Was Louisa May Alcott a trans man?

Peyton Thomas — host of "Jo’s Boys: A Little Women Podcast" — looks at the evidence in a NYT op-ed.

Alcott, we're told, "used the names Lou, Lu or Louy." And: 

She wrote of herself as the “papa” or “father” of her young nephews. Her father, Bronson, once called Alcott his “only son.” In letters to her close friend Alfie Whitman, Alcott called herself “a man of all work” and “a gentleman at large.”...

[S]he wrote, in one letter to Whitman, “with a boy’s spirit” under her “bib & tucker.” Alcott scholars agree that she felt a profound affinity with manhood....

[I]n an interview in the early 1880s, she declared, “I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body.”...

[Alcott's fictional alter-ego Jo says] “I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy.” When her stern older sister Meg asks Jo to behave, reminding her that she is “a young lady,” Jo answers, “I ain’t.” Jo’s delight in playing male parts onstage, her rejection of her feminine given name, her status as “son,” “brother” and “man of the family” — all are original to Alcott’s 154-year-old text, borrowed from her own experiences....

“I long to be a man,” she wrote in one journal entry. “I was born with a boy’s nature,” she said in that letter to Whitman, and “a boy’s spirit” and “a boy’s wrath.”...

But people back then thought in their own terms:

“Emerson, Thoreau and Louisa’s father, Bronson, all believed that human beings were fundamentally spirits who happened to be in a particular physical form,” [said John Matteson, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Alcott], “but that the spirit should not be limited, that the spirit has an obligation to develop itself according to its own unique genius."...

Transcendental, a much grander concept than transgender. 

Moving closer to the present, the op-ed author quotes Martina Navratilova: "Do you have any idea how hard you would try to convince me I am trans if I were born 50 years later?"

Her question seems to imply a concern that understanding a historical figure as a trans man might undermine gender-nonconforming women and girls. So is it inappropriate — anachronistic at best, misogynistic at worst — to describe Alcott as transgender?

I believe Alcott’s own statements give the lie to the notion that transgender identity is strictly a modern fad.

“The historical record shows that people have felt in remarkably similar ways to contemporary transgender people,” said Susan Stryker, a professor emerita of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona.

Why is today's template any more true than the template Navratilova experienced when she was young or that Alcott had in her day? The op-ed author may prefer the question: What's the most useful way to think about it today? In that light, the author must contend with those who want Alcott as a lesbian icon:

Alcott did speak of having “fallen in love” in her life “with so many pretty girls and never once the least little bit with any man.” However, there is no evidence that Alcott ever had a romantic or sexual relationship with a woman....

Dr. Stryker, the University of Arizona scholar, argued it is possible to recognize the plain fact of Alcott’s identification with manhood without minimizing the impact of “Little Women” on women’s lives and literature. “We can all recognize Lou Alcott in many different ways,” said Dr. Stryker. “We don’t have to turn it into a pissing contest or a turf war.”

Oh! If it's a pissing contest, you really do want to be the man. 

***

There's also this about Hemingway:

Was Ernest Hemingway a raging misogynist or merely an egg? (That is, a transgender woman who never hatched, owing to the strictures of masculinity.)

An egg! I learned a new term.

Speaking of Hemingway and the possibility of his being an "egg," here's a test of how well you know Hemingway. Which of these sentences was written by Hemingway: 

1. "It was a big American breakfast with ham and eggs and it was very good."

2. "There were the programs of the team races of two hours, with a series of pure sprints in their heats to fill the afternoon, the lonely absolute speed events of one man racing an hour against the clock, the terribly dangerous and beautiful races of one hundred kilometers on the big banked wooden five-hundred-meter bowl of the Stade Buffalo, the outdoor stadium at Montrouge where they raced behind big motorcycles, Linart, the great Belgian champion that they called 'the Sioux' for his profile, dropping his head to suck up cherry brandy from a rubber tube that connected with a hot water bottle under his racing shirt when he needed it toward the end as he increased his savage speed, and the championships of France behind big motors of the six-hundred-and-sixty-meter cement track of the Parc du Prince near Auteuil, the wickedest track of all where we saw that great rider Ganay fall and heard his skull crumple under the crash helmet as you crack an hard-boiled egg against a stone to peel it on a picnic."