Mary Read: the Bisexual, Transgendered Pirate?

Last night, while entertaining my nightly battle with insomnia, I picked up my "Women Who Dare" 2009 engagement calendar and casually perused the content. For every week of the year, they highlight a "notable" woman (Mia Hamm, Zaida Ben-Yusuf etc). On the week of October 5th, I was introduced to Mary Read. A person who--born female—was raised as a male by her (sic!) mother, joined the military as a male, married a male Flemish solder, lived life as a female until he died, joined a band of pirates (as a male), and then may—or may not—have had an affair with the "cross-dressing" wife of the captain of the pirates. When they were all caught, she and the wife of the captain, pleaded pregnancy and thus avoided hanging.*

Umm, come again? I get that these sorts of stories are fundamentally exaggerated, sensationalized and mythesized, but even the "basics" of Mary Read's life leaves me completely agog and full of questions (and, to say the least,does nothing for my insomnia).
How much of the history of femaleness been filtered through neatly squared stories of "cross-dressing"? Did Mary Read gain notoriety throughout history because she crossed those gender thresholds, several times, and in multiple ways? Or was it because she was a kick-ass pirate who sailed the seven seas? And how many male pirate stories are framed by "who they loved", "who they married" and "who they slept with"?

* For the purposes of a concise blog post, I severely summarized the wikipedia version of her tale. My profs would kick me out of grad school if they knew.