Circulating the female surgeon ballad, or, information for the early modern female-to-male transsexual

This essay contributes to queer bibliography by attending anew to the seventeenth-century circulation of ballads featuring so‑called female soldiers or sailors as a source for trans information history. It identifies a sub-tradition of these ballads involving scenes of surgical intervention and positions that sub-tradition within networks of early modern print that circulated ideas of sex as malleable. Bringing Colby Gordon’s recent challenge to the trans-exclusionary epistemological foundations of early modern gender studies together with J. D. Sargan’s methodological experiments toward a trans bibliography, I pursue a material-textual reading of the surgical sub-tradition and its circulation with two interrelated aims: to speculatively reconstruct a path through which early modern book buyers could access information about the possibility of trans embodiment; and, more broadly, to suggest how queer and trans bibliographical approaches to the material circulation of texts can aid in building renewed, trans-affirmative histories of early modern gender, information, print, and reading.