).
But what ultimately got her killed was that bar incident in March 1938. Some onlooker reported her for being "a man in women's clothing." For sitting at a fucking table.
And a diagnosis ("death sentence") from a doctor:
"Tranvestite to [her] core."
Thinking on dress/gender transgression from 1840s onward in US and Europe, often penalized and prosecuted via "anti-disguise" laws.
Explicit outlawing of crossdressing came with anti-crossdressing laws of St. Louis in 1843, Columbus 1848, and Nashville 1850.
What of the anti-disguise laws, though? Also referred to as "anti-mask" or "anti-masquerade" laws.
New York, in 1845, passed what would become the template for anti-disguise laws.
About the same time. Why? What else was happening?
Consider the spectacular anti-rent riots of 1839:
And then consider New York's anti-disguise laws:
And now we have stuff like this:
And then take a look at how Clare Sears frames this development in the 1840s:
["Several states did, however, pass anti-disguise or masquerade laws that encompassed cross-dressing when enforced. In 1845, for example, New York’s state legislature passed an anti-disguise law that made it a crime to appear in public with a painted face or when wearing a disguise designed to prevent identification. Passed in response to rural workers who wore women’s dresses and masks while participating in anti-rent protests, the law was later used to criminalize a wide range of cross-dressing practices. Similarly, in 1874, California’s state legislature passed a masquerade law [...]. As with New York’s anti-disguise statute, local police repurposed California’s masquerade law to arrest multiple people for public cross-dressing over the next one hundred years." (Sears, from March 2023, in Jacobin)]
Sorry for (what is, coming from me, now becoming) the refrain, always pointing out the entanglement of medical pathologization, crushing labor dissent, vagrancy concept, and criminal-making legal devices.
Like, in just five years' time:
1834: Slavery Abolition Act comes into effect (but slaves required to continue laboring as "apprentices" for four years) as Workhouse Act/Poor Law Amendment Act requires "vagrants" and the poor to work minimum number of hours. 1835: Municipal Corporations Act requires nearly 200 English boroughs to establish police forces. 1836: Thuggee and Dacoity Suppression Act in British India targets "any gang of Thugs" with life imprisonment. 1837: Establishment of Irish Constabulary, "Britain's first national police force". July 1838: Vagrancy Act makes "joblessness" a crime. five days later in 1838: technical legal emancipation of Black slaves under "apprenticeship" in British Caribbean. 1839: County Police Act and Rural Constabulary Act encourage judges to establish local/rural police forces.
Of course, race. Peter Boag examines crossdressing law in the western US in the nineteenth century; see his chapter “”He Was a Mexican”: Race and the Marginalization of Male-to-Female Cross-Dressers in Western History."
Sears also authored Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. She describes a continuum of the policing of "public visbility of problem bodies."
Apt setting, since San Francisco passed the 1867 "Ugly Law:
“Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, or an improper person to be allowed in or on the streets, highways, thoroughfares or public places in the City of County of San Francisco, shall not therein or thereon expose himself or herself to public view.”
Pop media making a game out of deducing "the truth," inviting everyone else to play along. From San Francisco again:
"Can You Tell at a Glance Which Are Men and Which Are Women in These Pictures?" (The San Francisco Call, 21 May 1911)
Imperative: becoming co-conspirators.
Regarding the anti-"ugly" and anti-vagrant law templates from California, here's a headline:
("Strangest Union in the World Uncovered Here: League of Beggars, Crippled, Sightless, Epileptic and Deformed," Los Angeles Times, 1913.)
Today, we've got San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland--the whole US--crushing "vagrancy" and severely punishing the homeless. Outlawing of "disguises"/masking at public demonstrations. Sweeping "anti-drag laws" and "bathroom bills" reasserting crossdressing/predator-in-disguise stuff.
Disguise, duplicity, masquerading, eluding, evading, etc.
Maybe I, Transvestite-to-Her-Core, do support subterfuge broadly. (Subterfuge Broad, name for life-affirming persona?)
Thinking about whoever it was in the Hamburg tavern who reported Liddy for sitting at a table. Should've shut the fuck up.
