Tuff Muff: Lucy Chesser

As a serious, young history undergraduate I studied with an impressive bunch of academically-minded ladies, a number of whom have gone on to greatness.

One of these is Lucy Chesser, whose marvelous book Parting With My Sex: Cross-Dressing, Inversion and Sexuality in Australian Cultural Life, I will be borrowing from today.

Chesser tells the eye-popping, true tale of Ellen Tremaye, a little Irish lady who, in 1856, came across to the colonies to make a new life. Not only did she switch homelands on the voyage, however, she also switched gender. By the time she landed in Victoria, for reasons not completely known, she had transformed into a Mr. Edward De Lacy Evans. Evans left that ship boasting he would marry her female cabin-mate, Mary Delahunty, which is exactly what he did. Mary was merely the first of three wives, the apparently studly Mr. Evans having no trouble pulling the ladies over the course of his life, including becoming a father on the way (it's a long story…).

Evans' life became front page news in 1879, when, following difficulties with his third wife, Julia Marquand, he suffered a breakdown which landed him in the Kew asylum in Melbourne. Here he was forcibly bathed, causing the truth of his sex to be revealed. An explosion of speculation and rumour-mongering ensued.

Anyone who had ever come within a whisker of Evans was interviewed for the local papers when they ran a series of sensationalist stories on the case. So while the historical record cannot be trusted to explain why Evans chose the life he did, what it does show is how the world responded to the knowledge that a woman had successfully lived, worked and loved for 23 years as a man.

The tragedy of the final part of Evans' story demonstrates that ultimately, society rejected his choices. Following his exposure, a broken Evans was subjected to a host of medical examinations and violations, derided by the press and forced back into female attire. He had a short and unsuccessful stint as a sideshow attraction as a 'man-woman', and finally, subdued and domesticated, lived an isolated existence in a women's hostel until his death in 1901, never to speak of his past again.

Chesser writes that, once she started looking for examples of cross-dressing in Australian historical sources, she found they were swimming in it. Her book exposes a gaping chasm between society's idea of what is 'normal' and the very queer reality. Re-examining 'truth' is the historian's métier and Lucy Chesser has done her job well. It is for this reason I name her CHERRIE Magazine's Tuff Muff of the month, alongside her transgressive and beguiling subject, Mr. Edward De Lacy Evans.