Ewan
Forbes’ case is as significant to the trans experience as Oscar Wilde’s is to
gay men. With the difference that whereas everyone knows about Oscar, what
happened with Ewan has been hidden in the deepest secrecy. But the
repercussions which arose from his case transformed trans lives for the worse
in ways that are still being felt today, more than 50 years later.”
Via Zoom
from her home in south-east London, Zoë Playdon, emeritus professor of medical
humanities at the University of London, is talking about The Hidden Case of
Ewan Forbes, her enthralling and explosive first book for a non-academic
readership. It concerns a transgender man, born the Honourable Elisabeth
Forbes-Sempill into an aristocratic Scottish landowning family in 1912. With
the financial means to procure synthetic hormones pre-puberty, and the ongoing
support of his remarkably progressive mother Gwendolen, Ewan Forbes proceeded
to live his life as a man, quietly and without scrutiny, just as he wished. He
was able to correct his birth certificate, and in 1952, he married his wife
Patty. But then in 1965, after the death of his elder brother William, he was
forced to defend his gender in an extraordinary and at times horrifically
intrusive court case, in order to prove that the Forbes of Craigievar baronetcy
should pass to him, over a male cousin who claimed he was next in line.
The case
took place behind closed doors, and afterwards was hushed up, the documentation
placed entirely off limits, until the 1990s, when then home secretary Michael
Howard ordered its disclosure after repeated requests by the former Labour MP
Lynne Jones, with whom Playdon founded the Parliamentary Forum on Gender
Identity in 1994. And the reason Playdon believes Forbes’ case was concealed
from public scrutiny for so long? Because it provides a potential legal
precedent not only for trans rights, but also for overturning the tradition of
male primogeniture that has underpinned the British establishment for
centuries.
Playdon
came to this shocking conclusion after going through the 500 pages of
transcripts which document this watershed case. Then her agent, Sarah Ballard
at United Agents, suggested that she make Ewan Forbes the focus for telling the
story of how trans people had previously enjoyed full equality and “how that
equality had been quite deliberately removed”. And so now in The Hidden Case of
Ewan Forbes, drawing on more than 30 years’ experience of frontline work in
LGBTI human rights—including legal cases where she worked with the likes of
Baroness Helena Kennedy QC—Playdon blows this astonishing case wide open.
Alongside Forbes’ story, she charts the shifting sands in how the medical
profession has treated trans people. And she also takes in the experiences of
other trans men and women, including painter Lili Elbe, upon whose life a novel
and subsequent film, “The Danish Girl”, was loosely based; as well as 1960s
Vogue model and trans activist April Ashley MBE.
The counter argument
What Playdon
documents runs entirely counter to our received view that the 1960s heralded a
more liberal era in terms of our attitudes to sex and gender. She argues that
in the intervening five decades since Forbes’ case was heard, trans rights have
increasingly been undermined. Our now-systemic transphobia has resulted partly,
she shows, from relatively recent pseudo-science which has led being trans to
be equated with mental illness, despite a lack, says Playdon, of “scientific,
objective evidence for this”. While in the 1930s, medicine recognised that
birth sex might be fluid rather than fixed as male or female, the medical and
legal narrative dating from the 1960s that surrounds trans people to this day
is quite wrong, she says. “If we take Ewan as our starting point, we can draw
on 100 years of trans experience which shows that there have never been any
problems around the self-determination of trans people, or around elective
medical procedures. And yet suddenly there is this desire to close all of that
experience down.”
I’m
interested to know how Playdon’s varied and distinguished CV as a teacher,
senior civil servant, academic (she has five degrees, including two doctorates)
and as an LGBTI activist has coalesced in the writing of The Hidden Case of
Ewan Forbes, a remarkable blend of history, medicine, law, politics and dogged
detective work. “My discipline of medical humanities is a relatively new
subject, concerned with improving patient care by the application of humanities
thinking. In terms of my own, practice-based medical humanities, we work
directly with clinicians, often senior consultants and GPs, to help them make
changes to improve both their working lives, and quality of life and care for
their patients. If I had to point to the thread that runs all the way through
my career, it would be the fact that I have always been concerned with change
directed at improving equality.”
Her
preoccupation with Forbes’ case began as a research project after she had
retired, in the wake of the Succession to the Crown Act of 2013, which removed
the precedence accorded to the male gender in terms of the royal succession. “I
had always known the broader concept of primogeniture was an issue in trans
civil liberties, but I thought that after the Act of 2013, things would get
sorted. In the past few years, the issue of male primogeniture has repeatedly
been raised in parliament, but each time the matter has been closed down. And
the only reason for that, as far as I can see, is the self-interest of a small
number of extremely wealthy, aristocratic people”.
Ironically,
Ewan Forbes himself was born into such privilege: his mother Gwendolen was a
close friend of Queen Mary, and her husband John (the so-called “Auld Laird”)
was aide-de-camp to King George V. But while this initially enabled Forbes to
access the pioneering endocrinal treatment he needed, the legal case later
exposed him, as a member of the landed gentry, to a level of public and press
scrutiny that was intensely painful to such a private and upstanding
individual. Without going into spoiler details here, it was a case he
eventually won and went on to prove he was able to occupy the position and
responsibilities of his title as ably as any cis man. But with the hushing up
of the case, the repercussions for trans people were profound.
My
conversation with Professor Playdon—who was born into a working-class family in
the Black Country, and was the first person in her family to go to
university—is characterised by an openness and a geniality that is worlds away
from the polarised vitriol which characterises much of the current so-called
debate around trans rights. Her dry and subversive sense of humour is
frequently on display; at one point she reminds me that we all start out as
biologically female in the womb, and “then if you’re unlucky you get to be
male”.
But, I
say, it must be demoralising, not to say distressing, after more than 30 years
of frontline campaigning for LGBTI rights, still to be fighting the same
battles. How does she keep herself going? “I think I’m probably a hopeless
optimist. I believe ultimately in the goodness of people. I think people do
want to do the right thing, it’s just a question of taking some time and
patience so they can understand what’s at stake. At the end of the day, the job
of a philosopher is to make arguments available, not to impose them. You have
to give people the opportunity to change. And that’s really been my whole
career: making the ethical argument, and saying to people, ‘If you go down that
route, this is the suffering you will cause. Is that really want you want to
do?’”
Book extract
Most
people are unaware that until the late 1960s, trans people lived in complete
legal equality with everyone else. Ewan was the reason that changed, and since
his life spanned nearly the entirety of the twentieth century, it gives us a
glimpse into almost a hundred years of trans history. His story begins in the
Victorian period, when the Viennese professor of sexology, Richard von
Krafft-Ebing, published the first medical description of being trans, and it
ends in the present day, with increasing attacks on trans people’s human rights
in the US and the UK.
It draws
on five years of research, 30 years of frontline LGBTI activism, and a lifetime
in academia. Ewan’s hidden court case, finally decided in 1968, marks a tipping
point between the trans equality that existed in the past and today’s trans
discrimination. More broadly, it is also a story of how freedoms we all take
for granted can be instantly lost.
Zoë
Playdon | 'I think I’m probably a hopeless optimist. I believe ultimately in
the goodness of people'. The Bookseller, August 13, 2021.
The
Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes: Interview With the Author. By Andy Reid. Anchor FM,
November 1, 2021
Zoë
Playdon is the author of the new book The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes and the
Unwritten History of the Trans Experience. It focuses on a landmark legal case in
the UK. Playdon is the Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities at the
University of London.
Q: What
inspired you to write this book about Ewan Forbes and his legal case?
A: Few
people know that for decades, trans people self-identified, accessed
affirmative medical care, corrected their birth certificates, and lived
unproblematically in complete equality with everyone else.
But in
1970 UK trans people were stripped of their civil liberties, became socially
excluded, and were subjected to an abusive medical regime that included
conversion therapy and compulsory sterilisation.
Ewan’s
legal case, decided in 1968, precipitated those changes, which damaged the
lives of countless trans people. All the records of Ewan’s case were removed
from public eye, the press gagged, and everyone involved in it sworn to
secrecy, and so this crucial piece of trans history is unknown.
I felt
it was important for people to know that trans equality used to be
straightforward, and that it was deliberately removed to solve a political,
constitutional problem – securing male-primogeniture inheritance to the British
throne – which no longer exists.
Q: How
would you characterize the attitude in Britain toward trans people in Ewan’s
younger days and during the time of his case?
A: Ewan
was born in 1912 – he’s the earliest example I have of a UK trans boy
self-identifying and getting affirmative medical care – at a time when there
was a well-established scientific recognition that some people have variations
in sex characteristics that position them between typical male-female binaries.
So he
grew up in a general social environment that accepted that some people’s sex
was different from that assigned at birth.
In the
1930s, it was generally trans men, like the athlete Mark Weston, who attracted
public attention and it was believed that trans men vastly outnumbered trans
women, who were considered a rarity.
But in
the 1950s, the world-wide publicity given to Christine Jorgensen in the US and
to Roberta Cowell in the UK shifted that perception, and in the early 1960s,
the publicity given to model and actress April Ashley cemented the social image
of trans people as exquisitely beautiful “sex changes,” with trans women
believed to vastly outnumber trans men. In fact, the issue wasn’t numbers but
visibility.
Apart
from these exceptional, well-known examples, trans people, both men and women,
simply went through supportive medical and legal processes and lived their
lives like anyone else.
No one
knew they were trans, or if they did know, they regarded it as a purely
personal matter of private medical history. This was the case for Ewan until he
was in his 50s.
But in
1966, when his cousin John announced that he was taking Ewan to court to prove
that he “is now and has all along been of the female sex,” Ewan knew, as a
doctor, that the medical climate was changing dramatically.
A group
of US psychiatrists, notably John Money, Richard Green, and Robert Stoller,
were busy claiming that being trans was a mental illness caused by inadequate
parenting, and that they could remedy it.
In 1962,
the first Gender Identity Research Clinic was opened at the University of
California, Los Angeles, to “cure” trans and gay people by a range of measures:
aversion conditioning using either emetics or electric shocks, frontal
lobotomy, psychotherapy, and electro-convulsive therapy.
Of
course, it was nonsensical pseudo-science, but in an aggressive turf war with
endocrinology, psychiatry won.
In the
UK, the affirmative care given by surgeon Lennox Broster and his team was being
replaced by a psychiatric model led by John Randell at Charing Cross Hospital,
who saw his role as being to
“breed
out of our genetic inheritance those with psychopathic and adverse genetic
propensities.”
The new
medical environment would classify Ewan as a floridly psychotic lesbian with a
perjured marriage: both he and his wife Patty would be liable to two years’
imprisonment, their lives ruined.
Ewan was
much-loved by his community, but he was lucky to escape the systemic
transphobia that overtook the UK from 1970 onwards.
Q: How
did you research the book and did you learn anything that especially surprised
you?
A: Oh, I
was constantly getting surprises, and sometime really big ones.
The
first was that it took two years and the intervention of the Home Secretary to
gain access to documents that should have been in the public record.
My
starting point for writing was the court record of Ewan’s legal case, 500 pages
of back-and-forth questions and answers. I went through it line by line,
reconstructing what had happened in court, how the evidence had been presented
and the narrative of Ewan’s life.
The next
shock was that a trans man had inherited a male-line primogeniture baronetcy,
something that we could never imagine happening today.
Clearly,
something had changed, and so I backtracked to the first clinical
categorisation of trans people in 1886 and went forward through medical
literature, legal cases, and newspaper reports in the first part of the 20th
century.
From
that, and from the work of other historians, including unpublished doctoral
theses, it became evident that for almost 80 years, being trans was classified
as a variation of sex development, an intersex condition, and that the regimen
was self-identification, affirmative medical care, correction of birth
certificate, and an unremarkable life as an equal citizen.
And
sadly, that was the next big shock, because since Ewan’s case, trans equality
has been made to feel like an impossible dream.
Of course,
I wanted to know what had happened after Ewan won his case. How had trans
people suddenly been stripped of their civil liberties and what had the
experience of that been like? So the next step was to work forward from Ewan’s
case to the present day.
What I
found was a mass of documents produced by trans activists in the 1970s and
1980s, all trying to make sense of what had happened to them.
It is
really distressing material to read: a group of people who have suddenly been
completely dispossessed and made subject to medical abuse, with no idea of why
this has happened, and not even aware of what they were now allowed to do or
be.
And like
other ghetto archives, it is a very moving record of people trying to survive,
and being obliged to accept the cruellest of conditions for survival: no
employment rights, dismissal for being trans, unable to marry or adopt, and if
unable to pay car parking fines, then sent to the wrong sex prison where women,
certainly, were raped without it counting legally as rape.
They
learned to expect to lose their jobs, homes, family, and friends, to be
expelled from their church, sports teams, clubs, and societies. They knew they
must never question their psychiatrist and must obey all their demands without
argument, or they would get no healthcare.
To
survive, the best chance was to move to another city, never speak of their
past, not take any job with a pension or health insurance or social security or
other benefits that required a birth certificate, and to accept that every
interaction with officialdom would be exposing and humiliating because they
would use birth names, pronouns, and titles.
The best
to hope for was to live in hiding, hope not to get beaten or raped on the
streets, and accept that if that did happen, the police would not investigate
or provide any protection.
That was
the legal regime until 1996, when the landmark case P v S and Cornwall County
Council restored employment rights, and the official medical regime until the
UK government accepted formally in 2002 that being trans was not a mental
illness. I think that is the next shock for readers – that these events are so
recent.
And the
final shock for me was to discover how entrenched the British Establishment are
in their protection of primogeniture.
When it
was removed from the monarchy in 2013, there was a general expectation that it
would be removed across the aristocracy as well. But now there have been six
separate bills, one a year, entered into Parliament to try to end primogeniture
– and they have all failed.
Q: What
do you see as the legacy today of Ewan Forbes and of his legal case?
A: I see
it as a dual legacy, both sweet and sour.
On the
sweet side, we know that trans children were self-identifying and receiving
affirmative medical care a hundred years ago, and that Ewan led a happy,
fulfilled life. That puts the present moral panic about supporting trans
children into a new perspective.
It’s
also helpful to know that for a long time, it was believed that there were more
trans boys than girls, then that switched to a belief that there were more
trans women than trans men: it reminds us of the historical and scientific fact
that we have no statistical records of the incidence of trans people, and that
trans visibility is and has always been dependent on social nurturance.
And I
think it is reassuring for the future to know that trans equality existed for
many decades without being in any way socially problematic.
On the
sour side, though, comes the uncomfortable truth that Ewan had to quite
literally fight for his life in desperate circumstances, and that the
consequence of his victory was a political crisis that was solved by putting
trans people outside the social pale.
Two
things, I think, are very hard to come to terms with.
The
first is that historically, when we find a specific group stripped of their
human rights, socially excluded, reviled by the media, and subjected to
sterilisation, we term that not just a eugenic project, but genocide. It is
unspeakably distressing to have to consider the possibility that the UK
government effectively carried out such a project against its own citizens.
The
second difficult thing to acknowledge is that it happened so recently and that
most British citizens knew nothing about it. History was occluded by a social
memory in which trans people had always been pushed to the social margins, and
that this was justified because they weren’t “real men” or “real women.”
As we
know from other periods in recent European history, once you’ve decided some
individuals don’t count as “real people,” it becomes permissible to say or do
whatever you like to them.
Those
kinds of brutalities are not just devastating for the people themselves but are
irreparably damaging to the societies that permit them.
Putting
these two items together, Ewan’s legacy, perhaps, is to invite us to look at
the century of trans lives that his life spanned and to ask ourselves, do we
want our society to continue that kind of injustice?
Q: What
are you working on now?
A: Two quite different things. With my
colleague Professor Jo Winning at Birkbeck College, I’m planning a research
symposium on trans narratives, for 2022, to think about how we can create,
structure, and critique histories that represent trans lives authentically.
I’m also
continuing to work with my colleague Dr. Lisa Fenton at the University of
Cumbria to develop our ground-breaking master’s degree in Bushcraft –
Wilderness Living Skills, as it is called in the US – as part of a wider
ecological initiative.
Finding
better ways of treating each other and the world we live in seems to me
crucially important for social justice and for species survival.
Q:
Anything else we should know?
A: I’m
absolutely delighted that in spite of the restrictions imposed by the Covid
pandemic, we can still talk virtually to each other – but I’m also so
disappointed, since I was really looking forward to visiting and spending time
in the US, talking about these issues and getting to know each other better!
Book
Q&As with Deborah Kalb. Deborah Kalb Books blogspot, November 3, 2021.
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.”
The
secret court case 50 years ago that has robbed transgender people of their
rights ever since. By Patrick Strudwick. i News, November 10, 2021.
Ewan
Forbes was born Elisabeth Forbes to a wealthy landowning family in 1912. It
quickly became clear that the gender applied to him at birth was not correct,
and from the age of six he began to see specialists in Europe for help. With
the financial means of procuring synthetic hormones, Ewan was able to live as a
boy, and then as man, and was even able to correct the sex on his birth
certificate in order to marry.
Then, in
1965, his older brother died and Ewan was set to inherit the family baronetcy.
After his cousin contested the inheritance on the grounds that it could only be
inherited by a male heir, Ewan was forced to defend his male status in an
extraordinary court case, testing the legal system of the time to the limits of
its understanding.
In The
Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, Zoë Playdon draws on the fields of law, medicine,
psychology and biology to reveal a remarkable hidden history, uncovering for
the first time records that were considered so threatening that they had been
removed from view for decades.
Bloomsbury
Zoë Playdon Website
As the
ongoing war against abortion rights tells us, people who are not in power have
no guaranteed stability of status. When autonomy is granted and easily taken
away, whole groups of citizens may experience unpredictable swings in their
legal rights, social customs and ability to be heard. Zoë Playdon’s erudite,
passionate, occasionally frustrating, yet ultimately persuasive new book, “The
Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes: And the Unwritten History of the Trans Experience,”
encapsulates this reality by telling three stories at once.
At the
center is a biography of Ewan Forbes, a Scot of wealth and lineage born in
1912, assigned female at birth and raised, at least initially, as a girl, and
of his struggle to be seen by the state as the man he knew himself to be. This
account is contextualized by a rich and riveting social history of trans
people’s rocky road to cultural acceptance in the West, from the early 20th
century up to the current day. Within this frame, Playdon, an emeritus
professor of medical humanities at the University of London, situates the
specific story of the wavering right of trans people in Britain to correct
their birth certificates. In this way she intertwines individual, social and
legal history in a manner that is mostly illuminating. And she shows how
fluctuations in the rights of trans people evolved in tandem and in conflict
with those of gay men, women and lesbians.
Playdon
argues that trans people benefited from the publication in 1886 of
“Psychopathia Sexualis,” an influential medical book by the German psychiatrist
Richard von Krafft-Ebing. The book was primarily intended, she maintains, for
use by the courts, in order to help juries distinguish between people who
engaged in criminal sexual behavior (gay men) and those who were merely
biologically different (trans). Krafft-Ebing presented trans identity as a form
of “physical intersex,” and argued that it should be accepted. Today we
increasingly understand that sexuality, biology and gender can represent three
separate experiences. But in the Victorian era, these three categories were
collapsed into one. While gay men and lesbians were regarded as lawbreakers and
subjected to awful medical punishments, trans people were seen as simply moving
from one binary pole to another — from man to woman or vice versa.
In 1910,
Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay German Jewish sexologist, published “The
Transvestites,” in which he differentiated cross-dressing, trans and
homosexuality while defending all three. He opened his Institute of Sexual
Science in central Berlin in 1919, when Ewan Forbes was 6 and playing in the
Scottish heather, already asserting his maleness. Hirschfeld worked closely
with endocrinologists developing early hormone therapies. In 1931 his institute
carried out the first documented gender confirmation surgery, a vaginoplasty
for a trans woman named Dorchen Richter. The next year, 19-year-old Forbes
moved to Munich for psychotherapy and hormone injections. He reported growing facial
hair and developing acne, often associated with testosterone shots.
While
trans women were far more numerous and visible in the climactic years of gay
liberation between the 1960s and 1990s, Playdon shows us that in the 1930s
trans men were overwhelmingly featured in popular news stories about “sex
changes.” “Being trans was a mystery,” she writes, and “trans women, who were
considered far rarer than trans men, were especially mysterious.”
All that
changed when the Nazis came to power, and imposed their view of both
transsexuals and homosexuals as degenerates. Gay men and trans women were made
to wear the pink triangle, while lesbians and trans men got the black
“antisocial” triangle shared with communists and intellectuals. All were sent
to concentration camps. At the same time, psychiatrists working with the U.S.
Army during World War II promoted the idea of homosexuality as a pathology and
worked to eliminate queer people from American military service.
In 1946,
while Forbes was starting his career as a medical doctor in Scotland, a fellow
physician named Michael Dillon, a British trans man, published “Self: A Study
in Ethics and Endocrinology.” He argued that trans people are who they say they
are; they are not pretending or passing. As Playdon paraphrases Dillon’s
thesis, “They are both the same as and different from” other men and women, a
complex concept of biological similarity and variability that ran counter to
rigid ideas about gender, sex and sexuality that were to become both popular
and legally inscribed in the postwar period.
These
two concepts — the individual’s self-perception and the punitive control of the
state — converged in Forbes’s life in 1950, when he and Isabella “Patty”
Mitchell, a Scotswoman and farmer’s daughter, decided to marry. Marriage would
be illegal with a female indication on Forbes’s birth certificate. Using his
wealth, position and connections to other powerful men, he obtained an “M” on
his birth certificate in 1952 and proceeded to the altar. The wedding was held
in the couple’s home, in what a local newspaper described as a ceremony
conducted “in the greatest secrecy.” Forbes told his friends that he had
corrected a “grievous error” that had occurred at his birth when he had been
mistakenly registered as a girl instead of a boy.
“Male-line
primogeniture,” the British law guaranteeing that particular titles and land
pass via inheritance through male heirs, has long been a foundational power
grab for British men, and is, remarkably, still being debated in the case of
some titled lines within the aristocracy. With his male gender certified on his
birth certificate, Forbes was in a position to inherit his father’s estate. But
there was one obstacle: his cousin John.
According
to the terms of Forbes’s father’s will, his estate and title (a baronetcy)
passed to Forbes’s older brother, William, and, at his death, to his male
offspring. In the event William had no sons (as was the case), the estate and
title would pass to Forbes’s father’s brother or, if he had died, his male
heir: John. Abetted by Forbes’s older sister, Margaret, who had a fraught
relationship with Forbes and agreed to attest to his female status at birth,
John filed a legal claim to the baronetcy. Reluctantly, Forbes decided to file
a counterclaim. Not to do so, Playdon writes, “would be tantamount to stating
that he was not the next heir because he was not a man.” (In an effort to
placate John, Forbes had already handed over much of his father’s estate.)
Before
the title contest could play out in court, however, Margaret, a lesbian who
lived with her female partner and was thus subject to the same indignities and
threats that her brother wanted to avoid, reconciled with him and prevailed on
John to agree to let the hearing take place in private.
Playdon
sees Margaret’s initial alliance with John as a betrayal, but Forbes’s lack of
solidarity with his sister’s gender and sexual exclusion could be described in
similar terms. Apparently it never occurred to him to protest Margaret’s own
inability as a woman to claim either the estate or the title. She was killed in
a car accident a few months before the hearing took place, and in 1968 the
baronetcy was awarded to her brother.
Britain’s
system of common law is based on the “doctrine of precedent”; one key legal
judgment affects all subsequent related decisions. So having all judgments
publicly available is necessary for British people to know what rights they can
rely on. However, because Forbes’s case — including the traumatic and
humiliating process of having to provide evidence of his maleness in court —
was heard in closed session before a single judge, the decision failed to be
recognized as the precedent it should have been, becoming unavailable to future
generations of trans people who found themselves in a similar predicament. In
2004, Britain passed the Gender Recognition Act, allowing citizens to change
their gender. But rather than authorizing corrections to the original birth
certificate, the law calls for the issuing of a second birth certificate, made
out in the “acquired gender.” The implication, Playdon writes, is that “trans
people are masquerading as real people, just as their faux birth certificates
are masquerading as real ones.”
In other
words, the victory Forbes won more than 50 years ago has yet to fully translate
to the lives of those who followed him. In the end, his inspiring and
impressive commitment to self-define coexists with his failure to imagine the
equality of women, including lesbians, in his own time, or how future trans people
could have benefited from knowledge of his struggle — and his achievement.
The
Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes
And the
Unwritten History of the Trans Experience
By Zoë
Playdon
Illustrated.
368 pp. Scribner. $27.
The
Secret 53-Year-Old British Case That Could Have Legalized Trans Identity.
By By Sarah Schulman. The New YorkTimes , November 2, 2021
The life
story of Sir Ewan Forbes – a Scottish aristocrat and trans man who fought a
bitter court battle over a title – is innately dramatic. Born in 1912, the
fourth child of John Forbes-Sempill, baronet of Craigievar, Ewan was thought to
be a girl at birth and christened Elisabeth. But from the earliest age, he
identified as male. So pronounced was his masculinity that by the time he was
six, his mother was encouraging family members to call him “Benjie” and
consulting paediatricians about possible medical interventions.
After a
sometimes difficult adolescence and various treatments, Elisabeth became Ewan.
He qualified as a doctor, and began working as a GP in Alford, Aberdeenshire,
with little controversy. When he fell in love with his housekeeper Isabella,
known as Patty, his birth certificate was amended – as was possible back then –
so he could marry her.
Wedlock
was one thing, though; inheritance another. The rule of primogeniture decreed
that when Forbes’s older brother William died in 1966, the baronetcy should
pass to the next male sibling. That ought to have been Ewan. But not everyone
agreed. One cousin, John, mounted a legal challenge on the basis Ewan "is
now, and has been all along, of the female sex".
Zoë
Playdon’s book, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, recounts these events and, more
importantly, the extraordinary ones that followed. Emeritus professor in
medical humanities at the University of London, she stumbled across the legal
challenge while fighting for trans equality in 1996. She and some lawyers had
taken a High Court action to allow trans people to once again amend their birth
certificates. That right had been swept away by a precedent-setting case known
as Corbett v Corbett in 1969. Then, a judge dissolved the marriage between
trans woman April Ashley and her husband Arthur Corbett on the grounds that
Ashley had always been a man and could not alter her birth certificate.
Playdon’s
side lost the case, but remained mystified. They knew people had successfully
altered their birth certificates in the past and could not understand what had
prompted the change. But then one of the lawyers was contacted by Ashley’s
solicitor, Terrence Walton. He said that before going into court in 1969, he
had been called into the judge’s chamber and shown a previous case, then sworn
to secrecy.
That
case was Forbes’s. And now, Playdon is revealing the details Walton couldn’t.
Preparation for the court battle had been traumatic. Forbes was subjected to
intimate physical examinations by a specialist who pronounced him to have two X
chromosomes and therefore to be genetically female. But then Forbes did
something audacious. He told doctors a coughing fit had caused a “testicle” to
suddenly descend. He performed his own "biopsy" and sent the specimen
to a lab.
Forbes's
claim was medically impossible; he must have bought the testis sample and faked
the biopsy. But it was impossible to disprove. Eventually, the judge found in
his favour. Forbes gained the title and kept his marriage. But, according to
Walton, the case had led to a "blanket ban" on altering future birth
certificates because “there are some interests it is more important to protect
than the rights of the individuals”.
The
victory proved pyrrhic for Forbes, too. The widespread conviction that he had
committed perjury affected his standing. He deregistered himself from the
General Medical Council and became moody and irascible.
The case
of Ewan Forbes was a landmark, and kudos to Playdon for unearthing it. But her
book is not without its problems. The first – not Playdon’s fault – is that a
lack of first-hand material means we don’t get a feel for Forbes as a person.
He never wrote in any detail about how it felt to be presented to the Queen as
a “debutante” while sporting HRT-induced hair on his chin, or to have his
genitalia the subject of legal speculation. There is no suggestion he ever
embraced the role of trans campaigner.
The
reader, then, relies on Playdon’s ability to enter that imaginative space. But
she has so fully embraced the role of trans campaigner, she sacrifices nuance
for polemic. Take her treatment of Forbes’s older sister Margaret. Margaret
initially sided with John, providing a written statement to the effect that her
brother had been brought up as a girl. Later she changed her mind but she died
before she could alter her testimony.
Playdon
has no time for Margaret. She makes reference to her "deadnaming"
Ewan. And, of course, Margaret was in the wrong. But it doesn’t take much
fellow feeling to understand why she behaved as she did. As a lesbian, she was
barred from marrying her own partner. Yet she watched Forbes change sex and
marry his. In addition, the rule of primogeniture discriminates against women.
Whether Forbes was male or female, she was the older sibling. No wonder she
felt resentment. I would have liked to have seen that intersection of
injustices properly acknowledged, and the emotional conflicts more fully
explored.
Instead,
Playdon attempts to write a definitive history of transphobia, weaving reports
and symposiums in and out of her account of Forbes's life. Every line of
thinking she agrees with is legitimate; everything she disagrees with is
“pseudo-medicine”, which is not to say that she is wrong, just that the
black-and-white way in which she presents her argument has the effect of
undermining it.
This is
not helped by her comparison of the subtle shift in official policy on trans
people to "the quiet bureaucratic process" that led to the Holocaust,
or her habit of dismissing wholesale media representations of trans people such
as Coronation Street's Haley Cropper.
The
irony is that a greater focus on the human story with all its sadnesses might
have played to her advantage.
At
present in the UK, trans men and women still require a Gender Recognition
Certificate to legally change sex and even those who obtain one cannot inherit
a title. Playdon’s aim is to convince the reader of the virtues of
self-identification. In the end, though, it was the ability to empathise with
Forbes's suffering, much more than her proselytizing, that left me wondering
why society makes it so difficult for trans people to be themselves.
The
Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes by Zoë Playdon, reviewed by Dani Garavelli. The Herald of Scotland, November 13, 2021.
It was an
announcement whose brevity masked one of the more remarkable stories in
north-east life from the 1950s. And it appeared in the Press & Journal on
September 12 1952: “Dr E Forbes-Sempill henceforth wishes to be known as Dr
Ewan Forbes-Sempill”. (…)
And the
interest in the person at the centre of these events – which is currently being
turned into a TV drama – was heightened by the fact that the “Dr E
Forbes-Sempill” in question was Elizabeth Forbes-Sempill: a birth registration
which Ewan subsequently described as “a ghastly mistake” and which cast a cloud
over the early years of his life in Aberdeenshire.
