potofsoup: Genderbend Howlies at work and at play 5/5: T. “Dum-Dum” Dugan Thelma’s
potofsoup: Genderbend Howlies at work and at play 5/5: T. “Dum-Dum” Dugan Thelma’s story of how she ended up with Barnum changes with every telling – she started growing facial hair and got so confused and scared that she ran away to the circus. Her parents were frightened and sold her. No it wasn’t fear it was greed. It didn’t matter. Switching up the stories is kind of how things worked in the circus, the Liou twins were discovering. After all, they were Chinese but were told to pretend they were Korean. America’s a strange place where your stories mattered more than your behavior. But they also knew that Thelma hated circus life and drank too much. Maybe all the gawking was different for them because they’ve been at this since they were 6, and it must also be harder when you don’t have family. Seng-sen worried about Thelma’s health and Tang-sen couldn’t stand Thelma throwing all that good money into bad liquor. But when they found out the reason – well, becoming a man is easy enough in show business, especially when you already have the beard. Plus half the bearded women were actually men anyway – all it took was some training, some help from a doctor that their father knew, and a good recommendation to a different circus, and suddenly Thelma was Timothy. Seng-sen was happy to see him smile for once, and Tang-sen was happy that Dum-Dum kept his nickname for him. Sure, it meant that they didn’t get to see Dum-Dum much, but father said they were going back to China to get married soon anyway. Previously: [Jane Morita] [Mary Falsworth] [Gabby Jones] [Jeanne Dernier] And also: [Jennie Buchanan] [Stella Rogers] —— I decided to move the Liou brothers’ lives back about 15 years to coincide with Dum-Dum. Of course, that meant that they probably cut their queues in 1911. They’re pretty rad! They did the circuit until they were 19, and then went home and got married and had children (such proper Chinese!) and then apparently when one of them got sick in 1957, doctors performed a successful operation that saved the healthy twin. In Beijing. Shit was going down in 1957 Beijing, so wow, all the props to those involved. I’ve headcanoned Tang-sen to be the sardonic one. (Despite the linkbaity-ness of that site, it also mentions a bunch of other conjoined twins, who all lead really interesting and fundamentally *human* lives.) Bearded ladies were usually forced to dress hyper-feminine to accentuate the beard and draw out the sense of the grotesque. Here’s a photo of Clementine Clatteau Delait (source): According to this timeline, 1920s and 1930s when really when trans people were starting to create their own communities and calling themselves transexuals and there were a number of high profile surgeries. But I feel like Dum-Dum probably wouldn’t have heard about them until later. (I’m trying to keep the circus background of comics Dum-Dum, plus I feel like there are class differences between these high-profile examples and Dum-Dum.) Christine Jorgensen was a bit later but she fought in WWII. Billy Tipton was more Dum-Dum’s time, but he kinda just … started living as a man and no one found out that he’d been anything but until his death in the 80s. And then there’s Lili Elbe, who died trying to get a womb transplant so that she could have biological children. As usual, I’m just blown away by all these thoroughly human experiences, and I hope that my fictional Dum-Dum’s doesn’t seem too out of place. (And OMG if any of this *does* feel wrong, please tell me so that I can fix it!! This is all “first page of Google” type lazy research. oTL) -- source link
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