 Welcome to the British Library or should I say the British Library's backyard because here we are right behind it My name is Bea Rollat I work in the cultural events team and we've got a real cork of you tonight It's a look into the trans archive with our panel of brilliant experts If you've got any questions during this event, please put them in the box below We are also looking for donations to the work of the British Library if you can donate that will be wonderful Also, if you can give us audience feedback, that's much appreciated Sadly the building's closed, but we are open online and there's loads more events. So please check out our program And thank you for joining us. I'm going to hand over now to our brilliant chair DM over to you DM Hi, and a warm welcome to a look into the trans archive and also a warm welcome to the living knowledge network If you need captions, there are closed captions for this event. So just turn them on At the bottom of the screen. My name is DM withers I'm a research fellow on a project called the business of women's words, which is based at the British Library And as part of this role, I've had the good fortune to be a curatorial consultant for the exhibition unfinished business the fight for women's rights, which this event is in dialogue with unfinished business features different facets of trans archive from what we might call the cultural archive represented in objects such as the first edition of Virginia Woolf's time traveling gender-bending novel Orlando to debates about social and medical constructions of sex in the 1930s to Activism from the late 90s and early 21st century which aimed to secure and did secure legal rights and human rights for trans people through the 2004 gender recognition act More broadly and throughout the exhibition. It looks at how across history medicine and technology have both constrained And expanded the social meanings of women and women hood as well as the conceptual categories of sex and gender Over the next hour, we're going on a 200 plus year sprint through the trans archive from the 19th century to the present We have four fantastic speakers and each will cover a period in trans history This will be our necessity only a snapshot of those periods of history But we hope it will inspire you to look further into the trans archive in the future Covering the 19th century is professor arne hallman of cardiff university who is author of among many things neo-victorian Biographelia and james moranda barry a study in transgender and trans genre Covering the 1930s is dr. Claire terbert who is assistant professor in gender studies from trinity college doubling Talking us through the post war period is adrian kane galbraith a doctoral candidate from the university of washington in the us christine burns will talk through the 1990s to the present Reflecting on her activism with press for change. She did so much to secure legal and human rights for trans people in the uk Each participant is going to speak for around six to eight minutes And there will be ample time for audience questions at the end So if you'd like to ask a question, please do so add it in the text box at the bottom of the screen You can do that at any point throughout the next hour or at the end And I will do my best to field your questions to our fantastic speakers We are taking a chronological approach. So arnes is going first from the 19th century And we're going to work our way up to the present. So without further ado, please take it away arne and enjoy Okay, hello, this is me. Um, my brief is to speak about Transgender in the long 19th century and could I have the first slide please? Okay, so, um, I want to begin with the a shift in thought at the end of the 19th century to the early 20th century in medical science sexology and how this shift led to the emergence of a discourse of transgender And then I work my way backwards and talk about two very prominent trans people the the french diplomat the And then james barry Could I have the next slide please? Okay, um at the end of the 19th century sexologists started to Develop a discourse which sought to Decriminalize homosexuality and in this homosexual discourse discourse for homosexuality. They developed A language of transgender. So transgender was first cast in relation to homosexuality So havalok ellis on the left in his 1897 book on sexual inversion Um described the homosexual as an invert um in a language um in the language of transgender a homosexual man was a female soul trapped in a male body And the homosexual woman was a male soul trapped in a female body in the early 20th century um An alternative term was offered by edward carpenter The intermediate sex edward carpenter himself gay um coined the notion of a third sex an intermediate sex between female between the binaries and in 1910 um next slide please In 1910 the german um sexologist margnes hersfeld for the first time disambiguated homosexuality and transgender in his book on transvestites where he made the point that um the impulse to Cross-stress and the and the um sense of a different sex identity Were not necessarily linked to homosexuality havalok ellis followed this up by um criticizing The idea of transvestism and saying that um cross-stressing did not necessarily come with a sense of different sex identity and instead of his own earlier version of inversion and his and um hersfeld's notion of transvestism He suggested eonism in his 1928 book eonism next slide please eonism was adapted was inspired by the french late 18th century early 19th century diplomat chevalier déant who presented in both genders um in our own terms a gender fluid individual who refused to um identify one gender as the true gender um created enormous um an enormous sense of sensation but also considerable anxiety to the point that a court case um was um held to decide the chevalier's sex and the court case decided that the chevalier was female um in um uh in in their shock the chevalier left for France where the same thing happened and a royal edict um issued the injunction that the chevalier live as a woman so in a sense um gender when uh when the categories are blurred historically speaking masculinity needs to be retained as a pure category and anything else is is feminized the um the case of James Barry offers a different example next slide please Barry um chose to transition not biologically but chose to transition from one sex and identity from one gender identity to another uh born female um he reinvented himself as James Barry um at age 20 um and attained um a very considerable um reputation as a military surgeon reaching the highest rank in the medical branch of the the the British army working in the colonies um in and um um a pioneer of sanitary reform 30 years before Florence Nightingale with whom he clashed at the end of his career quite significantly um and um also um a proponent of the rights of um um minority groups uh and oppressed groups um two slides on please yeah um in um it was only after Barry's death that um the woman who laid out the body claimed that she had found um a female body this was unverified the body had already been buried in an epidemic um and uh it was not until the 1980s that an art historian found legal evidence of documents that identified the female birth identity of James Barry as Margaret Barkley the niece of history painter James Barry from whom he adopted his his name now in contradiction to the chivalry whose fluid gender performance inspired sexology to um to start a discourse of transgender Barry because his life anticipated organized feminism in the Victorian period um has been placed as female rather than trans uh this is understandable in terms of Victorian feminists he um spoke um for the rights of prostitutes for example which was a very prominent cause for feminists later on his um year of death coincided with the first formal medical um woman Elizabeth Garrett Anderson uh being um completing her studies and the suffragettes in the early 20th century represented um the the feminist struggle as a struggle by amazons but up to our own period Barry um has been represented as a woman rather than as trans which is um it is surprising apart from two books the third of four biographies by Rachel Holmes which is um on the second half of the picture and um um and Patricia Duncan's novel um last slide please when I read my book um about a cultural history of James Barry and representations of James Barry um I was drawn to um a um a picture of uh the the older Barry um enormously confident which I then had adapted for for my uh for my picture and for my cover uh against the background of um uh Table Mountain in in South Africa and it was only afterwards that I discovered but this picture which I um sourced from an archive um telling them it was um the medical surgeon James Barry was James Barry but a different James Barry um a double um whose life um more or less coincided with um my James Barry um who also lived um for a long time in in Cape Town was a wine merchant and later a member of the Legislative Assembly and um this I think I want to end with this because it shows some unexpected discoveries we can actually make in our archival research that at first um may um may send us into some kind of um well anxiety but actually in this case nothing is more relevant than this um confusion because it represents Barry's own very deliberate confusion of his origins um he uh invented three um years of birth uh different mothers etc for himself uh and it also shows the difficulties of um tracing and of researching um historical transgender because with prominent figures the the facts are very difficult to reconstruct when the myth has subsumed the personality and it's the cultural myth and the cultural construction of the figure that is uh has has in a way um pushed us to the margins the the actual personality and I've come to my the end of my talk now thank you okay so I'm going to be moving us on into the 1930s and if I can get my slides up please so um I'm starting here in 1930 with a front page image from the popular newspaper The Daily Mirror and you have on the left hand side of the page very happy looking um newlyweds called Evan Burt and the reason I'm emphasizing this story is this I believe marks a moment in the 1930s when there's this kind of slightly surprising um window of possibility where there's a whole series of stories that seem now to be very positive trans stories and in many ways they speak to an intersex history they speak to lives of people whom we might now um more readily see as intersex but who are sort of viewed through a variety of lenses that um kind of put them within this history that is trans that is gender queer that is non-binary that is intersex that speaks to a past that is very much about people grappling with sex and gender identities so very much coming from the ideas that Ana's just discussed in the 19th century of coming out of the ideas of sexology you have here Evan Burt and his lovely wife um um Sarah Edwards on their wedding day and what is the story the reason this makes front page news is because in the words of The Daily Mirror you know Evan has lived for 29 years as a woman this is what makes the story um kind of newsworthy but it's in many ways very positive we have for sure this kind of construction of that terrible trope of the before and after photo but it's slightly reversed you have um you know kind of the idea of Evan being really foregrounded as the successful husband who has been celebrated for having married his long-term girlfriend you know this is really celebrated in all of the stories and the fact that you know here is someone in this small Wiltshire village you know in the southwest of England who has doubted his identity for a while has written off um has sought approval um has you know sort of looked for this judgment and has had it verified and when you go to the Wiltshire Record offices when you look at the birth register for Evan Burt's you see that it's been corrected and it may seem like a small thing but it's massive you know this was a moment when somebody could say you know actually I'm a man you we got this wrong and you could put that line through it you could cross it out and correct it so here we have Evan Burt getting married and it being framed as a successful story moving on to the next slide we move forward six years to 1936 which is the year in which there are the most of these stories it's a real kind of key year in terms of thinking about these intersex and trans histories you have again as a front sort of front page story alongside the baby being saved from the lion you know always a great story you have Mark Weston again getting married to his long-term girlfriend you know very much a celebration of heterosexuality but very much a celebration of Mark Weston the male figure here who had lived up until this point under the identity he'd been assigned at birth as a woman and again he has this realization that this is not correct that he is a man and he seeks medical support and this is supported he gets medical and legal recognition that indeed he is correct he is a man and a large part of this story is that he is intersex you would not get this from the popular press accounts and this newspaper story is just one of these moments it is just one press story you can see here it's front page news it merits um the sort of front page uh photo but this is a story that is being circulated around the world through the anglophone press and beyond it has been circulated through the local press it is something that is being picked up and circulated again and again and that then becomes reiterated again and again in stories and one of the reasons why mark western's story is significant is that mark had already achieved a degree of fame um within sports he'd had a career within um sort of what was seen as women's sport and this is partly why 1936 is such a key year because 1936 is the year of the berlin olympics the so-called nazi olympics and there is a massive debate in that summer of 1936 that has so many resonances when you look at the injustices and terrible rhetoric that is going on until this day around intersex athletes um in 1936 this is already happening you have these questions being played out who qualifies when you have this binary opposition of sex segregation within sport who qualifies as a woman athlete and so you have mark western who has won medals in the woman's shop put um now um realizing that he's a man and being affirmed in that the debate that goes on is how can anybody know quite who gets to qualify as a woman so if we move on to the next slide you have another athlete in this case the Czech um 800 meter runner sedenik kubek who again um is raised in these discussions around the 1936 olympics you have again what i think is a really beautiful and affirming photo of kubek here in his athletic gear in this real kind of um muscle pose um and at the same time you have this language of the man woman it's a language that is predates the 1930s um if we move on to the next slide you see from 1929 one of the kind of classic um cases of the genre of somebody who's been assigned female at birth and then keeps on asserting himself to be male in the face of so much societal opposition here colonel barker and again with the newspaper um front page story with image here you have this heading of man woman it's a category that is not medical but attests to this idea of gender fluidity of ideas of the difficulties of ascribing a definite male or female identity to some people in some ways i think it sounds like a really um pathologizing category but i would also argue that there's a real scope within it it's maybe the kind of space of non-binary of its time although it's much more expansive than that if we move on to the final slide um we move forward to 1938 and the real kind of moment that reinforces the surgeon and endocrinologist um so sort of hormone specialist who's behind a lot of this which is the South African um Lennox Ross Broster and you see here this classic trans narrative of the surgeon having all of the agency so we have a picture of Donald Purcell um another man who has been assigned female at birth and is now asserting himself to be male and the headline doctor changes sex of 24 patients have married again the agency is on the surgeon Lennox Ross Broster um there is this idea of um kind of agency for Donald Purcell and the sort of smaller photo is again of a potential bride for him because none of these stories are complete without the kind of you know sort of speculating as to some sort of heterosexual love interest but really you start to see this pernicious discourse of the medical um gatekeeping coming through as early as 1938 so this is my whirlwind tour of the sort of 1930s and the ways in which there is a massive interest centered around ideas of sex change as a phrase that gets used again and again that really refers to ideas of intersex and the potential for the body to be changing to be changeable and this idea of the man woman being replaced by notions of medical intervention and the need for sort of medical verification to be that gatekeeping role and decide who gets to um decide who can identify as who they are thank you well hello all i'll be taking us into the uh 1950s and 60s looking specifically at uh registration of trans people within the national insurance system sounds like a dry topic i know but bear with me i thought i would start in the spirit of the history of national insurance with its tables and tables of statistics with a few noteworthy numbers so 631 that's the number of people who between 1954 and 1975 applied to change the sex designation on their national insurance card from female to male or vice versa 522 that's how many of those applications were accepted in other words people who we know were issued government documentation that officially recognized them as men or women despite them having been assigned to different sex at birth and finally 779 that's how many images i have on my camera of individual documents held in the national archives at q under these mpni folders with the heading change of sex so what these numbers added up to for me was a surprise i'd set out on my dissertation research knowing there was going to be at least some traces of trans presence and the mid-century archives but i wasn't expecting to find civil servants in the 1950s already grappling with the fact that legal sex is not a self-evident category let alone actually updating so many people's identity documents so how did this policy come about was the ministry of pensions and national insurance some bastion of progressive thought well not quite in fact this rigid binary definition of sex and sex being a term that mpni officer is used to refer to a person's physiology their internal sense of self and their social presentation this was integral to the post-war contributory welfare system so it was assumed that men would be the main wage earners for their households and thus the national insurance act 1946 established lower levels of unemployment and sickness benefit for women along with a whole host of other differentials between men and women moreover until 1975 employers had to record a workers contributions by placing physical stamps each week on their national insurance card which a booklet was a booklet and it proclaimed in block letters in the upper left corner whether the bear was a man or a woman this card also served as proof of identity local insurance offices or employment exchanges it was in other words impossible to work during these decades without being able to consistently prove with appropriate documents which kind of worker you were the irony however was that by placing sexual identity documentation at the heart of this male breadwinner state the mpni kind of risked undermining its own ideological foundations because the reality was that sex was neither easy to define nor always consistent across a worker's life so insurance officers got their first taste of the difficulties this could create when in december 1954 a young trans man called Vincent Jones pled guilty to representing himself as a bachelor on his marriage certificate this ignited a storm of tabloid coverage that implicated the mpni and his supposed deception i am a man jones explained to the daily express after the trial but if you mean physically i still have female organs i have been to doctors to get my sex changed and i am sick of waiting imagine a few of us can relate to that uh however the tabloids reported jones had acquired a male national insurance card while he was waiting which enabled him at least up to this point to live and work unremarked as a man so it's a testament to the mpni's sensitivity about its public image that within days the solicitor j von sent a memo to his colleagues about this issue von professed himself sympathetic to the plight of people like jones but at their core his concerns were pragmatic because the national insurance card was such a ubiquitous feature of working life a passport to employment he called it transitioning people were likely to face public embarrassment if there was a mismatch between their social appearance and the sex marker on their card they might be forced to fall back on the strained mercies of the means tested welfare system instead of becoming working dues paying useful citizens hence he argued and his argument was affirmed by the april 1955 memorandum persons of doubtful sex there's a title for you sex change should be recognized as a reality however mpni officers were equally eager to ensure the bad publicity like that following the jones trial wasn't repeated persons of doubtful sex also required that all requests for sex redesignation be forwarded to the chief medical officer of the mpni who would assess and i quote whether it would be proper and to the advantage of the person concerned that they should be treated as one sex or the other this limited gate kept form of gender recognition thus was a double-edged sword the emphasis on unuseful citizenship or on propriety created kind of an implicit hierarchy in terms of whose applications for new cards were likely to succeed there's no information for instance in these files about how applicants were racialized but i think the emission might be significant in itself given how what we know about how gender normativity in the uk is found up with whiteness then as now i also found two instances where applicants had their requests for new cards delayed because they'd recently claimed disability benefit uh for mental health issues and women particularly women who are married to other women or who worked in marginal economies faced kind of the brunt of the mpni's systemic misogyny in april and august 1961 for instance uh mpni officers discovered that a woman they'd issued a female card had been arrested while doing street sex work it's an economic reality that comes up in quite a few of these case files she lived with another trans woman her partner miranda par i should say these are these names are all pseudonyms i should clarify uh who had also more recently acquired national female national insurance status par's status was challenged on the basis of this relationship by giving her a card was the mpni not supporting a domestic arrangement that diverged widely from the heterosexual family unit national insurance was supposed to uphold and thereby risking trouble with tabloids or the law but surprisingly though in par's case as in all but 83 of the 631 applications recorded during this period departmental pragmatism swung in favor of recognition the chief medical officer's rejoinder to the legal department's hesitancy about par was was rather tart par he wrote had come in with a certification from reputable psychiatrist and and i quote both these persons wish to live as females in fact the evidence is that they are doing so homosexual practices between females are not a crime i agree that the main fact that both live at the same address does not establish that anything is happening which might eventually embarrass the ministry and that it would be best to leave things as they are the practice of recognizing sex change of sex for national insurance purposes thus seems to have been tied as much to administrative rationality as it was to questions morals and administration that is the the selective accommodation of sexual difference that helps preserve the image of normativity on which the system is founded seems to have won out in most cases for the better part of two decades the process has left traces of trans presence in the high policy world of the national archives stories embedded in the statistics that show how long really trans people have been demanding to be recognized as who we are i want to close then with the humbling but exciting reflection that these stories are just the tip of the iceberg that there's no doubt much more trans presence to be uncovered and much more than may never be uncovered in the archive for one non-binary people are invisible here even if they opted to change their designation from one binary opt into another there's no record of their non-binary identity for another thing the 631 people who appear in the annals of the social insurance system are only those whose local officers decided to pass their files up the chain to the central office there's actually evidence to suggest that local officers sometimes issued new cards without thinking twice in one recorded interview from 1976 for instance a consultant to the london hospital recalled that and i quote the question of an employment card is solved very simply or has been by our patients by merely going to the office and saying you have put down mr kennett smith on this form there is a mistake my name is cathleen smith the clerk looks up and immediately agrees and issues a new card sometimes recognitions can be as simple as that thank you asian um i think i need to pick myself up off the floor i used to say as a adolescent and young adult that i hated history when i was at school i could actually see no relevance in it to my life um which is a shame because um all i had in order to try and understand myself when i was about 12 year old in the mid 1960s was beginning to read about people like April ashley um in the in the news of the world um and i think the thing that has been a feature of much of the last 60 years for me has been the knowledge that's the way in which we talk about trans people unlike all the previous three speakers who are actually going from some way of excavating what actually happens is through the lens of the press and how it distorts what our lives are um so that is actually in itself influenced the trajectory of trans people um but if i can actually just go back a little bit the way i've actually looked at trans history um is in a number of phases i think if we look from all the way back to the 1700s to the Chevalier Dion and all the way through to the 1930s 40s 50s the stories that are documented about trans people um tend to be about individuals there is no sense of trans people ever meeting other trans people um we have since learned no one or two instances for instance uh the famous trans man um was named as immediately disappeared off my list um Michael Dillon um he actually tried to form a relationship with another trans person Roberta Cowell in the 1950s but other than that i think most of these people were actually lived as solitary individuals trying to work out a solution to their what seemed like unique problem in their own way and again just to bring it back to myself i remember in the mid 1960s as as a child um dressing up in my departed sister's clothes thinking was i the only person like me in the world was i a unique kind of freak which actually makes it even more frightening to be but we don't actually see trans people coming together and talking to each other in a in any kind of supportive or political way until we get to the mid 1960s with the formation of something called the the Beaumont Society um which actually provided a forum for whether it was people who were cross dressed or people who saw themselves as transsexual to come together and actually discuss their life experience past tips um share information about where they might be able to get help uh what to avoid if they were out in the world if they got into trouble um so this second phase was one of uh mutual uh self support um and it amazes me that that was the model for again uh just over 20 years that we didn't actually progress i grew up i graduated i went i got i got a job i struggled with my identity not even knowing that that existed until um the um the late 70s and my only points of reference apart from the press were uh books and books were extremely hard to come by i remember my excitement the first time i heard on on a radio program a review of a book by a journalist called Jan Morris um who written her own autobiography about her transition um i now know it wasn't the first but at the time we all regarded it as being the first example of uh you know a true a true story of a trans person actually finding the way to uh to to surgical transition um and then later in the 70s towards the end of the 1970s there was a television documentary featuring something called Julia Grant which again showed away um but these things are extremely few and far between and um we we noticed them when we pounced upon them but otherwise there wasn't a lot to be seen so just as if you go back 200 years um we have a paucity of examples i don't believe that the examples we have for instance from the 19th century on one or two people are the beginning and end of the story those are the people who came to notice for one for some reason or other through their night notoriety uh is in the case of James Barry or in the case of um press reports or because people got into trouble with the law because for a long time it was unlawful to uh to to go about outside dressed as a member of the opposite sex and therefore some of the some of the other records that we have in the 19th century are people being bought before the law to be punished for their um then you know what they were doing so we didn't throughout that 20 25 years of support organisations up until towards the end of the uh i think i've had my six minutes uh the end of the um 1980s um that was just support there's no uh activist organisation and that's actually where the next part of the trans story begins um now obviously i've run out of time uh but i want to emphasize is that my life would have been so much different if i had known a fraction of what we are discussing today about historical figures and particularly how our experience historically has been had been erased culturally um and i think looking at today with uh with a backlash that is about four years old now which is rooted mainly in misinformation and and fear i can't help feeling that the conversation there would be an awful lot different if the people involved were actually you know studying the stuff that we've studied so i've grown up to realise not only is uh what you call history i call childhood um but that's uh history and being able to excavate this these these pieces of evidence that people's lives is vitally important to having a rational conversation about trans lives i've finished yeah fantastic that's a great point a great point to finish on christine thank you so much and thank you to all the speakers that was just incredible an absolute kind of riot through the through these centuries of so much stuff so much stuff happening um i've got quite a few questions coming through so i am going to start and i think we'll say picking up what you were saying christine by perhaps gesturing to the longer history so this is a question from jona coman um by starting in the 19th century and the invention of language for trans people it might be implied that trans folk are a modern phenomenon and that there were no trans people before that but how did the 19th century medical historical and philosophical writers build on an entire history of trans and gender variant folk and i suppose that's a question about you know how were they building on particular kind of mythologies or imaginaries and and what stories or ideas were they drawing on so if anyone can speak uh speak to that that would be be helpful so the longer history because you know we're conscious of we certainly in this event we certainly don't want to suggest that trans history begins and ends in the 19th century but i should have said this in the introduction the reason why this periodization has been imposed on this panel is because it mirrors the time period covered in the exhibition so um so yeah anyone want to have a go at that the question well shall i shall i just say that i think that historians like scientists as well are always constrained by the fact that they're human beings living in their time using the concepts of their time the language of their time so uh when we see you know the late 19th century uh beginning to codify uh the position of the law against people who were homosexual with the Lebesche amendment um is means that trans people who were sort of instinctively are regarded as being somehow but we don't quite understand how associated with all that stuff tend first i think to be described erroneously within the same language so as people start to talk about sexual inversion um trans people whether they are simply heterosexuals who are cross-dressing or trans people who are genuinely feelings very strongly that they want to live their life um in the the opposite gender role to the one they're issued with um tend to be described within that same that same framework but that's why the work of uh Hirschfield is so important in actually beginning to to and have a localis as well begin to break open that egg and actually separate out the white and the yolk so that we could talk about those things differently sure has anybody else got anything they want to respond to Jonah Coman's question and don't have to um one of the things that I think I'm really interested in just because of the experience of doing research for the exhibition and you know kind of trying to find trans lives in the archive is the the conceptual and archival sources really in where does where does one go to find it and I think we've got a massive massively helpful glimpse of that in your presentation so the the National Archives local record offices that kind of thing so I just wondered if you were able to elaborate on the different sites where you might go if you wanted to do more research on the history of trans lives and the kind of approaches you might want to take if you were doing that Claire do you want to answer that yeah sure so a lot of my work has been looking at the popular press which um as Christine sort picked up on you know it's certainly not without its problems there's the advantage of looking at the popular press is that you know particularly at particular moment it has a massive circulation you are getting access to something that is reaching you know kind of vast swathes of the population and you are getting to see how particular ideas are being framed and put out there um it just happens that in the 1930s some of that is being framed more positively so it's not quite as um painful as it might be looking at it at other points um also I mean it's one of those things where um you are looking for people in the past and I think it's a really key point that kind of Christine raises as well about looking at individuals and trying to think about how you might move beyond that um that there's not necessarily these kind of group formations that you can look for so for example I've spent a lot of time in medical archives and it means necessarily that you're looking at uh sort of trans identities into sex identities that are much more medicalized but then you're finding those moments that kind of creep through you find the moments in the discussions between medics when they're actually considering people's lives or you're finding the letters that people are writing in you're finding those moments when you're getting slight moments um of agency or you're getting um kind of if not agency you're at least starting to see um some of the less official discourse of the of the medics and you know getting to see kind of what's going on but it's necessarily it's not perfect it's yeah really trying to just look between between to find what there is yeah Adrienne I can see your your head nodding fear in relation to what you're saying there so yeah absolutely I think following up both on this and on the question of terminology as somebody who started doing my research in 2017 I think a huge influence on just the ability to do the kind of project that I'm doing across the national archives across the British library the welcome library the hall carpenter archives all these archives is the advent of searchable catalog systems and better metadata better tagging um of subjects related to trans people there was a learning curve though which I found was interesting I started out kind of searching the archive for for the modern terminology um that you know that I hope to find or or indeed for for medical terms like like transsexual which was pretty common in the in the mid 20th century us which is where a lot of the trans history that's been written is centered but I actually didn't find a lot of files tagged with this term transsexual um this specific medical term instead what I was finding was a continuation of the term sex change um that claire develops a lot in her own work um as this kind of nebulous catchall category that refers partly to social transition and partly to to physical transition and covers people who we would now classify as intersex as well as people who would now classify as trans this term has a long afterlife um and once I've figured that out being able to plug that term in to catalogs across and all these sites across the uk and in fact the world um has able to to get a much broader picture than I think I might have previously ah and I wanted to ask you about the cultural archive and and myth making because you talked about how that kind of impacted on your research and I just wondered how how those kinds of myths have both can you know are a barrier but also can enhance the presence of trans lives in the in the past and their visibility and our understanding of them arns muted can someone unmute unmute my arn okay can you hear me yes yeah okay sorry it keeps happening to me um obviously that happens with the more prominent figures and I also wanted to um contribute to what previous speakers have said that um you you start with um it's a snowballing system you you start with some sources and they lead you to other sources and it's really really important to follow these up um in in my research I I mean I I looked also at fiction and there is a very early um representation after the death of James Barry by in in um all the year round by Dickens which is anonymous but has some has has some aspects of Dickens writing I'm pretty convinced that Dickens had a hand in it which sounds like a witness account but which is obviously a construction and the way in which different um uh different parts of um literature popular media uh and so on act together um the that story which pretends to be a witness account then um it is taken up in by um by um a South African annual um winter annual with a cartoon and the cartoon is an illustration of the story um and it and then it it enters biography so then as as a historical as historical fiction then becomes a documentary source for biography so um it's very important to um be aware that biography and bio fiction and drama um very often blend and merge uh and you have elements of factual uh you have factual elements but you also have a lot of construction uh and and fictionalization and that is sometimes the very difficult thing to disambiguate this and to to find the real real life person behind the myth and with very prominent people the myth becomes the person and the the person themselves gets gets lost but on the other hand that mythologization that process that happens says something very important about the times about our times and about our thinking about trans so it's not um it's not wasted um it's it's actually it's it's also a documentary source that um um from which we can learn and which we can analyze about our own constructions um and um with with all this um merging of different sources it's still very important to go back to the archives um for example there is an absolutely fascinating part of a letter by Florence Nightingale which describes her encounter with Barry which was a clash and I had read that in various books and the letter itself reads like a post-modern um description because it changes the pronoun see she she he um and this is in the original this is in the original um and it's it's just fantastic to um go back to the source and find it but then the source itself can be as I said confused because um the um representation of Barry that I talked about is very widely used in Barry criticism um and um and um I checked with Rachel Holmes as well and when she um wrote her biography it was actually in the James Barry files um and it was only later taken out when the error had been reconstructed and and discovered I think it's you know it's an error that again is is really uh very says something about the construction of that figure and also how I mean how I personally see see Barry um but um it um to to not to restrict oneself to one source of information but to read widely and to research widely and to be open to all kinds of resources yeah I think that's a absolutely key point thank you on um and bringing them all together Christine you had uh something yes yes I just wanted to pick up on that because I think one of the the important things it's vitally important to be aware of actually who is producing the record um and that's as true with books that purport to be biographies as with some of these third party records um that's very often even what claims to be an autobiography such as April Ashley's was actually um ghost written by somebody helping her to to write it um so and then obviously there's the influence of editors as well producing a book that the publisher thinks that the largest audience wants to read so uh we also have to see books in terms of the period in which they were published um and what they were they were serving to try and hook in audiences which is I think why my criticism so often of um of trans biography in the past is that it tends to be a story about my brave journey towards the operating theater and the the story ends there as though nothing important ever happened afterwards whereas um as being subversive whenever I've written about trans lives it tends to be the other way around I start where they've actually become themselves because that's the really interesting part but there are many sources now for for modern research as well um talking about this period of trans neutral support organizations like the Beaumont society and later the gender trust and then organization called self-help association for transsexuals these all produced regular magazines and um one very valuable place to go uh and I would say start with places like hall carpenter archive um is to look for those because those are actually written and edited by trans people in the moment describing life as they saw it at that time um and then later when we became activists in the 1990s uh right from the word go when we talk our activist legal campaign online um I was very keen to ensure that because I know that things online can disappear as fast as they appear that we had some way of ensuring some longevity to the history that we were producing in real time uh and so I'm really really pleased that the British library even after we sort of more or less folded up um press the change um actually took a web snapshots of all of our work which in turn was archiving what other people were saying so that we have a an uninterrupted 10-year snapshot of the entire conversation about trans people from around about 1995 through to about 2007 or eight um so that's an incredible trove to be researched by somebody who wants to go through that because you actually you're there in the moment with that material but subsequently I'm also worried for the present because trans people today the ones that have followed behind me and my colleagues are actually making history right now and my concern is that that history isn't being recorded what you get recorded in the official places through the press is a completely distorted picture of our lives told through the lens of people who just want to say we're we're we're deviant with we're dangerous to women um we're trying to upend life as we know it um and the dialogues that are taking place between trans people actually trying to counter that move forwards are happening in places like facebook twitter in blogs and those can disappear as quickly as they appeared when I loved facebook a year ago I wiped out 12 years worth of my own history so uh I think my message to to people today would be for god's sake write it down put it in books keep a journal keep keep your files in my lifetime the format the emails have been stored in has changed four times the format for word processes just changed three times there are documents even as young as 2008 I can no longer read on my computer yet we we really if we're serious about providing good material for another panel like this in a hundred years time to be able to make sense of the present then we have to make sure that that stuff is saved and preserved and cherished so that it can be studied in the future otherwise this is going to be the sunday times or the daily mail and we don't want to remember that way no totally and I completely agree and I think there's it's important to remember if you are involved in these histories to consider depositing them in an archive you know as as soon as possible or it just makes it a lot easier to make exhibitions to tell stories about trans lives if the collections are there if they're visible so I think you know if you're if you're involved in anything please consider doing that I know bishop gate archives have have got some trans collections but there's lots of archives your local record office just depositing it is is is the important thing and not just for historians but for public understanding as well so I think the time has come for this incredibly rich and yeah just stimulating panel to come to an end I want to thank the four speakers for taking us through this whirlwind trip through the trans archive and thank you I think the enormous interest in this event shows that there is immense hunger for understanding these histories for delving into them deeper and also for using these histories to you know to make claims that you know trans trans lives trans people are obviously not a postmodern construction have a very long and rich history and enrich the world if that even needs to be said it's obvious but thank you again and see you next time or around bye