Unmasked by the Marquess (Regency Imposters #1)

by Cat Sebastian

“I’ve found the fears are there whether you fret or not. So I sweep them aside and try to enjoy myself while I can.”

He sat back down at his desk and attempted to write Robin a note. Something brief and friendly, just the sort of thing you write another man after licking his tongue on your sofa.

He found that he didn’t care terribly much whether Robin was a man or a woman. That was quite secondary, compared to the fact that Robin was a fraud and a cheat.

God help her, but she was going to have to add a mania for subdued tailoring to her list of depravities.

Imagine if people carried their hearts around like fragile birds’ eggs, carefully preventing the smallest crack or injury. Everybody would keep a polite distance, safe and protected and utterly alone.

there are historical precedents of people living and passing as members of a gender other than that which they were assigned at birth. Whether any such person was a cis woman, a trans man, or—as in Charity’s case—a nonbinary person is a thorny issue;

Certainly trans, nonbinary, and genderfluid people existed long before those terms and were sometimes accepted in non-Western cultures.

James Barry is probably the most famous instance: born in Ireland in the late 1700s, Barry subsequently enrolled in medical school and served as a surgeon for the British Army. Barry lived as a man in all aspects of life, and only after his death did it become publicly known that he had been assigned female at birth.

Albert Cashier, however, seems to have begun dressing and living as a man before enlisting, and continued to do so long after the war was over, until dying in 1915. Cashier was listed under his male name on payrolls and even the voter registry. What’s striking about this case is that we know of at least two doctors who attended Cashier during illnesses and injuries found out that he was assigned female at birth, but did not reveal his secret. Cashier was buried with full military honors and under a tombstone bearing his chosen name.