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 a handful of newspaper articles from 1908. But I wanted more. I wished to have a conversation with Woodhull. That fall I wrote a short story in which a young and isolated queer narrator uses a photo booth as a time machine, returning to Ellis Island to meet Frank Woodhull. In the story, Woodhull was more than a photograph. This Woodhull was alive — prickly, self-reliant, definitively masculine. I wrote the story with a swaggering, mischievous joy, granting my own wish.

In workshop, someone asked what pronouns they should use to discuss the story; I had used you to refer to Woodhull throughout, sidestepping the question. “Use any pronouns,” I said. As my colleagues proceeded to use they and he and she interchangeably, I lost the thread of the craft discussion, distracted by the way my body thrilled at the pronoun fluidity. As they talked about Frank Woodhull, I imagined they spoke about me. I was not yet using they/them pronouns. Within a year I would be.

In 1908, newspapers all used she and her pronouns for Woodhull. In my research on Woodhull, I also read more modern texts, including The Ellis Island Snow Globe by Erica Rand, which discusses the oppressive ways that gender, race, and citizenship were constructed at that immigrant inspection and processing station. Rand uses he and him pronouns for Woodhull and explains her choice this way: “I draw on the principle that I try to follow in relation to living people by referring to Woodhull in accordance with his own preferences.” But we have no record of the pronouns Woodhull wanted and, since Woodhull reportedly died around 1939, we can’t ask. While I’m tempted to use they, because it’s the pronoun I use and I’d like to insist in that way on kinship, there’s no evidence that Woodhull ever used it. Instead, I follow the lead of Maggie Nelson, who writes in The Argonauts that the key to avoiding pronouns is to “train your ear not to mind hearing a person’s name over and over again.”

I know little about Frank Woodhull’s life beyond the story of that day on Ellis Island. But immediately after that first encounter, I chose Woodhull as an ancestor. My gender, I decided, was of Woodhull’s lineage.

Woodhull was born in 1858 in Ontario, Canada. Of course, Woodhull went by another name then, a name the newspapers used in 1908, but which I will not use. According to those newspaper interviews, Woodhull’s father died when Woodhull was twenty, throwing Woodhull “entirely onto my own resources.” In 1894, at the age of thirty-six, unable to “earn an honest living” as a woman, Woodhull remembered having heard about someone from Canada who had “put on men’s clothes to do men’s work.” Woodhull decided to do the same: “I was in California at the time. I bought men’s clothes and began to wear them.” Regarding all that happened next — working stints as a book canvasser, sidestepping the curious questions of children, beginning to live alongside men in hotels and ship’s cabins, drinking bourbon with them, playing craps, talking about the Spanish–American War and, surely, about women — Woodhull stated succinctly, “Then things changed.”

In July 1908, after nearly fifteen years of that clean and independent life, Frank Woodhull had saved up some money from canvassing and decided to spend it not on land or luxuries, but on a months-long search for English lineage. Woodhull traveled in steerage on a ship bound for England, explaining, “My folks come originally from England and it had long been my wish to go there and take a look about.” I like to imagine Woodhull on this trip, searching for ancestry: I picture Woodhull running one finger down line after line of church records in Southampton, searching for a certain family name. Woodhull lighting a cigar with a match in a walnut-paneled smoking room on board the SS City of New York.

Upon returning to the States, Woodhull had to pass through Ellis Island, where Public Health Service clerks surveyed every person in what one clerk described as a “snapshot diagnosis.” I can’t find any official written record of Woodhull’s snapshot. The newspapers offer only this: “At Ellis Island, Woodhull was asked the usual questions and answered amongst others age fifty and health perfect. The clerk doubted the last declaration because Woodhull’s cheeks were a little sunken.” Suspecting Woodhull might have tuberculosis, the clerk chalked an EX, as in “examine,” on the collar of Woodhull’s suit.

Medical examination and a hearing before the Board of Special Inquiry would determine whether Woodhull could reenter the United States. This first snapshot led to another. While Woodhull was detained, Augustus Sherman, a clerk at Ellis Island and amateur portrait photographer, took Woodhull’s photograph, the snapshot whose gaze captivated me a century later.

In the photographic sense, the word “snapshot” dates to 1890, a few years after the first Kodak box camera arrived on the market in 1888. At twenty-five dollars for the camera and another ten dollars for film processing, the Kodak wasn’t cheap, but it made photography accessible for the first time to affluent amateurs. Demand was swift. The decade that followed became marked by a snapshot craze.

As photography became faster and cheaper, it was also increasingly used as a method of regulation and surveillance. The same year Kodak released its first box camera, Alphonse Bertillon, chief of France’s Judicial Identification Services, standardized the use of photography in law enforcement. He mandated that two close-cropped photos — one in profile and one head-on — be taken of any person convicted of a crime in France. Police departments in the United States quickly adopted a similar procedure, preceding the mug shot, DNA samples, and iris scans.

In 1892, when the Chinese Exclusion Act came up for reauthorization, a lawmaker proposed an amendment requiring that photographs be included with Chinese immigrant registrations. Early application forms mandated “the head not to be less than 1 ½ inches from the base of hair to the base of the chin,” a forerunner of the passport photo and the digital image now required with visa applications.

Augustus Sherman’s portraits belong to this lineage. He photographed exclusively those detained at Ellis Island. None of his subjects, including Frank Woodhull, could have known whether refusing to sit for a portrait would affect one’s chances of being admitted to the United States. Sherman also insisted that his subjects change out of their traveling clothes into their “national dress,” or, in the case of performers, their stage clothes. He labeled the photos not with names but with race, country of origin, and any other markers of interest.

Each label was its own kind of snapshot. Woodhull’s reads: “Dressed 15 yrs in men’s clothes.”

Woodhull sat before Augustus Sherman in the middle of two long days of uncertainty and confinement — first in the medical ward and then in the waiting room for the Board of Special Inquiry, where, according to historian Katherine Reed, other migrants had written on the walls using the physician’s blue chalk: “blasted America” and “they have here…a knife on the neck.” Woodhull was white, Canadian, Protestant, masculine in presentation, and thus protected by intersecting privileges. But before Augustus Sherman would insist on Woodhull’s best suit and hat, a matron insisted Woodhull undress entirely for an examination.

Once, in a hospital, I was asked to undress and step into the bathroom for a urine test. When I returned from the bathroom, my clothes and all my things were gone. What I felt then is what I imagine Woodhull experienced on that day — nakedness, panic, a sudden unmooring. In spite of this, I am grateful Woodhull’s portrait exists, and so I, too, disregard Frank Woodhull’s desire for privacy, anonymity, a clean and independent life. I keep writing about Woodhull, tugging Woodhull from the archives to endure my diagnostic gaze.

In my first story about Woodhull, I also disregarded a line from Woodhull’s newspaper interviews. It comes from earlier in Woodhull’s time at Ellis Island, during the medical examination. The line appears in a moment the newspapers love to dramatize — right before Woodhull’s disrobing, which the papers position as a revelation, the story’s climax.

Here it is in a newspaper from Omaha, Nebraska: Woodhull “tried hard to control her nerves, but when the surgeon said, ‘I shall have to ask you to remove your clothing, Mr. Woodhull,’ wept. ‘Oh, please don’t examine me!’ she pleaded. ‘I might as well tell you all. I am a woman.’” I’ve read a dozen newspaper articles about Frank Woodhull. All include some form of this dialogue. A small paper in Waterbury, Connecticut, follows it with: “The doctor looked at the full black mustache and doubted.”

I am a woman. This is the line I omitted in the short story I wrote about Frank Woodhull. While I doubt the veracity of the newspapers’ renderings of this encounter, that is not the reason I left the line out. I omitted it because I reject the newspaper’s breach of Woodhull’s privacy in this moment — their desire to sensationalize, their violation of Woodhull — and because this line represents the only time Woodhull appears desperate, pleading, stripped of poise. I hate that when I read these accounts, Woodhull’s voice in my mind spins high, girlish. Woodhull, in my imagination, suddenly sounds effeminate.

In 2015, Shadi Petosky, a trans woman, was detained for forty minutes in the Orlando International Airport because, after TSA agents identified her as a woman and pushed the pink button on their full-body scanner, the machine flagged what agents called an “anomaly” in her groin area. Petosky then endured two full-body pat downs; full disassembly of her luggage; and questioning from two police officers, one explosives specialist, and four TSA agents who temporarily took her phone for screening.

On social media, a quick search for #TravelingWhileTrans collates dozens of similar stories, stories that have led to articles offering tips on how to respond if your binder sets off an alarm or if you’re asked which gender of TSA agent should complete a pat down. Trans people with means are advised to splurge for TSA PreCheck. All trans people are advised to try hard, as Woodhull did, to control their nerves.

The newspapers look away from Woodhull’s actual medical examination as they might look away from sex. The Evening Star states only that Woodhull’s attempts at “demurring to a physical examination” were unsuccessful, and then writes, “A matron was called and thereafter Frank Woodhull became known as Mary Johnson.” The Mitchell Capital concurs: “Woodhull [was] shorn of the name Frank Woodhull.” A change in name stands in here for an anomaly in the groin area, for Woodhull’s gender identity. Shorn — in the word, the suggestion of a blade, a severing.

What happens next is a story familiar to any trans person who has set foot in a hospital. An attendant was called to show “Mary Johnson” to a private hospital room where Woodhull would meet Augustus Sherman and, later, spend the night. Directed to Woodhull’s room, the attendant “came out in a hurry, saying that there was only a man in there.” After the misunderstanding was addressed, Woodhull, “in a state of agitation,” was seen to the private room.

When I read Shadi Petosky’s tweet — “TSA has left me in a room alone. There is an officer holding the door” — I imagine the words chalked on the walls of the waiting room for the Board of Special Inquiry. On Ellis Island, Woodhull was treated the way trans people are still treated in hospitals, in airports, by immigration authorities. But can I label Woodhull trans?

In my notes for the first story I wrote about Frank Woodhull, I used he and him pronouns. I referred to Woodhull as a “traveling man.” I was not alone in this assessment. In We Were There, a blog series of The Queer-A-Day Project, Woodhull’s entry is tagged “transgender,” a choice the series explains by noting Woodhull’s “willingness to live as a man and…dislike of womanhood.” The Digital Transgender Archive, where I found the digitized newspaper articles that inform this essay, tags Woodhull’s newspaper clippings as “transgender,” “FtM,” and “stealth (transgender).”

I remain tempted by the label. When Woodhull says, “I do not know what I’ll do now that I have been found out,” I want to fill in, “to be transmasculine.” When Woodhull says, “Fifteen years ago,” I want to finish, “I embraced my trans identity.” When Woodhull says, “By adopting men’s dress I have been able to live,” I want to stop the sentence right there. I want to cut away what Woodhull says next — “a clean, respectable, and independent life.” That line, which initially drew me to model my gender after Woodhull’s, is now disconcerting to me, because in its practicality, its syntactical shrug, it belies all the difficulty and danger of being trans.

I want to insist that the choice to wear men’s clothing revealed some truth about Woodhull’s identity — deep, internal, far from only practical. I want to keep ignoring those words, “I am a woman,” which certainly seem to have been uttered by Woodhull in a state of duress, as a desperate attempt to stave off the violation of an exam, even perhaps anticipating the possibility of violence from that male physician. After all, Woodhull had only the language of 1908 to explain gender. What else could Woodhull have said?

It wasn’t until the second half of the twentieth century that the word “transgender” was used, first in texts written by German and Austrian sexologists intent on making medical what had previously been a social, spiritual, sometimes even supernatural, identity. Dr. John Oliven was among the first to use it, writing in 1965, “Where the compulsive urge reaches beyond female vestments, and becomes an urge for gender (‘sex’) change, transvestism becomes ‘transsexualism.’ The term is misleading; actually, ‘transgenderism’ is what is meant, because sexuality is not a major factor in primary transvestism.” Late in the twentieth century, the term “FtM” began to appear as an abbreviation in medical texts — for example, the statistical tables detailing the results of a 1989 longitudinal study of testosterone administration in “agonadal female to male transsexuals.”

All of this is to say: the words I’ve been tempted to impose on Woodhull, the words used to describe Woodhull in contemporary blogs and archives, are the words of the medical industry. They appear in guidelines for the primary care of transgender people and also in bills criminalizing trans healthcare. Though the word “transgender” is a needed and affirming label today, its lineage is medical, even pathological. I want to avoid labeling Woodhull as transgender in part because of this lineage, but also because it’s not the word I use to describe my gender identity. If I’m going to label Woodhull anachronistically, I want to insist on the language I use myself.

“Genderqueer” is of a different lineage, coined by 1990s activists to refer to individuals engaged in political advocacy. As Jacob Tobia described it: “If you were a gay person who was political, you were an ‘orientation queer,’ and if you were a transgender person who was political, you were a ‘genderqueer.’” I first came across the word “genderqueer” in Rand’s The Ellis Island Snow Globe. When I looked the word up, I felt freed by its anythingness — gender with queer at its end, queer which I’ll define like Shannon Winnubst does, as “to have no fixed idea of who or what you are or might become and to find this an extraordinary pleasure.”

I could try to say that having learned the word “genderqueer,” I immediately bought men’s clothes and began to wear them; I could say that right then, for me as for Woodhull, “things changed.” I could say I followed Woodhull’s example easily, as Woodhull had followed the example of another Canadian. But I didn’t. After I learned the word, I spent years researching gender. I began to think of myself as genderqueer long before I ever said the word aloud.

The first time I used the word to describe my gender was in the emergency department after a suicide attempt. I’d undressed. My clothes and phone had been taken away. I’d been left in a glass-walled room, alone. I was tired, agitated. A nurse sat outside facing the door. The psychiatrist asked why I’d attempted to kill myself.

In response, I invoked the word strategically; I thought “genderqueer” would act as a shortcut. I expected the staff would know about the statistics that showed trans identity to be a risk factor for suicide and wouldn’t ask any further questions.

This worked, though the causality I suggested was, for myself, a lie. I hadn’t tried to kill myself because I was genderqueer — though it was true that I was genderqueer. The fear that had kept me from previously voicing that identity aloud dissipated in the impersonal setting of the hospital, in the heightened recklessness following my attempt. When the nurse asked what pronouns I used, I said they and them. I expected the nurse to doubt this assertion, as the doctor had doubted Woodhull’s, but she only nodded, noted this, and left. I felt as though I’d gotten away with something.

When I returned to that same hospital for a mandatory follow-up appointment a week later, they took my snapshot for their patient registry. This is the portrait that now appears anytime I log in to the online patient portal. In it, my head tilts slightly left, as Woodhull’s did. My mouth, like Woodhull’s, is a wide flat line. But beyond that, I don’t look like Woodhull. I don’t yet have the androgynous appearance I would cultivate in the year that followed. In the space created by the word “genderqueer,” I would envision myself anew.

Would it be such a terrible thing to insist Woodhull was genderqueer, to offer Woodhull the freedom the word gave me? During the years I spent drafting my story about Woodhull, I thought it wasn’t. I imagined my acts of writing about Woodhull were a kindness, even a gift. I believed that because I was uncertain about gender, because I celebrated Woodhull’s gender identity, it freed me from the sideshow-like interest of Augustus Sherman, the lurid caricatures of the newspapers with their painful, chronic misgendering. I believed I’d reclaimed Woodhull as chosen ancestor.

In the last year, surrounded by genderqueer community — no longer lonely, no longer desperately seeking the kinship Woodhull first offered me — I’ve had the space to reconsider. Now I wonder if my adoration is not so different from that of the five men on the Board of Special Inquiry who, after hearing Woodhull’s story, applauded Woodhull’s work ethic, Woodhull’s willingness to maintain financial solvency at any cost. Woodhull “won the sympathy of every official at Ellis Island,” the Times reported. The Board decided not only to allow Woodhull entry to the United States but to allow entry dressed in whatever clothes Woodhull chose.

And the newspapers — those same newspapers that misgendered Woodhull and sensationalized Woodhull’s medical exam — they, too, finally celebrated Woodhull. The Times said Woodhull “looked a man to perfection, one of Napoleonic proportions” and described how Woodhull spoke to the Board “with arm upraised in so masculine a way it was hard to believe that she was a woman.” The newspaper later insisted, “Her story is that of an honest, hardworking woman, who in spite of discarding skirts lived a blameless life.”

New Yorkers, who had read the story in the Times, prepared to celebrate Woodhull, gathering in a large crowd at Battery Park to greet Woodhull on October 5, when Woodhull was scheduled to be released from Ellis Island, a day after arriving. However, Woodhull actually “took passage on one of the steamboats carrying immigrants to the outgoing trains in Jersey City and therefore did not set foot in New York,” either unaware or avoidant of this public admiration.

It’s in the last year that I’ve come to recognize that, no matter my liberatory intentions, if I insist Woodhull was genderqueer, then this essay is a part of that crowd. It is a descendant of Augustus Sherman’s photo. It is sprung from the Board of Special Inquiry, from the Public Health Service physician. It becomes my own snapshot diagnosis: an attempt to determine Frank Woodhull’s gender, to put my own frame around Woodhull’s story based on that single photo and a handful of quotes. My efforts to claim and explain Woodhull with my own words makes me no different from the articles that used the words they had — a trousered woman, a mustached woman.

If I say Woodhull was genderqueer because Woodhull dressed in men’s clothes, I am ignoring the many women today who dress the same way. If I say Woodhull was genderqueer because Woodhull was perceived in daily life as a man, I am suggesting gender is an externally imposed identity. If I say Woodhull was genderqueer because Woodhull disliked womanhood, I am conflating genderqueer identity with misogyny. (What Woodhull says in those interviews smacks of misogyny, even for 1908: “Women…are walking advertisements for the milliner, the dry goods stores, the jewelers, and other shops. They live in the main only for their clothes.”) I have every reason to believe that, discounting even the anachronism, imagining I could explain the meaning and context of the word and everything behind it, Woodhull would still find the label “genderqueer” at best unfamiliar and at worst inadequate, even limiting. There is no definitive reason to label Frank Woodhull genderqueer, outside my own desire to see myself in Woodhull’s story.

I write “Woodhull,” but I mean myself. But not only myself. I mean anyone who, attempting to make their gender-diverse identity legible for a cisgender audience, has used language in the lineage of Woodhull’s.

I still can’t explain to my mother why I’m genderqueer without telling her what it is to be a woman, and every time I try, she comes right back at me with, “Woman can be anything at all,” which is true, though it’s true, too, that I exist outside of that particular infinity.

I’m not genderqueer because I hated shopping malls from a young age or because I was reckless on a mountain bike or because I wanted robot kits instead of makeup for my birthdays. Perhaps I’m genderqueer because I feel a frisson of excitement when mistaken for a man. Perhaps because the word “genderqueer” helps me situate my past suicidality. Or because I want to confound my parents. Or because I once wanted to be attractive to a straight woman. Or because I recognized myself in Frank Woodhull’s snapshot. I could unearth dozens of similar explanations, all reasons I’ve considered and ultimately discarded in a favor of a more ineffable truth. For me, genderqueer identity means yielding to an internal knowing, an instinct.

Like any label, however affirming, the word “genderqueer” has also limited me, as I’ve shaped myself to what I believed were its demands and contours. As a white person with a vagina, I felt the word required an androgynous appearance like Woodhull’s. It was when I first reached for this androgyny in presentation and mannerism — resisted crossing my legs, learned to tie a tie, buzzed my hair — that I felt Woodhull’s approving gaze.

I could feel it again recently as I prepared for an author photo. I wore a sweater that hid my neck and body as Woodhull’s suit did. Woodhull watched me as I stood before the camera, guessing what angle of my chin, what tension in my jaw, would ensure the photo captured not just my person, but a genderqueer person. I felt Woodhull’s approval when I refused to smile. Woodhull hadn’t smiled.

I’m working now to define genderqueer for myself as affirmation — not as aspiration, not as a set of qualities before a diagnostic gaze I’m striving to meet, but as a description of my gender. Today, I will resist labeling Woodhull as genderqueer — not for Woodhull’s sake but for my own, and for the sake of anyone who has ever contemplated the language of gender with resignation. If I call Woodhull genderqueer, I’m erasing the history we may need most of all, one in which there is no word that fully captures and defines Frank Woodhull’s experience, not in 1908 and not in 2022. Maybe this is the real usefulness of lineage: a recognition that our concepts of gender today are specific to us, not timeless. While this may sound limiting, it also suggests the possibility of more expansive definitions of gender in the future.

I began this essay five years after I wrote the short story about Woodhull. I wanted to account for the liberties I’d taken with Woodhull’s life in that story, to distinguish Woodhull’s perspective from my own. Before I started writing, I pulled up the digitized photo of Frank Woodhull, to feel again the pressure of the gaze that had followed me through my earliest months in men’s clothes. There, above Woodhull’s flat wide mouth and dimpled chin, beneath the brim of that fedora, behind the wire-rimmed spectacles — it simply wasn’t. Woodhull’s eyes are not visible in the photo. The shadow of the fedora obscures them. The spectacles are blank, unseeing. I felt both dismayed and relieved by this revelation. I cannot disappoint Frank Woodhull. Woodhull has never once gazed back at me.