Pod Insights British Scandal April Ashley | The Secret That Could Have Saved April | 4 About this episode April's wasn't the only trans rights case to come to court in the late 1960s. But the other - concerning a trans man and the inheritance of a baronetcy - was hushed up and hidden, and those involved sworn to secrecy. Alice and Matt meet Zoe Playdon, the academic who uncovered the case, to learn how its suppression might have sealed April's legal fate.
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0:00 Alice Levine? Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of British Scandal ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app.
0:15 Alice Levine? From Wondry, I'm Alice Levine.
0:17 Matt Forde? And I'm Matt Ford.
0:18 Alice Levine? And this is British Scandal.
0:32 Alice Levine? What a series, Matt. What a character April Ashley is. What did you think?
0:36 Matt Forde? Well, hugely impressive individual, kind of eccentric, entertaining, glamorous, formidable, vulnerable as well. But I really enjoyed her resilience, her sharp wit, and of course, most of all, her singing.
0:49 Alice Levine? You're welcome.
0:50 Matt Forde? But it just feels so tragic. All she really wanted to do was just live her life.
0:55 Alice Levine? Yeah, I can't imagine how it must feel to have people subject you to tests and then decide that your sense of yourself is wrong. And it still feels like such a pertinent story and experience today because, of course, in April this year, the Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of a woman should be based on biological sex under a qualities law. Bring us right back to the point of April's divorce case.
1:18 Matt Forde? And it's a conversation that's notoriously fraught, often toxic. And it just makes you wonder how different life could have been for April and whether the conversation might be different today if the judge had ruled differently.
1:31 Alice Levine? Exactly. And our guest today will be able to give us some insight on exactly that. Zoe Playdon is the Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of London and has acted as an advisor to the NHS, Home Office, and Department of Education and Employment. Zoe's a leading voice in civil liberties for gay, lesbian, and transgender people, a former co-chair of the Gay and Lesbian Association of Doctors and Dentists, GLAD, and co-founder of the Parliamentary Forum on Gender Identity. She is also the author of The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, which is a case directly relevant to April Ashley's as well as trans rights in the UK in general. It was a case considered so threatening that those involved were sworn to secrecy and all of the records of it were
2:15 Alice Levine? concealed for decades. And we're going to hear more about that in the episode.
2:18 Matt Forde? The plot thickens.
2:20 Alice Levine? Zoe joins us next.
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3:16 Alice Levine? Zoe, thank you so much for joining us.
3:18 Speaker 04 It's a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
3:20 Alice Levine? So we've been talking over the last few weeks, of course, about April Ashley, and she struck us as such a formidable character. I just wondered why it's important in your mind for people to know her story.
3:32 Speaker 04 Her life was remarkable. And her court case, Corbett versus Corbett, devastated trans lives across the world for a whole generation. So she's very significant in trans history. Before April's case, trans people self-identified, accessed affirmative elective medical care, corrected their natal birth certificates, and lived in complete legal equality.
3:59 Matt Forde? How did it change with April's case? What was the wider impact on trans people?
4:03 Speaker 04 It changed with April's case because, in fact, she and Arthur Corbett were never actually married. She was still legally male when she and Arthur went through their wedding ceremony, and so there was no legal marriage. She could and should have taken her doctor's letter to Department Six of the Central Registry, where they would have corrected her birth certificate to show her female sex. We don't know why she didn't. So when we get to the legal case... It's positioned as a divorce case, but in fact, there was no marriage. So the judge in April's case, Lord Ormrod, claimed that his judgment would only affect trans people's right to marry.
4:47 Speaker 04 But the consequences were devastating. April's case assumed the status of what's called a super precedent. And it was cited to remove trans people's rights in Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. So it had impact across the world. Because trans people were no longer able to correct their birth certificates, their substantive civil liberties were removed. They could no longer marry or adopt, trans people were socially ostracized, and trans hate was fermented by tabloid shock horror freak show stories. Medically, trans people were subject to a brutal NHS regime, which included compulsory sterilization.
5:32 Speaker 04 The rule was, if you were trans, expect to lose your friends, expect to lose your family, expect to be expelled from any social club, barred from your church community, move towns, start your life again, never tell anyone about anything, and above all, assimilate. Because if you're recognizable as trans, then the least harmful thing that's going to happen to you is a bad beating.
6:02 Alice Levine? And what was social attitudes like towards trans people before April's case?
6:07 Speaker 04 Interestingly, all the way through the first part of the 20th century, the focus was entirely on trans men. There was a view that trans women hardly existed because of a strange evolutionary argument. And the argument was that since all beings evolved to their highest form,
6:28 Speaker 04 And since the highest form of human is a man, trans men are a natural product of evolution. And since evolution doesn't work in reverse, how could there be any trans women? Pre-attention was caught in the early 1950s by two trans women, Christine Jorgensen and Roberta Cowell, who both, like April, were remarkably beautiful, both of whom eventually corrected their birth certificates and went on to live full lives in their real sex. It was really at this point, though, that the public became aware of trans women as distinct from thinking that trans people were purely trans men.
7:12 Speaker 04 Until that point, trans people just lived their lives, you know? Get their elective medical care, correct birth certificates, live quite ordinary lives in complete equality.
7:25 Matt Forde? What was happening around that time? If we'd gone from relative peace and acceptance, albeit quiet acceptance, how did we get to the point where attitudes had changed so much by the time of April's case?
7:36 Speaker 04 So for 80 years, from 1886 to April's case, trans people were regarded as being intersexed and could have complete legal equality with medical support. This started to change in the early 1960s when a small cohort of US psychiatrists fought to have trans people reclassified as being mentally ill, just like gay people and lesbians.
8:04 Speaker 04 They won. The first gender identity clinic opened in 1962 at UCLA and trans people were subjected to conversion practices such as aversion therapies, ECT, insulin comas and frontal lobotomy. This new pseudo medicine was imported into the UK in 1969 and centralised by the NHS at Charing Cross Hospital under Dr John Randall. And it was Randall's evidence that damned April Ashley in court.
8:37 Alice Levine? There is a world where the series of events after Corbett versus Corbett might have looked very different. Zoe, in 1996, you came across another legal case. Can you talk to us about that?
8:46 Speaker 04 Yes, life could have been very different for both April and trans people.
8:53 Speaker 04 In nineteen ninety six, I was tipped off actually by April Ashley's solicitor, Terence Walton. Terence tipped me off about a case, a hidden case, he said. I was told that before Terence and April went into court, the judge took them into his chambers, showed them the case, told them they couldn't refer to it, that all records of the case had been removed from the public eye, and everyone who knew about it was sworn to secrecy, a pact that now included them. Because, Terence said, and I quote, "There are some interests that it's more important to protect than the rights of individuals."
9:36 Speaker 04 That case, it took me two years to uncover it with the help of a colleague, Dr Lynne Jones, MP. That case concerned a Scots trans man, Ewan Forbes, who corrected his birth certificate, married and lived happily until he became next in line for the family baronessy. The baronessy was limited by male primogenitor, the law that still today says that some titles and estates can only be inherited by men and never by women. A cousin challenged Ewan for the title on the grounds that because he was trans, Ewan wasn't a real man. But in court, Ewan won.
10:20 Speaker 04 And he caused a constitutional crisis. Because, at that period, the crown was also limited by male primogenitor. You know, we only had a queen because there were no eligible males. And constitutional law is all about securing succession to the throne for political stability.
10:41 Speaker 04 After Ewan, though, you might think you knew who the next monarch was, but they might have an older sibling, a signed female at birth who was trans and who piped them to the post. Or they might be trans themselves and no longer eligible. So these were the interests that's more important to protect than the rights of individuals. And in this context, had April been able to cite Ewan's case as a precedent, the verdict might have been different either in court. Or had she been able to go to appeal, she might have won then.
11:20 Matt Forde? It seems incredible that you could keep a case of that magnitude and its implications quiet. So were these hearings in secret, were the press and the public not allowed in?
11:32 Speaker 04 No, that's right, everything in secret, yeah.
11:35 Matt Forde? And they would have had no idea at all. It's not that the press knew and that there was, you know, whatever the equivalent of a super injunction was at the time. It was just not known about at all.
11:44 Speaker 04 There was just one report in the Glasgow Herald that referred to the case, that was all. And I was very lucky because I stood in touch with my former history teacher from school, who was an authority actually on the Scots Clans system. And he found this little snippet for me. We knew that the case existed, you know, but once we got a date for the case, it was possible to start to try to find it.
12:12 Alice Levine? So do you remember that moment when you first realised the significance of viewing April and Ewan's stories in parallel?
12:19 Speaker 04 Oh, absolutely. When I analysed Ewan's case, which was a forensic examination of 500 pages of court transcript, I was really shocked at what I found. And then I worked forwards to see what the consequences of the cover-up had been. And that's when I looked at April's case in detail and was obviously aghast at what I found. April and her solicitor knew about the case, the judge knew about the case. One of the many puzzles in all of this is the role played by April's solicitor. And certainly, in that respect, he abandoned his responsibility
12:58 Speaker 04 to protect the best interests of his client in favour of following a judge-directed silence.
13:06 Matt Forde? Ewan Forbes won his legal case in secret and yet April Ashley's divorce trial was a very public spectacle. So how do class dynamics and gender influence how she was treated?
13:19 Speaker 04 One of April's medical experts told her there was a lot of snobbery at work in court. And on the face of it, that appears to be objections to a working class woman becoming the next Lady Roanne.
13:33 Speaker 04 But the real class issue was protecting male primogenita, which still exists as sex discrimination against women in defiance of all equality law. What it effectively says is that although a woman might be physically able to run an estate or hold a title, as a man, in fact, she's mentally incompetent to do so. And this law is still there. From 2013 onwards, the campaigning group Daughters Rights have entered six bills in Parliament to end male primogenita, each of them instantly squashed by a clique of male peers. Successive governments have said they'll provide a remedy, none of them have.
14:17 Speaker 04 And so it seems as though class dynamics in this anomaly in equality law are still very powerful.
14:26 Matt Forde? Why don't you think successive governments have acted?
14:30 Speaker 04 Well, I suppose, you know, if you think the primogenita was created by William the Conqueror to ensure that the land he gave to his barons, once they'd appropriated all of the England that they could, to ensure that that land stayed permanently in Norman-French hands, then we're talking about a thousand years of influence. We're actually talking about the people who own the country. And after all, we still do have a largely medieval system of government in which we even call our upper house the House of Lords. And in a religiously diverse country, include bishops from the Church of England in there and no one else.
15:15 Speaker 04 I don't think it's strange, just that we're still rather anachronistic in our system of government and no one is hastening to change that.
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16:35 Alice Levine? So returning to the present day, the recent Supreme Court ruling defines woman in the Equality Act as someone born biologically female. Do you see echoes of the April Ashley case in the new ruling?
16:47 Speaker 04 Yes, there are a lot of similarities between the Supreme Court ruling and Walmart's judgment. Both ignore medicine's bio-psychosocial model of health and well-being. Both refuse trans people their democratic right to testify about their own lives. And both make the same casuistic claim that their decision will have little effect on trans lives. So yes, it is as though the Supreme Court judgment reprises Walmart's judgment. And the lessons of April's story are that any legal decision which impacts trans lives should take account of trans people's views. It must be based on medical and scientific evidence.
17:32 Speaker 04 It must keep pace with social change. It must be scrutinized to ensure its arguments and definitions are well-founded. And it must be capable of being appealed if trans people find it unjust. And I think that those requirements are ethical principles fundamental to democracy. The idea of nothing about me without me. And actually, neither April's case nor the Supreme Court's decision meet those requirements.
18:02 Matt Forde? But wasn't the Supreme Court ruling not just about biological sex but also about the Constitution? Because the devolution settlement set out in the Act of Parliament from the Blair government didn't allow the Scottish government to bring in laws like self-ID.
18:15 Speaker 04 So therefore, we might wonder why the Supreme Court went to such pains to create a whole new set of definitions instead of simply saying, look, you've acted ultra vires, and so we're just going to disallow this entirely, end of story.
18:34 Alice Levine? April's story was splashed across the front pages of the papers. How do you think current media portrayals influence the public's understanding of trans people?
18:44 Speaker 04 At the time, certainly, you know, media was limited to television and radio and the press. So perception tended to be shaped by the press. Again, it was a question of if you were outed, if you weren't able to assimilate, then you would likely be in the press as a shock horror story and as a freak show. Of course, media now is really rather different. We have social media, and the European Parliamentary Report, the tip of the iceberg,
19:23 Speaker 04 shows that since 2009, far-right religious and political groups have provided 70 million euros per annum funding for anti-gender activism. And that's brought a lot of influence, especially on social media, in terms of manufacturing doubt and spreading disinformation about trans lives. And that, I think, has created a moral panic, it's created a new scapegoating,
19:52 Speaker 04 it's created really a quite awful attack on a tiny minority community. And this, I think, is something that should worry us all.
20:04 Alice Levine? This is a hard question to answer, I'm sure, Zoe, but I wonder what your view is of the quality of life now for trans people, the trans experience now, in comparison to in the 70s for April and others?
20:17 Speaker 04 Um, yes, well, things got better and better from nineteen ninety six onwards, uh, when the European Court of Justice case, P versus S and Cornwall County Council, restored employment rights to trans people. Things progressively got better up to the Gender Recognition Act, to the Equality Act, and were, you know, gradually, slowly negotiating, not forcing, not imposing, but just slowly negotiating successive improvements in trans equality and trans lives, until July two thousand and nineteen, when the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson tore up government's LGBT action plan
20:59 Speaker 04 and dismissed the committee that, um, wrote it. And things have got steadily worse since then.
21:07 Alice Levine? Finally, how should April Ashley be remembered?
21:10 Speaker 04 Beautiful, talented, unwise and unfortunate. She was self-evidently beautiful and talented. She was unwise in not correcting her birth certificate, and unfortunate in listening to Arthur Solicitor, who told her she didn't need to correct her birth certificate to be married, and then unwise in listening to her own Solicitor, who told her that she could sue Arthur for, um, maintenance. He must have known that there wasn't a legal marriage.
21:42 Alice Levine? Zoe, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been really fascinating.
21:47 Speaker 04 It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
21:54 Alice Levine? Matt, I have a question for you. Where are you taking me next?
21:59 Matt Forde? Birmingham.
22:00 Alice Levine? Birmingham, okay. We can't do Peaky Blinders as a scandal, can we?
22:04 Matt Forde? We can't, no. It's not gang-related at all. In fact, we're doing our first ever British scandal miscarriage of justice, and let me tell you, this is monumental.
22:14 Alice Levine? Okay, go on.
22:15 Matt Forde? In nineteen seventy four, two pubs in Birmingham were ripped apart by IRA bombings, resulting in the biggest mass murder ever to take place on British soil. Justice had to be swift and it had to be visible and it was both of those things. What it wasn't was right. This is the story of six men who spent 16 years in prison for a crime they didn't commit and the man who did everything he could to clear their name. Join us next time for the Birmingham Six.
22:43 Alice Levine? This is a story that lots of people suggest to us, so we're doing it finally.
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23:59 Speaker 07 By 1779 Benedict Arnold had sacrificed more for the revolution than almost any other man in America. One of George Washington's most effective commanders, he had nearly lost a leg in the Second Battle of Saratoga, but in return, Arnold believed he had been humiliated by Congress and cheated of his glory by lesser men, so he decided to make them pay. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of the podcast American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in US history: presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, Benedict Arnold Turns
24:34 Speaker 07 turns his back on his comrades in the Continental Army and secretly defects to the British. With the help of his wife, he plots to hand over the most important colonial fortress to the enemy and doom the revolution he once served. Follow American Scandal wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.
24:59 Alice Levine? From Wondry and Sammerson Audio, this is the fourth and final episode in our series, April Ashley. British Scandal is hosted by me, Alice Levine.
25:15 Matt Forde? And me, Matt Ford.
25:16 Alice Levine? For Sammerson, our producer is Redzi Bernard. Our assistant producer is Louise Mason. Our senior producers are Joe Sykes and Dashalisa Tzina. Our engineer is Jai Williams. For Wondry, our senior producer is Theodora Leludis, and our senior managing producer is Rachel Sibley. Executive producers for Wondry are Estelle Doyle, Chris Bourne, and Marshall Louie.
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26:18 Alice Levine? Hey, I'm Cassie DePecce, the host of Against the Odds from Audible Originals. In each episode, we share thrilling true stories of survival, putting you in the shoes of the people who lived to tell the tale. In our latest We track the story of Hugh Glass, the real-life revenant that inspired the 2015 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. In 1823, Glass was brutally mauled by a grizzly bear in present-day South Dakota and left for dead. His survival depended on trekking through 350 miles of wilderness alone with grave injuries. But he was driven by his thirst for revenge. Follow Against the Odds wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of Against the Odds early and ad-free right now.
27:00 Alice Levine? Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.
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