A Strange Sort of Being by Bambi Lobdell

A Strange Sort of Being:
The Transgender Life of Lucy Ann/Joseph Israel Lobdell, 1829-1912
By Bambi Lobdell
        
Bambi Lobdell was at a loss as to what to research and write about for her dissertation when she was given a copy of an ancestor’s writings about her own life.  Her name was Lucy Ann Lobdell, but she didn’t live out her life under that name, later taking the name of Joseph Israel Lobdell and spending the rest of her life as a man.

“I see Joe as a transgender pioneer, one who bravely lived life as authentically as possible, even though it brought him harassment, ridicule and incarceration, and I feel it necessary to present Lobdell’s life from that perspective,” the author says in introducing her topic.

Lucy Ann Lobdell was born in 1829 and grew up in Albany County, New York, then moved with her family to Long Eddy.  She was pressed into marriage but her husband left her soon after.  The family looked the other way when Lucy wore men’s clothes while she did farm chores, worked in her father’s mill and went hunting.  She became known as the Female Hunter of Delaware County due to her prowess. 

Eventually she left home to earn money as a singing teacher, clothed as a man because, she explained in her writings, no one would pay a woman as much as they did a man.  First she went to Pennsylvania and then west. 

Though the information becomes more scarce about her life out west, it is clear that she was engaged to be married to a woman when she was found out and driven out of town.  She returned home, too depressed to work, and ended up in the poor house. 

There she met Marie Louise Perry and presumably fell in love.  They escaped the poor house together and Lucy become Joe permanently.  They were married in 1862.  They lived off the land in the woods until her brother helped her get the widow’s pension from her first marriage, her husband having died in the civil war, and she bought a house for herself and Marie. 

An understanding of the thinking at the time by the psychological community can help to explain the persecution that Lobdell underwent.  “Before the second half of the nineteenth century, there was no concept of homosexuality as an identity that described a type of person.”

Further, two women desiring each other made no sense at all to the psychological community.  “Since sexual desire was read as an active behavior, and active behaviors were gendered as masculine, it was believed only men possessed sexual urges.  Women were believed to have no sexual desire and simply passively received male advances and pleased men for the sake of having families.”

In the author’s research, she found that stories of Lobdell suggest she was a lesbian or a “passing woman” trying to further her earning ability through wearing men’s clothes.  The author’s research brought her to a different conclusion. 

"While others tell stories that present Lobdell either as an insane woman or a beleaguered lesbian, Lobdell’s own story about sex and gender is that he is a heterosexual man.”

It is a fascinating story of a brave person living their most authentic life.  It is a heartbreaking and tragic story as well.  Lobdell’s brother tricked him on a visit and had him forcibly institutionalized, where Lobdell spent the last decades of life, a prisoner.  False obituaries and reports ensured that Marie Louise Perry never knew what really happened to her husband. 

“Lobdell’s persistence in living as a man only brought him poverty and a lack of employment opportunities, a marginalized life outside of society, and persecution and incarceration by legal and psychiatric authorities.”