The Triple Whammy

The Triple-Whammy for trans men 1928-9 1928-9 was a triple whammy for trans men in that within a few months, trans men and masculine women in London and Paris were involved in three much publicised trials which, while they did not lead to legislation about clothes, gender or civil rights, did send a message to trans men that they should be careful. Dramatis personae Bill Allen, a mill-worker in Bolton, Lancashire, Victor Barker, secretary of National Fascisti, later a restaurateur. Cecil Beaton, a photographer. Gerald Berniers, a satirist. Lennox Broster, surgeon at Charing Cross Hospital. Evan Burtt, a domestic servant in Wiltshire. Jonathan Cape, an adventurous and successful publisher. Joe Carstairs, speed boat racer, scion of the Standard Oil fortune. Charlotte Charlaque, a German-American who was transitioning under the aegis of Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin. Julian Davenport, the male name of Vita Sackville-West. James Douglas, a Christian editorial writer for the Daily Express. Havelock Ellis, a sexologist. Oscar-Paul Gilbert, prolific Belgian writer, noted for Men in Women's Guise and Women in Men's Guise. Gluck, sometimes Peter, artist, scion of the J. Lyons and Co. chain of high street tea rooms. Stephen Gordon, the invert protagonist of Radclyffe-Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Norman Haire, sexologist, associate of Magnus Hirschfeld, William Holtom, coal heaver, a cow-man, a road mender, a timber haulier and a navvy. William Joynson-Hicks, the Home Secretary.Claude Lowther, right-wing Conservative MP for Eskdale in Cumberland and later for Lonsdale in north Lancashire. Brother of Toupie. Toupie Lowther, fencing champion, singer and composer, wartime ambulance driver, scion of the Lowther dynasty, which featured the Earls of Lonsdale and Conservative MPs. Gladys Mitchell, an authoress, mainly known for her detective, Mrs Bradley, featured in 66 novels. Violette Morris, multi-event athlete (put-shot, javelin, football, swimming, cycling, motor-racing) also opened a car/motorbike accessories shop. Descended from a line of French military officers. Madeleine Pelletier, a doctor and psychiatrist in Paris. Anton Prinner, Hungarian artist in Paris. Marguerite John Radcliffe-Hall, lived on her large inheritance. Her manner of dress was only inbetween: usually a skirt topped with a male-style jacket and tie – a style that had been very fashionable for upper-class women through the 1920s. Laura Doan, author of Fashioning Sapphism comments on Radclyffe-Hall: “Her haircut was thought to be the most feminine of all the short cuts popular at the time, and she had her hair done at Harrods — not a barbershop. Even Hall’s famous sartorial choices were on the feminine side of what was known as the ‘severely masculine mode’… Nor did Hall and her partner Una Troubridge dress in a bizarre manner, wearing, as some biographers have claimed, clothing from a costume shop. The couple studied fashion magazines and built their wardrobes not from men’s tailors in Savile Row, but from the most chic of London’s department stores for women. [unlike Gluck who bought suits from the expensive men’s tailors]. Hall always wore a skirt and conducted herself in a completely womanly way - in short, Hall definitely didn’t model her protagonist, Stephen Gordon, after herself.” (Interview in Genders 1998-2013) Joan Riviere, a psycho-analyst. Vita Sackville-West, part of an illegitimate line of the Sackville Barony, married to Harold Nicolson, the 3rd son of the 1st Baron Carnock, of HM Diplomatic Service. Una Troubridge, wife to John Radclyffe-Hall. Wynsley Michael Swann, Lieutenant-Colonel in the Women’s Army Corps. Mary Weston, shot-putter and javelin champion. Ernest Wood, cellarman, waiter, died age 24 from consumption. Virginia Woolf, daughter of a noted writer, active in the Bloomsbury Group, authoress of the magic sexchange novel, Orlando: A Biography. ----Prounouns and forenames Note regarding pronouns: Most of the persons discussed here never stated a preferred pronoun. In addition, Swann, Gluck, Lowther, Carstairs, Radclyffe-Hall and Sackville West had considerable inherited wealth, and were therefore less affected by the laws about clothing and gender which the lower orders had to conform to. Swann, Gluck, Carstairs, Barker, Wood and Holtom masculinised their names and wore male clothing. Barker, Wood, and Holtom had to work for a living, and therefore they had to pass. They are close enough to the 21st century concept of a trans man that anything but male pronouns would be wrong. Pelletier and Morris both kept their female first name, but dressed in male clothing, and worked at a time when women of their class did not, Pelletier as a doctor and Morris in sports and with motors. Morris also had a double-mastectomy (top surgery). But because of their retained first names, Madeleine and Violet, it is difficult to use male pronouns for them. The biographers of Gluck, Lowther, Carstairs, Morris and Pelletier use female pronouns, but I expect that this will change for future biographies. Contrariwise to Pelletier and Morris, Radclyffe-Hall did take a male name: John, and was so addressed by friends. However her manner of dress was only in-between: usually a skirt topped with a male-style jacket and tie – a style that had been very fashionable for upper-class women through the 1920s. Diana Souhami’s biography frequently refers to Radclyffe-Hall as John, but she never uses the pronoun ‘he’. While Radclyffe-Hall’s anti-hero Stephen Gordon in the Well of Loneliness is very much a trans man, perhaps also intersex, his author was not so. And we should note that Radclyffe-Hall uses female pronouns for her protagonist in The Well of Loneliness. Sackville-West had done soldier drag as part of her affair with Violet Trefusis, and as such the pair had fled to France pursued by their husbands. However she did not persist in such gender expression. Radclyffe-Hall, Carstairs, Barker and MorrisThe timeline 1923 • Vita Sackville-West. Challenge. George H. Doran Company, 1923. A novel, based on the affair between Vita and Violet Trefusis, with Vita’s male persona, Julian Davenport, the leader of a revolution on a Greek island. His cousin Eve (Violet) joins him as his lover but becomes jealous of his attachment to the island. The book was published in the States only, for Vita’s father found the portrayal obvious enough to identify his family. In the real world, Julian and Violet broke up because the latter had sex with her actual husband. 1924 Wynsley Michael Swann, Lieutenant-Colonel in the Women’s Army Corps during the Great War, quietly transitioned. Ernest Wood, cellarman, waiter, died age 24 from consumption, and was found to be female-bodied. He was buried as “Miss Ernest Wood”. Gluck, now having taken male clothing and appearance, has first one-man show of 56 paintings in South Kensington. Joe Carstairs who said of himself: "I was never a little girl. I came out of the womb queer", bought and developed a secluded estate in Hampshire, which he named Bostwick after his grandfather. He bought a yacht, Sonia, and became so proficient that by 1924 he was winning yachting prizes. Toupie Lowther had run an ambulance unit that was incorporated into the French Army, 1917-8, and in the 1920s ran a lesbian salon, and Radclyffe-Hall and other female writers popular at the time attended. Toupie loved to tell how, while motoring, she was stopped at the Franco-Italian border for masquerading as a man. On the return journey she wore a skirt and was arrested for masquerading as a woman. In 1926, Toupie Lowther was elected a member of the French Academie d’Armes, the only woman to that date to be so. Mary Weston was the best UK shot-putter 1924-1930. Multi-event athlete (put-shot, javelin, football, swimming, cycling, motor-racing) Violette Morris, who had set new records in the 1922 Olympics, opened a car/motorbike accessories shop, Spécialités Violette Morris, at 6, rue Roger-Bacon, Paris, using the inheritance from her mother. The rent was 8,000 francs per annum, and the 41,000 franc valuation was all in the stock. She lived in the flat upstairs. 1925 Joe Carstairs commissioned the best motorboat that money could buy, a hydroplane from Samuel Saunders of East Cowes, Isle of Wight. Joe named the boat Gwen after his lover, Gwen Farrar. After the boat capsized and came up again, Joe reversed the name to Newg.1926 Carstairs took part in and won the Duke of York’s International Trophy. On Lake Windermere Joe set a world record of 54.97 mph for a 1½ litre class boat. Violette Morris had been temporarily suspended for giving performance-enhancing drugs to her football team, for questioning the referees and for doing nothing when the referee was hit by a member of her team. In 1926 Morris was indefinitely suspended from football. She used her name to recruit female athletes for a film. She refused to transfer her licence to another club. Gluck had an exhibit at the Fine Art Society in London. Madeleine Pelletier left the Communist Party in 1926. Afterwards she was an anarchist. She always wore her hair short and wore male clothing, but refused to apply to the police for a permission de travestissement. She considered that female clothing represented slavery. Being short and fat she did not pass well. Sometimes she had to walk fast to escape public taunts. She was known to carry a revolver in her pocket. She would shout, use slang and go to places where women were not supposed to go. Radclyffe-Hall wrote a short story, "Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself", although it was not published until 1934. It drew on Toupie Lowther's accounts of her life during the war, her masculinity and her lack of fit in society. Ogilvy, "My God! If only I were a man", who, even as a child had insisted that "her real name was William and not Wilhelmina", finds a role in the war leading an ambulance unit, but afterwards finds that again her masculinity has become absurd. She commits suicide. Victor Barker’s wife, Elfrida, grew tired of his shenanigans, and returned to her parents. • Oscar Paul Gilbert (translated from the French by Robert B. Douglas). Men in Women's Guise: Some Historical Instances of Female Impersonation. John Lane The Bodley Head Limited, 1926. 1927 Wynsley Michael Swann took a wife. Unlike what happened to Victor Barker two years later, this marriage was never challenged. Victor Barker was the live-in secretary of National Fascisti. After a fracas with dissident members, he was charged with “uttering a forged firearm certificate”. He was found not guilty, but his firearms certificate was cancelled. The Public Prosecution Office did find rumours about a woman masquerading as a man, but did not pursue them. Barker quit the National Fascisti. Joe Carstairs commissioned Samuel Saunders to build three hydroplanes designed to be the fastest craft ever at a cost of £50,000. In a significant lapse of memory, Joe named the boats Estelle I, II and III after his mother Evelyn. Mary Weston was the best UK javelin thrower. Anton Prinner, artist, moved to Paris from Budapest taking a male name and from then wearing male clothes, a beret and smoking a pipe. Picasso would greet him as "Monsieur Madame".The Fédération française de sports féminins (FFSF) notified Violette Morris that she was suspended for violations, and for wearing male clothes. Her smoking and drinking did not help. The FFSF also banned shorts that were too short, playing without a bra, and costumes that were too tight. A journalist from Paris Midi who questioned Morris apropos the new regulations thought that he must be meeting her husband or brother, "mais non, c'était bien elle, en chair plus qu'en os, habillée d'un complet veston, avec pantalon - comme vous et moi, monsieur - faux col et cravate (but no, it was her in the flesh, dressed in a full jacket with trousers - like you and me, sir - collar and tie)". Morris won the motor-racing Bol d'Or against male competitors, and practised boxing, sparring with Raoul Paoli (1887-1960), the male Olympics athlete, champion boxer, wrestler, and rugby player for France. Morris attended a meeting of the FFSF, and issued a defense of her dress style: "L'habit masculin n'a, à ce que je sache, rien de malséant. J'y suis tenue de par mes obligations professionnelles et tant que les lois de la République française ne m'en empêcheront pas, rien ni personne ne peuvent m'interdire un costume qui, vous en conviendrez, est toujours décent (There is nothing, to my knowledge, unseemly about male clothing. I am bound by my professional obligations and as long as the laws of the French Republic do not prevent it, nothing and nobody can forbid me to dress in a way that you will agree, is still decent)". However this argument did not convince, and Morris was expelled from the FFSF, and thereby from all French championships and the French team for the Olympics where she was expected to win gold medals. July: Tom Barker died of tuberculosis, age 28. He left £1,000 to his sister Valerie (that is Victor Barker). This enabled Barker, and a second Mrs Barker, to rent an expensive flat (£295 per annum) in Mayfair, and to employ a valet. His son came to visit regularly, but the current Mrs Barker was always sent away on these occasions. Barker often held dinner parties for officers whom he had met while in the National Fascisti. From this grew the idea of a fellowship for the British survivors of the Battle of Mons, August 1914. The inaugural dinner was held in Barker’s flat 17 December 1927 with fourteen veterans. However the events proved so successful, that they had to be moved to a hotel. This was done in association with Colonel Neave, who in fact had been present at the wedding of Valerie (as Victor had then been) to Harold Arkell-Smith, but who was completely convinced by Colonel Barker's knowledge of military manoeuvres. Some thought that Barker looked a bit odd, but when he talked about his experiences in the war, he was completely convincing. 1928 With of the success of the Mons dinners, Victor Barker felt that he could run a restaurant. In February 1928, he found one to lease just off Charing Cross Rd, and renamed it Mascot Café. The Daily Sketch received an anonymous tipoff that Colonel Barker was really a woman, and sent a reporter. Twice he engaged Barker in conversation, but was unable to fault his manhood. However the café did not thrive. He owed a considerable sum in back-rent and the landlady was losing patience. He surrendered the café, moved to cheaper accommodation and found a job as reception clerk at the Regent Palace Hotel. The novel The Well of Loneliness by Radcliffe Hall was rejected by three publishers, and then accepted by Jonathan Cape, who priced it at 15/-, twice the price of an average novel. • Radcliffe-Hall, with an appreciation by Havelock Ellis. The Well of Loneliness. Jonathan Cape, 1928. The cover page names the author as ‘Radclyffe Hall’, not as Marguerite nor as John. Plot: Aristocratic parents, the Gordons are expecting a boy and so call the girl-child Stephen anyway. Stephen is narrow-hipped and broad-shouldered, hates dresses, wants short hair and longs to be a boy, and from age seven develops crushes for heterosexual women. The father reads Ulrichs and Krafft-Ebing to understand Stephen, but does not share his findings. After his death Stephen opens his locked bookcase and discovers the concept of ‘invert’. Stephen is an accomplished fencer, tennis player and motorist, and during WWI is in the ambulance unit in the battles at Compiègne, and is awarded a Croix de Guerre. This draws on the life of Toupie Lowther. The book presents inversion as natural, but Gordon’s self-loathing leads him to pretend an infidelity so that his girl-friend will leave him to go with a real man. The word ‘lesbian’ does not appear in the book at all. Radclyffe-Hall uses female pronouns for Stephen throughout. 27 July: The Well of Loneliness published. Reviews were mixed. No calls for it to be banned. 28 July-12 August: The Olympics were held in Amsterdam. Although only a few women's events were included, Violette Morris was not on the French team. 19 August: Christian reactionary James Douglas’s editorial on The Well of Loneliness in the Daily Express: "I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul”. Jonathan Cape sent a copy to the reactionary Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks who had been supressing alcohol, nightclubs and gambling. Joynson-Hicks replied after two days that the book was "gravely detrimental to the public interest". Proceedings would be brought if publication not stopped. Cape secretly transferred printing to Pagasus Press in Paris. 28 September: Pegasus editions on sale in London. 3 October: Joynson Hicks issued a warrant for shipments of the book to be seized. 11 October: publication of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography. A magic sex-change novel. "Orlando had become a woman - there was no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity". Based on Woolf’s affair with Vita Sackville-West, imagining Vita as Orlando. Notably, despite the fuss about The Well of Loneliness, no fuss was made about Orlando. • Virginia Woolf. Orlando: A Biography. Hogarth Press, 192819 October : the Chairman of the Board of Customs balked. He had read The Well and considered it a fine book, not at all obscene; he wanted no part of suppressing it. On 19 October he released 250 seized copies for delivery. However police were waiting when they were delivered. Jonathan Cape and the bookseller were summoned to appear at Bow Street Magistrates Court. 9 November: the trial. Havelock Ellis was not willing to testify, his book Sexual Inversion having been previously convicted of obscenity and thus his presence might be counter-productive. Sexologist Norman Haire was to be the star witness for the defence – he argued that homosexuality ran in families and a person could no more become it by reading books than if he could become syphilitic by reading about syphilis. However he and the other witnesses were not called. 16 November : The chief magistrate ruled that the book was obscene. For a while after the trial, Toupie Lowther took to dressing as a heterosexual woman: skirts, silks etc, and disassociated herself from Radclyffe-Hall and her wife Una Troubridge. • Havelock Ellis. Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Vol 7 Eonism and Other Supplementary Studies. FA Davis 1928. “On the psychic side, as I view it, the Eonist is embodying, in an extreme degree, the aesthetic attitude of imitation of, and identification with, the admired object. It is normal for a man to identify himself with the woman he loves. The Eonist carries that identification too far, stimulated by a sensitive and feminine element in himself which is associated with a rather defective virile sexuality on what may be a neurotic basis.” Perhaps not the very best time to publish this work. • Anonymous. The Sink of Solitude. 1929. A lampoon in verse by "several hands", satirised both sides of the controversy over The Well of Loneliness. Its primary targets were Douglas and Joynson-Hicks, "Two Good Men – never mind their intellect". The introduction, by journalist P. R. Stephensen, described The Well's moral argument as "feeble" and dismissed Havelock Ellis as a "psychopath". The Sink itself endorsed the view that lesbianism was innate: “Though Sappho burned with a peculiar flame/ God understands her, we must do the same,/ And of such eccentricities we say/ "'Tis true, 'tis pity: she was made that way”. It portrayed Radclyffe-Hall as a humourless moralist who had a great deal in common with the opponents of her novel. One illustration, picking up on the theme of religious martyrdom in The Well, showed Radclyffe-Hall nailed to a cross. The image horrified Hall; her guilt at being depicted in a drawing that she saw as blasphemous led to her choice of a religious subject for her next novel, The Master of the House.1929 A bankruptcy notice and receiving order addressed to Victor Barker was delivered to the Mascot Café, but Victor Barker had left and did not go back. Hence he did not know that he was required to be present for a public hearing on 24 January 1929. An arrest warrant was subsequently issued, Barker’s presence at the Regent Palace Hotel was discovered, and he was there arrested. He was taken to Brixton Prison, where like all new prisoners he was medically examined. He was told to put his clothes back on and was quickly transferred to Holloway women’s prison. February: using the excuse of fitting into a racing car, Violet Morris publicly had a double mastectomy (what today we would call top surgery) at the clinic of Dr. Cazalis in the suburb of La Garenne-Colombes. Barker’s lawyers raised the issue that a person arrested as a man was being held in a women’s prison – which appeared to be unlawful. In addition they made application in the bankruptcy court that all information in connection with the bankruptcy had now been supplied and thus the offence had been purged. Barker’s immediate release was ordered. Barker’s wife, Elfrida had been contacted and was talking to both the police and the press. 10 March: both Victor Barker (Valerie Arkell-Smith) and his wife published accounts of their marriage in different newspapers. • Valerie Arkell-Smith. “The Man-Woman – My Story” Sunday Dispatch, 10 March 1929. • Elfrida Barker. “My Story: By the Man-Woman’s Wife: Mrs Barker Reveals the Truth”. Sunday Express, 10 March 1929. 27 March: Barker was charged with “wilful and corrupt perjury in an affidavit” re his bankruptcy. Of this he was discharged, but was then charged with having “knowingly and wilfully caused a false statement to be entered in a register of marriage”. 24 April: the second trial. Barker was sentenced to nine months imprisonment. 11-12 May: William Holtom of Evesham, Worcestershire, coal heaver, a cow-man, a road mender, a timber haulier and a navvy, was taken ill, and admitted to the Evesham Poor Law Hospital men’s ward with enteric fever. He was then 42. This led to a discovery of strapping around his chest, and he was hastily transferred to the women’s ward. Radcliffe-Hall wrote: 'I would like to see [Colonel Barker] drawn and quartered. A mad pervert of the most undesirable type'. Radclyffe-Hall considered herself an invert and Barker a pervert, but despite what was said at Barker’s trial about passing as male to earn a wage, it was Barker, not Radcliffe Hall who lived full-time as male. 16 June: Claude Lowther, brother of Toupie, died age 59 after a period of illness. He was unmarried but the father of two, and had established a career as a right-wing Conservative. The outing of his sister during the trial cannot have helped.9 September: The World League for Sexual Reform held its third congress in London in 1929, organized by Norman Haire. The two trials were not on the programme. Magnus Hirschfeld and Felix Abraham attended aided by the bilingual Charlotte Charlaque, who had completion surgery soon afterwards. Toupie spoke of being the inspiration for Stephen Gordon and some books say that John and Una dropped her for saying so. Una wrote in her life of Radclyffe-Hall: “She passed out of our lives when John wrote The Well of Loneliness, and we afterwards heard that she had resented the book as challenging her claim to be the only invert in existence. Later still, when she was growing very old, I was told that she had moreover acquired the illusion that she had served as a model for Stephen Gordon.” Violette Morris sued the FFSF for reinstatement and 100,000 francs in damages. While her case was against the arbitrary use of power, the trial focused on the right to wear male clothing. Her male lawyer defended the inherent decency of trousers, and questioned why trousers had been okay with the FFSF for ten years, but no longer. He contrasted Morris with Victor Barker in England who had attempted to pass as male. The FFSF had two female lawyers, one of whom, Yvonne Netter, was a noted feminist, divorced and an advocate of planned parenthood. They explained that because of their responsibility to the government (which provided grants) and to parents, they must set good examples. Morris was accused of cross-dressing to attract attention. They noted how female clothing had evolved from the long skirts and corsets of the pre-war era. They portrayed Morris as being a moral danger in female locker rooms, and criticized her in that she had never applied for a permission de travestissement. Morris' lawyer produced a letter from the Commissioner of Police giving assurance that they no longer pursued women in trousers. The court ruled: "nous n'avons pas à nous occuper de la façon dont se vêt à la ville et dans ses autres occupations Mme Violette Morris, mais nous estimons que le fait de porter un pantalon n'étant pas d'un usage admis pour les femmes, la FFS avait parfaitement le droit de l'interdire. En conséquence, le tribunal déboute Mme Violette Morris et la condamne aux dépens" (we do not have to deal with how Mme. Volette Morris dresses in the city and in her other occupations, but we believe that to wear trousers is not permitted by custom for women, FFSF had every right to prohibit it. Accordingly, the court dismisses Mme. Violette Morris and awards costs)". • Gladys Mitchell. Speedy Death. Victor Gollancz, 1929. The first (of 66) Mrs Bradley detective novel. Explorer Everard Mountjoy is discovered dead in the bath, and to everyone’s surprise – especially his fiancée – he has a female body. Included the delightful untrue story of Captain Jack Tremain who was part of the British team sent to Khartoum in 1884 to rescue General Gordon. Tremain died of malaria and a post mortem revealed his secret. He was previously Miss Wilhelmina Nash.....who wrote in a diary "to be a woman with ambition beyond that which society will allow is to endure a slow death. I was determined to live a life." • Joan Riviere. “Womanliness as a Masquerade”. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 9, 1929: 303-313. Analyses how intellectual women in particular practice an artificial femininity as a defensive mask that is put on to hide masculinity. An important contribution to the concept of gender as social construction.