Louisa May Alcott, the author of the novel Little Women, was transgender
Yes, Louisa May Alcott identified as a man.
Trans people have always been around, and there are quite a few famous authors among them. It seems pretty clear that Ernest Hemingway, for instance, who did his best to presents as a “manly man”, was some shade of transgender.
Anti-trans activists find this hard to handle, as every story about transgender people from history proves that transgender identities are not the end result of postmodernist/liberal gender theory propaganda.
They therefore try to come up with alternative explanations, as in “this person was gay” or “they just explored alternative gender expressions.”
And it is true that for gender variance does not necessarily equals a transgender identity or gender incongruence as we understand these phenomena today.
Still, if someone openly tells the world that they would rather be a person of another gender, it makes sense to respect that identity. Moreover, the term transgender is open enough to encompass a lot of gender variance.
Louisa May Alcott
In a piece in the New York Times Peyton Thomas argues convincingly that Louisa May Alcott (1832 - 1888) was transgender. Louisa May Alcott was an American author and poet best known for the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo’s Boys.
Thomas discusses to the pros and cons of assigning gender identities to dead people and concludes:
In the absence of necromancy to really settle the question, we must base our understanding of Alcott’s identity on her writing. “I long to be a man,” she wrote, in one journal entry. “I was born with a boy’s nature,” she added, in that letter to Whitman, and “a boy’s spirit” and “a boy’s wrath.” As a child, she didn’t “care much for girls’ things.” As an adult, just a few years from death, recall that she saw herself as “a man’s soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body.” Why not take Lou at his word?
Indeed, why not?
Read “Did the Mother of Young Adult Literature Identify as a Man?” here.
Woooooow yall cant stop being misogynistic. Why would a woman who is oppressed because of her sex be a man? No reason right???
Also how is “this person was gay” an alternative explanation? So gnc homosexual people must be the opposite sex? That’s homophobic
trans activists with their whole heart say shit like this “I wonder why women who are restricted in every aspect of their lives want to be men to have more freedom??” you think “cis” women enjoy being oppressed and if we don’t we are men??
I read that article yesterday, it wasn’t convincing at all just full of misogynistic stereotypes taken as fact.
These historical revisionist assholes love to forget about women’s oppression and how women of that time were pretty much a step above farm animals. They were property. Women were not allowed to exist outside of the house. They were not allowed to have ambitions or hobbies. Women had to be creative and find ways to live authentically while also in hiding. Women taking on male pen names to get their works published was extremely common throughout history.
Not to mention how homosexuality was viewed at the time, of course it was easier to say they felt like a man in a woman’s body. The ideology at the time literally told homosexuals that is why they were gay. They didn’t have the terms homosexual or same-sex attraction. To them men were straight and if you were a woman who liked women you were actually a man trapped in a woman’s body. It’s homophobia. It has nothing to do with them actually wanting to be men or think they are actually male. They didn’t want to transition because they felt closer to men or liked masculine things, it’s because they wanted to be able to be gay freely and meet other lesbians.
This article is disgusting, offensive, misogynistic, and homophobic. It’s offensive to project your neo-liberal labels on to people that lived in a different time and can’t defend themselves. You all talk constantly about how misgendering is violence and here you are speculating about the supposed gender identity of a dead woman. You should all be ashamed of yourselves. This is embarrassing.
Do you know what scares me the most? People will just read this, get excited about their gender feels, and integrate it into their knowledge and belief system. They won’t question the historical accuracy of the article or look for the sources on her life. I just wonder how much manipulation regarding history people can get away with. It still blows my mind that they revise history when people are still alive to tell the real story. I guess that’s why they trans and attack they dead. They can’t defend themselves.











