Romaine-la-Prophétesse and Marie-Roze: the Black trans woman and her wife who led the early Haitian Revolution

In 1791, on a verdant Caribbean island, long-running Black resistance to its colonial masters’ brutal system of slavery broke into open war and the decade-plus Haitian Revolution began. Many historians have focused on the men who led that Revolution, and on its beginnings in the legendary vodou ceremony at Bois Caïman in the far north. Long—but no longer—disparaged or disregarded was the charismatic couple who led the rebellion in the south: Marie-Roze Adam, a woman who had used her guts and guile to free people before on a smaller scale from the servitude she was once sentenced to herself, and her spouse and co-parent of three children, Romaine Rivière la Prophétesse, a free-born Black coffee planter and trader turned perhaps-transgender prophetess and troop commander. The two would ultimately liberate thousands of enslaved people and govern for a time a vast area of southern Haiti, including two major cities.

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Marie-Roze Adam was born around 1742 on the western half of the island, in what was then the French colony of Saint-Domingue—which she and Romaine would later, in small part, help make the free nation of Haiti.^{T,R:46-47,236} Romaine Rivière was born roughly a decade later, around 1750 or '51, on the opposite side of the isle, the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo that is today the Dominican Republic.^{a,R:27-28,47-48,50-51,232,M,P}

From the moment Christopher Columbus had arrived there and began a genocide of its native Taíno people, driven by racism and gold-greed, vying colonizers had made the island a site of vicious inequality to their own benefit.^Ko Their callous capitalism then took only another form as the Spanish began to re-populate the plantations they had worked so many Taino to death on with enslaved Africans, and the French then expanded that system with even greater ruthlessness and rapacity.^Ko,W

the uniform was supposed to kill Helena

Earlier, I noted the passing of Stana Cerović, one of the last recognized members of the South Slavs’ ancient trans-male / third-gender category, and described how even before Stana’s death, younger transgender people in the Balkans have come to be treated as a new phenomenon, severed from historicity and often attacked. Today, let's look at one of those “new” trans people, “Major Helena” — forty-something activist Helena Vuković, who is well-known in the Balkans but little-noticed in English-language media.


Like many trans women, Helena long knew she was not a man.^1,2 As a child, she grew her hair long to curl it, and put on feminine clothes when no one was around.¹ At 13, she found a copy of the book Šta treba znati o polnom životu (“What one needs to know about sexual life”), which helped her realize she was transgender.² However, again like many trans people, she found herself in a hostile culture that expected her to be nothing but masculine.² In an effort to conform, she married young and joined the Serbian military, rising to the rank of major: “uniforma je trebalo da ubije Helenu,” she said: the uniform was supposed to kill “Helena”.^2,3 It couldn’t.

the last virgin in Montenegro

The last known virdžina (“virgin”) in Montenegro, Stana Cerović, died on August 1st, at the age of eighty.^1,2 Montenegro’s virdžine were part of a set of closely-related trans-male or third-gender categories found among the South Slavs, who also call them tobelije or muškobanje, and the Albanians, who call them burrnesha or virgjinesha. They are people who were initially (right after they were born) assumed to be women, but who later adopt masculine clothes and tasks, refer to themselves as men, and are respected as such after they take an oath to remain chaste — the reason they are collectively known as “sworn virgins” or just “virgins” in those local languages and in English.^3,4

As in many other societies, the influence of neighbouring binary-based cultures made the Slavic third gender a closed class even before Stana died. There are as many young transgender and non-binary people in the Balkans as there have always been in every society, but because they have been severed from their historicity and are treated as if they were a new phenomenon, they are often rejected. One thing everyone can do to overcome such claims that transgender and non-binary people are new and noisome is remember people like Stana, and remember just how ancient such people are.