In 1870, Ernest Fanny Boulton and Frederick Stella Park were arrested in London. Their crime? Presenting as women outside their theatrical act.

Fanny and Stella had appeared in newspapers before, known for their colorful personas as entertainers, sometimes praised and sometimes criticized for their performances. Boulton was revered for being the “best amateur performer off the boards,” while Park had a talent for interpreting matrons, dowagers, and old women in pantomimes. As long as their gender-bending impersonating talents were put to the good use of gentlemanly entertainment, there was nothing wrong with their behavior.

But this time, they were written up because the police had decided that their performance had gone too far: they carried their feminine personas from the stage onto the street. Fanny and Stella were arrested with a “potential suitor,” a young wealthy man seemingly unaware of the identities of the two. They were wearing their finest attire—Stella, a cerise satin dress with an open square body and a silk scarf wrapped around her neck; Fanny, a green embroidered gown paired with golden-plaited hair in Greek style (as reported by the arresting officer)—when they were charged with public indecency for luring wealthy men under false pretenses.

Boulton and Park were neither the first nor the last crossdressers in Victorian Britain. At the time, it was not unusual to see men playing women on stage. The word “drag” was invented as an acronym back in the 16th century to describe the phenomenon of men “Dressed Resembling A Girl” to interpret female theatrical roles on stage, as women were not allowed to be actors during this period.

Fanny and Stella, photographed by Frederick Spalding about a year before their trial in 1870. Public domain.

But Fanny and Stella weren’t mere cross-dressing actors: they also lived public lives as women as often as they did as men. Sometimes, they attended society outings as Frederick and Ernest, but other times they showed up in satin dresses and white gloves, kept their plaited wigs on and behaved with all the mannerisms of upper-class women of their time.

Today, politicized digital media and viral videos subject trans and non-binary individuals to unwarranted, sensationalized scrutiny—sometimes putting their lives at risk. While the technology to carry out systematic scrutiny and online verbal attacks is relatively new, the public appetite towards making trans-focused stories a matter of public safety has been there since the Boulton and Park trial in the 19th century, if not before.

Boulton and Park’s trial aimed to establish exactly what type of danger the pair posed—whether the unspeakable act of sodomy (homosexuality as a concept we know today still was in its infancy) or maybe theft and deception, the latter a fear stemmed from a common type of highway robbery in which carriage drivers stopped to help a damsel in distress only to be robbed at gunpoint by thieves in disguise.

First, a medical professional was called in to prove sodomy, subjecting Boulton and Park to an invasive physical procedure. When that was inconclusive, they turned to a lengthy trial to determine whether the pair’s double identity could constitute a crime.

Side by side the courtroom trial was an equally relentless trial by media. The legal proceedings only took on their full significance as newspapers and tabloids turned Fanny and Stella into a spectacle, emphasizing the oddity of the two “women personators”—as they referred to them—to sell copies. Thanks to the reach of print media at the time, the pictures and sensational details from the trial were broadcast up to the remotest corners of the nation. While Victorians may not have had television, let alone TikTok, to keep up with trending videos, trial illustrations circulated so rapidly that people could feel they were present at the tribunal, watching as the events unfolded live.

Early in the trial, cartoonists drew Fanny and Stella with feminine features, indistinguishable from other women. In the sketch showing their arrest on Bow Street, they were graceful figures whose appearance suggested nothing unusual or wrong. Without prior knowledge of the context, one might assume they were ladies of respectable society. But as the trial proceeded, and a public appetite for news of Fanny and Stella grew, the media’s depiction of the women shifted significantly. Increasingly, Fanny and Stella were depicted as grotesque, their masculine features emphasized and their faces frowning, mugshot-like.

The press coverage also fueled harassment of others. A remark by the unforgiving press about Fanny and Stella wearing long-haired wigs while in the privacy of their homes, for instance, quickly was printed in the tabloids. In the days following, readers across the nation heckled and harassed those who they suspected were wearing a wig. Meanwhile, columns in the daily press such as Dundee Courier and Newry Reporter reported a craze of normal citizens in “eccentric clothing” being harassed on the streets.

By transforming an otherwise trivial case into a public sensation, the media outlets gave people ammunition with which to judge and execute fellow citizens who didn’t conform to the societal standards of gender and appearance. From London to Edinburgh, and metropolitan Liverpool to rural Cornwall, Fanny and Stella, in their visible queerness, become a new symbol of what to fear. The relentless debate fueled by the media cost Fanny and Stella—along with countless others—their freedom.

Today, Fanny and Stella’s trial is being replayed repeatedly in regard to restrooms, drag story hours, and participation in sports. Trans people don’t need to be thrust into a court of law to face incessant judgement, misgendering, and abuse. Simply existing is grounds to be dragged, unwillingly, into the public eye.

Whenever the conversation sparks, be it on a right-wing or left-leaning outlet, the media and the public draw connections between trans women’s gender identity and their intrinsic danger. As a result, trans women are at risk of attack, as was the case for Lauren Jackson, who was beaten up while walking toward the female restrooms at a state beach in Oregon by an attacker who was emboldened and (mis)informed by extreme right-wing outlets.

In the blink of an eye, new examples of how we are failing genderqueer and trans people come up: most recently, the death of non-binary student Nex Benedict brought the news flow to a halt, forcing the media to grapple with the connection between hatred, online and offline, and how it disproportionately affects queer and non-binary people.

In Fanny and Stella’s case, one cartoon unexpectedly changed the destiny of the trial and turned it into farce. In the sketch, officers are depicted searching through the two ladies’ dressing rooms, garment by garment, looking for incriminating evidence to establish whether their attire could be considered theatrical props (which would make the defendants innocent) or proper ladies’ frocks (rendering them guilty). Presented with this surreal scene, public opinion shifted. Rather than treating it as a criminal case involving sodomy at the very least and possibly treason, they recognized the trivial hair-splitting nature of the case, and the rage subsided toward Fanny and Stella and their alleged criminal capabilities. When the next paper installment came out, and politicians moved on to other campaign-winning topics, they had already moved on.

It is time people face today’s similar absurdity, and acknowledge that marathon losers (trans athletes receiving a disproportionate attention, considering they constitute the 0.0003%), as well as bathroom users, are simply people just going about their daily lives. By debating private lives as topics of public concern, we jeopardize the already precarious safety and existence of those involved. By elevating everyday instances to priority politics, we play a risky game and obscure the real issues politicians should spend their time on, instead of focusing on what’s inside people’s knickers.

When we allow gender affirmation to be presented as an issue of protecting public safety, we allow trans people to be scapegoated across all areas of public life, from public spaces to sports and education. The absurdity is worthy of mockery, but the dangers are infinite.

The post When Victorian Newspapers Put Gender-Bending on Trial appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One of my best friends died recently.

It still doesn’t feel real. The last time I saw her was the day after the Fourth of July. Her smile always lit up the room, but that night, the joy seemed to seep out of her, so much so that even the person who took our order at dinner commented on it.

Life was coming together. She’d gone back to school to become a speech-language pathology assistant and was on track to complete her program in the fall. Unfailingly patient, positive, and compassionate, her teachers said she had everything it took to excel in the field. She’d just become an aunt for the first time, too, and made the four-hour drive from Ventura to San Diego whenever she could to get to know this three-month-old with a gummy smile and a pompadour, who was now a part of her. And she’d recently fallen in love, with a guy from Missouri, whose Hinge profile she’d shown me last Thanksgiving. They were talking about moving in together after she graduated. Our high school friend group had yet to meet him, but she promised we would soon.

We never got the chance before she left us. It was a prolonged sinus infection that progressed into fatal meningitis. A “perfect storm” of events, a nurse later said. Everything went so wrong so fast that she was still wearing the magnetic eyelashes she’d put on to see the Barbie movie when she was brought to the hospital.

Perhaps inescapably, because we met in the 2000s, when social media was just taking off and phones had become cameras (and vice versa), the grief has taken on a digital dimension. To stop myself from being consumed by the questions around her death, the hows and whys of what happened, I’ve been trying to focus on remembering her life through these memories preserved in pixelated resin.

There is an overwhelming number of them to choose from, but I can’t help but feel what is missing. The Facebook replies I can no longer access because I deleted my account. The texts and videos I never backed up on the cloud. Obsolete media whose formats are no longer supported today. Underlying this sense of absence, of course, is the knowledge that as much as there is, there won’t be more coming.

Much of the digital ephemera I’ve come across so far I remember, even if the memories of what we were doing or where we were when we made them are just glimmers. But going through our old texts the other day, I found a few unopened voice messages I must have forgotten to play. Because I’d waded through so much of the annals of our lives at that point, I thought I was prepared for anything. But I haven’t been able to bring myself to listen to those recordings yet.

I think it’s because the medium feels like it picks up a conversation in real time. It’s the message in the bottle of the digital age. You share a thought without knowing when, where, or in what time zone it will find its recipient. In that way, voice messages feel alive in a way that video or a photo—where a haircut, a t-shirt, or a setting betrays its time stamp—does not.

Voice messages are relatively new. WeChat, the Chinese instant message and social media app, introduced them in 2011, and they have been available on Apple’s iMessage since June 2014. Over the past decade, the technology, which allows you to send voice recordings over messenger apps, has rapidly gained popularity. According to a recent YouGov poll for Vox, 62% of Americans say they’ve sent a voice message (or voice memo or voice note), and around 30% communicate this way “weekly, daily, or multiple times a day.”

But the basic idea behind the technology has arguably been with us since the mid-1800s when Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented the phonautograph, the first machine to document sound. This soon gave way to Thomas Edison’s phonograph, which allowed people to record and playback sound on cylinders, opening up the commercial possibilities of the audio medium.

It doesn’t surprise me that once people could get their hands on the phonograph, they instantly saw its potential for preserving the voices of loved ones beyond the grave.

“The phonograph was linked with death from the very beginning,” according to Jonathan Scott’s Into the Groove: The Story of Sound From Tin Foil to Vinyl, which notes that the “idea of the preservation of a voice after death was a common trope in the phonograph’s advertising copy.” Most famously, the iconic trademark and logo of Victor Talking Machine Company, later RCA Victor, seemingly depicts a dog listening to a recording of his late owner.

Nipper, the dog gazing at the brass horn of a phonograph in English artist Francis Barraud’s painting “His Master’s Voice,” was the real-life companion of the artist’s recently departed brother, Mark Henry. While it’s been debunked that Nipper was actually listening to Mark’s recorded voice in Francis’ original rendering, recording the “last words” of dying individuals was a real trend, as detailed in newspaper accounts, like this 1889 piece in the San Francisco Examiner about a family who took a phonograph to the hospital to “cheer their mother on during her long illness and also to preserve the tones of her voice to comfort them after her death.”

It makes sense that Victorians embraced a technology for preserving the voices of the departed. The culture was steeped in death due to high mortality rates, and from funerals to fashion, Victorians came up with a dizzying number of ways to commemorate those who had passed (what historian James Steven Curl has characterized as a “celebration of death”).

Rapid scientific advancement during the era, which comingled with a burgeoning spiritualist movement, seemingly made the Great Beyond more tangible to mourners. The invention of X-ray machines made the invisible visible. Modern camera techniques like double exposure allowed for “spirit photographs,” which hinted at a world beyond this one. The phonograph presented just another way to thin the veil between the living and the dead, to help those grieving find new ways to connect with those who were gone.

Historian of sound John M. Picker has also made the case that because the phonograph was the first technology that let people record sound at home, its embrace by Victorians was “inherently more personal and interactive” than consumer responses to audio technology that followed (such as the gramophone, which allowed playback only).

We’ve come a long way from that initial liberation of the voice from the constraints of time and space. But holding my iPhone in 2023, the distance to these earliest phonographic recordings feels closer.

Like the Victorians, and many, many people since, I share that same human want that drove us to record sound from the beginning: to hold on to those we’ve loved and lost and miss.

The post Her Voice Memos and My Grief appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Are tech bros the new Victorians? I’m sure they wouldn’t think so. In fact, I’m sure they’d be deeply insulted by the notion. The Victorians of our imagination are staid fuddy-duddies—and the captains of Silicon Valley are the cutting edge of the future.

But the Victorians, too, thought of themselves as masters of invention, just as tech bros do now. As we contemplate the role of new technology, and the men who dominate it, in everything from financial markets to climate change, the Victorians offer a cautionary tale and a glimpse of how we got to the place we’re in. By creating and perpetuating the myth that futures are built on the backs of heroic, self-made individuals, Victorians shaped today’s misbegotten sense that it’s lone genius mavericks—and not collaborative efforts—that shape our tomorrows.

Victorian innovators, like their contemporary counterparts, saw themselves surfing a wave of invention into a new technological century. Invention after invention transformed the Victorian world—steam locomotion, the electromagnetic telegraph, the telephone, wireless telegraphy, animated photographs, and of course, electricity: The list could go on.

So, who was responsible for this Victorian future? Who made it, and owned it?

In fact, progress was usually collaborative. The effort to lay a telegraph cable across the Atlantic, linking two continents in practically instantaneous communication, for example, required the collective labor of hundreds. But Victorian popular culture celebrated men of science and inventors as the future’s authors: Individuals who had the discipline, determination, and sheer grit needed to remake the world in their own image.

Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help, a popular inspirational book published in 1859, treated readers to glowing biographies of men like these, including Sir Richard Arkwright, inventor of the spinning frame, and steam entrepreneur James Watt. Smiles urged readers to regard the biographies of determined men as gospel—a truly shocking thing to say at the time.

“Watt was one of the most industrious of men,” wrote Smiles, “and the story of his life proves, what all experience confirms, that it is not the man of the greatest natural vigour and capacity who achieves the highest results, but he who employs his power with the greatest industry and the most carefully disciplined skill.” Inventors were special men, the thinking went (and it goes without saying that, just like tech bros, they were men).

The American icon of industrious, self-made inventor-entrepreneurship was Thomas Alva Edison, who famously said that successful invention was 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration and often played on his image as the self-made, all-American, plain-speaking and plain-working man of action. No fancy theory for him. The future was going to be the property of the plain man made good. When, in 1898, pulp fiction author Garrett P. Serviss wrote a quasi-sequel to H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, it was a fictionalized Edison, captain of industry, who led the avenging fleet of electrically powered spaceships to Mars.

The flamboyant inventor and self-promoter Nikola Tesla—who competed with Edison and carefully cultivated his own image as a reclusive iconoclast and rule-breaker—provided a different, but related, model for Victorian invention. Tomorrow belonged to people like him (well, actually, only him, in Tesla’s opinion). “Nikola Tesla says Men of the Future may become as Gods,” screamed a New York Herald headline in 1900. The “great magician of electricity” pronounced that “war would be abolished,” thanks to his inventions, and that he would “work a revolution of the politics of the whole world.”

Tesla worked hard to hone his outsider-hero image, and kept on working at it until his death in 1943. A series of biographies polishing his reputation began rolling out soon after, with John Joseph O’Neill’s Prodigal Genius of 1944, and in recent years he’s been namechecked by everything from Doctor Who and The Big Bang Theory to the Disney cartoon Gravity Falls. That image of the inventor as iconoclast, operating outside the rules, is clearly a very seductive one.

There’s little question which of the conflicting Victorian images of invention Silicon Valley’s tech bros prefer; that car wasn’t called Tesla by accident. But channeling the iconoclast makes aspiring tech entrepreneurs very Victorian indeed. Despite the hype, Tesla really was a man of his own time.

His is the Victorian vision that works for now. You succeed through provoking difference, not by excelling at what’s here already. It’s the cult of individual iconoclasm taken to its extreme. Tesla promised that men might become as gods, but only if they bought into his vision of the future. It’s that seductive vision that makes the values of disruption seem so attractive now, too. Disruption seems to offer a road to power—and that’s apparently true for many politicians, as well as tech entrepreneurs.

But in reality, disruption was a Victorian fantasy, rather than actuality. Tesla died penniless, his innovations abandoned for other technologies, and it had nothing to do with the excuses he promoted. Edison didn’t steal his ideas, and unscrupulous capitalists weren’t terrified by his inventions. Tesla died penniless because he made the mistake of believing his own publicity. He really did think he could single-handedly forge the future through disruption. But his example suggests the opposite.

In the end, the Victorians show us that futures are best made collectively—when we build them to address what communities genuinely need now, instead of offering castles in the sky.

The post The Victorian Vision of Disruption Is a Tech Bro Fantasy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.