Pride Month: Trans People in World History #18
It's Pride Month! Let's talk about trans history!
June 18: Romaine-la-Prophétesse. Assigned male at birth around 1750 in Santo Domingo, Romaine Rivière was a free Black person from an affluent family. In 1772 they moved to what is now known as Haiti-- then Saint-Domingue, a French colony, and purchased a coffee plantation, Trou Coffy. By the 1780s they were a prominent person in the free Black community, still at this time living as a man. They enslaved at least two people; there are some records of them purchasing and selling enslaved people but it's unclear how many they enslaved at any one time. They fell in love with a woman, Marie-Roze, who was enslaved by someone else, and purchased her freedom for 6,000 livres on August 10, 1785, then married her. They had three children.
The Haitian Revolution began in 1791, and around this time, Romaine began living as a woman at least part of the time. They claimed the Virgin Mary had visited them and told them to work to overthrow slavery. They said they were "possessed by a female spirit" and a "prophetess," and wore female clothing, but also reportedly used male pronouns in dictated letters and said they were a "godson of the Virgin Mary," leading many scholars to believe they were bigender, while some believe Romaine was a trans woman. I'm not a scholar of this period, so I'm using the neutral "they/them." Romaine began to be known as Romaine-la-Prophètesse.
In 1791, a nearby rich and powerful white plantation owner, Joseph-Marie Tavet, had gathered a hundred armed white men at his plantation. Knowing damn well what this meant, Romaine called on their community of free Black people and some white people who sided with the antislavery cause, and gathered an armed force significantly outnumbering Tavet's. On September 24, 1791, Romaine-la-Prophètesse led them against Tavet's forces and burned his plantation to the ground. After this, thousands of people joined Romaine-la-Prophètesse's revolutionary forces. At one point, Romaine-la-Prophètesse controlled a big chunk of Haiti, including two cities.
The Trou Coffy uprising freed many enslaved people and caused many enslavers not yet reached by the uprising to grant concessions to their enslaved people, like more days off a week. LOL. Yeah, that'll work. Shortly thereafter, France sent a new governor to the colony who abolished slavery, but of course none of that was enough to quell the revolutionary spirit.
Opposed by white colonizers and some wealthy Black conservatives, the Trou Coffy uprising was eventually dispersed in March 1792, and Romaine-la-Prophètesse's wife and daughter were captured. Somehow the Prophetess escaped and from there, disappears from history. The Haitian Revolution continued until Haiti won its independence in 1804.
Trans people have always existed and will always exist.
