1800 Legal French law makes it illegal for women to wear trousers.
1789-1865 Culture Dr. James Barry, a trans man, was a surgeon, who among other things, performed the first known Cesarean section by a European in Africa in which both mother and child survived. His trans status became public only upon his death, in violation of his express wishes that his body not be examined, in the event of his death.. Dr. James Barry and the Erasure of LGBTQ+ History
1807-1829 Culture James Allen is married to his wife Abigail. Upon his death in 1829 it is found that he is anatomically female. Abigail claims to have not been aware - which may have been a polite fiction to escape her own punishment for the act.
1823 Culture “Travesty” which had carried the general meaning of dressing to disguise or in a buffoonish manner from the 1500s in other languages and from the 1600s in English, is used to specifically mean dressed in the clothes of the opposite sex.
1832 Culture “Travestiment” was recorded meaning "wearing of the dress of the opposite sex". https://www.etymonline.com/word/transvestite#etymonline_v_16904
1832 - 1888 Culture Louisa May Alcott aka Lou Alcott, author of Little Women, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys, was decidedly gender non-conforming and may have been trans masculine non-binary or a trans man.
1836 Culture - Mary Jones, who was either a black male crossdresser or trans woman, had “been in the practice of waiting upon Girls of ill fame and made up their Beds and received the Company at the door and received the money for Rooms &c and they induced me to dress in Women's Clothes, saying I looked so much better in them and I have always attended parties among the people of my own Colour dressed in this way -- and in New Orleans I always dressed in this way” She had been picked up by a man in New York to engage in street prostitution, and was accused and arrested for robbing him. Upon her arrest it was discovered that she had a false leather vulva, worn with a belt. In court he gave his name as Peter Sewally and declared he was a man and had also previously served in the military. Her charge in court was based around her taking on white clients, rather than her trans fem status.
Mary Jones - 2 articles at Out History;, Gill-Peterson, Jules, A Short History of Trans Misogyny p. 15.
~1840-now Legal Various anti-crossdressing laws were in place in different municipalities from at least the 1840s through even now, though they haven’t seen much enforcement in the past couple decades they were still used as grounds for arrest in the 80s. It didn’t matter if the person was someone we’d consider transsexual today or a cisgender crossdresser, a drag performer, or depending on the era, a woman wearing pants. Anyone wearing clothing not aligned with the stereotypical dress of their birth assigned gender could be harassed and arrested under these laws, and in many municipalities, they remain on the books despite not being enforced in years. In many places a “three-article” rule was used, in that a person could be arrested under the law if they were wearing three or more articles of clothing associated with a gender other than their birth assigned one, or its converse, of not wearing at least three articles of clothing of their birth assigned gender.
In parallel to and following the removal of such laws, various anti-prostitution, anti-loitering laws have been used as “walking while trans” laws to police the public appearance of trans people, especially trans women of color.
Eg: A Timeline of Anti-Crossdressing Laws (1848-2014)
How Dressing in Drag Was Labeled a Crime
A detailed legal history of the rise and fall of anti-crossdressing laws.
Anti-drag laws are part of a long history of policing gender
1855-1905 Culture William Sharp led a dual literary life under his birth name and under her pen name of Fiona MacLeod, while Sharp appears to have presented himself as MacLeod primarily on the page. He wrote of himself as being like half a man and half a woman and of Fiona being his truest self.
1859-1918 Culture Sandor Vay, a Hungarian poet and journalist, was born AFAB. However he was raised as a boy before attending an all girl’s school as Sarolta Vay. After graduating from university as Sarlota, from 1880 forward he presented himself as Sandor and male. Throughout his life he maintained a series of relationships and marriages to women. As with a number of historical cases, interpreting whether Sandor was a transgender man or a cisgender, but gender non-conforming lesbian woman is not definitive, though in his case the balance suggests he was a trans man.
1862 Culture : Karl Heinrich Ulrichs used the term Urning to refer to his status as being gay. While Ulrichs used different related terms to refer to other sexual orientations and gender variations, other authors grouped all forms of homosexuality, transness, nonbinariness, and intersex status under “urning” as more of a catch-all term.
1865 Justice The Northwest Province of British India made it a policy to "'reduce' the number of hijras through measures that would "gradually lead to their extinction'" under the pretense that they were involved in the sex trade and generally immoral. (Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny p. 33)
1866-1876 Culture Frances Thompson was a formerly enslaved woman who was either trans or intersex. In 1866, she was a victim of rape and assault during the “Memphis Massacre” in which 46 black people were killed by a white mob while over 90 buildings were destroyed. She was invited to testify before congress and may have been the first transgender person to do so.
In 1876, she was arrested on charges of crossdressing and imprisoned on a chain gang as a man. Following her release, later that year, she died of dysentery.
HRC Honors Frances Thompson, a Black Transgender Hero
1867 Legal Thomas Walker, a bar man in Southwark, London, was arrested for theft from the bar owner and during custody refused a bath and was found to be female, with the birth name of Mary.
1868 Medical The terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” were coined by Károly Mária Kertbeny.
Mid 1800s - Culture early crossdressing balls
1869 Culture The Odd-Fellows, a Black fraternal organization, began hosting annual opposite gender impersonation crossdressing balls at Hamilton Lodge, in Harlem. Both men and women crossdressed. This Masquerade and Civic Ball also known as "Faggots Ball" or "Fairies Ball", was also attended by some white folk, and legal restrictions were such that men were only allowed to dance with other men if one was crossdressed. These were canceled after 1930 due to increased tension with police.
1870 Culture The term “drag” was in use to describe male actors in women’s clothing because long skirts would drag across the floor. An alternate etymology claims it derives from “grand rag” with “rag” meaning “dance”.
1870 Medical Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal describes same-sex behavior as "conträre Sexualempfindung"
1870 April Legal Boulton and Park, aka Stella and Fanny, put on a stage show in which they crossdressed. They attended a party, crossdressed, after a show and upon leaving were arrested and charged with sodomy. Put on trial the following year, they were not convicted.
1871 Justice The Northwest Province of British India passed the Criminal Tribes Act, which, among other things, required hijras register with the police, outlawed property inheritance and forbade travel outside of their local districts. Wearing women's clothing and dancing in public had already been made illegal. (Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny p. 33)
1878-1882 Medical a variety of psychiatrists, journalists, and sexologists describe sexual inversion, meaning men who have women’s souls or behaviors or women who have men’s souls or behaviors and use it to describe homosexuality and being transgender with those fitting any of those descriptions being called “inverts”.
1880s Culture Germany - Urningsballs - or gay balls were held legally, where a number of participants came crossdressed. They continued through the early 20th century with a brief period of illegality prior to 1910 following a homosexual scandal in the Kaiser’s cabinet.
1880s - Culture William Dorsey Swann aka “The Queen”, a former slave, began holding drag/crossdressing balls and/or gatherings in the DC area. They were raided by the police multiple times.
1885 Culture Upon her death in Cambridge, Ohio, Sophia Gibons was discovered to be a trans woman, having lived socially as a woman for at least twenty-five years.
1886 Medical - Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing published Psychopathia Sexualis, which introduces the terms sadism and masochism, while describing them, and sexual inversion (which included and did not make named distinction between homosexuality, bisexuallity, androgyny, transsexuality, and transvestism) as paraphilias - mental disorders, which he did for any behavior deemed sexual which would not allow for procreation.
1889 Medical Charles-Edouard Brown-Se´quard injected himself with extracts from the crushed testicles of a dogs and guinea pigs for the first recorded androgenic hormone therapy for cisgender men, prior to the isolation of testosterone. He recorded a restoration of physical strength. The “juices” of animal testicles and ovaries were used for cisgender therapies from here forward prior to the isolation of specific hormones.
1897 Justice The Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee or Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was formed by physician Magnus Hirschfeld. It was the first LGBTQ rights group founded. Other founding members included Hermann von Teschenberg, who was a gay cross-dresser.
1898 Culture The term transsesso, which in modern times is the Italian word meaning transsexual and for transgender appeared in a Latin language book