In 2003, the St. Paul City Council took on an unusual issue for the notedly liberal governing body. A 110-year old law on the city’s books barred women from wearing men’s clothes and men from wearing women’s clothes. Though rarely enforced, it cast a cloud on a city striving to be equitable; it nominally criminalized gender non-conforming citizens.

In the group’s newsletter, Minnesota Family Council president Tom Prichard said the repeal “provides an interesting commentary on the shifting mores of society, that inappropriate activity is no longer viewed as inappropriate.” Prichard’s group, which opposes LGBT rights, opposed the repeal.

For Mayor Chris Coleman who was a council member at the time, the push for repeal was easy: “It’s a stupid and outdated ordinance,” he told the Pioneer Press in 2003. The repeal sailed through the council with a unanimous vote.

Twelve years later, these laws remain on the books in a number of Minnesota cities.

These laws make appearing in public “in a dress not belonging to his or her sex” a crime carrying a misdemeanor punishment with fines up to $300 and up to 90 days in jail. These ordinances are a hold-out from the late 1800s when progressives were looking to cut down on vice and ‘stabilize’ families. Stabilizing families, these progressive leaders thought, meant preventing women from entering what were then considered men’s spaces such as leadership positions and employment. They were also used as a tool to police gender generally and the targets of law enforcement action were often gender nonconforming people that today would be referred to as members of the LGBT community.

Many of the ordinances among Minnesota cities are holdovers from that era. Waite Park (ordinance), Springfield (ordinance), Deer River (ordinance), Benson (ordinance), Farmington (ordinance 6-1-28), Moose Lake (ordinance), and Brooklyn Center (ordinance 19-207) all have these laws on the books.

Cities such as Minneapolis, Red Wing, New Ulm, and St. Louis Park once had these laws but were repealed over the last 30 years.

The ordinances have been used throughout the last century to harass and imprison gender nonconforming people. For example, in 1974 in Columbus, Ohio, two drag queens were arrested under the law. They sued and won; the judge ruled that the ordinance was unconstitutional because it was impossible to determine how clothing trends change. In Houston in the 1970s dozens of transgender women were harassed and jailed under such ordinances. In 1977 alone, 53 people were arrested under the ordinance. The community organized and fought back, and in 1980, the city repealed the ordinance. In 1974, two Chicago transgender women were arrested on charges that they were illegally dressed “in a dress not belonging to his or her sex.” The women sued and the Supreme Court of Illinois found the ordinance to be unconstitutional.

Many of these laws were passed just after the Civil War. In Minneapolis, for instance, the ordinance was passed in 1877. It was repealed mid-century, as we a lot of other similar ordinances. But, in the heightened religiosity and anti-LGBT climate of the Cold War Era, more cities passed similar ordinances in the 1950s. In 1952, Miami passed an ordinance outlawing “female impersonators,” and in 1954, Denver made it illegal for men to dress in drag.

And when challenged in court, several judges around the country cited the following passage from the Christian Bible: “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord, thy God.”

Much of the information about harassment and arrests of Minnesota’s LGBT community under these ordinances has been lost to history. But anecdotes still exist. In an interview with Richard Bosard for the Twin Cities Gay and Lesbian Oral History Project, Bosard recalled at least one such arrest from the 1970s

Scott Paulson: I’m just curious because, I heard this in Seattle, that was the one night you could go out in drag or for women to wear a t-shirt and jeans because if the police stopped them they could say this is a costume. There was an ordinance that said that you couldn’t be wearing more than two articles that weren’t of your gender. In an article here, I read, that you could be arrested for dressing in drag.
DB: That’s possible, I’m not aware of that. I am aware of one thing that is the opposite that
was written up in the paper. A person, I don’t remember if it was male of female, was
arrested or stopped by the police for some traffic violation. [It] showed drivers license
which indicated sex opposite from the way that person was dressed. The person was
arrested, under perhaps this ordinance you speak of. A judge in Minneapolis dismissed it
because, he said there was no law against that and the person did not claim to be of the
opposite sex. The person admitted, “Yes, I am” a he dressed as a she or a she dressed as a
he. I may say that the judge who made that decision was Graham Winton who himself was
gay.

Since Minnesota’s Human Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on gender identity, these ordinances are merely reminders of an oppressive past. But efforts to repeal them continue.

The latest to repeal such laws was Little Canada which did so in 2013 after a citizen requested the change. City council members noted there hadn’t been any arrests under the law in the last 20 years, and repealed the law in a unanimous vote: