Glen or Glenda? and the History of Trans Healthcare

Ed Wood’s film about transvestism and a panel discussion about trans healthcare.

The blurby bit

Glen or Glenda? and the History of Trans Healthcare, hosted by the University of Westminster

How has understanding of transness and trans healthcare developed since Ed Wood’s infamous and iconic ‘Glen or Glenda?’ (1953)

A screening of the groundbreaking and gloriously marmite film Glen or Glenda? will be followed by a discussion of the development of trans healthcare at the site (St Pancras Hospital) of some of the pioneering work in that area in the 1960s by a distinguished panel of researchers. Delve into the fascinating history of trans healthcare as we explore the struggles, triumphs, and advancements in this field. Our knowledgeable speakers will guide you through the journey, shedding light on the challenges faced by transgender individuals and the evolution of healthcare practices.

From Eventbrite

Of note, the University of Westminster is also sponsoring the Non-Binary in Higher Education Project (which I have also written about recently). I have no clue why St. Pancras, which specialises in rehabilitation, would host such an event.

The exhibition

On the day of the screening, an exhibition of LGBTQ artwork had been installed. This included a work by Simon Croft of Gendered Intelligence of a trans-themed snakes and ladders board. There were other ‘transed’ popular board games too, including Monopoly, Scrabble, Cluedo and so on. Some of the artworks were created by the students from the University of Westminster.

Additionally, there were several works focussing on breasts, or rather the lack thereof. God knows what the rehabilitation patients who walk through the area think.

The film – Glen or Glenda?

Ed Wood, director of Glen or Glenda?, was an auteur whose reputation was solely based on the fact that he made bad B-movies, later emulated by the likes of John Waters and feted by Tim Burton. I therefore expected the film to be terrible. In fact, it wasn’t, just awkwardly contrived. Its central plot, if it could be said to have one, is whether Glen should tell fiancé Barbara that he is a crossdresser before or after they are married. Otherwise it is a pseudo documentary, informing a 1950s American audience of the ‘complexities’ of transvestism. The main thrust appears to be ‘if only men could be transvestite more openly’.

Wood makes clear whose side he is on from the off, as hysterical female voices, reminiscent of Margaret Hamilton’s Mrs Gulch-Wicked Witch, tell us in the opening moments that they don’t understand the New World, they didn’t understand Air Travel and now they don’t understand Men-in-Dresses. Later, we hear the same shrill naggers complain that their clothes have been bent out of shape by their husbands. They are literally the terfs of yesteryear. And the similarities to the othering of women doesn’t end there (especially non-compliant ones).

Poor men, when they go home of an evening, can’t just relax in comfortable clothing, unlike women. Men’s hats are so tight they restrict the blood to their brains, unlike the dainty lightweight hats women get to wear. ‘How many men suffer like this?’ it is asked. They are men who have fallen in love with themselves or men who have dissociated in childhood, we are told.

Wood also hints at the porn behind the compulsion to crossdress by having actual women act out scenes where they tie each other up and whip each other. In 1953 I guess these things must have been shocking but clearly Wood wanted to let us know that it was ultimately sexually driven (though he clearly doesn’t think that’s a bad thing).

Finally, when Glen tells Barbara his secret, Barbara is forgiving but the thing Glen really panders after isn’t her forgiveness, it’s the angora sweater she’s wearing. Glen reaches out and strokes the fabric to satisfy his urge, whilst Barbara dimly believes it’s a show of support.

It also makes the (false) distinction that the man who wants to go ‘full time’ is essentially a different animal to the one who is ‘part-time’ with only heterosexual urges. The man who undergoes a ‘sex change’ must have hormone treatment for the rest of his life we are portentously told, it’s no light decision and must be respected.

I feel like it has Virginia Prince’s fingerprints all over of it, though the film predates Prince’s Transvestia magazine by several years. Nevertheless, Wood clearly spent time speaking to such men (probably was Prince) and the psychiatrists who treated the same, as the description and depiction of transvestism is all too familiar to those who know it. A reminder also that gender identity ideology was already fully formed before most of us were even born.

The panel

Professor Pippa Catterall (Professor of History and Policy at University of Westminster), Professor Zoe Playdon (Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of London), Simon Croft of Gendered Intelligence and three trans-identified female PhD students Dan, Lucas and Eden.

Pippa Catterall, previously Peter, is a lecturer from the University of Westminster. Gleaning online sources it seems he transitioned around 2018. Zoe Playdon’s claim to fame is to have written a history of how ‘trans people lost their human rights in the 1960s’.

[Zoe’s] commercial consultancy clients include the Standing Conference on Postgraduate Medical Education, the Royal College of Anaesthetists, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and a range of small businesses, charitable trusts, and public sector bodies.

https://www.zoeplaydon.com/about

Simon Croft is a trans-identified female and Director of Professional and Educational Services at Gendered Intelligence. (Interestingly, GI have a vacancy at the moment, ringfenced for only those who ‘identify on the trans-feminine spectrum’ (aka jobs for the boys) and have cited the Equality Act.)

The three University of Westminster students invited to speak on the panel about the film, which examined the phenomenon of male crossing dressing, were all young trans-identified females in various states of transition.

Panel discussion

Pippa Catterall explained that Wood’s film was released shortly after the international attention Christine Jorgensen had received following ‘sex change surgery’ and introduced Playdon as ‘probably the leading historian on trans health in the UK’.

Catterall jokingly pretended that the film had triggered him in places but did admit that he had recognised elements of his own life story in that he had got married and not told his wife, reflecting that ‘was probably a mistake’ and that it ‘didn’t end well but I am so much happier now’. So’s your wife, mate. Catterall observed that a friend had whipped off their beret pretty quickly when it was alleged that the blood to the brain was restricted by hats, quipping that Richard ‘still had a full head of hair’. Amazing really, when you consider Richard is a woman, who looked as if she hadn’t taken any testosterone.

Zoe Playdon

Zoe Playdon, invited by Catterall to critique the film, had sat throughout the screening fiddling with her essay papers. Playdon opined that that the film lacked dialogue, had too much exposition and relied on too much stock footage (like bulls stampeding), regardless of the fact this was Ed Wood’s shtick. Interestingly she claimed that Wood had been forced to add an extra ten minute segment, more or less onto the end, to explain the phenomenon of transsexualism. Playdon found it interesting that it positioned the audience as witness to Glenda/Glenda as a case study and didn’t allow us to enter the lives of the characters. We could consider it now as as an avant garde trans film, she suggested.

Playdon then moved on to the subject of her book, Ewan Forbes (available at all good bookshops, peeps). Playdon claims that Forbes was a ‘trans man’, however this was challenged by barrister Barbara Law on Twitter, who pointed out that Forbes was found to be a male affected by a disorder of sexual development (DSD), though what kind is not known – see the Daily Mail article. Playdon has made some fantastic claims about Forbes’ inheritance case:

Before Ewan’s case, being trans was medically classified as a variation of sex development, an intersex condition, but months after he won his baronetcy, a new legal definition declared that being trans was a mental illness.

https://www.zoeplaydon.com/books/the-hidden-case-of-ewan-forbes

Playdon claims that Forbes’ marriage in 1952 was a significant historical event, despite the fact that Forbes never described himself as undergoing a sex change and had merely corrected his birth certificate, following sex being incorrectly recorded at birth.

Christine Jorgensen was commended for not going too over the top with his make-up and outfits, likewise it was also noted that Glen’s alter ego Glenda was also careful not to emulate the excesses of the gay drag artiste. Do you know what else happened in 1952? The first DSM was published and included transvestism as a condition, under the heading of sexual deviation, according to Playdon. Other conditions in the section included homosexuality, paedophilia, fetishism and sexual sadism.

Around this time Harry Benjamin also made a clear distinction between transvestites and transsexuals, defining this roughly as the former enacting the role of a woman, whereas the latter wanted to be one. After this, Playdon went off on a tangent about ‘psychic hermaphrotism’, which we learnt was basically a pretentious way of saying ‘lady brain’. Playdon claims that in the 1960s trans people could ‘self-identify’, but didn’t exactly expand on what she meant by this, rendering the claim meaningless. Around ten years later John Money opened his clinic to fix the gender identities of the patients who visited, though naturally Playdon forgot to mention the awful case of David Reimer, the boy who was forced to live as if he were a girl following a botched circumcision surgery, nor that Money had sexually abused David and his twin brother Brian. Both committed suicide. After repeating for the umpteenth time that it was an interesting turning point in time, Playdon finished the lecture to a round of applause.

Catterall wanted to draw on more context: there was also the Korean War. He couldn’t quite make that one work though, so instead suggested that in the UK, at that time, it was ‘trans women’ who were invisible, whereas ‘trans men’, like Michael Dillon, were the visible ones (despite the famous Jorgensen footage being produced by British Pathé). To undermine his point even further, he pointed out that the film we had just watched had not mentioned ‘trans men’ or ‘non binary’ at all. Doh!

The case of Dora Ratjen

Playdon responded that that high point of visibility for ‘trans men’ were the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Which is funny, because when I did my deep dive research (aka Googling a few things) the only gender bender I could find at the 1936 Olympics was a bloke called Heinrich/Hermann Ratjen, a man who competed in the female category under the name of Dora Ratjen. Ratjen later claimed that the Nazis recruited him whilst he was in the Hitler Youth, simply to get more Gold medals (which he didn’t). He also appears to have been retrospectively given an intersex condition, as Gretel Bergmann, the Jewish woman he ultimately replaced at the 1936 games, noted that Ratjen would avoid washing in the huge shower room the other competitors shared. He also served in the Hitler Youth, which was male-only (girls had a separate organisation), which contradicts the claim his family bought him up as a girl (made by the official Olympic account, no less).

Finally, we have this claim:

[Ratjen] was uncovered returning from the European Championships in Vienna in 1938, where he had broken the women’s world record. At a train station in Germany, two ladies noticed him in a skirt but with a five o’clock shadow. A doctor was summoned, he lifted the skirt and Ratjen’s career was over.

Amazing tale of man called Hermann who finished fourth in women’s high jump, Independent, Sunday 20 July 2008 

Roberta Cowell

Anyway, that was a bit of diversion, but incredible that a supposed leading historian didn’t know it. In any case, Playdon wanted to get back onto the men; Roberta Cowell was the UK’s very own first transsexual (and Cowell had the surgery before Jorgensen on 18 April 1951). Playdon compared Cowell to Jorgensen as Diana Dors was to Marilyn Monroe, i.e. an ersatz version.

Perhaps because [Roberta Cowell] was one of the first to transition medically, she didn’t recommend it easily to others, saying, “Many of those people will regret the operation later. There have been attempted suicides.”

Overlooked No More: Roberta Cowell, Trans Trailblazer, Pilot and Auto Racer, The New York Times, 5 June 2020

Dan, Catterall’s PhD student

Dan is doing his PhD on trans healthcare from a legal perspective. In the past trans healthcare had been understood to be a straightforward binary affair with mimicking of primary sexual characteristics. Her research endeavoured to prove that perception of gender was based on secondary sexual characteristics rather than primary. In other words, does the person pass? Or, more usually, has the person done enough to signal to others that they’re trying? The result of her research is no doubt going to be: we should be focussing on who people are as human beings, i.e. the individual approach. She didn’t like the focus the film had taken on showing the man on the surgical table because that wasn’t the totality of what being trans meant (although I note she seemed rather flat-chested, so this seemed a bit hypocritical).

Although Playdon had nominally agreed to stop talking, she kept on with insights on the film, speaking about how the film looked at different theories as to how transvestism arose and this was contrasted by the character The Scientist (played by Bela Lugosi) and that of The Psychiatrist. The former argues that transvestism/transsexualism is innate, whilst the latter argues there is a pathology behind them. Guess which theory Playdon subscribes to?

Lucas, the loud mouth

Lucas, being a loud mouth American, got more than a word in edgewise compared to Dan. She was a rather large woman and appeared to have not started her transition yet, but clearly thinking about it. Or wanted us to think she was thinking about it. Her name, I think, has been directly lifted from the Game of Thrones. She felt the film was particularly linked to American medical history, which is an amazing observation given the film was made in the US.

Lucas claimed in the US, the public had more awareness around ‘trans feminine’ people who had more access to so-called gender confirming care, whereas it was ‘trans masculine’ people who were forgotten about. Even now ‘trans masculine’ people found it much more difficult to get access to care. Also, a lot of the care ‘trans feminine’ people received was really just the same kind of care that ‘cis women’ received, whereas ‘top surgery’ and exogenous testosterone was particular to the ‘trans masculine’ population. She then alleged that it was very difficult to access testosterone in the US because of individual state law. In fact, and this is according to the HRC, just 21 states have a law or a policy which bans gender affirming care for those under the age of 18 (there will be no bans for adults). She bewailed the fact that you couldn’t get your hands on hormones until you had gotten a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

Before you could get a cosmetic bilateral mastectomy doctors wanted you to be socially transitioned for at least 2-4 years and for you to have been on testosterone for at least 2-4 years also (I don’t think the numbers add up). On the other hand, ‘trans feminine’ people could get access much easier because there were already loads of ‘cis women’ doing exactly the same thing.

No evidence was presented to prove these differences in care, and, for what it’s worth, I have never heard of anything like this in all the time I have been looking at these issues.

Of course, Playdon, our ‘leading historian’, chipped in that people used to be able to buy their hormones over-the-counter but now there was ‘medical gatekeeping’. She also claimed that there were still state laws in place which governed how one kept their hair but forgot to add that such laws had fallen into desuetude. That’s okay though because Lucas chipped in that her home state Colorado still technically had laws against crossing dressing and Catterall added that the UK similarly had desuetude laws.

Mastectomies for women with a strong family history of breast cancer

In the most maddening moment of the afternoon, Playdon claimed that ‘cis’ women who had a familial history of breast cancer were quickly signed up for bilateral mastectomies, no questions asked. As if such procedures were not life saving. She claimed that the gold standard for a woman removing her breasts in that scenario was one session with a clinical psychologist, whereas ‘trans men’ had it so much harder. Mischievously Playdon wondered whether a case for sex discrimination could be bought. ‘We might come back to Dan for a legal opinion on that,’ tittered Catterall.

Eden, artist and student

Eden wanted to tell us about the ups and downs she had experienced whilst she had been transitioning these last few years. In fact, some of her art work was on display in the exhibition, herself in sexualised poses but minus breasts and smattering of moustache. She had tried the NHS and she had tried private. What Eden had found interesting about the film was that Glenda was a sort of character that Glen had made up and she related to that in her own search for ‘gender identity’. She felt that she couldn’t ’embody herself’ but now she was on hormones and raising money for her own ‘top surgery’, fantasy was becoming reality. Eden couldn’t relate to the bits of the film which were grossly sexist but could relate to the bits where we saw Glen at home with himself being Glenda.

Catterall wanted to buck the notion that trans people are masquerading, as portrayed in the film. The notion of having to ‘pass’ was an oppressive notion, whereas Catterall would prefer (being a man who does not pass in the slightest) that ‘everyone should be accepted for who they are’. Also, ‘cis people’ masquerade too! Have you ever met a politician?! This was the perfect segway into introducing the final speaker, Simon Croft of Gendered Intelligence, the woman responsible for making the childish snakes and ladders artwork.

Simon Croft, Gendered Intelligence

Croft gave a rundown of the types of services Gendered Intelligence (GI) offer, notably ‘a support line looking to access healthcare for those who are 17 plus’, and urged any interested people to pick up the details from the artwork itself and a ’50 plus group just for trans women’. Croft’s feeling on the film was that a number of narratives were still very much in circulation – pathologisation, medicalisation (she’d just signposted people to the same), gatekeeping (GI runs a social group which keeps over 50 trans-identified females out) and biological essentialism (ditto). Some of these narratives had begun to fade away a little bit but had ‘really resurged in recent years’. As per usual, no political context given.

Croft, however, was keen to talk about what Gender Grand Wizard, Judith Butler, had said in a speech at the LSE just a few days before. Faithfully assigning Butler as a ‘they’, Croft told us that Butler had described it as ‘the accelerating normalisation of rights stripping,’ and this had struck a chord with Croft because it wasn’t just about trans people but many other marginalised communities. Cue the right wing fascist conspiracy.

To be fair to Croft, she was the only person to point out that there was one section of the film which was blatantly racist, though her main concern, of course, were the coy suggestions that Glen was deviant and unsafe, it was this kind of thing which had led to young trans people in our country being stabbed or murdered. The Prime Minister had also made a ‘transphobic joke’ in Parliament (in fact, Sunak’s joke was directed toward Starmer). Croft was also pissed that the EHRC had said that trans-identified males could be excluded from services set out for women, meaning that they were excluded from the category of women.

Recently Croft had spoken to GI’s director of youth and community services, who had said there had more serious and mental health safeguarding related incidents in the first quarter of the last year than GI had seen in the whole of the previous year. Things had reached crisis point. The real problem though was the persecution of ‘trans women’ and ‘trans feminine people’, with those who were also POC bearing the brunt.

Croft’s recommendations:

• It was time for allies to be vocal – silence is not allyship at this point, as it was silence which had allowed the situation to fester.
• Give direct support to anyone you know who is trans/non-binary, friends, family, colleagues, etc. We should offer them listening ear and (my favourite) ‘try not to place additional demands on them at the time when they are so much under stress’.
• Don’t ask them to educate or explain, do do the work yourself, Croft said with a patronising half-laugh.
• It isn’t safe on the streets for trans people anymore, so please put your lives on hold and sit in with them of a night.
• Be vocal about improving services within your workplaces, try to influence policy, especially ensure that ‘gender diverse’ toilets are available.
• Responding to the current Department of Education consultation was also important.

Catterall stated that the government was now ‘going after muslims’ (a few weeks later the government pledged £117 million towards security costs for the Muslim community) and that was important to support everyone who was marginalised. He believed that the Tories had made this shift because of the votes that there were haemorrhaging to the Reform Party, despite there being no evidence of that (the date of the general election had not been announced). Catterall has a friend who works at Stop Hate UK, who had pointed out to him that every time someone like Priti Patel, Cruella (sic) Braverman and Rishi Sunak says something inflammatory, people get hurt (note the accused are all non-muslim Asians).

Q&A

The Q&A was kicked of by member of the audience asking Catterrall to consider that anti-semitism was also a problem. He reluctantly agreed, admitting that he had passed one of the Palestinian demonstrations earlier and was conscious of it.

The Keira Bell case

One of the students wanted to know about Keira Bell’s case (who had been prescribed without understanding the long term consequences). He generally wanted to know how the panel felt about the matter and how it had changed things, rather than directly being critical.

Playdon was invited by Catterall to comment first and spoke for ten rather long minutes. She began by misrepresenting the Bell case by focussing on the fact that Bell had had a bilateral mastectomy and said that this was her regret. In fact, the case focussed solely on the prescription of so-called puberty blockers and cross sex hormones, since it was the Tavistock who was responsible for issuing these prescriptions. Playdon said that as Bell was 18 years old when she had the bilateral mastectomy, she had therefore made the choice as an adult and after she had left the care of the Tavistock and we could easily discount the saliency of the case.

On the other hand, gender identity disorder services for children had always been a cinderella service. It had started at St George’s Hospital in the 1980s and transferred to the Tavistock to be overseen by Polly Carmichael. There were only two options open to the Tavistock, they could either treat patients or run research studies, but they didn’t have the money to do the latter, so just had to make do with the former. Playdon admitted that referrals had shot up ‘exponentially, all of a sudden’ a few years ago.

Much more waffling from Playdon on the difference between medicine and law, medicine was about ‘it depends’ and the law was about all about ‘yes or no’, sparing us any technical analysis whatsoever. There was nothing in ‘trans healthcare’ which wasn’t used in ‘cis health care’, ergo the precocious puberty blocker card was played. Playdon claimed that there was a lot of evidence to show that puberty blocking use was a good thing and had nil long term effects.

A landmark Tavistock study on the effects of puberty blockers on children, which concluded that they led to 'no changes in psychological function', was wrong as 34% of the participants saw a significant mental health deterioration, new analysis has found https://t.co/5CgYObzuWX

— ripx4nutmeg (@ripx4nutmeg) September 19, 2023

The ensuing review of the Tavistock, Playdon claimed, had been partly instigated by ‘hardline Freudians, yeah,’ who believed that gender dysphoria arose from childhood attachment. In summarising the Cass Review, Playdon emphasised that Cass had said that the clinic was underfunded to carry out the kind of research programmes needed (I think what Cass actually said that there was insufficient evidence to justify issuing puberty blockers as a treatment and that essentially it was experimental as there was no research proving their efficacy). The waiting list was now 5 to 6 years and puberty blockers could now only be prescribed as part of a formal research framework, Playdon complained. The real kicker though, was the warning that if parents, or children themselves, accessed puberty blockers or cross sex hormones from private providers, which weren’t approved by the Care Quality Commission or the NHS, the parents would be liable to investigation by social services.

On 12 March 2024, NHS England announced that 'puberty blockers' (GnRH agonists) would no longer be prescribed to children.  

https://news.sky.com/story/children-to-no-longer-be-prescribed-puberty-blockers-nhs-england-confirms-13093251 

Dan, one of the students, wanted to emphasise how long the process took. You could be waiting several years just for your first appointment. Trans people were turning to GoFundMe to be able to afford the things that they should be able to access on the NHS. Not only that but there were ‘cis women’ who were getting mastectomies and women ‘of a certain age’ were able to access HRT. Life’s just not fair.

A woman in the audience, who described herself as having fought for trans rights in the past, wanted to express concern about what the Tavistock had done. If you took the long view of the situation, it was actually quite serious, since it was now proved that puberty blockers were not reversible and did cause long term damage. Puberty could not just not just be stopped and started. They allowed her to speak until the point at which she suggested as a teen she might have also chosen to take herself off to the Tavi to have a mastectomy aged 12 or 13. There was much outrage, as you ‘literally couldn’t do that’ (which is true) but everyone roundly ignored that many of the Tavi’s patients were expressing the desire to do just that. And then did go on to do just that.

The American woman impressively managed to shout everyone down, informing us that she had started her puberty well before anyone had even spoken about sex or periods in schools and described puberty ‘as an extremely permanent thing,’ so what was the difference between the permanence of the two things (erm, bone thinning, infertility, heart disease, stunted brain development? I could go on). Playdon wanted to go back to the questioner’s faux pas – no one would get a bilateral mastectomy aged 13 on the NHS and then ‘you make a choice’. Regret rates for surgery were a fact of life. For example, the regret rates for prostate surgery were as high as forty percent (on Googling this appears to be more like 10-13 percent, it is those who had received robot assisted techniques, i.e. not the tried and tested way, who had a high regret rate).

Lucas reassured us that if she woke up one morning and decided not to be ‘trans-masculine person anymore’ but a woman, it was possible for her to reverse everything. She could simply stop testosterone. Breast implants could reverse a bilateral mastectomy. Voice training could reverse the pitch of your voice. It all cost time and money but it was all achievable.

Catterall said that there was much more informed consent for trans procedures than there were for cancer and heart procedures and this was about equity and then neatly rounded things up, the woman who had posed the concern in the first place having no right of reply.

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Conclusion

So yet another seminar, this time with the aim of educating the public, peddling utter falsehoods. And, yet again, young female students manipulated by much older tenured academics. It was interesting how biological sex was relied upon to make theories work.

On the film, it is definitely worth a watch if you are interested in the history. It serves as a reminder that the messaging has changed very little over the span of more than 70 years. How effective that narrative has been (is)!

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Post script

One the day I published this article I received a question asking if I was absolutely sure that Professor Playdon was a trans identified male. My hunch was that, I didn’t even question that assumption for a moment until it was pointed out there was no confirmation for this publicly. I suppose one should always go with instinct, but on reflection since there is no absolute confirmation that Playdon is trans based on the information available (i.e. just Google searches), I have edited the piece. However, I did then dig up that Playdon was involved with the Beaumont Society’s Gendys Conference as far back as 1996, writing Roads to Freedom and talks affectionately of Alice Purnell (founder of the Society). However, the writer is extremely careful not to show his hand, so on that basis I have desisted this one time. I think they call it stealth.

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