Op by unknown doctor was a world first

[mephisto5]

ONE of the most important episodes in the history of gender re-assignment surgery took place in Bristol during the Second World War say researchers on the LBGT project

Comments

[tabaqui]

How very cool. Amazing how there was a doctor with enough empathy and compassion to help him transform.

[mephisto5]

People a long time ago often were more tolerent than we think. There was an army officer who was pretty well known to be FtM in Victorian Britain who was well thought of.

[tabaqui]

More stuff i did not know. :)

I enjoy Downton Abbey, and the characters knowing and accepting the orientation of another character was very refreshing.

[bmh4d0k3n]

Yes, I've been wondering about how realistic that could've been. On one hand, Britain criminalized homosexuality longer than many other nations. On the other hand, there's no reason there couldn't've been enclaves that were pretty accepting. Do we know of any true stories?

[mephisto5]

It was criminalised, but afaik, actual prosecutions bar a few high profile cases were only ramped up after the world wars. I think prior to that it was more 'do your duty to society: have a wife and kids, but we've got a fucking empire to run and unless you're high profile we aren't going to bother going after you'.

[tabaqui]

I thought what Robert Crawley said about school and boys trying to kiss him/other boys was interesting, as well - the cliche about English schools being a sort of 'hotbed' of m/m experimentation seems to be still going strong.

I'm reminded, too, of the very strong undercurrent of same-sex attraction in 'Brideshead Revisited' and how not a big deal it was.... I dunno. Something to research!

[muted_hitokiri]

The way I've always interpreted it (and this is just my amateur opinion, obv), is that England in practice tended to be more open/forgiving of LGBT-type stuff than the US because our big foundation was the class system, rather than morality. We obviously still had the same types of laws, because yeah, Christian society, but in practice as long as people stayed within their classes and acted appropriately in that respect, whatever else they did was almost secondary. Which is kind of the opposite to the US, where Christian morality was all important, and class movements were greatly encouraged.

(Not, btw, saying that either system was better than the other, they both had a few good points and a ton of bad ones, just different.)

[tabaqui]

Possibly, yes. It's interesting to think that 'class' outweighed morality so much that 'lower classes' were all but ignored unless they did something disrespectful/out of bounds.

*wanders off to re-read Maurice*

[akashasheiress]

We tend to think that the history of rights is one of constant progress, but I'd argue that while we've made a lot legal progress, we've actually regressed in some areas and our narrow-mindedness has simply shifted rather than gone away.