I try to make this distinction clear in Long Road from Red Cloud: Life Lessons from Willa Cather. After forty years of studying Cather, I came to the conclusion that she was born intersex. This meant that she had no choice when it came to her gender identity; that decision was made for her at birth. The main difference between transgender and intersex people lies in the issue of “bodily autonomy.” Some of the same surgeries most often sought by (and sometimes denied to) transgender individuals are forced on intersex babies and children, mainly to fit a doctor's pre-conceived notion of how they should look. These early surgeries often make necessary more and more intricate medical treatment as a result of the hormonal and reconstructive alterations that have been done to their bodies. Some intersex people end up not having language for their body parts, accounting for Willa Cather’s fear that her organs would never measure up, if she were to “undergo a searching physical examination.”
I believe a Civil War doctor named William S. Love surgically altered the firstborn infant of Virginia and Charles Cather, the baby who had first been called “Willie,” in honor of men named William on both sides of the family. This fact might have been completely obscured by fear and secrecy in the family, especially after the child grew up and became a famous author, but for the courage of a woman named Mildred Bennett, who chose to write the truth, as close as she could get to it, in her landmark biography, The World of Willa Cather, published in 1951.
Bennett, as well as every other Cather biographer for the first forty years after Cather’s death in 1947, was consigned to writing about her subject in stilted terms, certainly never broaching the subject of gender identity, and only gradually coming to terms with what appeared to be Cather’s sexual orientation, as a “woman-loving woman,” in the language of my generation. Mildred Bennett never allowed herself, during the entire decade of our friendship, to say what people in Red Cloud, Nebraska, called Cather.
Spelled phonetically, the word was first presented to me as “morpheedite.” I mulled it over for decades after Mildred’s death in 1989, until Willa Cather’s letters began to be published in 2013.
By 2018, I had followed enough tendrils that I could begin to weave the tapestry of Cather’s life in a new pattern. I drew on the lives of transgender people as well as intersex individuals in doing my research, because I found it fascinating to study how gender identity can fluctuate, over a lifetime. This was certainly true of Willa Cather, and it fully informed the “lessons” she learned in life, valuable ways of being that I hope will be a comfort to current and future generations of “women-loving women,” as well as intersex and transgender people whose identity may be more challenging to define. For example, I came to believe that Cather was not what I called in the book “a garden-variety lesbian,” but that her identity was more complex than that. Certainly, she loved women, but because in her early life, up to and through puberty, she identified mostly as male, her response to feminine beauty has puzzled her readers and critics for decades.
To read novels such as My Antonia and short stories from “Tommy, the Unsentimental” to “The Old Beauty,” is to begin your own journey with Willa Cather and the fascinating ways in which her experiments in gender identification and sexual orientation played out in her work. It must have been painfully confusing at times, to be “Willie” and then “Wilella,” (a name her mother realized would never stick, by the time her child was fourteen months old, probably as a result of the surgery Dr. Love had performed). Virginia Cather changed it immediately to “Willa” The self-assigned name became fully “William” during college, but after being embarrassed by bullying on the University of Nebraska campus, Cather went back to the familiar, signing her letters “Willie” and preferring to be called that early name all the rest of her life by those who knew her best.
She may have settled into “Willa” as her pseudonym, more or less, after identifying strongly with the great “Georges” of literature, especially George Sand, whose image she kept over her mantle throughout her life. Clearly, she had been defined and designed as a girl, by Dr. Love, and by each succeeding doctor in her life (she and her mother were exceedingly close to Dr. Love in Virginia and to Dr. McKeeby in Red Cloud) and by the medical teams who worked on her “condition” at the Mayo Clinic. Her letters show at least two extended visits to the famous research facility in Rochester, Minnesota, one sometime in 1912-15, and the other in 1928.
Even those who travel widely can usually wait until they return home to consult their doctor, barring an emergency en route. Willa Cather was dependent on doctors wherever she went, with frequent mysterious maladies requiring emergency treatment and often hospitalization. She may or may not have been told by her parents what her specific physical makeup had been, at birth. Even her parents may not have known, fully, all the secrets the doctors knew. The first real evidence I have found that Cather was aware of her body’s exigencies was when she told her brother Roscoe how much she appreciated that the doctors at the Mayo Clinic had spared her having to have more surgery in 1928. They called her condition a “hardened appendix,” which more than one doctor has verified was a euphemistic term for an undescended testicle. for which surgery is often done, in modern times, when a child is between six months and two years old. Dr. Love's surgeries must have had more to do with Cather's outer appearance, since she lived nearly all her life with that "hardened appendix," finally having major surgery in 1942 to remove it.
Recent history in which the term “hermaphrodite” has been replaced by the less alarming “intersex” contains stories of the lies told to parents in order to justify the genital mutilation of their intersex children. Those who read my book about Willa Cather’s “long road from Red Cloud” may benefit from watching a documentary on Amazon Prime from New Zealand, called “InterseXion,” and a more recent, shorter film called “A Normal Girl” now streaming (until May 31). Register by clicking this link: Women Make Movies Virtual Film Festival.
“A Normal Girl” is about Pidgeon Pagonis, who became an intersex activist advocating for “bodily autonomy” after discovering in college the truth of their own genital mutilation, in which their parents had lied to them because the doctors lied to the parents about what was about to happen to their child's body. Pidgeon’s story is partially told in Long Road from Red Cloud, but watch both films if you want, as Paul Harvey would say, “the rest of the story.” If you sign up and watch “A Normal Girl” now, it also contains a Q & A, in which Pidgeon reveals information about many more surgeries than were revealed in “InterseXion,” when they gave the impression that there had only been one, at age 12. As they gained access to medical files, they learned how early the surgeries had begun. Their story helps to illuminate what may have true of Cather's surgeries, as well.
Since Willa Cather was born in 1873, we won’t likely ever know the rest of her story, but by learning about other intersex people, starting with Pidgeon, whose body was altered at ages 6 months, 1, 4, and 11, we can understand more fully the miracle of who Cather was and who she became. “Gender as performance” is a topic we can tackle here, perhaps as part of a podcast I’m hoping to do for my new Virtual Chautauqua series. Please post here or email me if you’d be interested in being a part of that discussion.
I believe a Civil War doctor named William S. Love surgically altered the firstborn infant of Virginia and Charles Cather, the baby who had first been called “Willie,” in honor of men named William on both sides of the family. This fact might have been completely obscured by fear and secrecy in the family, especially after the child grew up and became a famous author, but for the courage of a woman named Mildred Bennett, who chose to write the truth, as close as she could get to it, in her landmark biography, The World of Willa Cather, published in 1951.
Bennett, as well as every other Cather biographer for the first forty years after Cather’s death in 1947, was consigned to writing about her subject in stilted terms, certainly never broaching the subject of gender identity, and only gradually coming to terms with what appeared to be Cather’s sexual orientation, as a “woman-loving woman,” in the language of my generation. Mildred Bennett never allowed herself, during the entire decade of our friendship, to say what people in Red Cloud, Nebraska, called Cather.
Spelled phonetically, the word was first presented to me as “morpheedite.” I mulled it over for decades after Mildred’s death in 1989, until Willa Cather’s letters began to be published in 2013.
By 2018, I had followed enough tendrils that I could begin to weave the tapestry of Cather’s life in a new pattern. I drew on the lives of transgender people as well as intersex individuals in doing my research, because I found it fascinating to study how gender identity can fluctuate, over a lifetime. This was certainly true of Willa Cather, and it fully informed the “lessons” she learned in life, valuable ways of being that I hope will be a comfort to current and future generations of “women-loving women,” as well as intersex and transgender people whose identity may be more challenging to define. For example, I came to believe that Cather was not what I called in the book “a garden-variety lesbian,” but that her identity was more complex than that. Certainly, she loved women, but because in her early life, up to and through puberty, she identified mostly as male, her response to feminine beauty has puzzled her readers and critics for decades.
To read novels such as My Antonia and short stories from “Tommy, the Unsentimental” to “The Old Beauty,” is to begin your own journey with Willa Cather and the fascinating ways in which her experiments in gender identification and sexual orientation played out in her work. It must have been painfully confusing at times, to be “Willie” and then “Wilella,” (a name her mother realized would never stick, by the time her child was fourteen months old, probably as a result of the surgery Dr. Love had performed). Virginia Cather changed it immediately to “Willa” The self-assigned name became fully “William” during college, but after being embarrassed by bullying on the University of Nebraska campus, Cather went back to the familiar, signing her letters “Willie” and preferring to be called that early name all the rest of her life by those who knew her best.
She may have settled into “Willa” as her pseudonym, more or less, after identifying strongly with the great “Georges” of literature, especially George Sand, whose image she kept over her mantle throughout her life. Clearly, she had been defined and designed as a girl, by Dr. Love, and by each succeeding doctor in her life (she and her mother were exceedingly close to Dr. Love in Virginia and to Dr. McKeeby in Red Cloud) and by the medical teams who worked on her “condition” at the Mayo Clinic. Her letters show at least two extended visits to the famous research facility in Rochester, Minnesota, one sometime in 1912-15, and the other in 1928.
Even those who travel widely can usually wait until they return home to consult their doctor, barring an emergency en route. Willa Cather was dependent on doctors wherever she went, with frequent mysterious maladies requiring emergency treatment and often hospitalization. She may or may not have been told by her parents what her specific physical makeup had been, at birth. Even her parents may not have known, fully, all the secrets the doctors knew. The first real evidence I have found that Cather was aware of her body’s exigencies was when she told her brother Roscoe how much she appreciated that the doctors at the Mayo Clinic had spared her having to have more surgery in 1928. They called her condition a “hardened appendix,” which more than one doctor has verified was a euphemistic term for an undescended testicle. for which surgery is often done, in modern times, when a child is between six months and two years old. Dr. Love's surgeries must have had more to do with Cather's outer appearance, since she lived nearly all her life with that "hardened appendix," finally having major surgery in 1942 to remove it.
Recent history in which the term “hermaphrodite” has been replaced by the less alarming “intersex” contains stories of the lies told to parents in order to justify the genital mutilation of their intersex children. Those who read my book about Willa Cather’s “long road from Red Cloud” may benefit from watching a documentary on Amazon Prime from New Zealand, called “InterseXion,” and a more recent, shorter film called “A Normal Girl” now streaming (until May 31). Register by clicking this link: Women Make Movies Virtual Film Festival.
“A Normal Girl” is about Pidgeon Pagonis, who became an intersex activist advocating for “bodily autonomy” after discovering in college the truth of their own genital mutilation, in which their parents had lied to them because the doctors lied to the parents about what was about to happen to their child's body. Pidgeon’s story is partially told in Long Road from Red Cloud, but watch both films if you want, as Paul Harvey would say, “the rest of the story.” If you sign up and watch “A Normal Girl” now, it also contains a Q & A, in which Pidgeon reveals information about many more surgeries than were revealed in “InterseXion,” when they gave the impression that there had only been one, at age 12. As they gained access to medical files, they learned how early the surgeries had begun. Their story helps to illuminate what may have true of Cather's surgeries, as well.
Since Willa Cather was born in 1873, we won’t likely ever know the rest of her story, but by learning about other intersex people, starting with Pidgeon, whose body was altered at ages 6 months, 1, 4, and 11, we can understand more fully the miracle of who Cather was and who she became. “Gender as performance” is a topic we can tackle here, perhaps as part of a podcast I’m hoping to do for my new Virtual Chautauqua series. Please post here or email me if you’d be interested in being a part of that discussion.
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