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Happy Saturday.

Jemima Wilkinson was born on November 29, 1752, or 273 years ago today on the day this podcast

is publishing.

She became seriously ill in October of 1776, and after recovering was known as a genderless,

religious, and spiritual figure called the Public Universal Friend.

Our episode about all this originally came out on June 8th, 2020.

Enjoy!

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson.

And I'm Holly Fry.

Today we are going to talk about a religious figure. That's the

public universal friend who described themselves as a genderless spirit sent by God to inhabit the

resurrected body of a woman named Jemima Wilkinson. So the friend has a clear place in the scope of

LGBTQ or queer history. But the details of their story also mean that

we need to handle their name and pronouns a little differently than we have done in other

episodes of the show. We've generally tried to take our cues on names and pronouns from our

subjects themselves, so sticking as much as we can to what they used in their own lives.

And when we've talked about people who have experienced something that we might describe as a

gender transition, even if the idea of transitioning had not really evolved yet, we've stuck

to their post-transition name and pronouns. The basic idea is that's who they were the whole time,

...