Murray Hall was a Democratic politico who lived in the Manhattan Borough of New York City after he fled Scotland in 1870 when his wife revealed his assigned birth sex to police officials. He lived the majority of his life as his true gender, male, and his assigned birth sex was only known to his peers in New York after his death.

He worked as a manager of a domestic help company as well as a bail bondsman. He remarried a schoolteacher after settling in Manhattan. He frequently was known to play poker and pool with local politicians and adopted a daughter with his wife. After his death there was an inquest to how to distribute his will and property, his daughter won the case, and his headstone was erected next to that of his wife, rightfully.

After his death, an acquaintance interviewed for a local newspaper is quoted to have said about his birth sex, “If he was a woman, he ought to have been born a man, for he lived (as) and looked like one,” a sentiment which, for the era, would come across as acceptance.