Female husband

A female husband is a person born as a woman, living as a man, who marries a woman. The term was known historically from the 17th Century and was popularised by Henry Fielding who titled his 1746 fictionalised account of the trial of Mary Hamilton The Female Husband.

Prosecutions involving women living as men and marrying other women were reported in the seventeenth century and eighteenth centuries. In many of these historic instances, the female husband was presented as having deceived the bride and was accused of defrauding her.