LGB&T History, challenges and successes A brief history of the involvement of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people in medicine and healthcare through the ages Promoting Equality, Diversity and Human Rights NHS North West’s LGB&T Timeline Exhibition commemorates and celebrates the involvement of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people in health and health care through the ages. We launched this exhibition to coincide with LGB&T History Month in February 2011. The aim is to document the experiences of LGB&T people in relation to medicine. It also highlights the individual contributions made by LGB&T people to medicine and the evolution of health care. The exhibition is a follow-up and companion to the history timeline exhibition we produced in 2008 in the NHS 60th anniversary year. This was to mark the contribution of Black and minority ethnic staff to the health service since its foundation in 1948. We hope this exhibition encourages the North West health service and its partners to continue to develop their commitment to Equality, Diversity and Human Rights. For and on behalf of NHS North West. Key Shahnaz Ali Associate Director of Equality, Diversity and Human Rights Notable trans/gender variant healthcare practitioners NHS North West Notable LGB healthcare February 2011 practitioners Medical events Credits: Commissioned by the Equality and Diversity Team, NHS North West Advisor Christine Burns MBE Landmark events Editor Loren Grant, NHS North West Research Trans Research and Empowerment Centre (TREC), Trans and LGB organisations Lesbian and Gay Foundation (LGF) North-West-specific Design and production Clear Presentations information 3 Homosexuality? What homosexuality? Before the 19th C sexual relationships and love between people of the same sex certainly existed, but an homosexual identity as we know it did not. Sexual relationships between men were common in Ancient Greece, with an older man taking on the role of educator to a younger boy. There was no homosexual identity as such and men were expected to take part in heterosexual marriage. The writings of Sappho (c.620-560 BC) a poet from the Greek island of Lesbos survive only in fragments and much of what we know about her is based on rumour and speculation, but it was her powerful poetry about her love for other women that inspired the term ‘lesbian’. Native American men who wore women’s clothing, did women’s work, and became wives to men were seen as a mediator between the world of women and the world of men, and they always held a respected position in the tribe. Known as ‘Two Spirits’, they often had ceremonial roles and sometimes were attributed special power, such as curing the sick. Some tribes had a female equivalent but this was less common. In Britain, from medieval times onwards, homosexuality was thought to be linked to disease. For example a pamphlet published in 1787 warns of ‘emasculated foreign singers’, whose ‘degeneracy and effeminacy’ are ‘contagious like the pestilence’. 4 Categorise it! Doctors, writers and lawyers begin to explore what homosexuality might be and what causes it, seeing it as either a disease or a crime. However, this discussion allows an idea of the homosexual as a figure to emerge, albeit one that is very much focussed on sexual activity between men. Today, transsexuality is recognised as distinct from homosexuality. However, in the 19th century, the two concepts are blurred. Sexology, or the study of human sexuality, seeks to study, and consequently classify, types of sexual behaviours, especially allegedly more ‘devious’ and ‘abnormal’ practices. So begins the medicalisation, and consequent pathologisation, of trans and gay identities. Homosexuality is regarded as one of the many diseases that can be caused by masturbation Mid-19th (itself an obsession for social moralists of the period). In the 1860s, English psychiatrist Henry century Maudsley claims masturbation leads to insanity. After 1858 clitoridectomy is popularised for girls as a cure for masturbation by London surgeon Dr Isaac Baker Brown. The medical profession begins to categorise non-procreative sex into different ‘perversions’ and ‘deviations’. Homosexuality gradually emerges as a separate category, and so too the homosexual as an individual. European medicine largely sees homosexuality as degeneration in individual development Late 19th (post-Darwinian ideas offering a scientific explanation of sexual evolution play a significant part). century/ Homosexuality could be the result of the parents’ defective genes, resulting from, for example, early 20th hysteria, alcoholism, epilepsy or debauchery. Such theories conclude that these century ‘born criminals’ should not be locked up in prison but treated in asylums. By contrast, the British medical profession places more emphasis on madness than moral depravity or wickedness, possibly because madness is something that could happen to anyone, and is the only explanation that doesn’t undermine social norms. Castration and hypnosis are used as ‘cures’ for homosexuality across Europe and America. 1812 James Miranda Barry graduates from the Medical School of Edinburgh University as a female- born doctor. Barry goes on to serve as an army surgeon working overseas. Barry lives as a man but is found to be female-bodied upon his death in 1865. 1852-1863 Dr. Johann Ludwig Casper, Germany’s leading medico-legal expert on homosexuality, develops a distinction between ‘innate’ and ‘acquired’ homosexual characteristics. These form the poles of the debate for generations to come. 1858 Isolated cases of female-born persons dressing in male clothing and ‘passing’ as members of the male sex are reported in local newspapers, such as the case of Harriet/Henry Stokes in Manchester. 1861 One of the earliest known examples of a gender variant person practising as a nurse. Canadian Franklin Thompson, born Sarah Emma Edmonds (1841 – 1898), serves with the Union Army in the American Civil War. 1861 The death penalty for buggery, which had been tacitly abandoned since 1836, is finally abolished in England and Wales (abolished in Scotland 1889). 1864-1879 Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German sexologist, publishes a series of 12 booklets calling for an end to the legal, social and religious condemnation of homosexuality. He sees homosexuality as a ‘third sex’, implying inversion of gender characteristics as well as sexual attraction and coins the term ‘Urning’ for a male subject of this condition, and ‘Urningin’ for a female. Ulrichs was a self- acknowledged Urning and so was the first homosexual to come out publicly as well as one of the first theorists of homosexuality. 1869 Hungarian-Austrian doctor Karl-Maria Kertbeny coins the term ‘homosexual’ which enters English currency in the 1890s. 1885 All male homosexual acts are made illegal in Britain through Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, known as the Labouchère Amendment. 6 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, a German-Austrian psychiatrist, publishes Psychopathia Sexualis 1886 which names and classifies virtually all non-procreative sexuality. He argues that in many cases the ‘perversion’ is not a sin or a crime but a disease and that sexual disorders are often inborn in the individual. Oscar Wilde is accused of gross indecency (oral sex between men). His highly 1895 publicised trials help to create a public image of the homosexual. Dr Helen Boyle and her partner, Mabel Jones, set up the first women-run 1897 general practice in Brighton, including offering free therapy for poor women. Dr Boyle also founds the National Council for Mental Hygiene (now MIND). British sexologist Havelock Ellis publishes Sexual Inversion, the first 1897 volume in an intended series called Studies in the Psychology of Sex. He argues that homosexuality is not a disease but a natural anomaly that had occurred throughout human and animal history, and should be accepted, not treated. The book is banned in England for being obscene; the subsequent volumes in the series are published in the US and not sold in England until 1936. Turn of the century filmmakers Mitchell and Kenyon record a cross-dressing carnival in Crewe, 1900 – 1905 in the north west of England. 7 Theorise it! Although homosexual acts are still illegal, enlightened discussion begins to move away from criminalisation towards ways to understand and deal with homosexuality. News items of ‘cross-dressed men and women’ occur regularly in the British press in the early part of the 20th century. 1905 Sigmund Freud, Austrian founder of psychoanalysis, publishes Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality which theorise that homosexuality is not a congenital madness or disease, but the result of arrested development at a young age. Homosexuals had ‘failed’ at heterosexuality, but it is extremely unlikely that they could be cured. Freud argues that homosexuals should not be punished and homosexuality should be legal. 1906 Dr Louisa Martindale sets up a private practice in Brighton and becomes the first woman GP. With a group of other Brighton feminists she develops the New Sussex Hospital for Women, where she is senior surgeon and physician. She later becomes a specialist in the early treatment of cervical cancer and is awarded a CBE in 1931. Louisa lives with her partner Ismay FitzGerald for three decades, and writes of her love for her in her autobiography A Woman Surgeon, published in 1951. 1907 Magnus Hirschfeld is introduced to Harry Benjamin. 1910 Hirschfeld’s study Die Transvestiten proves seminal in classifying the practice of cross-dressing. 1914 The British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology is set up by a group of theorists and activists, with Edward Carpenter as president. Carpenter is a proponent of the theory of homosexual as a third sex, and himself lives openly with his lover, George Merrill. The Society discusses the topic of homosexual oppression along with other issues including women’s rights, contraception, divorce law reform and the use of sex hormones.