Bill Edwards, gender rebel

  April 30, 1905 Australia: Woman/man Bill Edwards (1881 - 1956), was arrested and charged with burglary of a Collingwood, Victoria, pub.

Transvestite and/or transexual Edwards (real name Marion Edwards) went on to public notoriety and wrote The Life and Adventures of Marion Bill Edwards, the Most Celebrated Man-Woman of Modern Times: Exciting Incidents, Strange Sensations, Told in the Graphic Manner by Herself (1906).

In about 1897, Marion Edwards had got some men's clothes and, transforming into Bill, rode off on horseback for the Riverina area where s/he worked on a variety of stations (ranches), living as a man for the rest of her life, both in country and city, variously working as Bill Edwards the storeman, clerk, French-polisher, horse-dealer, house painter and barman, later a 'she-male' attraction in a travelling sideshow and SP bookie in a Melbourne pub. Marion Edwards even lived as Bill Edwards abroad, making several horse-dealing trips, including the delivery of horses to India ...

(Read on at the Almanac.)