The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes

The Transgender Trial That Threatened to Upend the British Establishment

The life story of an aristocratic Scottish trans man - whose secret 1968 legal case had a profound impact on trans rights for decades.

Ewan Forbes was born Elizabeth to a wealthy landowning family in 1912. As young as six, it was clear that the gender assigned to him at birth was incorrect. With the financial means of seeing specialist doctors in Europe and procuring synthetic hormones, Ewan was able to live as a boy and then as a man, even correcting the gender on his birth certificate in order to marry.

Then, in 1965, Ewan found himself in line to inherit the family baronetcy. But when a cousin contested the claim on the grounds that the inheritance could only be passed on to a male heir, Ewan was forced to defend his gender in an extraordinary court case, testing the legal system of the time to the limits of its understanding.

A never-before-told story based on years of archival research, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes draws on the fields of law, medicine, psychology and biology to reveal a remarkable hidden history, uncovering records that were considered so threatening that they were removed from view for decades.

©2021 Zoë Playdon (P)2021 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd