Sally-Tom was one of the first people in the US to have her gender recognized by a legal governing body long before sex was included in regular documentation. Sally was a formerly enslaved Black trans woman who became an incidental activist. Unlike many others at the time, she was open about her gender in public. In fact, she may be the first trans person in US history to have her gender recognized by any governmental institution. Around 1869, the Georgia Freedmen’s Bureau approved her decision to live as a woman. Although no photographs or recordings of Sally exist, local journalists wrote vivid details of her life and struggles.
Sally was born in Georgia around 1839. According to the reporters documenting her case, she lived in rural Randolph County. Georgia birth records for whites did not begin until 1875, and public records of people of color (except for slave sales) were even less common. It is unlikely Sally had any records before the 1860s. The Kendrick family enslaved her and forced her to perform plantation work up to the end of the Civil War when she was about twenty-six.
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Sally-Tom sought new freedoms with her emancipation. The end of the Civil War brought economic opportunity for formerly enslaved people. Many of the over four hundred thousand formerly enslaved people in Georgia stayed on their plantations. Sally, on the other hand, left for the city of Albany, Georgia.
Although she adopted paid work, Sally was still subjected to slave-like conditions. Former Confederate major Thomas Walker first hired her. She became his cook, gardener, cotton cutter, and wood chopper. During her early years as Walker’s employee, Sally-Tom began living more openly as a woman. She was seen running errands in a men’s shirt buttoned to white pants with a feminine white apron meant to contour her body. She also donned a sailor’s hat.
While Sally-Tom worked for Walker, Georgia entered the Reconstruction era with the aid of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (popularly called the Freedmen’s Bureau). The agency intended to help transition Black communities out of slavery through a constellation of offices throughout the Southern states. Yet their councils were divisive. They forced Black women to work and attempted to convince families to do plantation labor again. On the other hand, they distributed food, encouraged education, and helped settle legal disputes. The councils began to close in 1870 and are seldom heard of today as they failed to truly emancipate the Southern Black population.
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Around 1869, officials brought Sally-Tom into the local bureau office as a witness to a case. The branch leader was much more interested in her than the matter she was brought in for.
An unnamed reporter noted the bureau leader “inquired minutely into [her] life and habits, found out all about [her], and after due deliberation solemnly laid down the law that [she] could either be a man or woman as [she] preferred, but [she] had to be of one sex only as far as wearing apparel was concerned.” Interestingly, the reporter initially used it/its pronouns for Sally-Tom in the article before switching to she/her pronouns when he described the Freedmen’s Bureau giving its approval for her to live as a woman.
Respectability politics generally did not favor trans people in the nineteenth century. However, Sally took advantage of the gender binary. By embodying the shame of being forced to live between genders, the council offered her a choice to live as male or female, depending on her wishes.
The reporter pondered, “Here was a dilemma, a position that few human beings are placed in, to decide at once whether to be a man or woman for all one’s future life. To toil among the men or live in the more quiet manner of the gentler sex and be one of them.” The answer was clear: “Sally-Tom was not too long in deciding. [She] had good taste and determined henceforth to lead a new life and become a woman. She changed her sex, donned feminine garments and since that day for over twenty years has passed as female.”
Interestingly, the reporter seemed to accept Sally’s changed gender and pronouns. After transitioning, Sally-Tom wore a brimmed straw hat that became her new, distinguished look.
If Sally were white, it is possible her gender would have been prosecuted. Cross-dressing laws began emerging in the 1840s, but in the wake of Reconstruction, the Freedmen’s Bureau had significant jurisdiction over the Black population and frequently made decisions that would avoid inciting more conflict. There is no way to know what each court member thought, but cultural attitudes undoubtedly influenced Sally-Tom’s case.
Sally refused to discuss her life with reporters, so we do not have a single word of her self-narrative. Those who knew her described her to papers at length, however. With a high and crackly voice, Sally reportedly hid behind her straw hat and left events before conflict arose. Her decision to avoid media made sense from the perspective of self-preservation; she likely did not want to draw attention to herself during such a violent era of increasing lynchings and attacks on the Black population.
Thomas Walker died in early 1877, and Sally continued to undertake similar work. She hired herself out for tasks like cooking and gardening. One man who hired her to be his chef decided to let her go because he was uncomfortable with her Black gender-nonconforming presence. She would hold his baby in her lap, as most female cooks did at the time, surprising him with her gentle demeanor. Intuitive, she left before he had a chance to officially fire her.
About twenty years after Sally’s gender became official, white-owned newspapers reported on her with mixed reactions. They used slurs against her but appeared amazed at her confidence in transitioning. The 1889 articles referred to Sally as a “hermaphrodite” (now considered a slur for intersex). At the time, the term was typically used to describe any queer person, typically those who were gender nonconforming.
It is possible “Sally-Tom” was simply a nickname as no records with that name appeared on Georgia’s registries in the nineteenth century. Other local commentators used the term Sally-Tom to describe indecision or conflict within a single body. Sally was a feminine name and Tom was masculine, after all. Commentators also began to use the term Sally-Tom to describe conservatives and President Grover Cleveland when they had unfavorable policies to the South or whites, similar to how we use flip-flop, centrist, or traitorous today. One 1893 commentator explained, “A ‘Sally-Tom’ Democrat is a sort of political hermaphrodite—half Democrat and half something else.” The term appeared to emerge around the same time newspapers reported on Sally-Tom’s case, so it is unclear if one Sally-Tom led to another or if the names were unrelated. The articles on Sally-Tom did not describe her as “a Sally-Tom,” and the articles on her independently used the name, indicating it was the multi-gender name she used for herself.
Sally-Tom’s obituary confirmed the 1889 article on her. She died on March 4, 1908, likely around the age of sixty-nine (although the obituary claimed she was “about 80 years old”). An unnamed reporter published the death notice in the Waycross Journal and revealed that nobody in her community knew she was trans. It was not until a doctor revealed her assigned sex that her neighbors learned about her gendered past. “After living here for the past 50 years as a woman, death revealed the fact that Sallie Tom, about 80 years old, was in reality a man,” the reporter wrote. “No cause for the deception can be ascertained. Postmortem examination was made yesterday, the negro having died the day before.” Sally-Tom shied away from media and public life, hence the lack of reporting for two decades. Her cause of death was never printed, and no death records for that week are available in Ware County.
The obituary also revealed she lived in a small room in the Black neighborhood of Hazzard Hill, Waycross. The 1889 and 1908 news articles would mean she lived in the cities at overlapping times. It is unclear if she picked up seasonal work in one location or the other—or why reporters could not agree on where she was located. Waycross was over one hundred miles from Albany, but living in two places for seasonal work was not uncommon at the time.
Waycross was considered among the most religious towns in the state during the early 1900s, another reason why Sally may have wanted to avoid attracting attention. Even her neighborhood, Hazzard Hill, was named after a reverend.
There would likely be many more details of Sally-Tom if she were white. White reporters seldom reported on internal Black affairs, and white people owned nearly all the newspapers at the time (historical Black newspaper indexes yielded no information on Sally-Tom). It was usually crime or law that drew the reporters to similar cases. Perhaps there would be more information had she been prosecuted by the Freedmen’s Bureau. However, the acceptance of her gender was notable enough for a few news stories in the South and Midwest. We will never know the complete account of Sally-Tom. But even from these small fragments, we know her incredible narrative was an important moment in trans history that has been overlooked until now.
Courtesy of Beacon Press
