Hall, Thomasine/Thomas

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HALL, Thomasine/Thomas

HALL, Thomasine/Thomas (b. 1603; d. ?), colonist.

Thomasine/Thomas Hall was raised as a girl in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and London, England, served in the English army during its 1627 campaign against the French on the Isle of Rhe, and then migrated to Virginia, where Hall's claims to be both woman and man brought her/him to the attention of the colony's General Court. In 1629 Hall's neighbors in Warrosquoyacke, Virginia, began a series of searches of Hall's body. It is not clear what sparked their inquiry. It might have been rumors that Hall had been engaged in sexual activity with a servant maid or the more unusual report that s/he was both a woman and a man.

Hall suffered through two examinations at the hands of Warrosquoyacke's married women, who concluded on the basis of a "peece of flesh" protruding from Hall's lower belly that s/he was a man. Their tenacious insistence that s/he was a man eventually convinced the plantation commander, who had initially ignored their findings. Upon donning men's clothes, Hall became fair game for the men of Warrosquoyacke, who conducted their own impromptu examination and concurred that s/he was indeed a man. The matter did not rest there, however, as the locals sent the case to the General Court at Jamestown.

Justices in that court declined to initiate their own physical investigation, preferring to elicit from Hall a narrative of her/his gender history. Hall told a tale of early female identity, rooted in female dress, needlework, long hair, and the name "Thomasine." S/he did not divulge any dramatic anatomical event like the delayed descent of testicles that might have motivated her/his decision to become a man, but instead linked it to her/his brother's entry into the English army. S/he marked this shift in gender performance with a change of clothes and the richly symbolic gesture of cutting her/his hair. Upon leaving the army, Hall briefly changed back into women's clothes to earn money doing needlework in Plymouth, England, before shipping out to Virginia as a man. Once in the colony, s/he mainly wore men's clothes with the exception of an excursion in women's dress to "gett a bit for my Catt," a mysterious reference that could reflect an effort to satisfy either economic or sexual needs. The justices responded to Hall's narrative punitively out of a desire to stabilize her/his performed identity, but elected not to choose one gender identity as primary. Rather, they declared Hall to be both woman and man and ordered Hall to don a female headdress, apron, and cross-cloth over her/his male attire. Everyone would thus immediately recognize Hall's gender ambiguity; no one would be able to engage in sexual relations with Hall without fear of committing a same-sex offense.

Hall's gender changes and the response to them reveal a great deal about the meaning of gender for early Anglo Virginians. Same-sex sexual activity was not unknown in early Virginia, yet most of Hall's neighbors seem to have believed that an expressed gender identity reflected anatomical sex and coincided with certain heterosexual sexual behaviors. Hall's alleged sexual past—that s/he had "layn" with a woman named Great Besse—meant to Hall's neighbors that s/he must be anatomically male. Thus, s/he transgressed if s/he dressed as a woman. Despite popular European traditions that warned young girls of the perils of strenuous activity—the heat generated might make testicles descend—and Galenic medical theories that understood the female body to be an imperfect version of the male body rather than a separate entity altogether, Hall's neighbors adhered to a popular view of gender as rooted in anatomical difference and performed through clothing, labor, and sexual history.

Hall's case also reminds us that, while most early modern people exercised only limited choices over how they expressed their gender identities and, indeed, many might have thought of these identities as frighteningly unstable and porous, a few notable individuals made dramatic choices. Most Atlantic world stories of people cross-dressing (dressing in clothes customary for the opposite sex for the purpose of passing as a member of that sex) involved women passing as men to take advantage of military opportunities that would otherwise not be available to them, or of aristocratic men dressing as women. Hall's story bears some resemblance to the female pattern, although her/his motives were somewhat different. Hall's account of her/his own life suggests that a primary identity as female had taken hold during the years s/he had been raised, dressed, and trained as a girl. Hall's male identity, in contrast, while possibly sparked by a desire to accompany her/his brother or by the unexpected descent of testicles, seems to have been overlaid on top of this one. S/he seemed to feel that both identities were rightfully hers/his based on the claim to be anatomically both male and female and on the experience of meeting both sets of gender expectations. In contrast to the General Court's order that s/he wear both male and female attire, s/he had carefully chosen to perform her/his identities sequentially, conforming to rather than challenging normative behaviors for each gender.

Bibliography

Brown, Kathleen. "'Changed … into the Fashion of Man': The Politics of Sexual Difference in a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Settlement." Journal of the History of Sexuality 6 (1995): 171–193.

Katz, Jonathan Ned. Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary. New York: Harper and Row, 1983.

Norton, Mary Beth. Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Vaughan, Alden. "The Sad Case of Thomas(ine) Hall." Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 86 (1978): 146–148.

Kathleen M. Brown

see alsocolonial america; intersexuals and intersexed people; transsexuals, transvestites, transgender people, and cross-dressers.