UNKNOWN

Mrs. Nash is a screenplay written to imagine what led the real Mrs. Nash, the first historically documentable EuroAmerican male to live his life as a woman in the United States, to choose to live as a woman.

Claypool Wright is a young Bostonian lawyer who is rejected by “polite society” when he is caught having sex with his former college professor, Edward Neisman.

The film opens with the death of Mrs. Nash and the Army coroner discovering that she has hidden her birth gender well. This arc serves as the film’s frame story.

We then catch Clay with Edward at the moment his father discovers his “unsavory” activity, banishing him from the family and his inheritance. We follow Clay as he struggles with his own feelings and needs, until, in a flash of insight, he decides to try to re-enter “polite society” by becoming a woman.

Once he is courted by an Army officer, Clay becomes Eleanor and migrates to Fort Riley, Kansas, where her husband is stationed. Kansas, though, holds many surprises for Eleanor, the least of which is a chance encounter with Neisman.

The film ends with the frame story coming back, where Army officials decide to keep Eleanor’s true identity secret.

Ruth J. Heflin grew up in a small town in Kansas, the 10th of 10 children, the 7th of 7 daughters.Her father was the family storyteller, but her mother took her twice a month to the local library where she enjoyed checking out exactly eight books at a time. Ruth loved reading, having the great fortune of having many teachers help her learn the skill, so that she was proficient in reading, writing, and counting to 100 well before she began kindergarten.As a robust young girl, Ruth loved reading, writing, drawing, riding horses, running around the family farm, and playing with her dog. Every morning, she helped feed the livestock, which included rabbits, chickens, ducks, cattle, her horse, and pigs, before going to school, a chore she did twice a day all the way through high school. After she bought her own horse while in high school, she rode her horse, Misty, every evening after her chores were done.Because of her size and assertive demeanor, running down a few basemen during sports when they refused to move, Ruth was nicknamed Moose by older boys in high school, but also Encyclo by her friends because one of her favorite habits was to sit in front of the tall bookcase her father had built that housed three different sets of encyclopedias and read them. When she did not understand a concept, she used another encyclopedia to look it up, resulting in her having a phenomenal knowledge of many things even as a teenager.Ruth's love of learning pushed her through three college degrees, a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and a doctorate-wherein she studied America's various ethnic cultures and gender. She also worked at Fort Riley one summer while pursuing her Master's degree at Kansas State University, which is why she chose to set Mrs. Nash's story in those places.Ruth first learned about Mrs. Nash, who actually lived at Fort Lincoln, Nebraska, while working on her doctorate at Oklahoma State University, but she studied various forms of transgendering, which has been labeled variously during her studies. Realizing that Mrs. Nash was the earliest verifiable reference to an EuroAmerican male who chose to present as female in American history (aka the first colorless trans woman), Ruth designed this screenplay, originally, as an ironic homage to Alfred Hitchcock's "wrong man" theme that runs through most of his films.