Trans Ancestor Frank Woodhull and the Stories That Come From Necessity

How do I make sure to separate the stories that I tell from necessity—for advocacy reasons, for example—from those that feel most personal, most true, most alive?

Today’s essay is a bit different than some of the others (so if you’re new, maybe start here or here instead.) I found myself thinking about the story of Frank Woodhull, and wanted to share a bit about his life and what interests me most about him, which differs so much from what’s emphasized in the historical record.

Image: Ellis Island employee Augustus Sherman’s portrait of Frank Woodhull. Source: USCIS

Today I’m thinking of trans ancestor Frank Woodhull.

Woodhull enters the historical record just once, in October 1908, when he re-enters the United States at Ellis Island and his birth sex is found out.

But let me back up.

Frank Woodhull was born in Canada in 1858 and lost his father by the age of twenty. He struggled to make his way in the world, eventually moving from Canada to California. In his thirties, he began wearing men’s clothes and took the name of Frank Woodhull. At this point, his life opened up—he was able to find a number of employment opportunities, spending the next fifteen years working in a variety of roles, including as a bookseller and as a lightning rod salesman.

As his life began to stabilize and take shape, he met with enough financial success that he decided to save toward his longtime dream of traveling to England to see the original homeland of his family. (I am moved that with his modest savings, he chose not to purchase land or invest, but to buy roundtrip passage in steerage class simply to spend two months in the land of his ancestors.)

It was on his return from this trip that he enters the historical record.

I find here that I don’t wish to recount this episode in great detail, partly because it has been so thoroughly recounted elsewhere, and partly because I simply feel exhausted at the prospect of recounting yet another episode of administrative policing of trans bodies and lives. I want the center of this story to be elsewhere. In the unknowns. In the imagination.

But, in brief: His birth sex was revealed during inspection at Ellis Island, and he was detained and questioned. He frames his choice to wear men’s clothes as being from economic necessity, and the authorities are suitably impressed with his story—perhaps because it fit nicely into dominant narratives around capitalism and misogyny—such that he is ultimately allowed to go on his way. His story makes national news and crowds gather in Manhattan to see him as he disembarks, but he instead takes the ferry to New Jersey, likely gets on a train to New Orleans, and never enters the historical record again.

I briefly touched on the story of Frank Woodhull in a recent podcast interview, when I commented that many of our trans ancestors lived their best lives outside of the historical record, that this is important to remember so that we can imagine their moments of joy and freedom when much of what is preserved and recorded can be oppressive and painful interactions with authorities, narratives delivered under duress.

I hope that Woodhull was happy after he settled in New Orleans. I hope that the experience at Ellis Island didn’t change him too much, that he was still able to move through the world with the ease and confidence that he had before. He must have had quite a bit of ease and confidence, I imagine, to choose to travel internationally for pleasure even knowing that his gender presentation didn’t match his assigned sex. He traveled without citizenship documents because he didn’t have any—he didn’t wish to reveal his birth sex or to lie in order to get such documents.

Did he worry that he might be detained when crossing international borders, but decide it was worth the risk to pursue his dream of visiting England? Or did the thought not even occur to him, after fifteen years of moving through the world with relative ease?

(As I’ve written about elsewhere, I had many years of relative ease moving through the world as a white, cis-passing trans man, before becoming pregnant and being subjected to a level of administrative scrutiny I hadn’t fully imagined. Perhaps I, like Woodhull, forgot just how conditional this level of ease could be for any trans person, no matter how privileged.)

But the stories I most want to hear from Woodhull aren’t in the historical record. In fact, they don’t relate to his gender at all, or at least, not directly.

What did he do in England? Did he touch his hand to the ground, perhaps bring some dirt home as a keepsake? Did he visit a cemetery? Pray at a local church? If I were able to ask him one thing about his life, it would be about his experience of this trip. What did he hope to find? Did he find it? Did his heart feel heavy or light when it was time to leave?

I want a story about Frank Woodhull that centers his relationship with his ancestors, his choice to go to considerable expense and difficulty to visit the land from which they came. I want a story that makes this choice as interesting—if not more interesting—than his gender presentation. But this is a story I will have to imagine.

I’m thinking a lot about stories, a lot about which stories are deemed interesting and worthwhile, and which ones are not. Which stories are documented and which remain private.

As I have become more public about my experiences around my pregnancy, I find myself watching closely, scrutinizing my stories even as I produce them—am I being invited into tropes that don’t serve me? Is my story being framed around questions that aren’t the inquiries that feel most alive for me?

How do I make sure to separate the stories that I tell from necessity—for advocacy reasons, for example—from those that feel most personal, most true, most alive?

The only narrative we have of Woodhull’s life is a story he told under duress, to explain his gender nonconformity. The stakes were high—his safety and freedom—and his storytelling was effective. He drew on capitalist and misogynistic tropes that resonated for his audience, and they released him.

But I wonder: What stories were most important to him? Did he ever have any loved ones or trusted friends to whom he told the stories closest to his heart?

I wonder: What happens when we mistake a successful narrative for the heart of the matter?

As I become more public with my own stories, I am learning that I need to leave time and space to make sure that I am telling the stories I most want to tell—the ones that feel true and alive for me, the ones that resonate in my body—and not those that the dominant culture tells me are most interesting about my life. I need to know that an effective narrative and a deeply true one may or may not be the same.

I think this is a practice. So I leave time to imagine. I look for gaps and questions. I check with my body. And I make time for my secret writing, the writing I do only in a notebook, the stories I tell only to myself.

For more on Frank Woodhull, I suggest Morgan Thomas’s recent piece in Guernica, which explores Woodhull’s story from a different angle, or the chapter in Erica Rand’s excellent book, The Ellis Island Snow Globe.

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I’m excited to share . . .

I recently spoke with Wil Fisher on the Queerly Beloved podcast — we had a wonderful conversation about all sorts of topics—why this newsletter is called The Menstruant, my love for cycles, and the varying shapes and experiences of spiritual practice. Check it out here!

I had another wonderful podcast conversation this week, too—can’t wait to share that one when it’s available!

And speaking of wonderful conversations, I recently had the opportunity to interview Floyd Rumohr and Jonah Scott Mendelsohn, the director and actor behind Love Alone, a play for World AIDS Day that stages the text of Paul Monette’s Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog, a collection of poems that are at times raw, funny, angry, and deeply loving, grieving the loss of his partner, Roger, to AIDS in 1986. I’ll be sharing this interview here in the coming days, and in the meantime, tickets are available for both livestream and in-person NYC performances on December 3, 4, and 5.