Historian spotlights 19th century transgender relative

HANCOCK, N.Y. –– During the 19th century, transgender individuals were often persecuted and, in extreme cases, incarcerated and/or put in insane asylums. All of these things happened to Joseph Israel Lobdell, who began life as Lucy Ann, and whose relative is sharing his story, over a century later.

Bambi Lobdell, professor at State University of New York, Oneonta wrote the book “Strange Sort of Being” in order to share the story of of her distant relative, who lived his life in the mid-1800s as a transgender man.

“It’s a great story, and it also gives me a chance to educate people,” Lobdell said.

She has been interviewed on the topic by The Advocate magazine, Philadelphia Gay News, Women4Women radio station and The Washington Post. She is now consulting with a filmmaker to turn Joseph’s life story into a feature film.

Lobdell first learned about Joseph from an aunt who gave her his autobiography, “The Narrative of the Female Hunter of Delaware County,” she recalled. She ended up writing her dissertation on the topic, using old newspapers and the memories of relatives to research.

“It was 2002 and, back then, nobody was talking about trans stuff,” she said. “There were very few books on the subject, so I really had to educate myself. I read many, many books and then wrote the dissertation and got my doctorate, which eventually became my book, ‘A Strange Sort of Being.'”

Born in 1829 near Albany, Lucy Ann Lobdell taught herself to shoot at the age of 10 to afford tuition for school, Lobdell explained. Partly to escape a forced marriage and to earn a decent living, she began dressing in men’s clothing.

Sometime shortly after 1850, the Lobdell family moved the 15 miles from Hancock to Long Eddy, New York, a small town on the Pennsylvania border.

Lucy’s marksmanship continued to improve and she became known as “The Sure Shot.” In the fall of 1854, Lucy left Long Eddy, and in October of that year, she entered the town of Bethany, Pennsylvania, as “Joseph Israel Lobdell.”

A handsome young man, Joseph established a singing school and fell in love with a pupil. The two were engaged but, on the eve of their wedding day, a visitor passing through recognized the singing teacher as Lucy Ann, who had run away from home many months before, according to an article titled “The Man-Woman” in an 1876 edition of The Port Jervis Evening Gazette. When word got out that the singing teacher had a female body, a tar and feather crew was formed. But the bride-to-be warned Joseph ahead of time, and he fled town before the crew could catch him.

In the summer of 1858, Joseph was arrested and put on trial for falsely impersonating a man, but a judge found him not guilty as Joseph was capable of doing men’s work, Lobdell said. He was discharged and taken back to Long Eddy, but too despondent to work, he ended up in the Delaware County Poorhouse in Delhi, New York.

At the Poorhouse, Joseph met Marie Louise Perry, a young woman who had run away from her well-to-do father. A year later, they escaped and were married by a Justice of the Peace in Wayne County, Pennsylvania. In 1862, the two made their way to Whitman, Massachusetts, where they lived on Marie’s father’s estate. Eventually, someone in the family became suspicious of Joseph’s sex and had him arrested. He was tried again for impersonating a man, but Marie’s eloquent petitions to the judges and authorities gained his release.

Around 1865, Joseph and Marie fled to the woods in Wayne County, where they lived in the wilderness for nearly 15 years, thanks to Joseph’s wilderness survival skills, hunting prowess, and ability to trade pelts and meat for necessities.

Eventually, Joseph’s original identity was discovered and connected to his fame as the “Female Hunter.” Once people knew he had a female body, he was harassed for gender nonconformity and frequently arrested whenever he got too close to towns.

In October 1879, obituaries for the Female Hunter, Lucy Ann Lobdell, began appearing in newspapers from The New York Times to the Galveston Daily News claiming that Lobdell had died after a short, unnamed illness. In reality, Joseph’s brother, John Lobdell, had begun legal action to have him declared insane. Upon order of the judge in Delaware County, Lucy Ann Lobdell was declared insane for “wearing men’s clothes, pretending to love a woman, and pretending to be a hunter.”

In October of 1880, Joseph was taken to Willard Insane Asylum in Ovid, where he continued to wear men’s clothes and insisted he was man. In 1900, he was moved to the Insane Asylum in Binghamton, where he died in 1912.

Lobdell said her studies in gender and queer theory have enabled her to successfully argue that Joseph Lobdell was a transgender man, not a lesbian, as gender theorists had argued in the second half of the 20th century.

She insists her relative was a transgender man, she said, “because Joe insisted he was a man.”

“While Joe was alive and for almost 100 years after his death, people have been calling Joe a woman despite his dogged persistence in living as a man and telling people he was a man,” Lobdell said. “He continued to wear men’s clothes, call himself Joe, and insist he was a man to the doctor in the insane asylum who had the power to set him free. In light of such determination and loyalty to himself, I feel referring to him as a woman is an act of identity piracy, which … disempowers transgender people and robs them of their right to name themselves.”

Reynolds writes for the Oneonta, New York Daily Star.

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