Searching for D

Walter Sholto Douglas (1790-?1830) was a trans man who made a pastime of confusing straight people two hundred years ago. The illegitimate child of a Scottish Earl, Douglas supported himself, his widowed sister, and a series of close female “friends” by writing short stories, poetry, and book reviews, and by teaching music. Around 1827, he moved to Paris with his new wife Isabella and his adoptive daughter, and he began living full-time as a man. Douglas was known to the public by his penname David Lyndsay and to later researchers by his birth name Mary Diana Dods. To his friends and family (including Mary Shelley), he was known as “Doddy,” or simply “D.”

As a gay trans man, entitling my first blog post “Searching for D” may be a little on the nose, but this choice is in the playful spirit in which Douglas also wrote. A chapter of my PhD is devoted to the various writings that Douglas left behind, and here I would like to introduce one of my favourites – an article published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine chaotically titled “My Transmogrifications.”

A Note on Terminology

Living during the Regency era, Douglas did not have access to the language of transness that we use today. LGBTQ+ community terms only emerged in response to medical pathologisations of queerness in the late Nineteenth Century. Applying modern labels to historical figures can be dicey – it risks anachronism and over-determination, putting people into fixed boxes, which is ironically something that our communities still struggle with enormously. On the other hand, not acknowledging continuities and similarities between historical figures and contemporary experiences risks erasing queerness and transness from the archives altogether. Lots of researchers have written brilliantly on this ethical quandary, and I especially recommend reading Kit Heyam’s Before We Were Trans (2022) and Hil Malatino’s Trans Care (2020). Malatino writes beautifully at the point between ethics and affect in archives:

I’m haunted by these archival specters, and by my sense of duty to them. Because, in some small way, by existing… they have made our existence possible. Because our lives are, in some opaque and difficult to capture way, entwined. Because I want to do justice to their struggles and their joys. Because, in my own way, and with all of my own projections and fantasies intact, I have fallen in love with them. To love the dead is for them to remain with you, introjected, present. Haunting and love are very close, indeed. (Malatino, 57)

In an attempt to care for the “archival specter”  of Douglas – and to care for myself as a trans researcher – I choose to use the term “trans” to describe Douglas. He lived the last few years of his life as a man, and the surviving letters between him and Shelley show that his friends understood him as something other than a woman before he transitioned. The final records we have of Douglas demonstrate that he was willing to risk ongoing imprisonment and even death to maintain and affirm his male gender presentation. He transed gender in ways that are very recognisable to my own experiences, and so I choose to take his gender expressions seriously and show care by imagining possibilities on his behalf that were disallowed and made illicit by the culture of his time. This is not intended to pin him to a “trans” label – but to acknowledge my own affective response to his story.

“My Transmogrifications”

This enticingly named article was published by William Blackwood in 1825, and is framed as a response to another article by Mary Russell Mitford in a literary annual (a type of gift book popular in the 1820s and 30s). In Mitford’s light-reading article about the differences between men and women, she argues that “there is very little change in [men] from early boyhood” (307). Douglas refutes this, claiming that Mitford has only reached this conclusion “solely because she is not one of us, and could scarcely have opportunities of remarking our changes as closely as those of her own sex” (152). This rebuttal marks Douglas’ implied author as male, something which the magazine’s readers would have no reason to doubt, as the articles were always anonymous, and Douglas wrote to Blackwood under a pseudonym anyway. Douglas was smuggling a trans experience of masculinity into a mainstream magazine, helping to influence how the public understood gender in the early Nineteenth Century.

Douglas then recounts his own “transmogrifications” from a sensitive young boy, to mischievous and rowdy pre-teen at boarding school, to romantic teenage poet, to sensible adult. Betty T. Bennett, the Mary Shelley scholar who first pieced together Douglas’ story from the archives, dismisses this as a “pretty story” but unlikely to be true (160). For instance, she points out that having been raised as a girl within an aristocratic household, Douglas would not have attended boarding school, but would have had a governess. But I think that Bennett is somewhat missing the point here. By describing his “boyhood,” perhaps Douglas was imagining a narrative for himself that more closely reflected his internal world, that used the archetypes of public masculinity to express a deeper truth about his childhood experiences. Perhaps he was gifting himself the boyhood he longed for. I search the pages of this crumbling periodical for traces of Douglas’ life, and find a mirror of my own trans yearnings – the longing for the easy recognition of self that cis people take for granted.

To a cis audience, “My transmogrifications” would perhaps read as a light article joking about gender stereotypes. To a trans reader, Douglas’ writing is chaotic and enticing. He laughs at his own youthful melodrama:

My intense love of the beautiful, undirected by reason, exhibited itself in the most ridiculous forms – I read novels, and the pathetic stories in magazine. – I contemplated the setting sun – fell in love with the moon, and made verses to every little star that twinkled behind the clouds and before the clouds. I would not have read or written anything lively for the world; I should have thought fun an insult to my feelings… I concluded that I should be a tall, thin, pale, pensive-looking young man, and acted up to the character accordingly. I loved to be thought an invalid, and frightened my mother to death by an affectation of a hectic cough, which I pretended to consider as a warning that I should die early of a decline… I wrote a long string of verses, called the ‘Dying Boy’… It brought the tears into my own eyes to read it – (I have since learned it had the same effect upon others, but from a very opposite emotion) – I sent them to one of the most pitiful magazines, where they were (God knows why) inserted. Oh, how proud was I – I was a Scholar and a Poet! (153)

The narrator’s decision to be “a tall, thin, pale, pensive-looking young man,” then an “invalid,” and finally “a Scholar and a Poet” are telling. Douglas is showing that we all – cis and trans folks alike – try out different roles and gender persona. Douglas seems to understand gender as fundamentally textual citation – as a series of emulations. This is similar to how scholars understand gender today, following the groundbreaking work done in the 1990s by Judith Butler, who understood gender as iterative and citational – as emulating and re-emulating itself in everyday moments of human interaction.

Douglas closes with another comic moment, though not many of his contemporary readers would not have fully understood the joke:

My friends alone must decide whether the boy be like the man – I think not – so, with the burthen of nearly thirty years on my shoulders, all the usual cares of life, and some, perhaps, that are not usual, I take my leave, to fight out the remainder as I may. (154)

“Cares… that are not usual” could allude to Douglas’ queer experience of living as a man. The question of “whether the boy be like the man” could likewise be read as a joke about transitioning that only his “friends” would understand – an explicit nod to those friends, quietly poking fun together at his unknown cis readers and their binary, normative experiences of gender. Just as trans and queer people today tend to poke fun at straight people, partly as a coping mechanism in the face of growing hostility, Douglas carved out space in one of the most widely-read magazines of the Regency era to make fun of straight people without them even realising. It is always good to find queer people in history, but it is especially satisfying to find one who so comfortably made space for queer community knowledge, smuggled like a pilot fish on the leviathan of public, cis narratives of gender.

Works Cited & Further Reading

Bennett, Betty T. Mary Diana Dods, a Gentleman and a Scholar. William Morrow, 1991.

[Shelley scholar Bennett did incredible, groundbreaking work on Douglas, but I recommend her book with a warning – her language is dated and often transphobic, explicitly dismissing queer/trans possibility and treating Douglas’ transition as “disguise” and “fraud.” See Yingst’s article for an incisive analysis of these problems.]

Douglas, Walter Sholto. “My Transmogrifications.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 20, no. 115 (1826): 152-154.

Heyam, Kit. Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender. Hachette, 2023.

Malatino, Hil. Trans Care. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Mitford, Mary Russell. “A Village Sketch.” Forget me not; A Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1826. R. Ackermann, 1826.

Yingst, Carlisle. “Transition by the book: editing pseudonymity, and the possibilities of trans bibliography.” PBSA 118, no. 2 (2024): 197-222.