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The court case that dismantled trans rights 50 years ago
4 years ago
This one seemed important enough to share.
The secret UK court case 50 years ago that has robbed transgender people of their rights ever since
The story of Ewan Forbes shows how trans people were able to enjoy equality – until it was quietly removed to protect male rights of succession
A narrative has developed about the position of transgender people today that has become so widely accepted as to be assumed as fact: that it is only in the past few decades that trans people have begun to enjoy any rights; that trans women have always been more prominent than trans men; and most of all, that in recent years, trans people have been seeking to gain more rights than they’ve ever had before.
A new book, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes by Zoe Playdon, upends all of this. The Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of London has unearthed a legal case that 50 years ago changed everything for trans people, but which has been kept secret at the highest levels ever since.
The purpose, it seems, of this blackout was to uphold the patriarchal structure underpinning the monarchy, aristocracy, and hereditary peerages – the right of inheritance by the firstborn son. Or, to use the formal term, male primogeniture. The effect was to remove the human rights of transgender people that had previously existed – and in silence.
She first suspected something important had been buried in 1996, while helping lawyers with a case about trans rights in the High Court of Justice, which failed, baffling everyone.
“I knew that there was something about primogeniture that was a stumbling block,” she tells me via video call. This sense was emboldened by an informant, the lawyer Terrence Walton, who had worked on a famous early case involving trans rights, who told her “‘there are some interests that it is more important to protect than the rights of individuals’. I thought, ‘we’re not going to actually get trans equality until the issue of primogeniture is dealt with.’”
Playdon hoped that after the Succession to the Crown Act in 2013, which removed male primogeniture from the monarchy, something would shift. But after the Act, several attempts to end the same among hereditary peers unexpectedly didn’t pass, and certain trans rights cases stalled. By then, Playdon had retired so was able to devote five years of digging to find out what happened, and why.
“I knew that in the past, trans people had corrected their birth certificates,” she says. “All the way through up to 1970, the path was: self-identify, get affirmative medical care, correct your birth certificate, and live equally. After 1970, that’s gone.”
Read the rest here:
https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads.....rights-1291857
The secret UK court case 50 years ago that has robbed transgender people of their rights ever since
The story of Ewan Forbes shows how trans people were able to enjoy equality – until it was quietly removed to protect male rights of succession
A narrative has developed about the position of transgender people today that has become so widely accepted as to be assumed as fact: that it is only in the past few decades that trans people have begun to enjoy any rights; that trans women have always been more prominent than trans men; and most of all, that in recent years, trans people have been seeking to gain more rights than they’ve ever had before.
A new book, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes by Zoe Playdon, upends all of this. The Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of London has unearthed a legal case that 50 years ago changed everything for trans people, but which has been kept secret at the highest levels ever since.
The purpose, it seems, of this blackout was to uphold the patriarchal structure underpinning the monarchy, aristocracy, and hereditary peerages – the right of inheritance by the firstborn son. Or, to use the formal term, male primogeniture. The effect was to remove the human rights of transgender people that had previously existed – and in silence.
She first suspected something important had been buried in 1996, while helping lawyers with a case about trans rights in the High Court of Justice, which failed, baffling everyone.
“I knew that there was something about primogeniture that was a stumbling block,” she tells me via video call. This sense was emboldened by an informant, the lawyer Terrence Walton, who had worked on a famous early case involving trans rights, who told her “‘there are some interests that it is more important to protect than the rights of individuals’. I thought, ‘we’re not going to actually get trans equality until the issue of primogeniture is dealt with.’”
Playdon hoped that after the Succession to the Crown Act in 2013, which removed male primogeniture from the monarchy, something would shift. But after the Act, several attempts to end the same among hereditary peers unexpectedly didn’t pass, and certain trans rights cases stalled. By then, Playdon had retired so was able to devote five years of digging to find out what happened, and why.
“I knew that in the past, trans people had corrected their birth certificates,” she says. “All the way through up to 1970, the path was: self-identify, get affirmative medical care, correct your birth certificate, and live equally. After 1970, that’s gone.”
Read the rest here:
https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads.....rights-1291857
