A Mystery Still: Historical (Trans) Gender Variance and James Miranda Barry

Professor Ann Heilmann will be at Barnard's Inn Hall on Tuesday 10 November, from 13:00 to 14:00, for a talk titled A Mystery Still: Historical (Trans) Gender Variance and James Miranda Barry. It's part of Gresham College's Invisible No More: Uncovering LGBTQ Histories and Identities series, so it's one of several sessions looking at queer lives that have been left out of the usual records.

The talk centres on James Barry (1789?-1865), a high-ranking nineteenth-century military surgeon. When Barry died, the posthumous speculation about their body became a sensation: claims emerged that Barry had been assigned female at birth, and that discovery sparked a wave of Victorian, twentieth-century, and contemporary representations of gender and sex identity. Heilmann will work through that speculation, tracing how Barry's life and death have been interpreted over the years.

Heilmann is a Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University, and her research draws on Victorian and contemporary literature, gender and sexuality, and the Gothic. That Gothic angle fits the subject well enough — the whole thing starts with a body and the secrets it was thought to hold.

The venue itself has a bit of its own history to lean on. Barnard's Inn Hall, the home of Gresham College, dates from the fifteenth century, with sixteenth-century linen-fold wood panelling and roof timbers that include the only surviving crown posts in Greater London. Down in the seminar room, some of the chalk-and-tile walling goes back to Roman London. Gresham has been providing free educational talks to the public since 1597, and this is one of them: it runs from 13:00 to 14:00 on Tuesday 10 November, and it's free.