Trans Disruption as Religious Hysterics: Reverend Joseph Lobdell's Incoherence as Social Problem

Emily Skidmore’s paper, “Trans Disruption as Religious Hysterics: Reverend Joseph Lobdell’s Incoherence as Social Problem,” explores additional intersections between spirituality and tonal deviance by focusing on... [ view full abstract ]

Emily Skidmore’s paper, “Trans Disruption as Religious Hysterics: Reverend Joseph Lobdell’s Incoherence as Social Problem,” explores additional intersections between spirituality and tonal deviance by focusing on expressions of incoherence. Skidmore observes that across different historical epochs trans expressions have taken a number of different forms, many becoming legible by the way they challenge normative expectations of social interaction. Joseph Lobdell was an individual who was assigned female at birth but who lived most of his adult life as male in the mid/late 19^th century. Lobdell became somewhat notorious throughout Pennsylvania and New York as a socially disruptive individual as he cycled in and out of alms houses, and as he and Marie Perry (the woman who lived as his wife) were accused of causing public disturbances through “Reverend” Lobdell’s religious “ramblings.” Representing Lobdell as an individual assigned female at birth but who sought to pass as male, newspaper accounts often depicted him (and his religious articulations) as problematic because he was incoherent. Additionally, after he was institutionalized in Willard Psychiatric Center, medical reports continued to comment not simply on his behavior but the tone and tenor of his discussions with medical staff and doctors. This paper will explore the ways in which Lobdell’s gender expression was policed and discussed in terms of tone, and in so doing, it will suggest new ways of imagining the transgender past.