Sunday, January 29, 2012
The Singular Identity of Albert Nobbs
Posted by Gina at 5:13 PM
http://skipthemakeup.blogspot.com/2012/01/singular-identity-of-albert-nobbs.html"The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs" by Irish novelist George Moore is a short story about a woman in fin-de-siecle Dublin who lives and works as a male butler in a hotel. Many have suggested Moore (who was quite the bohemian and progressive) might have met such a person and written a fictionalized piece about their life. Persons who were born woman-bodied yet lived, worked and even fought in wars as men were relatively common. Several dozen accounts of them throughout history have been documented (not to mention the likelihood that many were never discovered) and a large number of them had their gender histories unveiled only after their deaths.* Moreover, many contemporaries writing about whether this is possible forget how much more often people of 100 years ago encountered visibly 'gender variant' persons, both due to Intersex births (and relatively common conditions like Congential Adrenal Hyperplasia now routinely modified with hormone treatments) and that hormone replacement therapy or gynecamastia surgery didn't exist in those days, so any hormonal 'irregularities' could have their full impact in altering one's appearance. In other words, persons of that era were actually far more used to seeing females with large amounts of facial hair or males with 'hairless faces, breasts and curvy bottoms.'
