Laws
The Cross-Dressing Laws Map highlights 63 municipal ordinances that were used to police trans people and other gender nonconformists in the U.S. since the 1840s. In 1843, St. Louis, Missouri, became the first city to adopt a law that prohibited people from appearing in public “in a dress not belonging to their sex.” Cincinnati, Ohio, was the last known city to adopt such a law in 1974. In the late 1960s, the contemporary LGBT legal movement began dismantling these laws.
The map tracks three types of laws:
- Explicit cross-dressing laws that followed St. Louis’s model (red dots).
- Laws prohibiting public disguise (green dots).
- Laws that prohibited lewd or indecent dress, but did not contain an explicit cross-dressing clause (blue dots). Vague in their description of indecent dress, such non-specific laws were sometimes used to punish people for an unorthodox gender presentation.
Data Sources
I developed this map as a supplement to my chapter “Regulating Public Gender and the Rise of Cross-Dressing Laws,” in The Cambridge History of Sexuality in the United States, edited by Nicholas Syrett and Jen Manion (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press).
The main source for comprehensive cross-dressing law data in the U.S. is Appendix A in William Eskridge’s book Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet. Since the publication of Gaylaw in 1999, scholars have continued uncovering additional laws and making revisions to the dates originally compiled by Eskridge. Clare Sears clarified the timeline for San Francisco in Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco, a book that is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the development of cross-dressing laws in the United States. Jen Manion made several important additions in Female Husbands: A Trans History, uncovering the fact that St. Louis was the first municipality in the country to adopt a cross-dressing law in 1843. Nic Butler’s research in Charleston, South Carolina, supplies a correction for that municipality’s ordinance (I thank Susan Stryker for bringing Butler’s work to my attention).
I have added several locations to the list based on my archival research. These are primarily small towns that were not part of Eskridge’s national survey, including:
- Vermillion, South Dakota (1873)
- Virginia City, Nevada (1878)
- Duluth, Minnesota (1881)
- Langston, Oklahoma (1891)
- West Orange, New Jersey (1895)
- Bellingham, Washington (1904)
Contribute
No doubt more laws will come to light as scholars continue to probe local histories of gender policing. If you have additions or corrections to this data, I encourage you to get in touch so that this map can be updated to reflect your contributions.
Bibliography
Bayker, Jesse. “Regulating Public Gender and the Rise of Cross-Dressing Laws,” in The Cambridge History of Sexuality in the United States, edited by Nicholas Syrett and Jen Manion (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press).
Butler, Nic. “Under False Colors: The Politics of Gender Expression in Post-Civil War Charleston.” Charleston County Public Library, September 28, 2018. https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/under-false-colors-politics-gender-expression-post-civil-war-charleston.
Eskridge, William N. Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Manion, Jen. Female Husbands: A Trans History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Redburn, Kate. “Before Equal Protection: The Fall of Cross-Dressing Bans and the Transgender Legal Movement, 1963–86.” Law and History Review 40, no. 4 (January 2023): 679–723. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248022000384.
Sears, Clare. Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.