A Transgressive Revolution: America 250 and the Public Universal Friend
2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the United States’ founding, and the struggle over how it will be remembered is already intense. Donald Trump’s proclamations regarding America 250 cultivate a blatantly jingoist perspective on the past. Rejecting multiplicity, nuance, and free thought are core tenets of Trump’s administration, so it is no wonder that his so-called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order casts an ominous shadow across public history projects that promote multidimensional insights into the nation’s origins. Remembering the Revolutionary era as a golden age of ‘founding fathers’ fits well with a vision of the U.S.’s commemorative landscape that can be boiled down to the proposed National Garden of American Heroes: static, celebratory, and superficial. As outlined by Trump’s executive order, the National Garden strips the featured figures of their historical context and individuality, presenting an eclectic group of people as simplistically “heroic.” This presentation of history is designed to be easily consumable, with no room for multiple perspectives, critical thinking, or grappling with the past’s intricacy.
As a queer historian—and as a postdoctoral fellow working with the National Park Service—I had high hopes of nuancing commemoration of the United States’ founding by directing attention toward the Public Universal Friend, a self-identified genderless prophet who became incarnate in 1776. However, the Friend’s life was deemed unacceptable to the federal government on January 20, 2025. Trump’s executive order entitled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” decried “replacing the immutable biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from biological facts.” Public histories attesting to complex lived experiences of gender were promptly shuttered. Stonewall National Monument removed “TQ” from the initialism “LGBTQ,” excluding the transgender and queer people fundamental to Stonewall’s legacy. The National Park Service’s webpage about the Friend’s Home in Jerusalem, New York was deactivated outright. While Stonewall’s censorship received a well-deserved outcry, the Friend’s disappearance inspired less public consternation. Nevertheless, the Friend’s life is worthy of continued memory.
Why does the Friend matter to our present understanding of the American Revolution? The Friend’s story embodies much of what the present administration finds objectionable: non-binarism, an intricate understanding of personhood, and self-asserted autonomy. Recounting their life blurs gendered lines and complicates divisions drawn between spirit and flesh. The Friend’s narrative resists easy classification, eschewing modern understandings of personal identity. They undermine the present administration’s claims that nonbinary assertions of gender are a modern construct, that personal identity is self-evident and unchangeable, and that only unequivocally celebratory histories can be valuable. In sum, their legacy stands in opposition to the present moment’s embrace of homogeneity, uniformity, and incurious oversimplification.
The Friend’s perspective on their identity and place in the world was unusual, but not without precedent in the English colonies. Their theology drew on Quaker roots, emphasizing the power of direct divine revelation and the presence of an intangible “Inner Light” in every person. Indeed, their very name—“the Public Universal Friend”—implies an association with Quakers, known as the Society of Friends. Additionally, the Friend occupied a body formerly recognized by Cumberland, Rhode Island’s settlers as a member of a Quaker family, the Wilkinsons. The Friend stated that the person who previously inhabited the body the Friend used had died in October 1776, following a brief illness. The Friend then occupied the abandoned body, using it as a vessel through which to share God’s message with the world. The Wilkinson family acknowledged the Friend’s transformation; indeed, they were among the Friend’s earliest followers.
The Wilkinson family may have accepted the Friend’s self-assertion, but many English colonists were bemused by the Friend’s claims to a genderless spiritual identity. The Friend’s gender presentation often attracted more controversy than their theology did. By donning a broad-brimmed hat outside and removing it to preach, exposing their short and loose hair, the Friend startled audiences by implicitly identifying with English masculinity despite occupying a body they perceived as female. A letter published on February 14, 1787 in The Freeman’s Journal observed that the Friend’s appearance indicated that the Friend was “neither man nor woman.” This fact grabbed audiences’ attention and served as an added draw to the Friend’s public appearances. One listener observed that the Friend had a “masculine-feminine tone of voice,” a hyphenation that suggests one way an eighteenth-century English onlooker articulated the Friend’s gender presentation.
The historian Paul Moyer analyzes the trajectory of the Friend’s ministry, recounting their early evangelical successes and continual scandals. Early in their career, the Friend traveled often, both to gain converts and to avoid fallout from the controversies engendered by their presence. The Friend’s confident, authoritative sermons led listeners to speculate about whether the Friend considered themself to be a messianic figure, a prophet, Jesus Christ incarnate, or an embodiment of the Holy Ghost. Each possibility was as shocking—and intriguing—as the last. The Friend’s transgression of normative gender roles was inseparable from their ministry. The Friend’s followers were also critiqued for their perceived nonconformity to an assigned gender; male followers were described as “effeminate,” and female followers’ authority was deemed overtly masculine.
In 1787, following Pennsylvania newspapers’ coverage of an alleged attempted murder that may have implicated the Friend’s followers, the Friend ended their itinerant ministry. They instead planned to create an isolated religious community on Seneca homelands in New York, seized by white settlers after campaigns against the formerly British-allied Haudenosaunee. Colonial property speculation, unclear boundary lines, continual infighting, and general disregard for treaties and legality chipped away at the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s lands. The Friend’s sect was part of this occupation. As the historian Scott Larson observes, the Society of Universal Friends’ “need to be ‘away from the world’ was a response to persecution, but it also drew on the sense that ‘the world’ did not include Native Americans or their land.” On one occasion in 1794, the Friend spoke before a mixed Seneca and English audience, calling for the Seneca to repent of their sins and convert to Christianity. The following day, a group of Seneca women commented that “one of the white women had yesterday told the Indians to repent; and they now called the white people to repent for they had as much need as the Indians, and that they should wrong the Indians no more.” The Friend uncritically bolstered settler colonial ideologies and participated in land dealings for which white people, to paraphrase those Seneca women, needed to repent.
In the wake of disastrous land speculation and intensifying interpersonal rancor, the Society of Universal Friends splintered along class and gender lines as they struggled to find a place to settle. The Friend’s most devoted followers (most of whom were women and working-class) ultimately accompanied the prophet to Jerusalem, New York, where the collective tried to establish a permanent base. The Society’s aspirations for longevity were foiled by the Friend’s death in 1819. A few adherents tried to carry on in their prophet’s absence, but the Society of Universal Friends ultimately fizzled out in 1863.
Analyses of the Friend’s life resist easy oversimplifications. The Friend’s example gives us insight into a person whose experience of self was, to quote Trump’s “Defending Women” EO, decidedly “internal, fluid, and subjective.” The Friend never claimed to be a woman with the power to preach. Rather, the Friend described their own being as a spiritual presence that reanimated a female body. This differentiation shows a clear capacity for nuance and mutability in the way people in the past expressed and understood gender. Finding the language to describe the Friend’s identity requires deliberate examination of modern preconceptions about gender, spirituality, and personhood. The Trump administration claims that “gender ideology” is newfangled and flies in the face of “the ordinary and longstanding use and understanding of biological and scientific terms.” The Friend’s life suggests otherwise. Gender has never been the simple, self-evident construct that Trump’s executive order imagines.
The Friend also defies Trump’s decree that history must be interpreted through a straightforwardly celebratory lens. It is tempting to retrospectively cast historic figures as “heroes,” but more often than not, that framing fails to do justice to reality. As a white queer person myself, there is an allure to highlighting the Friend as a singular #QueerIcon. However, that narrative choice elides the Friend’s participation in settler colonialism, sidelines the collective of followers that built the Friend’s legacy, and obscures how the Friend perceived their own identity within their own historical context. The Friend’s story exemplifies how oversimplified histories are both less accurate and less interesting than the same histories told multidimensionally.
The Friend’s nonbinary and self-asserted gender presentation and spiritual identity were the reasons Trump’s administration sought to censor their story. These same factors underscore why their erasure from America 250 is ludicrous. Paying tribute to the principle of self-determination inscribed on a national level while aggressively denying that right to individuals is hypocrisy. A political administration dedicated to pretending there is no room for complexity or self-discovery in people’s experiences of gender must erase the stories providing evidence to the contrary.
The telling and retelling of histories holds power, as the furor surrounding America 250 attests. Whether the Trump administration likes it or not, the Friend’s story is also the story of 1776. It deserves our attention as we think about how to define self-determination, autonomy, and identity, 250 years ago and today.