Data Sources
I developed the Cross-Dressing Laws 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 Cross-Dressing Laws Map highlights the research of multiple historians who have contributed to our understanding of public cross-dressing and disguise laws. The main starting point for cross-dressing law data in the U.S. is Appendix A2 in William Eskridge’s book Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet. Eskridge compiled a table based on his review of municipal sex offense ordinances in major cities across the country. He found laws prohibiting cross-dressing, indecent dress, or disguise in 55 cities. Additionally, his book discusses two states that prohibited disguise or masquerade (New York and California).
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:
- La Porte City, Iowa (1871)
- Vermillion, South Dakota (1873)
- Denison, Texas (1874)
- Virginia City, Nevada (1878)
- Duluth, Minnesota (1881)
- Langston, Oklahoma (1891)
- West Orange, New Jersey (1895)
- Bellingham, Washington (1904)
Kate Redburn’s article “Before Equal Protection: The Fall of Cross-Dressing Bans and the Transgender Legal Movement, 1963–86,” adds to our understanding of the legal strategies that successfully dismantled cross-dressing laws in the second half of the twentieth century. Redburn adds many new locations to the list of cities and states that prohibited cross-dressing by the mid-20th century. Redburn’s research focuses on the end, rather than the beginning, of the cross-dressing bans. While we now know that these cities had cross-dressing ordinances (and we know that the ordinances were challenged in the courts beginning in the 1960s), we do not yet know the dates when these cities originally adopted their ordinances. For this reason, many of the cities supplied by Redburn do not appear on the time-lapse map (which only tracks each law’s starting point); however, all of Redburn’s locations have been integrated into the main data map.
This research is ongoing, and I continue adding more data points to the map as I explore laws in different regions and find relevant information about cross-dressing bans.
Check out the Primary Sources page to see examples of the laws, including the first known cross-dressing law in the U.S., enacted in St. Louis in 1843.
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.