The Cross-Dressing Catalogue
This website catalogues cross-dressing ordinances passed in cities and towns across the United States from the mid-nineteenth to late-twentieth centuries.
Cross-dressing bans are older than the nation itself. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example, banned cross-dressing as part of its broader sumptuary dress laws. Later in the 19th and 20th centuries, a wave of local ordinances swept the nation, criminalizing the wearing of clothing “not belonging to [one’s assigned] sex.” Together with general vagrancy laws and a handful of state statutes, these ordinances were used to effectively force gender nonconforming people out of visible public life.
As more cross-dressing laws are mapped, geographic and temporal trends emerge, offering opportunities for future study. This project adds significantly to the number of identified cross-dressing bans in the United States, providing an additional resource for understanding these trends and the impact of cross-dressing bans on people who fell outside the state’s strict definition of the gender binary.
A Note on “Firsts”
As Eli Erlick observes, “[w]e frequently hear stories of the first trans person to do x, y, or z. These claims are almost always wrong… These irksome claims matter because they erase history.” Erlick explains that in her research “[m]ost individuals I located are likely not the firsts but simply the earliest known for now.” (Erlick, Before Gender, 19-20).
Existing scholarship on cross-dressing laws, while robust, often makes the same mistake, assuming there were no laws in a particular time or place in the United States based on limited information, or claiming a given law was definitively the first in the nation or in a region. Kate Redburn adopts a more advisable approach, similar to Erlick’s, explaining that “St. Louis appears to have been the first place to [adopt an ordinance] in 1843″ (emphasis added) and “[i]t is possible that anti-cross-dressing ordinances remain on the books in some cities; a national canvas of every town would be nearly impossible.” (Redburn, Before Equal Protection, 687, 714 n. 221).
This catalogue adds a significant number of ordinances previously undiscovered in academic scholarship. This addition should not be regarded as a comprehensive list of cross-dressing laws, but rather as the latest in a series of research projects expanding our understanding of cross-dressing laws, their impact, and geographic spread. As more primary sources become digitally preserved, even more laws are likely to surface.
© Kat Reilley Harlow