“People are complicated” is a truism that holds in the past and the present. Seldom do we find a person where all of their actions and thoughts are black and white. What we see instead is that people are colorful because they aren’t just one thing and they don’t think and act in one way.

Human identities are one area where we find a lot of colorfulness and complexity. Most humans have multiple Identities based in geography, nationality, religious affiliation, race and ethnicity, and also gender.

Jen Manion, a Professor of History and of Sexuality and Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College and author of the book, Female Husbands: A Trans History, joins us to investigate the early American world of female husbands, people who were assigned female at birth and then transed-gender at some point in their lives to live as men.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/359

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Complementary Episodes

• Episode 002: Cornelia King, “That So Gay” Exhibit at the Library Company of Philadelphia
• Episode 013: Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America
• Episode 080: Jen Manion, Liberty's Prisoners: Prisons and Prison Life in Early America 
• Episode 266: Johann Neem, Education in Early America
• Episode 292: Craft in Early America
• Episode 309: Philip Reid, Merchant Ships of the Eighteenth Century
• Episode 354: John Wood Sweet, The Sewing Gir’s Tale
• Episode 357: Eric Jay Dolin, Privateering During the American Revolution 

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