Through history, women have successfully passed as male: no hormones, no surgery, only perhaps herbs to end or slow menstrual periods. During the American Civil War, some 200 soldiers who died in battle or otherwise later identified were female. Who can blame them? For eons across many cultures, women have been cast as the frail sex, subservient to men. A spirited woman who resists her defined role and seeks an independent life would be motivated, if at all possible, to take on male identity.

With notable exceptions, cultures define the sexes on binary lines. A sixteenth-century English girl like Kate Collins, protagonist of The Secret Player, realizes early on that she can’t go along with the social dictums for women. The only model she knows for escape is the Cornish woman Lady Mary Killigrew, who, though known to be female, successfully played pirate. As the story goes, when caught—as a pirate, not as for impersonating a man—Killigrew was freed by Queen  Elizabeth. How could she not? She referred to herself as a Prince and said a male heart beat within her. Lady Mary Killigrew was not alone: according to Wiki, there have been 27 female pirates through history.

Kate Collins would be unsuited to any marriage, but the husband her father chooses to tame her, a rough, illiterate sheep farmer, is the worst imaginable. With the help of her grandmother and her younger brother, she escapes wearing his clothes. Taking on the name of Alexander Cooke, she determines to go to sea as brave boys do. Before reaching port, however, she encounters a troupe of actors and manages to join them. Of course she has a talent for acting: she’s been doing so all her life, playing dutiful daughter to her widowed father.

The Secret Player  depicts the challenges of a girl passing as male, with an added complication of her falling in love with a man, the poet John Donne. Dare she reveal who’s under those breeches and codpiece? And if she does, what happens to her budding career as an actor?

Overcoming her obstacles, Alexander Cooke, known as Sander, remains male. Only boys and young men could perform on the London stage. As Cooke is mentioned in Shakespeare’ Folio, as an actor in these plays, she succeeded.

In Bedtrick, indeed, she marries a woman. So: not only is Sander transgender, but the husband in a same-sex marriage: in London in 1599!