It is typically British that Zoë Playdon’s story of trans experience should be told through the ever-fascinating prism of the British class system. Simply put – does this mean we will listen now?
In the early years of the 20th century, Elizabeth Forbes-Sempill grew up near Balmoral and, as the child of the 9th Baronet of Craigievar, in the milieu of the British Royal family. Except Elizabeth was a trans man. With the support of her mother, Gwendolen, who took her to Germany for hormone treatment before the Nazis disallowed it in 1933, he lived as a man called Ewan, married his housekeeper, Isabella, and worked as a doctor.
The law let him change the sex on his birth certificate – today you get a second birth certificate – and he did so in 1952, citing “a grievous error”. In this book, Ewan Forbes-Sempill is a blank because he wanted it that way. His memoir The Aul’ Days doesn’t record his trans identity. It just was.
When his older brother, William – apparently a spy for the Japanese, but that is another book – died without sons, disaster struck. His malicious cousin, John, demanded the title on the grounds that Ewan “was” a woman. (John had already blackmailed him out of the estate.) Ewan’s sister, Margaret, a lesbian, initially supported John’s claim in 1968, reporting that, for her, Ewan had always been a woman. Although she recanted this testimony, a long court case began, at the end of which Ewan was given the title – but trans people would no longer be able to correct their birth certificates.
The judgment, appallingly, was suppressed ( “accidentally misfiled” until 1998), which meant later trans people could neither benefit from the legal precedent of his victory, nor understand why they ended up having fewer rights than he did. Playdon, a co-founder of the parliamentary forum on gender identity and a professor of medical humanities, believes this “troubling” subversion of the doctrine of legal precedent was the establishment’s way of protecting male primogeniture, which, though plausible, is impossible to prove.
