Fri Jan 25, 2013 at 04:00 PM PST
The Man-Woman Case: Convicted by the press
by rserven
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/25/1181810/-The-Man-Woman-Case-Convicted-by-the-pressI see there's a new book due out soon by Mark Tedeschi QC that may be of some interest. It's title is Eugenia: A True Story of Adversity, Tragedy, Crime and Courage, which in true Guardian fashion offers offense from the first word of the title. There is a web site for the book as well.
Tedeschi writes as a lawyer, not as a historian. His purpose is to expose a miscarriage of justice.
Born Eugenia Falleni in 1875, the subject of this biography is a (female-to-male) transgender man who was more variously known as Eugene Falleni, Harry Leo Crawford, and Jean Ford.
Falleni was born in Livorno, Italy and was the eldest of 22 children, 17 of whom survived birth. He and his family migrated to Wellington, New Zealand when he was two. His father was known as a stern taskmaster who worked as either part of a horse and cart carting service or as a fisherman. Young Falleni dressed as a boy in order to obtain work in the brickyards and stables into his teenage years. Eventually he left home to become a cabin boy. His family's reaction was basically, "Good riddance."
After a few years working at sea, his birth sex was discovered during a drunken conversation with the ship's captain. The conversation had been in Italian and Falleni was caught out by using feminine grammar endings in reference to himself as a youngster. He was thereafter ostracized by the rest of the crew and repeatedly raped by the captain. He was put ashore pregnant and destitute at Newcastle, Australia in 1898. He gave birth to a daughter, Josephine Crawford Falleni in Sydney. He put the child in the care of an Italian woman and adopted the name Harry Crawford, a Scotsman. Thereafter he visited his daughter only infrequently.
