‘Farewell to Frocks’ — ‘Sex Change’ in Interwar Britain: Newspaper Stories, Medical Technology and Modernity

Abstract

In 1938 the News of the World reported that a young woman, 24-year-old Doris Purcell, was about to undergo ‘a series of operations to have her sex changed to that of a man’. This was one of a whole string of stories in the Sunday newspapers in the 1930s, reporting both spontaneous change of sex and ‘sex change’ operations, mainly involving young women turning into men. Purcell was being treated at the Charing Cross Hospital in London, by ‘the famous surgeon, who has brought new hope and happiness into the baffled lives of many men and women who were desirous of changing their sex’.2 This and a number of similar reports clearly suggested that changing one’s sex was medically possible before the Second World War. Although the appearance of ‘sex change’ as a sensational newspaper story is often regarded as a development of the 1950s, the possibility of deliberately changing one’s sex was established in the British popular press as early as the interwar period, through a number of stories similar to that of Doris/ Donald Purcell above. This chapter will focus on the representation of sex change in British popular culture, analyse how it gradually developed from the years before the First World War through to the 1930s, and examine the incorporation of new scientific ideas about indeterminately sexed bodies into existing forms of explanation in the creation of this novel concept.