But her pronouns
A debate about the gender identity of Dr James Barry, the pioneering Victorian who adopted a male persona to become the UK’s first female-born doctor, has erupted after the award-winning author EJ Levy was accused of disrespecting Barry’s legacy by using female pronouns in a forthcoming novel.
Levy announced last week that she had sold a novel about the “true story” of Barry, titled The Cape Doctor. The forthcoming book, which will be released by Little, Brown, will trace Barry’s life story: born Margaret Ann Bulkley in Ireland, the future doctor became Barry at the age of 20 and left for Edinburgh to study medicine as a man. Barry joined the army after graduation, the start of a distinguished career as a military surgeon that spanned Cape Town, St Helena and Trinidad and Tobago. In 1865, Barry returned to the UK with dysentery, and died. A maid discovered the doctor’s biological gender after the death.
When Levy, winner of the Flannery O’Connor award, announced the news of her novel by describing Barry as “a heroine for our time, for all time”, other authors began to question Levy’s reference to Barry as “she”, including novelist Celeste Ng, who told Levy: “I’m now seeing you use she/her pronouns for Barry even as many are telling you Barry himself used and wanted he/him pronouns. I hope you and L,B will listen to these concerns and take them into account.”
But Barry “used and wanted he/him pronouns” at a time when people with she/her pronouns were not welcome to study medicine in Edinburgh and become doctors, and then to practice medicine. There were a few pioneers but it was a very uphill battle. Given that, we can’t know whether Barry really “wanted” male pronouns or simply resorted to them in order to get the freedom and the work she/he wanted to do. Barry didn’t leave a collection of tweets taking a position on pronouns.
Barry’s gender identity has been overwhelmingly framed as female by writers over the past 150 years, said Cardiff University professor Ann Heilmann, author of Neo-/Victorian Biographilia and James Miranda Barry: A Study in Transgender and Transgenre, exceptions being Patricia Duncker’s 1999 novel James Miranda Barry and Rachel Holmes’s 2002 biography The Secret Life of Dr James Barry.
…
“While I understand that emotions run very high (understandably so, given the difficulties trans people face and in light of ongoing tensions between feminism and the trans community), I don’t think that Barry can be that easily mapped on to contemporary trans thought,” she said. “Though of course there have always been trans people, the lived and felt gender identity of an 18th and early 19th-century person would have been very different from our contemporary identity politics.”
And that person would not have called it a “gender identity” or understood what you were talking about if you used it.
Jeremy Dronfield, co-author of Dr James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time, said: “In my biography, I used male pronouns for Barry. He was, at least outwardly, a man. But whether Barry qualifies as transgender in modern terms is complicated. When Margaret became James, it wasn’t primarily because she wanted to be a man. She wanted to live the kind of life which in 1809 was impossible for a woman. Once the persona had served its purpose, Margaret intended to discard it. Circumstances prevented that. There’s evidence that Barry missed being a woman. But we also know that he relished being a man, his behaviour exceeding what was necessary for disguise. However, the claim made online that Barry left a will asking to be remembered as a man is false. He left no statement of identity.
“If Margaret had been born in 1989 instead of 1789, free to be a surgeon and soldier, would she have chosen to become a man? On balance, I don’t think so, but Margaret might have identified as non-binary. I have no argument with seeing James Barry as a transgender icon, or Margaret as a feminist role model. I do take issue with those who insist on recognising one and erasing the other.”
And bullying people who refuse to comply.
And who is responsible for those ongoing tensions with feminism? Which group wants to erase the other? Which group is actually the one that is gendering the other against their will, and defining gender based on subjective criteria that strangely enough happen to match the stereotypes of the past 50-75 years? In short, who is to blame for those tensions?
Feminism left to its own devices would probably have used the preferred pronouns and accepted the trans-women as trans-women; when it is demanded that we give up our own realities to accommodate their “lived experience”, we started finding it a bit…restrictive…and started doing what feminists have always done: asserted the rights of women to be safe and free from male dominance.
One point I’ve not seen raised in what I’ve read of this kerfuffle so far is that the book is novel, not a biography. Historical fiction authors routinely introduce their own assumptions on matters where the historical record is ambiguous or silent. It really should suffice to say “This is a fictionalized account of Barry’s life, based on the assumption that Barry’s internal sense of self was more ‘she’ than ‘he.'”
The book sounds really interesting, and I’d love to read it – I hope the bullies don’t succeed in getting in quashed entirely.
Really? How so?
Doesn’t sound complicated to me.
So she enjoyed behaving in ways that women were not allowed to behave in the 18th century. Let me guess: she relished being outspoken, using naughty words, moving about freely?
That makes her a man–how, exactly?
I’m not seeing the complication.
Because only men are outspoken, sweary and have freedome of movement silly! It’s how we can tell the difference. Women are quiet, well spoken and stay at home so the don’t get raped. They also like long hair and makeup and flouncy colourful clothes. Get with it!
I’ll show myself out…
Another thought: I wonder if the bullies are demanding that the he/him pronouns be used for the entire book, even the early chapters before Barry started dressing and living as a man. Doesn’t their doctrine hold that a trans person has always had their post-transition identity, even if they didn’t realize it yet – which would imply that Barry was always a man/boy named James, never a woman/girl named Margaret?
Kerith, they wouldn’t want to dead-name (him/her) now, would they?
Won’t it just be easier when they declare the whole world trans (since none of us conform exactly to gender expectations), and we can all have fun guessing what the proper pronouns are for anyone we meet? So we don’t get bashed over the head with a purse or a baseball bat, depending on tools appropriate to the gender of that individual that day?
I’ve been doing science all day long today, so I’ve been in my male personal. Now I’m going to go home and cook dinner, so I’ll need to put on my female to do so.
This reminds me a bit of the longstanding practice among Mormons to allow baptisms by proxy into the LDS for people who are deceased. So Anne Frank, Albert Einstein, and Joan of Arc (not to mention Hitler & Stalin, according to Wikipedia) can get magically accorded the privileges of dead Mormons well after their expiration date. Here’s a person who died ~150 years ago & is being recruited to make a point about the current gender identity landscape… so why not make them a Mormon while we’re at it?
Also, why is all the debate and conflict over third person pronouns? Surely, first and second person pronouns should be modified to be appropriate for special gender identity applications? It would certainly be a powerful reminder to me to use the proper third person pronouns if the subject referred to theyself like “Myx name is Rachel, and Ix ride a bike, and weex demand access to whatever competition will be easier for ux”. Please pardon the childish thought experiment.
Wait. Wouldn’t trans ideology conclude that Barry would have been a biological male? Would not Barry have had a man-vagina? The maid must have just gone ahead and stupidly believed the unreliable testimony of her own eyes, blinding herself to this important fact, and tragically, erasively, genocidally, asigned him female at death. Transphobe bigotry, pure and simple.
I wonder how much of the success of the conflation of “sex” and “gender” is the result of squeamish or puritanical attitudes to the four letter word* “sex” itself?
*It might exhibit the external appearance of having only three letters, but clearly identifies itself as a four letter word.
“Erasively”; v good.
One of those weird little coincidences; Barry’s own doctor was a Major D. R. McKinnon.
Yes? That’s the sex that was discovered upon death. Barry/Margaret was female.
The real story should be that women had to erase their sex in order to do the things they wanted to do and were good at. But no, that can’t be the story, because if someone acts other than the sex they were born, they must be trans. And how do we know if they are acting other than the sex they were born? We consult the big ole’ book of traditional stereotypes to discover the ‘real’ behavior of women vs. men.
You’d think so, wouldn’t you?
Thus reifying the connection between gender stereotypes and the sexes. Good job, trans activists! Such woke folx.
The one thing we definitely know about her is that she identified as a doctor.
I’ve only read one book on Barry, and it was some years back. We do not know that Barry was female. We have the maid’s report of a fleeting glimpse of Barry’s corpse. Apparently he did not appear to be biologically male. As I recall, the author speculated that Barry’s female childhood, and later reappearance as a male were a demonstration of intersex status.
The trans-Mafia coopting Barry’s story, and imposing THEIR notions upon him at a distance of two centuries is just too typical. We can only speculate on how Barry viewed himself, or what his adaptation to circumstances meant or felt.
Well, could still be either he or she, but we can at least narrow it down to a white he or she:
https://www.blogtorwho.com/newsweek-doctor-who-special-edition-out-now/
For the moment at least, until casting expands their range of flesh tones…
There is also a suggestion that Barry had given birth, either as a result of a childhood sexual assault (her younger sister may have been her daughter) or from a relationship with Lord Charles Somerset, the Governor of Cape Town.
Her parents clearly considered her female, and Barry herself, at age 19, told her brother in a letter that “was I not a girl I would be a soldier”.
It certainly seems plausible that Barry knew that her sex was a barrier to her ambitions, so with the aid of her mother and some influential, liberal-thinking friends of her uncle (the Irish artist James Barry RA) her new persona was invented; she left Ireland in 1809 as Margaret Bulkley and arrived at Edinburgh University’s medical school as James Barry.
I would say that a switch of gender identification in order to achieve her ambitions and exploit her potential to the full does not equate to being transgender except insomuch as she was living as a man, which doesn’t of course mean that she believed herself to be a man, just the equal of one in her chosen field. The tragedy is that she had to go through such subterfuge in order to succeed, and succeed she most certainly did, quite spectacularly so.