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In March of 1929, just three months after the banning of The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall, a woman many of us assume to be the supreme embodiment of female masculinity, complained to her literary agent about one Colonel Victor Barker, alias Valerie Arkell-Smith, discovered to have passed successfully as a man for several years: "I would like to see her drawn & quartered.... A mad pervert of the most undesirable type."(1) Like the obscenity trial of Hall's novel, the shocking revelations of Col. Barker's perjury trial received massive publicity: reporters scrambled to obtain as many details and photographs as possible about the extraordinary woman who masqueraded not only as a man but also as a husband and a decorated military hero (fig. 1). Barker's wife, Elfreda Haward, claimed not to have known her husband's sex until she read about it in the newspapers, even though she first knew Barker as a woman. Swept up into a tangled array of gender and sexual identities of her own making, Barker told of how she convinced her future wife and father-in-law that she had been a man all along -- a boy cross-dressed by her mother who desired a daughter. A living embodiment of film critic Annette Kuhn's dictum, "Change your clothes and you change your sex," Barker explained that she underwent "no surgical operation to turn me from woman into man, and physically I am, as I started out in life to be, 100 per cent woman. But for so long have I lived as a man, that I have come to think as one, behave as one, and be accepted as one."(2)
How strange that Hall, whose own masculine appearance was the source of continual comment throughout her life, would invoke the "p-" word to vilify another woman drawn to masculine clothing and to members of the same sex. Hall's intense derision seems even more anomalous when read against the dominant reaction of the tabloids, which ranged from amazement to curiosity and even admiration. Most newspapers reduced the life story of Col. Leslie Ivor Victor Gauntlett Bligh Barker, D.S.O. [Distinguished Service Order], to headlines such as "Exploits of Man-Woman" and "Secrets of Six Years' Masquerade: Amazing Impersonation" and peddled sensational accounts of Barker's life based...