Maybe, but maybe it was also the case that various people suspected or knew the truth but didn't do anything because she was good at her job and did not make a fuss or do anything that caused them to have to confront reality. Why expose someone as female when a) it would make you look stupid and b) it would leave you down a man (so to speak)?
If you look at the letter that Barry's physician sent back to the registry office regarding Barry's death certificate:
...Amongst other things [the woman who discovered Barry's sex postmortem] said that Dr Barry was a female and that I was a pretty doctor not to know this and she would not like to be attended by me. I informed her that it was none of my business whether Dr Barry was a male or a female, and that I thought that she might be neither, viz. an imperfectly developed man. She then said that she had examined the body, and was a perfect female and farther that there were marks of him having had a child when very young. I then enquired how have you formed that conclusion. The woman, pointing to the lower part of her stomach, said 'from marks here. I am a married woman and the mother of nine children and I ought to know.'
The woman seems to think that she had become acquainted with a great secret and wished to be paid for keeping it. I informed her that all Dr Barry's relatives were dead, and that it was no secret of mine, and that my own impression was that Dr Barry was a Hermaphrodite. But whether Dr Barry was a male, female, or hermaphrodite I do not know, nor had I any purpose in making the discovery as I could positively swear to the identity of the body as being that of a person whom I had been acquainted with as Inspector-General of Hospitals for a period of years.
His attitude is pretty clearly "yeah maybe I don't give a fuck."
A similar thing used to go on with gays and (especially) lesbians in the US military: everyone knew that particular people were homosexual, but as long as there was plausible deniability, they just pretended not to know. I actually heard a story about a man who tried to get separated from the military in the 90s (?) before DADT was abolished, so he went to one of his superiors and admitted that he was gay. And the superior basically did a slightly more subtle version of putting his hands over his ears and yelling "LALALA SORRY I CAN'T HEAR YOU" because he didn't want to deal with being whatever the military equivalent of understaffed is. (I forget if he eventually successfully separated this way or not)
I think the more restricted in terms of gender roles and homosexuality a society is, the more people are willing to indulge in polite fiction
in certain cases, and pretend that the two ladies who have lived together for 60 years are just 'good friends,' or that the suspiciously tiny man with the squeaky voice who is good at his job is truly a man.
I am not trying to paint the past as idyllic or anything, these people still had no legal protections, and even if they
were tolerated, they had to live knowing that they were only 'protected' by the whims of others. And in fact one of my problems with troonery is that it pushes us back towards this model of "everyone who defies gender roles
must be a member of the opposite sex; let's all play along and lie to each other and pretend that gender roles are great except for the few exceptions that don't fit.'
That said. This is apparently an actual photo of Barry:
Ver archivo adjunto 2834443
Can't see all that well, obviously, but I wouldn't clock that at a glance. She looks like she has male pattern baldness. Did she do that to herself? World's first Kikomi?
