Had you been sitting in the Royal Strand Theatre one evening in April 1870, you might have noticed a giddy young woman in a low-cut cerise silk dress, larking around in a box before repairing to the ladies’ lavatory. If you had looked a little closer, you would have realised this was no lady after all: rather, a 22-year-old man by the name of Ernest Boulton. Or, to give her the name she preferred, Stella.
The question of what gender you have to be to use which toilet is, depressingly, still capable of causing uproar today – witness the ongoing furore over North Carolina’s controversial ‘bathroom bill’. And in the Victorian era, a cross-dressing young man popping into the ladies’ lavatory was absolutely scandalous. On leaving the theatre, Stella and her fellow cross-dressing companion Fanny were arrested on the charge of sodomy. [...]
“Because of the extraordinary work that trans and non-binary people are doing at the moment to make us more aware that gender identity categories are often imprecise and useless, that there are as many genders as there are people, I think we can see stories like Stella’s in a new light,’” suggests Bartlett. “For Stella, identity was never a destination – it was a journey, a constant transformation. And that’s an idea we’re now very open to.”
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