the article i just read about lou alcott (louisa may alcott, author of little women) was wild because it was literally like "he preferred being called lou and his whole family always called him that. he never identified with girlhood or liked feminine things and said he had a boy's spirit and longed to be a boy and believed he was a man's soul put into a woman's body. he loved dressing up as a man and passing for a man and being flirted with by people who thought he was a man. he called himself a gentleman and a father to his adopted children and his own father once lamented sending "his only son" to war when he enlisted in the army as a nurse.
...calling her a trans man is reductive and misses the point of her work though lol she was obviously a cis woman who was speaking figuratively because women in the 1800s weren't allowed to wear pants!"
Peoples biggest defense is always ‘we don’t know how they would identify in this day’ which IS true but I find it interesting how they have little problem ‘justifying’ Lou’s feelings by calling him a cis lesbian or a nonbinary person or a tomboy.
There’s also so much terf rhetoric towards this subject of Lou’s identity that I’m almost certain it’s just discrimination…
“She was confused”
“She didn’t understand the world properly”
“She was trying to escape oppression”
I don’t know why people are so convinced trans men/mascs existing is anti-feminist but it’s not, people literally parrot misogynistic points just to take away their identity and that should say enough.
We don’t know how he would have identified today, however; we DO know how he preferred being referred to in his daily life and how he saw himself in the past. I think he is owed that much.
Some articles I found:
“I am more than half-persuaded that I am, by some freak of nature, a man’s soul put into a woman’s body.”
Louisa May Alcott felt a strong affinity with manhood.
To family and friends, she was Lou, Lu or Louy. She wrote of herself as the “papa” or “father” of her young nephews. Her father, Bronson, once called Alcott his “only son.” In letters to her close friend Alfie Whitman, Alcott called herself “a man of all work” and “a gentleman at large.”
This is all BARELY mentioned in the Wikipedia entry, so an opportunity there to help fix the representation.
ah, thank you, i think that first article from LGBTQ nation may have been the one i read back in july when i posted this! just from quickly skimming over it, it appears to include all these points i mentioned and argues in favor of lou alcott being a trans man—but then includes a section at the end about the idea that "she was just speaking figuratively and saying she was a trans man is backwards and anti-feminist" 🙄🙄 transmascs existing and living their lives is not anti-feminist. saying that someone who called himself all kinds of masculine terms and enjoyed being seen as a man just might have been a man is not illogical or unreasonable, these people are just transphobic.
@chiefexecutiveossomancer asked if i could find the article, and @petiolata also mentioned wanting to read it, so here you go!
