Frances Thompson

Thompson was born into slavery in Alabama and assigned male at birth. By time she was 26 years old, Thompson was living as a free woman in a Black community in Memphis, Tennessee. She made a living doing laundry and lived openly as a woman, keeping her face clean-shaven and wearing brightly colored dresses.[3]

The Memphis Riots of 1866 began after a group of black soldiers, women, and children began to gather in a public space in South Memphis. After the police attempted to break up the group, arresting two soldiers, gunshots broke out which subsequently led to rioting.[4] For three days, a white mob targeted communities of black residents, starting fires, killing black people and raping black women.[5]

During these attacks, Thompson's and Smith's house was targeted by white men who questioned their affiliation with union soldiers.[1] Thompson would later testify during the congressional committee that the men demanded that they (Thompson and Smith) make them food, and they obliged. After which, the men demanded a "woman to sleep with", which Thompson refused; the men then gang-raped both Thompson and Smith and robbed them. The group of white men who attacked the women included two police officers.[1][3]

In July 1876, Thompson was fined $50 (~$1,374 in 2022) and jailed for "cross-dressing." She was forced to undergo numerous physician's examinations in which four physicians "confirmed" that her "biological sex" was male.[8] She identified as a woman.[2] Southern Democrats used her arrest as a "man dressed in women's clothing" as ammunition to discredit her story of being raped during the riots 10 years prior. This fueled an even larger campaign to refute white racial terror against black people in the south.[2] The discovery of Thompson's identity was also used to discredit other black women's claims of rape by white men, and suggested that the entire congressional report that Thompson had testified in was only manufactured propaganda in support of Reconstruction.[1]

Thompson's story is an example of a Black woman reclaiming her body after the injustices of slavery, when slaves didn't have the rights to their own bodies. In addition, she sought justice before the US Congress at a time when free Black women did not often have access to legal support, particularly against the aggressions of white men.[3][10]

Documenting Thompson's story is related to "transcestry", an idea credited to LGBTQ activist CeCe McDonald. Transcestry is the practice of telling the early stories of transgender people in order to acknowledge their historical existence. Thompson is one such example of a trans woman, living openly according to her own gender identity in 1866.[3]