The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes

Zoë Playdon

Bloomsbury, £20

Review by Dani Garavelli

THE life story of Sir Ewan Forbes – a Scottish aristocrat and trans man who fought a bitter court battle over a title – is innately dramatic. Born in 1912, the fourth child of John Forbes-Sempill, baronet of Craigievar, Ewan was thought to be a girl at birth and christened Elisabeth. But from the earliest age, he identified as male. So pronounced was his masculinity that by the time he was six, his mother was encouraging family members to call him “Benjie” and consulting paediatricians about possible medical interventions.

After a sometimes difficult adolescence and various treatments, Elisabeth became Ewan. He qualified as a doctor, and began working as a GP in Alford, Aberdeenshire, with little controversy. When he fell in love with his housekeeper Isabella, known as Patty, his birth certificate was amended – as was possible back then – so he could marry her.

Wedlock was one thing, though; inheritance another. The rule of primogeniture decreed that when Forbes’s older brother William died in 1966, the baronetcy should pass to the next male sibling. That ought to have been Ewan. But not everyone agreed. One cousin, John, mounted a legal challenge on the basis Ewan "is now, and has been all along, of the female sex".

The Herald:

Zoë Playdon’s book, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, recounts these events and, more importantly, the extraordinary ones that followed. Emeritus professor in medical humanities at the University of London, she stumbled across the legal challenge while fighting for trans equality in 1996. She and some lawyers had taken a High Court action to allow trans people to once again amend their birth certificates. That right had been swept away by a precedent-setting case known as Corbett v Corbett in 1969. Then, a judge dissolved the marriage between trans woman April Ashley and her husband Arthur Corbett on the grounds that Ashley had always been a man and could not alter her birth certificate.

Playdon’s side lost the case, but remained mystified. They knew people had successfully altered their birth certificates in the past and could not understand what had prompted the change. But then one of the lawyers was contacted by Ashley’s solicitor, Terrence Walton. He said that before going into court in 1969, he had been called into the judge’s chamber and shown a previous case, then sworn to secrecy.

That case was Forbes’s. And now, Playdon is revealing the details Walton couldn’t. Preparation for the court battle had been traumatic. Forbes was subjected to intimate physical examinations by a specialist who pronounced him to have two X chromosomes and therefore to be genetically female. But then Forbes did something audacious. He told doctors a coughing fit had caused a “testicle” to suddenly descend. He performed his own "biopsy" and sent the specimen to a lab.

Forbes's claim was medically impossible; he must have bought the testis sample and faked the biopsy. But it was impossible to disprove. Eventually, the judge found in his favour. Forbes gained the title and kept his marriage. But, according to Walton, the case had led to a "blanket ban" on altering future birth certificates because “there are some interests it is more important to protect than the rights of the individuals”.

The victory proved pyrrhic for Forbes, too. The widespread conviction that he had committed perjury affected his standing. He deregistered himself from the General Medical Council and became moody and irascible.

The case of Ewan Forbes was a landmark, and kudos to Playdon for unearthing it. But her book is not without its problems. The first – not Playdon’s fault – is that a lack of first-hand material means we don’t get a feel for Forbes as a person. He never wrote in any detail about how it felt to be presented to the Queen as a “debutante” while sporting HRT-induced hair on his chin, or to have his genitalia the subject of legal speculation. There is no suggestion he ever embraced the role of trans campaigner.

The reader, then, relies on Playdon’s ability to enter that imaginative space. But she has so fully embraced the role of trans campaigner, she sacrifices nuance for polemic. Take her treatment of Forbes’s older sister Margaret. Margaret initially sided with John, providing a written statement to the effect that her brother had been brought up as a girl. Later she changed her mind but she died before she could alter her testimony.

Playdon has no time for Margaret. She makes reference to her "deadnaming" Ewan. And, of course, Margaret was in the wrong. But it doesn’t take much fellow feeling to understand why she behaved as she did. As a lesbian, she was barred from marrying her own partner. Yet she watched Forbes change sex and marry his. In addition, the rule of primogeniture discriminates against women. Whether Forbes was male or female, she was the older sibling. No wonder she felt resentment. I would have liked to have seen that intersection of injustices properly acknowledged, and the emotional conflicts more fully explored.

Instead, Playdon attempts to write a definitive history of transphobia, weaving reports and symposiums in and out of her account of Forbes's life. Every line of thinking she agrees with is legitimate; everything she disagrees with is “pseudo-medicine”, which is not to say that she is wrong, just that the black-and-white way in which she presents her argument has the effect of undermining it.

This is not helped by her comparison of the subtle shift in official policy on trans people to "the quiet bureaucratic process" that led to the Holocaust, or her habit of dismissing wholesale media representations of trans people such as Coronation Street's Haley Cropper.

The irony is that a greater focus on the human story with all its sadnesses might have played to her advantage.

At present in the UK, trans men and women still require a Gender Recognition Certificate to legally change sex and even those who obtain one cannot inherit a title. Playdon’s aim is to convince the reader of the virtues of self-identification. In the end, though, it was the ability to empathise with Forbes's suffering, much more than her proselytizing, that left me wondering why society makes it so difficult for trans people to be themselves.