Trans history in Washington

Some folks consider the conversations around expansive gender identity and the rights of trans individuals to be a modern phenomenon, but Harry Allen would disagree. Harry was considered something of a troublemaker and rabble rouser by officials in and around the young city of Seattle from the 1890s to the 1930s. He worked in many careers as a bartender, barber, and longshoreman. He got in fights, swore openly, and had a wife name Isabelle. By all accounts, Harry Allen was an active and energetic Northwestern man… and his assigned sex at birth was female.

“I did not like to be a girl; did not feel like a girl, and never did look like a girl,” he once told The Seattle Sunday Times in an interview, “So it seemed impossible to make myself a girl and, sick at heart over the thought that I would be an outcast of the feminine gender, I conceived the idea of making myself a man.” This was helped by moving to the West where attitudes towards gender identity were less rigid than the more densely populated East coast and Midwest. Most of the indigenous tribes of the Northwest and Western Canada had a cultural respect and understanding for people who were gender non-conforming, so it’s possible these attitudes served as a model for white settlers and increased the societal tolerance of people who were trans.

But while Harry Allen was open about his status as a trans man, many hundreds of others chose to keep that part of their lives hidden, and in some cases were only discovered to be trans after their death. Regardless of whether they chose to speak openly about it, trans individuals have lived and worked in Washington since long before statehood, and back to time immemorial. The contributions of people who are trans or gender non-conforming are a significant part of who we are, but our history does not always reflect those contributions. While Pride as an observance started in New York in 1970, Harry Allen and others like him have been proud members of our communities for much longer, and will be for many years to come.

Note: If you’d like to learn more about this issue, read the book “Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past” by historian Peter Boag, or “True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century” by Emily Skidmore.

Learn how you can support trans youth and check out SAMHSA's LGBTQI+ resource page!