Families play a crucial part in our freedoms and acceptance as humans with rights. We’ve been making waves in what ‘family’ means for centuries. Learn how transmasculine recognition has evolved, from ‘female husbands’ to a High Court victory for birthing parents.
In 1746, Charles Hamilton became headline news as a ‘female husband’, a term which would become an Anglo-American cultural fascination.
Hamilton was prosecuted for vagrancy and sentenced to a public whipping in four towns and to six months imprisonment with hard labour after his wife discovered he was Trans+. It sparked a media obsession over people we’d now consider to be transmasc. But when Hamilton was arrested, he’d passed as male for around ten years, since first wearing his brother’s clothes at 14.
Grown to be “impudent”, “bold” and “very gay” in his charms by age 22-25 – helpful for his job making sales as a quack doctor – he met Mary Price in Wells, Somerset. Price fell into what would become a whirlwind marriage with Hamilton, and they travelled together.
In court she explained how she had ‘bedded’ with Hamilton, unaware of his gender diversity. She ultimately sealed her husband’s fate in this testimony to the court about their relationship and sex life.
Hamilton wasn’t the only ‘female husband’ to gain notoriety in the press from this era, though. Through family, James Howe became the heart of his local community. He passed as male for over 30 years from 1732, beloved and respected in co-running The White Horse Tavern in London’s East End with his wife Mary.
The same year Hamilton was outed, writer Henry Fielding printed a pamphlet calling transmasculine people finding family “monstrous and unnatural”.
When a Mrs Bentley recognised Howe as an old acquaintance, she demanded increasing bribes for concealing his birth-assigned sex. When Howe didn’t pay up, she reported him for highway robbery, forcing him to out himself to defend his innocence in court.
Both stories show a colonial-era Britain obsessed with enforcing strict gender rules. But we can reclaim the harm done to our own by valuing how - even though we know these stories because of extortion and defamation - they show our Trans+ ancestors found home and lived authentically, if only temporarily, as adored and admired members of society.
We’re still fighting for our right to build a loving family without ‘dismantling the people we are’, as a High Court judge rightly expressed it. In a landmark 2025 victory for a trans man denied a Gender Recognition Certificate for wanting to give birth, it was ruled that he’d be legally recognised as male.
Even without the social progress to match, centuries of us have sought a family that embraces who we are, and found it.
Time to do the workbook
The 2026 Trans+ History Week workbook is the ultimate toolkit for shutting down lies about Trans+ people
This year, QueerAF produced the workbook for Trans+ History Week. We mentored five Trans+ researchers and writers to put it together through over 80 hours of research.
That work was spearheaded by lead researcher Gray Burke-Stowe, who ensured the stories have accurate and rich historical sources.
Download it now to immerse yourself in stories of the Lango people of Uganda or the legacy of Miss Major, tracing back to Comptons Cafeteria.
Or maybe you're intrigued by how gender diversity has shown up throughout history, or the trans masc (no longer) underground scene in Tokyo?
Get your copy now, to help us get the word out: We've always been here, we can't be erased, we're more than Trans+, and crucially, we're stronger together.
