The Ancient Art of Gender-Bending

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But exactly! The gender-bender heroines and heroes of history were after power, or at least autonomy. For women, masculinization has meant taking part in what patriarchy still considers the "real" world of power and achievement—plus you get to wear comfortable clothes. And for many men, femming has been a welcome escape from the bone-crushing demands of stereotypical guyhood.

Beyond this, though, both sexes, and all sexual persuasions, have discovered a subtler empowerment that comes when you realize that no set of social scripts can contain your humanity. When a gender-bender becomes famous, an entire society may be challenged to decide what it means by maleness, femaleness, toughness, tenderness—even "realness." Nobody in their right mind would minimize the pain and difficulty of living on the gender edge, but what's remarkable about the great gender-benders is how untragic they usually are.

To prove that, we need look no further than Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin Dudevant, whom the world knows as George Sand. An outspoken foe of sexism and an eloquent enthusiast who put the power of her pen behind most European social reforms, Sand "never let a day pass without covering more pages than most writers do in a month," as one biographer put it.

And she was a sharp cross-dresser and cigar smoker whose masculine nom de plume seems to have served as an alternate identity. In her autobiography, The Story of My Life, Sand sings a poignant hymn to the freedom she found when she first doffed her crinolines and unsensible shoes for boots and a boxback coat: "With those steel-tipped heels I was solid on the sidewalk at last. I dashed back and forth across Paris and felt I was going around the world. My clothes were weatherproof too. I was out and about in all weathers, came home at all hours."

One of her many—usually famous, always male—lovers, the poet Alfred de Musset, addressed her as "mon grand et brave George" ("my great and brave George"). French speakers: note the masculine form of the modifiers. Even more tellingly, in many places in her letters and Intimate Journals (never intended for publication) Sand uses masculine forms in addressing or referring to herself. Gender dysphoria? Or the novelist's license to, as writer Molly Giles puts it, "speak with all the voices in your head," including the male ones? Maybe it's also the social reformer's conviction that the two halves of humanity must go forward together—in the same psyche, if need be.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, the Civil War provided unique opportunities for would-be androgynes. One notable attender to the Civil War wounded was the formidable Mary Edwards Walker, the first woman surgeon in the United States Army and still the only woman to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. A pioneer female doctor, Walker was denied a commission as a medical officer when the war broke out. She volunteered anyway, working as an assistant surgeon at the Union front lines. No fan of petticoats, she eventually designed herself some practical drag—a modified male officer's uniform—to wear in the mud and blood.

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