Video transcript: Dr James Barry
Dr James Barry was a British army doctor during the 1800s. Barry travelled around the world with the British Army to places including Jamaica, St Helena, Barbados, Corfu, Malta, Antigua, Trinidad, Crimea and Canada before finally returning to the UK after 50 years of service.
Barry’s work saved countless lives in his army hospitals. He was a renowned surgeon and doctor. He improved hygiene, sanitation and diet at the bases he served at, benefitting many people. Barry also is one of the first documented successes of a C-section surgery where both the mother and child survived. Barry was hugely respected and looked up to by soldiers and other doctors alike. His skills were well known and often praised.
It wasn’t until his death in 1865 that his medical accomplishments were not the most spoken about thing regarding Dr James Barry. Barry was biologically female but identified as a man, something that today we may call transgender, although this term did not exist at the time. Upon his death, Barry had explicitly requested that his body be buried in the clothes he died in and that his body not be examined. However, a former servant of Barry’s had seen Barry’s dead body and realised it was a female body. She seemed to think that she had become acquainted with a great secret and wished to be paid for keeping it. When she did not get the money she demanded, the servant went to the press and sold the story.
The story of James Barry dominated headlines, with them expressing disbelief and shock that someone could keep such a secret for so long. This document from The National Archives is a newspaper telling the story of James Barry published in 1910, almost 50 years after his death. The article highlights that nobody had any idea that Barry was biologically female.
Newspapers also took to using she/her pronouns to refer to Barry despite throughout his life using he/him pronouns. Similarly, the articles use words like feisty conspicuous, irritable, impatient and mischievous to describe Barry, all words commonly used to describe women and not men, often due to their negative connotations. This seemed to try and diminish Barry’s character and identity. There was also relatively little covered about his accomplishments during his time in the Army and the improvements that he made, the revelation of his sex overshadowing his lifetime’s achievements.
Thankfully, Barry still had his supporters and friends; people such as McKinnon, who wrote in a letter: ‘It’s none of my business whether Barry was a male or a female. I have never had any suspicion that Dr Barry was a female.’ Similarly, Lieutenant Colonel Rooks, who was one of the few people who had found out about Barry’s sex but had kept it secret, said in an interview for a newspaper: ‘I have never, until now, mentioned the subject.’ This shows that even though there were people who didn’t care about the invasion of Barry’s privacy in life, he still had people who kept his secret and did not care about his biological sex.
I think it’s important to talk about James Barry’s story because there are many parts that can still resonate today with transgender people. While Barry would not have called himself a trans man, that’s what we might call him today because he identified himself as a man.
What Barry went through wasn’t acceptable then and definitely isn’t acceptable today even though similar things still happen. People are still forcibly outed and their work is still sometimes overshadowed by their sex or gender. But there has been progress. And even though it’s terrible what happened to James Barry, we now have the chance to share his story and raise awareness of what he did and what he experienced and improve
how we treat others in the future.