Sex (Gender)

This essay explores how incarcerated persons in Washington Territory and Washington State prison archives of the long nineteenth century illuminate trans* histories by analyzing the presence of aliases in bureaucratic documentation—names prisoners were typically forced to assume through criminalization, yet which also allowed them to disrupt, stall, or evade being fixed in and by the prison ledger as a carceral surveillance apparatus. Simply put, this essay argues that those labeled criminal perform, on paper, modes of trans* embodiment regardless of self-identification or external sex (gender) assignments, thus resulting in an overlooked archive of non-identitarian trans* politics. This trans* historiography considers as aliases the registered names in the prison ledger as well as other documentation decisions that produce multiple identities for the singular prisoner body. Through examples of “grammatical passing,” it reveals early enmeshments of trans* criminalization within white supremacist formations—across the gender-deviant convicted woman, ungendered Black female body, criminalized rural farmhand selling liquor to Natives, and discursively castrated assigned-male Chinese immigrant body. While the prison archive and this historiographic method do not reveal cross-racial solidarities as movement work per se, they compel scholars to question whether gender is ever assigned benignly, without painful or harmful consequence.