A Snapshot Diagnosis

The person who told me about the trans man who passed through Ellis Island in the early 1900s was a woman I’d only just met. One evening at the fellowship we were both attending, we found ourselves talking about gender and love: about labels, their limited usefulness. We’d been drawn together, but we didn’t have a label for our connection, couldn’t settle on one. Perhaps because of this, when the fellowship ended, we flew home to different states with no concrete plans to meet again. She was hundreds of miles away, but I kept returning to the conversation we’d had, remembering that scrap of story: a man had attempted to enter the United States on October 4, 1908, but had been detained, subjected to medical examination, and outed as trans.

I was lonely the night I lifted my computer into my bed and entered “trans man” and “Ellis Island” into the search bar. I expected this search to be futile. I thought the story would be impossible to find online, that it would be buried in an academic library somewhere, hidden behind an archive’s paywall or in an eighty-dollar book on trans histories. But Frank Woodhull appeared immediately in a black-and-white photograph, the first result.

The photo startled me. Woodhull looked directly at the camera, eyes narrowed behind spectacles in a stare somehow both aloof and understanding. Woodhull seemed put-together, impatient, but not frightened as I would’ve expected.

Far from being obscure, Woodhull appeared in several Reddit threads, was the face of Pride month for the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation, and was even written about by several fifth-grade students in a class taught by one Ms. Fischler. Always the same photo. The same scant facts. I dug deeper. I couldn’t find any transcript of the immigration hearing alluded to in present-day accounts, but in an archive, I found twentieth-century newspaper interviews with Woodhull. The newspapers described Woodhull as a “mustached woman” who “posed as a man.” Reading past these descriptions, I encountered Woodhull’s own words for the first time. Woodhull said, “By adopting men’s dress, I have been able to live a clean, respectable, and independent life.” A clean, respectable, and independent life: that was preferable, surely, to a lonely one. Enamored of Woodhull’s quote, the glimpse of Woodhull’s broader life I saw in those words, I thought, That is how I might be.

For months after I saw the photo, I felt Woodhull’s stare upon me in odd moments — at a low note in my laugh or a firm movement of my hand. The sensation comforted me, lent confidence to my experiments with masculine gestures. Woodhull, I thought, would have approved.

Of course, I had no way of knowing whether this was true or not. My understanding of Frank Woodhull was limited to that one photograph and