From the Trans Archive: Just Some Guy in 1950s England
In the spirit of creating some cheerful distraction for @little-brisk, I thought I’d share my favorite bit from the chapter I’ve been writing this week: a glimpse into the refreshingly un-tragic life of trans tabloid personality Kim Harford.
Sweater vest and two tone tie: a timeless transmasc look
Now I say tabloid personality, but what I love about Kim is that he’s basically just some guy. He wasn’t ‘the first trans’ anything. He wasn’t a celebrity. He didn’t do any noteworthy crimes. He put in his shifts at the aircraft plant and hung out at the pub and picked away at his Great British Novel and would probably have lived and died in total anonymity had he not, in December 1953, tried to emigrate to Australia with the 'friend’ to whom he was still legally married.
Here’s the thing: in 1950s England it was really really difficult to change the sex on your birth certificate. But Kim had managed to get himself reregistered as a man with the Ministry of National Insurance, which meant that he would have been able to work and draw benefits and access healthcare without anyone knowing his trans history. And because this was the legal ID that mattered most in his day-to-day life (and because he was still living with and at least besties with his husband Paddy) neither he nor Paddy apparently bothered to check to see if their marriage was valid until somebody at Australia House took a look at their visas and was like what the fuck, it is 1953, gay marriage is not a thing.
Paddy: ‘We shall be friends, perhaps deeper than brothers, all our lives’
Anyway, someone at the Sunday Pictorial got a tip about the two guys’ visa issues and bought an exclusive off them, which promptly turned into interviews at a dozen-odd local Australian papers. And in some ways the coverage is exactly as gross as you’d expect for 1950s.
But reading this stuff ‘against the grain’, as we say in the trade, gives us a snapshot of a trans life that’s almost moving in its banality. His husband misgenders him when referring to him in the past, sure, but uses he/him in the present and seems pretty staunch in his support. The news stories themselves are sensationalist and sexist but are also mostly free of moral condemnation and focused on cosy domestic detail. Like here’s a fairly representative lede:
[Kim] got up from an armchair, knocked out a pipe, threw a jacket over well-muscled shoulders, and said, “Well, time for a pint, Paddy! Gosh, I’m thirsty.”
They grinned with warm companionship and set off down the road--sharing what is perhaps the greatest personal dilemma in Britain to-day.’ --Sunday Mail (Brisbane), 20 December 1953
It’s kind of refreshing, even as someone who’s been elbow-deep in these docs for three years, to hear about a trans person 70 years ago cracking open a cold one with the boys. This is a person. He banters with the lads and wears silly sweater vests and shows off his new T muscles for the camera. He is a human person.
Whomst among us who has been on T has not taken this picture?
What’s more--and this was the most exciting find in my camera roll this week!!! breaking news!!!--I turned up his actual reregistration documents and he seems to have had decent community support, too. His GP and the welfare officer at his work sent letters to the Ministry of National Insurance testifying to his ‘male outlook’, and the Ministry lawyers, after a bit of back-and forth, responded with a resounding ‘Whatever, dude, just pay your taxes.’
‘Whatever, dude, just pay your taxes’
Anyway. Look, there’s obviously a lot to say here about what kind of trans person was most likely to enjoy this kind of community support. This is a white man. He has access to HRT and is no longer, apparently, read as trans. He doesn’t have a disability that we know about. He’s working-class but has a steady semi-skilled job; he’s married to a man and seems probably bi but presents himself as straight for the papers. I read a hell of a lot of stories about English trans people in the 1950s and a hell of a lot of those stories, especially when they’re about anyone who isn’t a white man, don’t have happy endings.
And technically we don’t know how Kim’s story ends. He drops off the archival record in late 1954 with the immigration issue unresolved. The last we hear of him, Kim and Paddy and Paddy’s new girlfriend--and according to at least one paper Kim’s new girlfriend, too--are still planning to move to Australia, now as a bigger, more complicated menage. I’ve poked around the arrival records there but haven’t managed to figure out if they made it.
Kim & Paddy ‘gay married and possibly polyam in a God-honoring way’ Harford-O’Lynam
I like to think that they did. And I like to think of this story when I’m deep in those more familiar depressing trans stories. Yes being trans in the 1950s could look like alienation and prejudice and physical danger but sometimes it could also look like this: just some guy, and his husband, and his husband’s girlfriend with her arms around them both, and all of them, despite everything, smiling.
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If anyone’s interested, TROVE, the National Library of Australia’s digital repository, has some of the articles here (cw for transphobic language and misgendering and sexism, obviously)
Photo credits: (top to bottom) Sunday Mail [Brisbane]; Sunday Mail [Brisbane]; Singapore Standard; personal photo; The Sun [Sydney]
Dear minor regional civil servants with unusual names, I hope you realise how much you are appreciated by the social historians who one day are going to hunt you down and put you in their dissertation.
Okay, context: so the second English trans guy I know of who got his birth certificate changed (and the first who publicly wrote about it) was, by his own account, chronically depressed and unable to hold down a job for most of his pre-transition life. In 1944* a disability like that made it incredibly difficult to get any kind of legal gender recognition at all, let alone the holy grail of a corrected birth certificate. And this guy was not rich and famous. Working-class kid from a town near Liverpool, left school at 13, kind of wandered around a lot, not at all the kind of person who could flash around a bunch of cash to get a registrar to look the other way. So I’ve been trying to figure out, bluntly, how on earth he managed to pull it off.
ANYWAY, here’s where the unusual names come in: the superintendent registrar who signed off on his new male name and birth designation was called L.M. Worgan. As he’s apparently the only L.M. Worgan who has ever existed, I was able to track the guy’s career through a bunch of local newspaper articles and learned that Worgan was, in 1944, not just the registrar but also the chief Public Assistance Officer--aka the man who ran the local welfare office, with which our chronically-depressed-and-unemployed trans hero was intimately acquainted.** And Worgan seems to have been a decent welfare officer overall. Shows up in the papers a lot for fighting a stingy council over food and housing shortages etc. Non-transphobic enough, at any rate, to preside over the trans guy’s eventual marriage to a woman. Which suggests to me that for once a public servant looked at a man who was obviously, debilitatingly unhappy and instead of telling him to hike up his skirts and get a proper job thought well hmm, maybe the whole having-to-pretend-to-be-a-woman thing might be contributing to the obvious debilitating unhappiness; lets see if we can fix that for a start.
Moral of the story is, if you have a weird name please go into the civil service and be decent to people. History will vindicate you.
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*and not at all like today, when our public institutions are all very enlightened and certainly don’t engage in murderous discrimination against disabled people
**How intimately acquainted? He married the woman who worked the front desk, that intimately acquainted.
We rewatched ‘Trials and Tribble-ations’ last night--because when I have a rough day I run to the arms of DS9 like a puppy during a thunderstorm--and honestly, on a second viewing I think it’s one of my favourite Jadzia episodes. It’s one of the few instances where we get a real sense of her relationship to history--not just to her past selves as individuals, or to grand events like Khitomer, but to whole historical milieux with their associated trends and fashions and social mores. While all her comrades are getting flustered over meeting their Federation heroes, her dominant emotion is something closer to nostalgia, a wistfulness for a time she can remember but never exactly lived. Like, that little moment with the tricorder (’I love classic twenty-third century designs. Black finish, silver highlights...’) was obviously meant as an affectionate nod at a certain type of Trekkie, but it also brought out the fact that ownership over the past must be a continual source of tension for joined Trill: part of her appreciates ‘classic’ design in the way a contemporary collector would, and part of her must look at that tricorder the way my nana looks at the WPA murals on her high school wall, only at a remove of centuries rather than decades.
Anyway, now I would die to see an episode where the B-plot is some Klingon PhC trying to interview Dax about the Khitomer Accords and just getting an endless stream of retro design opinions and dirty anecdotes before--finally--breaking through her defensive ambivalence about Curzon’s legacy and having a brutally honest conversation about species and selfhood and the politics of memory and going home to become, like, the Klingon Foucault.
One of the strangest things about my past few years as a grad student has been watching myself fail to do institutional relationships the right way. Partly this is personal, in that I’m just not good at being normal with my advisors. We don’t have each other’s mobile numbers, we don’t go out for coffee, they don’t know a lot about my inner life, which apparently is something they all do with other people they advise. But it’s also partly the fact that - especially since Covid fractured the whole idea of a campus - I’ve made my intellectual home elsewhere. The people I know are all my old pre-Teresa May crew on the other side of the Atlantic, and most of them aren’t people my advisor knows. I’m doing my Zoom-chats and seminars outside of my Academic Lineage, which you don’t think is a thing until you realise you’re not in it, until you realise you’re failing not so much as a scholar but as a person.
Like I’m always saying to Em that I feel like a cat with two families, and the family that’s really feeding me isn’t the one with the address on my tag. And most of the time I feel like this is my fault, and that I’m right in assuming this means I need to get out of academia. And then something happens on The Other Side - a connection, a project idea - and I feel a touch of resentment instead, at the fact that being sick and having the wrong passport is going to make it impossible to do this thing I can, in fact, be very good at.
Anyway, I’m very tired and this isn’t very coherent, but it’s where my brain is right now. With every wave of enthusiasm for my subject, now, there’s a corresponding long-withdrawing rush of melancholia, and it feels bad! It feels really bad!
I just learned that one of my advisors transed over their sabbatical and I spent the whole conversation fighting the urge to congratulate them on their gender. Like yes...join us...
Sometimes I really wish there were an AO3 for academic writing. Like ‘this article makes a significant contribution to...’ no, fuck that, I want someone to drop a comment on my half-written article that’s just like *keysmash* omggggg your characterization of the University of Manchester Department of Psychiatric Social Work circa 1957 is KILLING me wtf 😡😡😡. Way better motivation than a looming peer review.
One of things that was difficult about this week--difficult and also important, I think--was deciding not to apply for the job that in December 2019 I’d have called the Perfect Job. A lecturership in the history of sexuality at my former university, in the city that it practically ripped my heart out to leave, should be everything I want. Is what I keep telling myself I want. It’s your best chance. It’s your last chance. If you don’t take a chance on this you’ll never take a chance again. And maybe I’m right. Maybe it’s a mistake to throw away seven years of hard work and love and fury because not quite two of those years were very unhappy.
But as Em and I were walking to Safeway last Thursday--in one of the few hours over...nine days?...I managed to claw away from grading--she finally interrupted my endless pointless cycle of self-recrimination and was like, “Okay, but how would you feel if you actually got the job?”
And the answer was, terrible. I would feel terrible. Because I don’t actually want to be a lecturer. Not now, which means probably not ever. I have loved writing, and I have loved teaching, but right now all I want is a nap.
Anyway, it was harder than it should have been to close that H-net tab after six weeks of staring at it, and I’m still feeling pretty raw about it. In the past when I’ve dodged my advisors’ Obligatory Job Search Emails I’ve taken the statistical way out: yes, it is extremely improbable that someone from my B-tier institution will land one of the two British history jobs that MIGHT pop up in a given year, and yes, my dissertation has to come first etc. etc. But my good friend--and only fellow British historian in the department--has spent the autumn rushing through one TT job interview after another, and even though her CV is definitely more impressive than mine it’s a lot harder to hide behind statistics now. The fact is that I don’t want what I’m supposed to want. And disentangling the reasons for this not-wanting from the knot of pandemic problems and brain problems and fallout-from-incident-on-research-trip-I-don’t-talk-about problems and good ol’ fashioned minoritized-person-in-academia problems is exhausting and I’m too tired to keep forcing myself to try.
I want a nap. I want to want to live on a permanent basis. And I don’t know what kind of future will make these things possible, but I’m pretty sure now that even a history lecturership I actually have a plausible chance of getting, in my field at my favorite university in my favorite town...ain’t it.
