“A Special Law Just for Us:” Negotiating Gender Recognition in Postwar Britain

In December 1953, Michael Kim Harford and his friend Paddy O’Lynam were finalizing plans to emigrate from England. Like hundreds of thousands of their contemporaries, the young men had been lured abroad by the prospect of land, work, and a higher standard of living in Australia, where O’Lynam’s sister and brother-in-law had settled shortly after the Second World War. However, one formidable obstacle had to be cleared before they departed. O’Lynam and Harford had applied for Australia’s assisted migration scheme as husband and wife. And in the intervening years, Harford had—in his own words—“changed my sex.”

A poster promoting migration to Australia. “There’s a man’s job for you in Australia,” 1947. Image courtesy National Library of Australia.

What, precisely, this change entailed would prove a titillating puzzle for the British and Australian journalists who tracked the couple’s struggles over the next several months. As O’Lynam described it to the Sunday Pictorial’s Sidney Rodin and Barrie Harding, Harford’s transition had begun as a kind of sympathetic magic: Harford had been writing a novel about a girl who wanted “to become a man” when, according to O’Lynam, his body and psyche started to mirror those of his subject. Harford’s face began to “look mannish,” O’Lynam explained. “[He] became masculine, too, in [his] habits.” At Harford’s insistence, the pair found a “gland specialist” willing to prescribe a course of hormone therapy, and, thereafter, Harford seems to have eagerly embraced a working man’s identity: by 1953, the Pictorial noted, Harford carried a man’s National Insurance card and paid his income tax at a single man’s rate. But when he and O’Lynam went to Australia House to confirm their new status as “friends,” they learned that, despite Harford’s male social status, their marriage remained legally valid. This put the pair in an unusual bind. “We can’t get a divorce as Paddy is a Roman Catholic and it’s against his religion,” Harford lamented to the Sydney Evening Telegraph. “We can’t have an annulment because the marriage was consummated. Maybe they’ll have to create a special law just for us.”

Harford’s call for a “special law”—a neat statutory solution to the problem of his dual identities—highlights the fact that bureaucratic gender recognition in 1950s Britain was far from straightforward. Then, as now, sex was fundamentally tied to citizenship. In what Jane Lewis has termed the “strong male breadwinner state” that emerged after the Second World War, bureaucratic “manhood” or “womanhood” shaped Britons’ relationship to public spaces, law enforcement, healthcare, marriage, pensions and disability benefits. However, as Harford discovered, different institutions prioritized different factors in deciding who counted as a man or a woman. In practice, the rigid model of sexual complementarity upheld by the welfare state tended to bend when confronted with the messy, mutable reality of so-called “biological sex.”

Internal correspondence from the Ministry of National Insurance (MNI) helps illuminate the policy minutiae behind Harford’s sensational human-interest story. While the MNI’s origins date to 1911, its remit expanded dramatically in the postwar years; after 1948, identity cards issued by the ministry were required to access employment, benefits, and care at National Health Service facilities. A mismatch between a person’s appearance and the sex marker on their card—as with, say, a burly baritone called Michael who carried a “Special Woman’s” card—could lead to denial of employment or services. This risk was apparently on the mind of the welfare officer at the factory where Harford worked when, in November 1952, he advised Harford to request a new National Insurance card. At his instigation, Harford surrendered his old card at his local employment exchange and submitted a medical certificate as proof of his “change of sex.”

A National Insurance card for an employed woman, 1940. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

At this point, however, the MNI’s central legal division took up the case. Harford was not the first person to apply for a card using a new name and sex, but prior applicants had acquired amended birth certificates to support their claims. Harford’s birth certificate still labeled him as a girl. Nor did it seem likely that the General Register Office, which governed birth registration, would permit him to change it. In a series of test cases during the early twentieth century, the General Register Office had concluded that “true sex” could not be changed, only misidentified, and amending a birth certificate required a physician to attest that such a misidentification had occurred. It was a system designed to forcibly assign intersex bodies to one of two sexes, not a path to self-determination. And while sociologist David Griffiths has pointed out that the hazy definition of “true sex” permitted some non-intersex people to voluntarily acquire amended certificates, Harford lacked the resources to do so. Harford’s general practitioner testified in writing to his “male outlook,” but in a telephone interview with the MNI’s Resident Medical Officer James H. Ramage, she declined to elaborate on this term. Likewise, his endocrinologist would testify only to having prescribed Harford “male hormone,” leading Ramage to speculate that his “male characteristics are, at the most, not fully developed.”

Yet, remarkably, the legal officers who decided the case’s outcome opted to set aside the advice of Ramage and his fellow medical officers. Ramage had, in his summary of Harford’s medical reports, noted that Harford had consulted a solicitor before reaching out to the MNI, and this fact, together with the support of Kim’s employer and company welfare officer, seems to have tipped the scales in Harford’s favor.  Moreover, Harford’s request also signaled his desire to pay his National Insurance contributions at the higher male rate, which likely struck officers of an already cash-strapped welfare system as a laudable expression of civic duty and a net gain to the nation’s coffers.  Two weeks after his initial application Harford was issued a Class 1 men’s card and asked to make up the difference between the amount he had paid on his Special Women’s card and the new higher tax rate he was liable for—a limited, technical, and pragmatic decision which both officially recognized Harford’s male identity and deferred existential questions about Harford’s “true sex” that would come back to haunt him at the doors of Australia House.

Now, more than seventy years after Kim Harford’s and Paddy O’Lynam’s fifteen minutes of fame, their story feels both poignant and painfully relevant. In some ways, it remains hauntingly unfinished: when news coverage of the pair tapers off, in September 1954, Harford and O’Lynam were still living in England, still married, and still determined to emigrate together, now with O’Lynam’s girlfriend added to the menage. If Harford ever managed to amend his birth certificate, there is no record of it. We do know, however, that Harford’s negotiation with the MNI set an important precedent. Between 1953 and 1969, the MNI and its successor institutions issued more than 600 National Insurance cards with a sex marker that differed from the marker on the insured person’s birth certificate—a path to gender recognition that was partial and situational but no less significant for that. At a time when trans Britons’ legal personhood has been undermined in the name of the “plain and ordinary meaning” of manhood and womanhood, it is vital to restore the messy, open-ended stories of people like Michael Kim Harford to the public history of the British state.

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Adrian Kane-Galbraith is a PhD Candidate at the University of Washington, Seattle. Their dissertation "Public Bodies: 'Sex Change' and the State in Postwar Britain" examines the entangled bureaucratic and medical practices involved in gender transition between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1970s, and considers ways the circulation of people, narratives, and ideas between the UK and other states in the Empire and Commonwealth helped shape public assumptions about "biological sex." Their work has also appeared in the 2024 collected volume Men and Masculinities in Modern Britain.

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