15.10 / 18:15
Life
Transgender
Yee-haw! Turns out the Wild West was super queer
Historians throughout time have erased LGBTQ people from the history books, including from stories of the Wild West. But one historian has revealed that this era of settlers, cowboys, outlaws, and Native Americans also contained “hundreds” of people who lived as the opposite gender.Peter Boag, author of Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past, said he discovered “hundreds of individuals living their lives as the opposite gender” from the early 1800s to the early 1900s.Boag said that many of these people were individuals who were assigned a female gender at birth, but dressed and lived as men in order to either escape criminal charges they had gotten as women or to have the same social rights as men.At the time, women were treated like the property of their husbands or birth families.