- Dr. Jerrold Coe
- Feb 6, 2021
-
Is it me?
|
I remember reading that unlike in a lot of other countries, the UK never really got an established intersectional third wave feminism. As a result, a lot of their institutional powers established by the ardently white upper/middle-class feminism never really got questioned.
This is obviously an issue in dealing with really any modern women's issues, but leaves those established powers particularly prickly because they've never really questioned gender essentialism or their ossified mores from decades ago.
So trans issues are just so far beyond their understanding it just breaks them. Note this is still a thing for racial and class and sex work and other issues, trans issues just are an especially confrontational understanding that undermines their ancient understanding of the world.
Surprise surprise, it also has to do with England's awful class system:
https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/secret-court-case-50-years-ago-robbed-transgender-people-rights-1291857
The story of Ewan Forbes shows how trans people were able to enjoy equality – until it was quietly removed to protect male rights of succession
quote:A narrative has developed about the position of transgender people today that has become so widely accepted as to be assumed as fact: that it is only in the past few decades that trans people have begun to enjoy any rights; that trans women have always been more prominent than trans men; and most of all, that in recent years, trans people have been seeking to gain more rights than they’ve ever had before.
A new book, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes by Zoe Playdon, upends all of this. The Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of London has unearthed a legal case that 50 years ago changed everything for trans people, but which has been kept secret at the highest levels ever since.
The purpose, it seems, of this blackout was to uphold the patriarchal structure underpinning the monarchy, aristocracy, and hereditary peerages – the right of inheritance by the firstborn son. Or, to use the formal term, male primogeniture. The effect was to remove the human rights of transgender people that had previously existed – and in silence.
Alongside a distinguished career in academia, Professor Playdon has been involved in human rights work for 30 years, during which she co-founded in 1994 the Parliamentary Forum on Gender Identity. Her manner is understated and learned, even as the scandalous tale unfolds. Books are piled up all around her.
She first suspected something important had been buried in 1996, while helping lawyers with a case about trans rights in the High Court of Justice, which failed, baffling everyone.
“I knew that there was something about primogeniture that was a stumbling block,” she tells me via video call. This sense was emboldened by an informant, the lawyer Terrence Walton, who had worked on a famous early case involving trans rights, who told her “‘there are some interests that it is more important to protect than the rights of individuals’. I thought, ‘we’re not going to actually get trans equality until the issue of primogeniture is dealt with.’”
Playdon hoped that after the Succession to the Crown Act in 2013, which removed male primogeniture from the monarchy, something would shift. But after the Act, several attempts to end the same among hereditary peers unexpectedly didn’t pass, and certain trans rights cases stalled. By then, Playdon had retired so was able to devote five years of digging to find out what happened, and why.
“I knew that in the past, trans people had corrected their birth certificates,” she says. “All the way through up to 1970, the path was: self-identify, get affirmative medical care, correct your birth certificate, and live equally. After 1970, that’s gone.”
The reason, she discovered, lay with the case of Ewan Forbes. “So I went through 500 pages of court transcripts, and reconstructed what had happened on those four days in court. I was really quite shocked.”
Ewan Forbes was born into a landed, aristocratic family in Aberdeenshire, in 1912. He was the youngest of three, with an older brother and sister. Ewan was assigned female at birth and named Elizabeth, but from the age of six, his parents became aware that the baby of the family was at odds with more than just his name. He was already living determinedly as a boy. They called him Benjie.
Due to the wealth and connections of Forbes’ supportive mother Lady Gwendolyn, at 15, he was taken to a range of specialists across Europe and given synthetic testosterone, which had only just become available. It prompted a male puberty (complete with spots and stubble) which supported the fact that throughout his young life he presented as and considered himself a boy.
In her book, Playdon reveals that in the 1930s, the media ran stories “predominantly about trans men”, and that “being trans was a mystery and trans women, who were considered far rarer than trans men, were especially mysterious”.
At the time, trans people could take hormones, have gender confirmation surgery, and then change their birth certificates. There were no panels of psychiatrists and endocrinologists, as we have today, deciding whether to grant you a gender recognition certificate, which since the 2004 Gender Recognition Act has provided certain legal protections. There was no need; you could simply change your birth certificate and therefore other necessary paperwork.
It was the case of Ewan Forbes that changed that. He became a GP, corrected his birth certificate, and married a woman. Having been accepted as a man, he never considered that it all might be threatened until his father, Lord Sempill, died, and then his elder brother, William, in 1965.
As the second son, Forbes would inherit both paternal titles: the barony and the baronetcy, which could only be passed down the male line. But a cousin called John “turns up at William’s funeral”, says Playdon, and tells him he’ll contest the succession in court “because you’re not a real man”.
What followed in 1968 was a trial in which Forbes fought for his male birth certificate to be judged legitimate. His defence had to contend with a recent and radical change in medical thinking. Up until the 1960s, doctors largely regarded trans people as intersex; that is, a physiological difference in which individuals have elements of both sexes.
This idea was then engulfed by a new American psychiatric ideology, “which classifies being trans as a mental illness,” says Playdon, “as floridly psychotic”. The only way for Forbes to bypass this legally would be to prove he had physical male traits.
If he lost, he faced jail, because if declared female his marriage would be deemed perjured. If the case were held in open court, the media would have exposed the most intimate parts of his life and anatomy.
Forbes requested that the trial be conducted privately. “John says, ‘All right, provided Ewan agrees to a private medical examination by my experts, and pays all my legal fees,’” says Playdon. Forbes agreed.
The experts’ conclusion was that “Ewan has female anatomy with some male characteristics,” says Playdon. Although the examiners didn’t know Forbes had been taking testosterone, this wasn’t enough. Forbes procured some testes tissue and passed it off as his own.
“He wins,” says Playdon. “But it causes a constitutional crisis. A trans man won a primogeniture baronetcy. It could be used as precedent, not just for trans people, but crucially for primogeniture. What if an older sister of the heir turns out to be trans? Or the person you’re sure is heir is trans and no longer eligible?”
So the case was covered up. “Everyone involved in the trial was sworn to secrecy, and the trial was removed from public life,” says Playdon. The Home Office did not respond to her request for details in 1996. She enlisted an MP to ask the Lord Advocate (the chief legal officer for the Scottish government and crown) for the files, who initially denied that a “judgement was ever issued” before adding that “it would not be appropriate for me to… disclose the details”.
Finally, it took a complaint to the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, to begin to gain access to the legal documents in 1998.
But the effect on trans people had already been dramatic. In 1970, April Ashley, who had become the first well-known trans woman in Britain after being outed by a tabloid, was seven years into her marriage with the aristocrat Arthur Corbett. But it was failing. Rather than divorce her and give her money, Corbett attempted to have the marriage annulled, asserting that she was male.
This was despite Ashley having had lower surgery, and Corbett being fully aware before they married in Gibraltar. But she had not corrected her birth certificate.
The judge sided with the aristocrat and swore the lawyers to secrecy about the Forbes trial. During Ashley’s case, the judge “creates a sex test which dis-authenticates her,” says Playdon. Ashley was subjected to the most invasive genital examinations imaginable – twice – because after the expert clinicians concluded that she “had a perfectly usual vagina” the judge demanded they look again. After which, in defiance of their report, the judge declared her a “homosexual transvestite who’s mentally ill” and with a “supposed vagina”, says Playdon.
Ashley lost. It was this case that set the legal precedent, blocking legal rights for trans people, preventing the correction of birth certificates, while the opposing precedent was suppressed. It would be decades before any rights were reinstated.
Playdon’s book, which constitutes one of the most important pieces of investigative journalism ever written about trans people, has already been optioned for film adaptation. But she is particularly pleased by its timing amid a media moral panic and far-right backlash against trans people.
“Because it feels as though people need to know [about this],” she says. “Before we start getting too worked up, can we just remember that for decades and decades you just self-identified, got elective medical care, changed your birth certificate, and lived in equality?”
Instead, the fear and silence surrounding the Forbes case reversed progress, without anyone knowing why, which flourished into today’s ahistorical assumptions. “Things have become skewed further and further and further,” she says, “into a really very sinister place.”
|
#
¿
May 25, 2022 03:48
