Dr. James Barry: A Man Ahead of His Time
The word transgender in the way we currently use it might be relatively new, but that doesn't mean these experiences are new. In a binary society, outliers will emerge. That is why it is also so interesting to look into history whether we can see hints of people with shared experiences as transgender people today. The change in wording, knowledge and understanding makes this quite challenging. And using the word "transgender" for someone long dead feels quite disrespectful as one can't know whether they would have identified with the word in our current society. What we can do is study historical figures' lives to see whether they had a transgender experience.
One of my personal favourites is Dr. James Barry (born around 1789). Being the first doctor in the UK who was assigned female at birth (afab) he gained a lot of attraction from historians, having books written about him like Dr. James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time. And I understand the appeal of wanting to highlighting him as a feminist icon, taking steps towards women entering men's fields. After all, he took up the identity of James Barry to enrol into medical school as women couldn't go to medical school at the time. However, I really don't think that is how he should be framed in history. After all, people only found out after his death that he wasn't male.
Okay, but who was Dr. James Barry? Dr. Barry was born in Ireland and later went on to go to medical school at Edinburgh University. After qualifying as a doctor he became an army surgeon, which allowed him to travel a lot. He was posted to Cape Town, South Africa. To say that the remarkable aspect about him was that he was the first afab doctor is definitely not doing him any justice, as his ideas on health and medicine were what made him an exceptional doctor.
He saw staying healthy as more important than curing people, criticising people who lived in unhealthy ways. He also had progressive views on sanitation. During his time in Cape Town he improved sanitation; water systems; the conditions of slaves, mentally ill, prisoners, and he provided a sanctuary for people suffering from leprosy. It has also been said that he was the first (Western-European) to perform a C-section where both the mother and child survived. Before doing so he hadn't even witnessed a C-section himself.
It is worth adding that he did play a feminist role in medicine of the time, as much of his research was dedicated to women's health.
As I stated before, people only found out he wasn't male after his death. This is what, for me, solidified his life as a transgender experience. He didn't just present himself as a man to get the education and career he wanted, he explicitly stated that he didn't want anyone to undress him post-mortem and that he'd be buried in the clothes he died in. Even after his death, when it wouldn't matter anymore what genitalia he had, he didn't want people to know he was born a woman. Against his instructions someone still undressed him and revealed his body to be female.
Having a bad temper can help passing as a cis man
With the struggles of transgender people in current society with trying their hardest to pass as the gender they identify as, it is impossible to not try and imagine how Dr. Barry dealt with that. First of all, there is this theory of Dr. Barry having been intersex. Whether this stems from people having seen proof of ambiguous sex organs or whether people simply found it unbelievable that they hadn't detected a "woman dressing up as a man" in the British army for about 40 years is unclear.
Dr. James Barry did struggle with something many contemporary transmen and transmasculine people deal with: looking much younger than you actually are. That is why he often lied about his age, making the actual year he was born hard to detect.
He was also strong tempered, and when his feminine features were questioned he wasn't afraid to stand up for himself. And with "stand up for himself" I mean that he once hit an officer in the face when he'd said Dr. Barry looked like a woman. A reaction like that is something I also would expect from a badly tempered cisgender man.
This little article of mine is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Dr. James Barry. It's barely an introduction to him, his life, and his work. Plenty of other people have written about him, and luckily more and more articles about him also address him as him. He's more and more presented as a "transgender" man, rather than a women who had to live as a man in order to live out her dream career.
Overall, what makes him so admirable to me is that he seemed to have lived his truth in the 1700s and 1800s and had an incredibly successful and influential career. He was so much more than the first afab doctor.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zj43hbk
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/dr-james-barry/
https://thackraymuseum.co.uk/dr-james-barry-the-surgeon-defying-gender-norms/
https://georgianera.wordpress.com/2019/11/07/the-secret-woman-the-fierce-lonely-life-of-of-dr-james-barry/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Barry_(surgeon)#
Image: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zj43hbk
PS: I use he/him pronouns for Dr. Barry, since that is what he went by during the majority of his life.
