Louisa May Alcott Doesn’t Need to Be Trans To Be a Trans Icon

If Louisa May Alcott, author of “Little Women,” were alive today, would she identify as a trans man? The answer is unknown and unknowable, but this hasn’t stopped author Peyton Thomas from issuing a verdict in a recent piece for the New York Times, in which Alcott, dubbed “Lou,” is referred to with male pronouns.

Thomas is not the first to make this claim—only the most recent and perhaps the most prominent. This isn’t without reason. Louisa May Alcott was famously masculine, once referring to herself as “a man of all work” and “a gentleman at large.” Notably, she once told an interviewer that she possessed “a man’s soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body.”

Is this not a profession of trans identification? And, if so, shouldn’t we, as Thomas suggests, “take Lou at his word?”

Sure, except that we don’t really know what Lou’s word meant. Perhaps she was, as Thomas seems to think, being completely literal and telling her interviewer that she was actually a man, and not a woman. Perhaps, however, she meant something else—more akin to what we mean when we call a young person an “old soul.”

It’s not uncommon for people to speak this way. I have met non-Jews who say they have a Jewish soul. I have met Americans who say that they are Europeans at heart. I have heard straight women say that they are gay men in women’s bodies.

Such statements are an expression of something that is actually a quite common part of the human experience—which is that we don’t always feel a total alignment between who we are and who the world expects us to be.

With this in mind, are we certain that we can know the precise meaning of Alcott’s statement? Certain enough to “assign” her a new gender? For that matter, even if one was convinced that Alcott was trans, why a trans man? Why not nonbinary? Or genderqueer? Why “he/his/him” and not “they/their/theirs”?

Of course, amidst all these unanswerable questions, one might ask why I insist on continuing to refer to Alcott as a woman and using female pronouns when referring to her. Is this not an equally uninformed guess? The answer to this is that we have no good reason not to—and the burden of proof remains with those who want to claim that one of history’s most beloved female writers was actually a man.

The truth is that we don’t, and can’t, know how Alcott, if she lived today, would have understood herself. For that matter, we don’t know how we would have understood ourselves if we had been born in the 19th century, or the 18th, or the 31st. And we have no grounds to say which time period’s array of cultural constructs and paradigms should be taken as authoritative.

The truth is that we don’t, and can’t, know how Alcott, if she lived today, would have understood herself.

The urge to exhume and relabel the dead is a common one. A ghoulish example is the Mormon Church’s practice of posthumously baptizing dead Jews into their faith. In the world of progressive Jewish academia which I inhabit, this takes the form of op-eds, academic papers, and viral tweets claiming that Jesus was a communist or a Palestinian freedom fighter; or that King David was a gay man; or that Ruth was a lesbian; or that Abraham was a Zionist.

In many instances, there is a good reason for the inquiry, but the case is almost always overstated. This is because such inquiries are rarely about the pursuit of truth. As Thomas admits, what’s really at stake is “who gets to claim a hero.”

Fortunately for all of us, we don’t need someone to have batted for our team in order to claim them as a hero. What matters is that they evoke something deep in us that speaks to our own experience of the world. This is in no way diminished by the fact that the feeling might not be mutual.

We can therefore acknowledge that Jesus’ message of egalitarianism and non-materialism might have profound significance to modern-day Marxists, without saying that Jesus was a communist. Because, of course, he wasn’t.

We can look to the story of King David and Jonathan as a poignant portrayal of love between two men that will speak to gay male couples. We need not assert any unverifiable truth claims about King David’s sexuality for this to be the case.

We can see how Abraham’s sojourns in the holy land become a midrashic thread in the Zionist tapestry despite the fact that the biblical patriarch was, obviously, not an adherent of a 19th-century secular national movement.

And we can appreciate how many in the trans community look to Louisa May Alcott’s relationship to her sex and find a deep resonance with their own experience.

After all, we are free to claim anyone we want as an icon for ourselves and our communities. We are free also to ask and re-ask the question about whether or not our icons would claim us back if they had the chance. What we are not free to do, however, is to baptize the dead—changing their pronouns and their names when they can neither protest nor consent.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.