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Nov. 3rd, 2011 03:26 pmTales of Interest!
So, I was looking at little_details, and came across a posting from a few weeks back; someone was trying to work out the term of address for an early 19th-c military surgeon from the POV of a soldier - conventional wisdom is that surgeons were “Mr.” physicians were “Dr.” – because this particular surgeon had also trained as a doctor.
Eventually the OP mentioned that the surgeon in question was James Barry, but referred to him with male pronouns throughout.
It struck me that assuming Dr. Barry was a trans-man really does make a lot more sense than the version I’d always heard (cis-woman pretends to be male for over fifty years so she can have a career as a doctor) – it’d be a lot easier to keep up the disguise that long if it wasn’t really a disguise.
Further looking around suggests that the intersex theory put about after his death has also regained some ground – 20th–century accounts paint this as people of the time being too sexist to believe a woman could’ve become a doctor, so she had to have been androgynous; but this article suggests that people who’d barely known the doctor were quick to claim they’d suspected all along that she was a woman, while the closer colleagues were the ones saying, no, he was a man –although maybe an atypical one.
Zagria also points out that the only evidence we really have that Barry was female is the word of the charwoman who had laid out the corpse, and she didn't say so till well *after* the burial, and apparently as a blackmail attempt. So, maybe he was just a guy with Klinefelter's syndrome. (ETA - although Klinefelters' males tend to be taller than average, and Barry was shorter.)
Around now, one of the dissenting voices in my head asks whether Barry’s gender matters, as long as s/he was a good doctor* - but the thing is, it mattered to him – he’s known to have got very offended if anyone taunted him about his masculinity**. You can argue this was from fear of discovery, but it could just have easily have been genuine anger at being misidentified. At any rate, taking him at his word and using male pronouns seems the respectful thing to do.
Images of Barry turned up by a quick google search:
This portrait, probably painted in Barry’s teens, is the one I’ve most often seen, probably because it does look pretty androgynous. OTOH, that could also be the painting style and his youth.
This one was done later. He kinda looks like a blond Benedict Cumberbatch here.
This is a photo of Barry late in life.
This is the actress who played Barry in a recent movie.
* (As it happens, Barry was a really good surgeon – he performed one of the first c-sections where both mother and infant survived; and he had very advanced ideas about nutrition, sanitation etc.)
** (In his lifetime, this mostly took the form of people assuming he was a gay man, rather than a woman.)
So, I was looking at little_details, and came across a posting from a few weeks back; someone was trying to work out the term of address for an early 19th-c military surgeon from the POV of a soldier - conventional wisdom is that surgeons were “Mr.” physicians were “Dr.” – because this particular surgeon had also trained as a doctor.
Eventually the OP mentioned that the surgeon in question was James Barry, but referred to him with male pronouns throughout.
It struck me that assuming Dr. Barry was a trans-man really does make a lot more sense than the version I’d always heard (cis-woman pretends to be male for over fifty years so she can have a career as a doctor) – it’d be a lot easier to keep up the disguise that long if it wasn’t really a disguise.
Further looking around suggests that the intersex theory put about after his death has also regained some ground – 20th–century accounts paint this as people of the time being too sexist to believe a woman could’ve become a doctor, so she had to have been androgynous; but this article suggests that people who’d barely known the doctor were quick to claim they’d suspected all along that she was a woman, while the closer colleagues were the ones saying, no, he was a man –although maybe an atypical one.
Zagria also points out that the only evidence we really have that Barry was female is the word of the charwoman who had laid out the corpse, and she didn't say so till well *after* the burial, and apparently as a blackmail attempt. So, maybe he was just a guy with Klinefelter's syndrome. (ETA - although Klinefelters' males tend to be taller than average, and Barry was shorter.)
Around now, one of the dissenting voices in my head asks whether Barry’s gender matters, as long as s/he was a good doctor* - but the thing is, it mattered to him – he’s known to have got very offended if anyone taunted him about his masculinity**. You can argue this was from fear of discovery, but it could just have easily have been genuine anger at being misidentified. At any rate, taking him at his word and using male pronouns seems the respectful thing to do.
Images of Barry turned up by a quick google search:
This portrait, probably painted in Barry’s teens, is the one I’ve most often seen, probably because it does look pretty androgynous. OTOH, that could also be the painting style and his youth.
This one was done later. He kinda looks like a blond Benedict Cumberbatch here.
This is a photo of Barry late in life.
This is the actress who played Barry in a recent movie.
* (As it happens, Barry was a really good surgeon – he performed one of the first c-sections where both mother and infant survived; and he had very advanced ideas about nutrition, sanitation etc.)
** (In his lifetime, this mostly took the form of people assuming he was a gay man, rather than a woman.)
