(no subject)

Happy birthday, cofax7!

Yes, I wondered about the class privilege angle, too

Review in the latest Literary Review of that book The Hidden Caee of Ewan Forbes (not alas fully freely available on their website) - I posted a link to an article apropos of this case last month - which actually makes explicit something that was lurking at the back of my mind.

I.e. that Forbes was not the beneficiary of some halcyon and now forgotten era when trans people were living their lives unproblematically in the UK. Maier, the reviewer, suggests that 'vast reserves of personal ingenuity and a helpful degree of social and professional well-connectedness', that is, being born posh, and then becoming a doctor himself - created an 'accidental amnesty', brought about by Forbes' ability to manipulate contemporary assumptions about intersex.

Which figures. Certainly some of the other early notorious (that is, got into the press) cases leant on similar arguments.

And being someone who has encountered the medprof covering its back with a plausible excuse in other contexts ('you are feeling suicidal, dear, aren't you? aren't you?' - she nods, psychiatrist ticks box, he takes cash in hand payment and she goes back to the gynaecologist for her 'd&c').

Not to mention, the fact that if you had money/privilege you could get most things in Harley Street - abortions, rejuvenation ops, Grafenberg rings, artificially insemination - and I'm pretty sure that some of the interwar docs I've encountered doing the aforementioned would probably not have had any qualms over what was then called 'the sex change operation' or doling out hormones.

It's a generally murky and dodgy dynamic - a twilight zone! - in which it's unlikely that either party is going to grass up the other.