A row has broken out over a book about a “transgender” Scottish aristocrat after legal experts said claims made by the author were “utterly unevidenced and highly tendentious”.
Published by Bloomsbury last month, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes: The Transgender Trial that Threatened to Upend the British Establishment, recounts the story of Forbes, a Scottish nobleman who was embroiled in a 1960s legal battle with his cousin over his baronetcy. It was written by Zoë Playdon, a University of London professor and trans rights ally, and is being adapted into a TV drama.
Forbes was named Elizabeth Forbes at birth in 1912 but claimed to have been assigned the wrong gender. He underwent hormone treatment, lived as a man and re-registered the gender on his birth certificate in 1952.
When his older brother William died in 1965, the family baronetcy could only go to the next male heir in line. Forbes’s cousin John made a claim for the title on the grounds that Ewan was classified female at birth.
Following private hearings, the court ruled in Ewan Forbes’s favour in 1967 and he was named the 11th Baronet Forbes of Craigievar. He died in 1991.
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Playdon seeks to paint him as a trans pioneer whose court battle “rocked British society and transformed transgender experience to this day”. Yet legal experts have questioned whether he was transgender at all.
Barbara Rich, a barrister who has published a string of tweets challenging the book, pointed to the 1967 ruling on the baronetcy, in which the judge concluded that Forbes was “a true hermaphrodite in whom the male sexual characteristics predominate”. Others have commented on how Forbes’s memoirs do not even acknowledge his transition.
In a statement, Playdon said that there was “no doubt that Ewan was trans”. She explained that the descriptions of him in court proceedings were the result of long-term testosterone treatment.
She added that the “male characteristics” referred to in the ruling were his “psychological sex” or gender identity.
Rich also questioned the book’s “utterly unevidenced and highly tendentious speculation” that Harold Wilson, then the prime minister, had discussed the case with the Queen because it posed a threat to the right of succession under male primogeniture. In her book, Playdon writes: “These were serious matters of state, especially given the unusual nature of the baronetcy’s terms of succession, and consequently it will have been discussed at the highest level.”
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Rich argued that, far from it being a matter of political and royal intrigue, James Callaghan, the then home secretary, simply performed his duty on succession matters and rubber-stamped Ewan Forbes’s baronetcy after the court judgment.
Playdon told The Times that the book makes clear that she is speculating. “Having spent a little time myself as a senior civil servant, it felt like the sort of issue that might be kicked upstairs to make sure everyone was happy with the outcome,” she said.
In another line of attack, Rich argued that the case was far from “hidden”, given the home secretary’s decision was covered by the press in 1968, not least in Time magazine. She added that the court proceedings probably took place behind closed doors because of the “distressing, invasive and intimate nature of the evidence given about Ewan’s sex”. Scott Wortley, a law lecturer at Edinburgh Law School, argued that Playdon’s book displayed a “lack of awareness of Scottish law and procedure” relating to Forbes changing his birth certificate.
“The book is premised on the basis that correction of the birth certificate was done of right for a trans person,” he tweeted. “That was not the case. There was no right to correct unless the sheriff was satisfied there was an initial error in registration.”
Playdon said that she wrote for a “general readership” and in describing the interplay between medicine and law chose to “use language in its ordinary and natural meaning”.
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Rich said that Playdon had “put forward a narrative of this individual’s life and an interpretation of the legal consequences of his case that are highly contestable”. She added that it was a “campaigning book”.
The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes is being developed into a television drama by Sukey Fisher, a Bafta-winning trans screenwriter.
It will be produced by Synchronicity Films, which made the BBC1 series The Cry, starring Jenna Coleman.
Bloomsbury declined to comment.
Craigievar Castle, once the seat of the Forbes family, is now owned by the National Trust for Scotland. The estate suffered damage during Storm Arwen and is closed to the public at present.
