Dr James Miranda Barry

[mammoon]

Never posted a thread before so apologies if I'm doing it wrong! Anyway, I thought this was of interest. A new book about Dr Barry is causing a meltdown on Twitter - twitter.com/EJLevy/status/1095759928667516928 . As far as I can see, all the books about Dr Barry consistently refer to them as a woman, but this latest book, unlike others, is being called transphobic, and the author and publisher are "cancelled".

I'm sure the novel makes it more complex too.

Yes, I think that's what Levy was trying to get across to the people screaming "fuck you terf" at her and saying her book should be burned.

I mean ffs you're burning books but somehow you still think you're "on the right side of history"? I am lost as to how supposedly intelligent people, authors who are supposed to be serious thinkers(!!) can defend a position which is essentially: we have decided a thing, with no evidence whatsoever, and if you do not submit then you will be destroyed.

I'm glad to see some feminists have found the thread and given Levy some support. She needs it. And hey, funny how it's always a woman who gets her book cancelled along with death threats and abuse. So progressive! Woko Haram strikes again.

I really, really want to go on that twitter thread and post that one of the best fictional representations of Transmen in a patriarchal society is Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment, but I think I might get into trouble...

I've just been back to the thread. Hadn't seen it since a few hours ago. Oh my god its hideous. Blue ticks joining in.

They have given no thought to the status of and restrictions on women, and what the motives could have been. Maybe they don't know. Maybe they really are that thick. They can't see beyond their own navel. It's tribal, ugly, and v regressive in that it accepts no other possible point of view. Only people standing in exactly their position are acceptable. So very intolerant.

Yep, now this voluble loser has involved himself and writer twitter is retweeting away :(((( twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/1096468869911199745

Jane Clare Jones dealt with that self satisfied egotist a while back. He absorbed as much sense as you might imagine from reading that steaming turd of a tweet thread.

I fucking loathe Twitter.

Me too. 'Writer Twitter' in particular is absolutely shocking. I see NK Jemisin has started tweeting on the Levy thing and how writers have a responsibility not to 'harm'. It's so disappointing - for some reason I always thought authors were intelligent. Twitter has disabused me of that notion. It seriously makes my head explode.

The book and story wouldn't exist if we believed fully and treated the story fully that she was a he.

I thought the same. By their reckoning, presumably she was born a man, with a man’s brain, thus making her achievements

She was only remarkable as her sex was female.

One day, sanity will return and the sex of transitioners will be acknowledged again and all this fanatical opposition to recognising sex will pass.

*making her achievements unremarkable.

Chu is ascribing things to levy that she hasn't said, and assuming things about the novel that he doesn't know. Knob.

Chu is very fond of looking at Chu's words.

*From the Twitter thread: There were plenty of places it was legal for women to practice medicine in the 19th century

I don't believe this to be true - does anyone know different?*

This is a list of the first women, by country, allowed to graduate from medical school.

The earliest in modern times seems to have been Germany in 1754. I can’t bekieve that from then on, there was a sudden rush of female graduates taking their place alongside male medicos.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_first_female_physicians_by_country

So the supposition that in the early 19th century, there were lots of countries a woman could openly practice medicine, is demonstrably false.

Certainly those female graduates elsewhere in the world would have had a tough time with misogyny, having to fight tooth and nail for every opportunity. Medicine is rife with misogyny nowadays, it would have been so much worse 200 years ago. Ignaz Semmelweis couldn’t convince doctors to wash their hands in order to stop women dying from sepsis after childbirth, let alone work happily with female doctors.

By dressing as a man, Dr Barry enjoyed all the advantages of being a male doctor in a male-dominated society. She had opportunities, acceptance, adventures and collegiality, none of which she would have enjoyed as a woman. Instead of practising medicine, she would have had to constantly fight for her right to practice.

Easy enough to imagine her enjoying the freedom that pretending to be a man offered. It’s not at all surprising she never went back to living as a woman - it would have been like clipping the wings of a bird.

Men who argue for her having a trans identity demonstrate that as well as lacking basic research skills, they have no understanding whatsoever of what it means to be a woman under patriarchy.

I think the whole thing is very complex. There is a big difference between feeling yourself male and women in the past having a totally shitty lot in life and choosing to live as men because you could do that more easily then if you had some means and just moved away from where you grew up, and then do what you wanted to with your life.

We can't say, unless they said it somewhere themselves, that women who lived as men in the past can be identified as trans, as opposed to women who chose to live as men because it was much better and freer than living as a woman (and may allow them to have a relationship with another woman).

This isn't quite the same as transing the dead though. In fact, referring to doctor Barry as 'she' goes against how Dr Barry was referred to and referred to himself throughout life. Transing the dead is when people who lived as their birth-sex and never claimed to be the opposite sex are suddenly made trans or 'gender-queer' by people rewriting history. None of us know how Dr Barry felt internally, so changing pronouns to 'she' is also seeking to impose this person's version of the truth on someone who is dead.

Well one thing is for sure and that is that Barry was not trans. There is a well-researched and substantiated case to make that she was a female who used a male disguise to achieve what she would not otherwise have been able to do because of institutionalised sexism and misogyny. Levy says she thinks it's more complex than that and her novel centres on shifting perceptions of Barry's body and gender. That seems justified, given what we know, and actually pretty interesting.

It really is 'transing the dead' to claim she was a trans man! As discussed above, we don't demand this unquestioning acceptance of a political narrative to be applied to other historical figures. We don't say that Pharoahs were divine because they insisted they were, or that the trees really did talk to King George. In any historical writing, there are assumptions made and current political mores are retrospectively applied, but part of the challenge of such scholarship is to try to see things as they were and not as how we would expect or want them to be. It sounds to me like Levy has at least attempted to understand this. Whereas the people screaming "he he he he" over and over are acting like hysterical ideologues who have zero understanding of Barry's social and political context and are just desperate to erase female history and achievement. They are rewriting history. We don't know how Barry felt internally but we know for certain she was female and she was not trans. Because there was no such thing as trans. So let's at least work with the reality of what we know.

Yep, she was female. Whether she believed she was male or not (and there is no evidence she believed it), the reality is that she was a woman overcoming all the constraints on her sex by pretending to be a man.

Because there was no such thing as trans. So let's at least work with the reality of what we know.

But trans is nothing more than a person of one sex presenting as and telling others that they are the opposite sex. It's not like some revolutionary invention. We know that James Barry lived as a man both in public and private. We also know that James Barry was biologically female. We aren't certain whether it was solely to practice medicine or whether James Barry actually preferred to live and present as male. Either way, it is pretty clear that James Barry was referred to as 'he' for most of his life, so this change in pronouns is a rewriting of that.

this change in pronouns is a rewriting of that

There are lots of women in history who have either partially or totally hidden their sex to overcome the restrictions placed on them. But we generally refer to them by the correct pronouns for their sex.

Why is this case any different from the others because Dr Barry had the wealth and connections to suppress the public questioning of her sex during her life?

Mary Read and Anne Bonny both spent part of their childhood as boys (there's no evidence Dr Barry did) and then continued to disguise their sex as adults as well but they are always referred to as women.

Did Patrica Duncker get this attack by TRAs when she wrote her book about Dr Barry? I doubt it, since it was written 20 years ago.

She was only remarkable as her sex was female.
Exactly that. If Dr Barry had been a man he would have just been another 19thC doctor and nobody would have written books about him, he wouldn't have a Wikipedia article about him. Would anybody even remember his name?
Doctor James Barry is remembered because she was a woman - a woman who had the courage and ambition to break out of the prevailing social conventions and live the life she wanted to live. Turning her into a man erases all her achievements, her strength, her spirit, her tenacity. It makes her just another average man.

Not seen the Patricia Duncker book but did read DrJames Barry: A Woman Ahead of her Time (2016) Michael du Perez and Jeremy Dronfield last year. Book is a good read, especially bringing the medical realities to life. The book really sets out how Barry was a great, if sometimes tyrannical doctor. Unlikely that the authors have received a public dressing down for writing it!

I've had a bit of a immersion in books written about the period, say 1700s to mid 1800s, and women, although they certainly did not always accept the roles prescribed their sex, were certainly greatly restricted by them. Barry got on through hard work, opportunity and patronage, assuming a male persona gave her opportunities just not possible as a woman.

A trailblazer of her time.

Also, where is it then? This great wealth of scholarly material demonstrating that Barry was unquestionably a trans man? All these people on twitter keep screaming about "evidence" and how Barry is part of LGBTQ history - well, where is the evidence then? All I see is the claim that asking not to be outed as female after her death PROVES conclusively that she was a trans man (and this must be unquestioningly accepted because... reasons). That's it - just that one piece of evidence. She used male pronouns and didn't want the truth to come out after her death - that one claim stands against SEVERAL academic and in-depth works of scholarship, none of which suggest that Barry was trans. Fine, maybe they're all wrong, but you can't just say they're wrong and not produce any actual evidence. Go and work on your book that proves everyone else is wrong! You can't just scream at people until they shut up, just because you don't agree with their conclusions.

Oh wait, no, you actually can. Because the magic word is TRANS and that's all you need to say to avoid having to give any evidence or reason or justification for your views, your behaviour, or your crimes.

I am so fucking angry about this. It has been an absolute mob pile-on of Levy and if they break her I am going to... I don't know what I'm going to do. I feel fucking TRIGGERED by this shit.

These propellant accept that she was a doctor trapped in the body of a housewife.

If you define yourself by your gender you can't seem to realise that it's only one facet of life for most people.

This great wealth of scholarly material demonstrating that Barry was unquestionably a trans man?

A trans man is just a biological female who lives as a man (meaning telling others that they are a man and using male pronouns).

That's not the case, though. There was no such thing as a trans man until a few years ago. Was Joan of Arc a trans man? Was George Eliot? Currer Bell? No - they were women who used male pronouns and told others they were men AS A DISGUISE.

A "trans man" is a biological female who claims they have a male soul/identity in a female body. That is a very contentious thing to claim about women in history who adopted a male persona in order to access opportunities or avoid discrimination. There is nothing to suggest that trans identities existed in any recognisable form prior to the last few decades. To claim Barry was a trans man is historical revisionism and female erasure.

Fair enough. Why not refer to her by her birth name as well then, rather than using the masculine name that she adopted?
Also, there are lots of trans people who do not claim to have a gendered soul- e.g. Miranda Yardley. Miranda has obviously gone back to using male pronouns, but there are plenty who know and accept that they are biologically one sex but live as the opposite one because they feel more comfortable that way. I would still class them as transgender.

Names are not the same as pronouns. Names are an identity thing and can be changed with all sorts of motivations.

Pronouns are ontological - they are not arbitrary choices, they are meant to clearly describe real things.