Thread by @Resjudicatamyft

This thread is about @zoeplaydon’s “The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes” [Bloomsbury Publishing PLC ISBN-13: 9781526619136 HB & in other formats] & argues that it should be withdrawn from sale by @BloomsburyBooks pending a review by appropriately qualified legal & science experts. 1.

In the alternative, the same review, I contend, should be instigated by Bloomsbury while allowing the book to remain on sale, and a decision whether or not to withdraw it made following the review. 2.

I much doubt the book could pass such scrutiny. Of course I may be wrong. And that, rightly, should be the starting assumption including that the publisher has already substantiated the book’s claims & verified the author’s competencies. 3.

An immediate objection to my argument is that the distinguished lawyer, Helena Kennedy, Baroness of the Shaws Q.C. has endorsed the book. 4.

She describes it as: “A landmark work of history, law and social change”. Kennedy is a Scottish barrister; this is a Scottish law case. Her endorsement is puzzling. 5.

But isn’t Pr. Playdon herself an expert? Her qualifications are here - the “five degrees including two doctorates” mentioned on her dust jacket acquired from some 20 years of study do not appear to include law, science or medicine. They do include “Health Service Management” 6.

Professor Playdon’s book is about history, but it is rooted in law & provides legal commentary. She also comments on & interprets medical evidence submitted in Forbes-Sempill (the case upon which the book is based) & Corbett, another. And she discusses human biology. 7.

On law, essentially there are two substantive claims: The first is that trans people prior to the judgment given in Corbett v Corbett [1971] (a landmark legal case in England), were able (presumably according to law) to change the sex designation on their birth certificates. 8.

The 2nd claim is that the “hidden case” in her title - Forbes-Sempill (1967) was decided against the precedent in an earlier case known as “X (1957)), and, having done so should have enshrined the right for trans people to self-identify thus changing the history we know. 9.

Broadly, the sense here is that before the judgment in Corbett, the UK was close to a well-lit trans-utopia, but after, the lights were switched off, only to be partially re-lit (I suppose) by the Gender Recognition Act (2004). I don’t think any of this is supportable. 10.

This thread is not concerned with the debate today between trans rights campaigners & their “gender critical” opponents; it’s not abiout what should happen in the future: It’s about what happened in the past. 11.

On the face of it, there is a basis for an argument. It is undisputed that Ewan Forbes was registered female at birth & changed the sex on his birth certificate in 1952 (He was born in 1912). As a man he then lawfully married a woman. 12.

The case of Forbes-Sempill is straightforward. As a male he was next in line to inherit a baronetcy, but his cousin disputed his right. He said Ewan was actually female & under the aristocratic right of primogeniture he, the next male in line should inherit. 13.

Ewan Forbes prevailed at summary trial & was confirmed in his title by the then Home Secretary, James Callaghan, on advice from the Scottish Lord Advocate. 14.

In a confusing narrative, Professor Playdon attempts persuade her readers that Forbes is actually a trans man and having prevailed at trial, the case should have had precedent effect in Corbett, thus changing the judgment, & history. 15.

Corbett was not a case about birth certificates. It was, in the simplest terms, about a husband who wanted to dissolve his marriage instead of divorcing, on the grounds that his wife was, in fact, male, thereby avoiding maintenance payments. 16.

He won. The court found his wife was, in modern parlance, a (post-operative) trans woman, born male and that “the biological sexual constitution of an individual is fixed at birth (at the latest)”. But note also the reference to “a mistake” in the last sentence. 👇 17.

What, it seems, Professor Playdon says is that since the law following Corbett was that a person’s sex is fixed no later than at birth, then the right to change sex on a birth certificate for trans people (if it existed before) had now been removed. 18

She blames the failure of Ormrod, the judge in Corbett for not applying as she sees it the precedent from Forbes-Sempill, and makes a number of highly critical comments about him as a result. 19.

But she does not seem to account for Ormrod’s scenario “in which a mistake as to sex is made made at birth”, presumably because, as is indisputably true, it did not apply to trans people following the judgment. 20.

But it surely can’t have applied to trans people before Corbett either. This is the error Professor Playdon makes when she writes about trans people “correcting” their birth certificates. Nor has she cited a law that says differently as far as I can tell. 21

There appears to be no evidence at all of a right to change sex on birth certificates unless it was to correct a mistaken attribution of sex, at birth. Which is why Ewan Forbes needed evidence of this mistake. This is what the law required. 22.

But Professor Playdon obfuscates. On p.73, she describes a process of obtaining “an official letter” from a Doctor, without explaining it’s content. 23.

She says: “Ewan needed the signatures of three doctors to get his new certificate”, describes these as the “evidence”, which he sent to “Professor Sir Sidney Smith...and Smith spoke to the Registrar General.” 24.

“Ewan had lined up all the big guns neatly, and shortly he received his new birth certificate.” 25.

Professor Playdon describes a similar process in England: “Doctors provided an official letter...for their trans patients...”. On twitter, she had this to say. 26.

But see here: 27.

But why would Forbes need “big guns” or even little guns for that matter? Why would anyone need a Doctor at all to vouch for them in some manner if changing the sex on a birth certificate was a right? 28.

There’s a reason why Doctors were involved in the process of correcting birth certificates. But it eludes Professor Playdon. 29.

There are only two sensible possibilities at this point: Either Ewan Forbes was biologically male as the law understood this & lawfully corrected his birth certificate, or he was biologically female & unlawfully corrected his birth certificate. 30

But she wishes to identify Ewan Forbes as a trans man in order to claim that a court allowed such a person to inherit a baronetcy, from which she argues that primogeniture should have been abolished as a result. 31.

And that would mean abolishing it for the monarchy too. This, because it was unacceptable to the establishment, is why she says, the case of Forbes-Sempill had to be “hidden” until she & her fellow campaigners discovered it by sleuthing in 1996. 32.

Her narrative continues, explaining that having been rebuffed by officialdom in her efforts to obtain the court process (the papers relating to the proceedings), only on the intervention of Michael Howard, the Home Secretary at the time did officialdom relent & provide them. 33.

Oddly, having achieved this extraordinary victory, Professor Playdon says she did not examine the papers for another 16 years, until 2014 when she retired and had time to give them her attention. It’s quite the story. But it’s not the whole story. Not the whole story at all. 34.

As we know, the premise of the book’s central claim is about precedent & it appears to have a close connection to imaginative speculation published in 2007 by a lawyer, legal academic & @zoeplaydon’s fellow trans rights campaigner in an academic paper. 35.

The author and this academic are known to each other. She says he is her “colleague”. (xi) Indeed, according to Professor Playdon, it was this academic who first made her aware of the “legal wrangle” involving Ewan Forbes. 36.