Trans Erasure and the Old Bailey
Today's guest post is from Catherine Butler. Butler is an academic and writer, living in Bristol, UK and blogs here.
http://www.transadvocate.com/trans-erasure-and-the-old-bailey.htmTrans erasure happens in all kinds of places, but it happens most to those who lack a voice: children, the poor and ill-educated, and the dead.
A young child gets bullied at school for preferring dolls to football. Teachers can know nothing about the child's future sexuality. Nor can they know whether the child is trans. Maybe the child just likes dolls, end of? But the form on which they record the incident has only one box, and it is marked "homophobic bullying". If she was a trans girl, that fact is erased.
[...]
Now we have BBC Radio 4′s series Voices from the Old Bailey, which draws on the Old Bailey transcripts to give us a glimpse of eighteenth-century criminal life. This week they did a programme about homosexuality. Except that one of the cases, about "Princess Seraphina" (the segment starts at 27.30) sounds to me as if it's actually about a trans woman. (If you want to look at the actual Old Bailey transcript for this case, it's here.)
