The Captain and Thomasine

Grew up a girl, became a soldier, dressed as a woman, defended herself in stunning Jamestown court case. Cross-dressing was not all that uncommon in the 17th Century, not among the English and not among the Native Americans of Virginia. But the Thomas/Thomasine Hall case of 1629 was not about cross-dressing as we think of it today. It was about choice-dressing - it was about America’s first known intersexual, her struggle for identity in a male-female world and her choice to dress as a woman despite efforts of settlers in Jamestown to force her to dress as a man. Thomasine Hall testified during a March 25, 1629, session of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia that she was christened as a girl in Newcastle upon Tyne, named Thomasine and was raised as a girl. She considered herself a girl in childhood and a woman in adulthood. It was her wish to be called a woman, to be called Thomasine, which was her birth name