Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"It bothers me that I keep seeing posts about James Barry talking about his 'secret.' As far as I can tell, he was quite open about his gender: he was openly a man, that was not in any way a secret. The physical configuration of his body was not a 'secret,' it was _private_.

"When the physical configuration of his body was made public expressly against his actual will, that wasn't 'a secret being discovered,' that was _his privacy being invaded_ and him being willfully misgendered after death, which trans folks are still threatened by today in 2019

"This is one of those areas where I feel like the language and framing is really important with how we talk about things"

-- Sandstone (@quartzen), 2019-02-15

[Context: Dr. James Barry (b. 1789, d. 1865) was a military doctor who, after his death was discovered to have been anatomically female, despite repeated expressed wishes that upon his death his body should not be examined and should be "buried in [the] bed sheets without further inspection". So he pretty clearly wanted to be remembered for all time as a man. But a new book coming out presents him as a gender-rebellious woman, constantly refers to him as "she", and basically erases the identity he cultivated for himself. Understandably, trans people are quite pissed off about this erasure.]