
The First Female Doctor in Britain Spent 56 Years Disguised as a Man - Petiver
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-first-female-doctor-in-britain-spent-56-years-disguised-as-a-man
======
saycheese
Strange how Atlas Obscura does not mention the doctor's letter regarding their
observations of James' body to issue a death certificate.

Given this information is on the first search result for "James Barry doctor"
which happened to be the Wikipedia entry for Barry, it makes me wonder why
this was left out.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Barry_(surgeon)#Death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Barry_\(surgeon\)#Death)

------
devereaux
What a beautiful story. Some people will say there is no discrimination
anymore. Personally, I don't buy that - and I'm speaking from personal
experience.

Even in the most enlightened places like HN, it is helpful to impersonate on
line the kind of person that others readers would expect me to be, vs. being
who I really am.

You know the old saying- on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog!

~~~
finid
_Some people will say there is no discrimination anymore._

Who's saying that? There's discrimination everywhere you look, and it doesn't
have to take the form detailed in the article.

~~~
libeclipse
I feel that the younger generation has very little to no feelings of prejudice
towards ethnic or sexual groups. I'm talking as a teenager myself. It's more
the older people that generally discriminate.

It's possible that, over time, the problem will solve itself.

~~~
nommm-nommm
This actually seems to be moving in the other direction...

[https://hbr.org/2016/09/why-more-american-men-feel-
discrimin...](https://hbr.org/2016/09/why-more-american-men-feel-
discriminated-against)

>Perhaps more important, though, researchers have found that men are prone to
seeing discrimination as a zero-sum game. That is, they believe that
discrimination against one group necessarily benefits another group and vice
versa, so any policy that benefits African-Americans, for instance, harms
whites, and any policy that benefits women amounts to discrimination against
men. Fifteen years ago, younger men — and women of all ages — overwhelmingly
rejected this view, but recent data shows that _younger white men_ are now
about as likely as older men to see discrimination as zero-sum.

~~~
chipperyman573
That might be because, in a lot of ways, it i̶s̶ can be true. If I (a white
man) don't get selected for a job because of a diversity program that requires
that _x_ % of workers be a PoC, it does actively harm me because I would have
(possibly) otherwise have been chosen for that job.

I'm not saying that this is always the case (or even that it usually is), but
this scenario wasn't true 15 or 20 years ago.

~~~
vertex-four
For the record, as a social justice type, I think that the solution to
diversity issues in the workplace isn't to enforce percentage figures - it's
to figure out why the workplace isn't attracting members of X group, change it
so that it is, and actively seek out applications from diverse communities. If
you're doing everything right, you should almost naturally wind up with a
diverse workplace. Of course, guess which of these choices is the cheapest and
requires the least amount of change in culture. One can also be imposed top-
down while the other requires cultural buy-in in the first place.

~~~
chongli
_you should almost naturally wind up with a diverse workplace_

That's a factual claim which implies that different groups of people are
uniform in their preferences and thus you'd find equal representation of
people across all fields. A lot of people find this to be an absurd
proposition with a mountain of evidence to contradict it.

If cultural and workplace issues were the explanation for disproportionate
representation in different workplaces then we would expect to see the
countries which implement the most solutions to those issues have the most
equal representations. In fact, what we see is the opposite. The Scandinavian
countries have the best policies (generous child care, long parental leave,
extensive anti-harassment and anti-discrimination training, board quotas) and
yet they have even more gender self-segregation by occupation than other
developed countries [0].

[0] [https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/gender-
socie...](https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/gender-
society/occupational-gender-segregation-pay-differences)

------
rustynails77
While everyone discriminates, I think the older generation is more in touch
with egalitarianism than your generation. I'll give you a few examples,

Today, people refuse to acknowledge that domestic violence has male victims.
This has NEVER happened in history. It's a modern phenomenon to reject victims
based on gender. Perform a Google search for the entire year of 2015. You will
not find one single picture of a male victim of domestic violence. Yet, ABS
puts the figure at about 30% of victims as being male. Some Australian
politicians have tried to legislate DV based on gender!

My local magazine has pictures of only girls on the front cover almost every
issue. 50 years ago, you would almost always have a girl standing next to a
boy.

We refuse to talk about suicide rates (80% male) or homelessness (75%+ male).
In fact, most Australian media will only talk about homelessness of women.
[http://abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/2049.0Mai...](http://abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/2049.0Main%20Features22011)

[http://www.mindframe-media.info/for-media/reporting-
suicide/...](http://www.mindframe-media.info/for-media/reporting-
suicide/facts-and-stats)

A government organisation in Australia called 1800respect bombarded the TV
with ads saying that the root cause of domestic violence was young boys "it's
a boy thing" was the catch cry. They purposely targeted the demographic with
the highest suicide rates who are most vulnerable to criticism.

Or Hillary Clinton's exit speech. What about this gem that not one media
outlet commented on. Hillary's message of exclusion was clear. If you're a
young boy you are not even worth mentioning.

"And to all of the little __girls__ who are watching this, never doubt that
you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in
the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams."
[http://www.vox.com/2016/11/9/13570328/hillary-clinton-
conces...](http://www.vox.com/2016/11/9/13570328/hillary-clinton-concession-
speech-full-transcript-2016-presidential-election)

These are all legacies that have been created within the last decade. Never in
history have we played such nasty gender games. It is the older people that
are banging the drums saying "what the hell is going on?", not the younger
generation. I am yet to hear younger people chime in to the conversation. I've
had some doozy arguments with younger people who talk about revenge (to which
I say "for what?") or "no, that's OK, that's equality".

Now, you could argue that it's not the younger generation that's controlling
the media. However, there are a lot of young people on Facebook and Snapchat.
Where's the outrage at the extreme prejudice we see today from the younger
people? It's just not there.

What may surprise you is that I don't support a men's movement because of how
toxic feminism is as a gender based movement. What I reject is the extreme
gender prejudice that is so popular today. Almost every media in the western
world is in the collusion and there appears to be no bar too low they will
stoop to.

When I see young kids in droves calling out The Verge, Ars Technica, The New
Yorker, BBC News, Fores, Vox, Vulture, Beast and all of the other prejudiced
media outlets, I will know that you are right. Until then, I will assume the
majority of people who give two hoots about egalitarianism are the older
generation of men and women.

~~~
vacri
> _In fact, most Australian media will only talk about homelessness of women._

Horseshit. This Australian sees most public discussion of homelessness as not
mentioning gender either way.

> _Yet, ABS puts the figure at about 30% of victims as being male._

Yes, men are subject to 30% of domestic violence, and it's an under-reported
problem. But the women cop _much more severe_ violence. The male victims don't
need refuges in the proportions that females

> _bombarded the TV with ads saying that the root cause of domestic violence
> was young boys "it's a boy thing" was the catch cry._

This is a gross misrepresentation of the DV ads. The core message of the ads
_wasn 't_ "it's a boy thing", but "we socially train boys to disrespect women,
let's do better".

> _Never in history have we played such nasty gender games._

Nah, places like the US and the UK simply didn't give women the vote until _a
couple of centuries_ after men had it. Or let women own property freely, or so
on and so forth. But since you're just talking about people saying 'girls'
instead of 'kids', well, fuck, men/boys have been the default in public
announcements for so long that it's ridiculous.

Yes, men have problems that feminism doesn't really recognise well (if at
all), but you have a chip on your shoulder that is distorting your
perceptions. It's bizarre that you get so worked up over a single utterance of
Clinton's, yet pretend that the long history of "boy's clubs" excluding women
from positions of power simply doesn't exist. As an Australian, are you aware
that women were legally paid 2/3rds the rate of men as late as the mid 1970s?
Or that as late as the 60s, women weren't allowed to secure loans without a
male guarantor? Hell, in some states in the US, there's no such thing as rape
if the couple are married. All of those things are a bit more than "girls, you
can do it!"

By all means, raise consciousness for men's issues, but don't take the petty
passive-aggressive swipe at women's issues in the process.

~~~
dang
> _Horseshit_ > _you have a chip on your shoulder_ > _It 's bizarre that you
> get so worked up_

Your account has a pattern of posting uncivil comments on HN, which we've
asked you many times to stop. It's not cool, regardless of how wrong or
annoying someone else is. It's also not cool regardless of how right your
views are. Indeed, you discredit those by being a jerk, so if you care about
these things, that is an extra reason to be civil.

Please fix this.

------
ourmandave
_It wasn’t until after Barry’s death in 1865, that the doctor’s secret was
finally discovered._

1865 was the year the American Civil War ended. In 1867 Dr. Quinn (Medicine
Woman) started her practice in Colorado Springs.

Coincidence?

~~~
saycheese
Appear more likely that if Dr. Quinn (a fictional character) was based on
someone, it would have been this person:
[http://twrpcactusrose.blogspot.com/2009/10/real-life-dr-
quin...](http://twrpcactusrose.blogspot.com/2009/10/real-life-dr-quinn-
medicine-woman.html)

Also might be worth noting that "While in London, she lectured extensively and
became the first woman to have her name entered in the British Medical
Register." \- which appears to conflict with the facts provided in the article
that's the subject of these comments.

------
dominotw
Now that the pendulum has swung to the other side with female doctors
outnumbering male doctors in NHS. There are questions being raised if this
"too many female doctors" phenomenon is contributing to doctor shortage faced
by NHS [1].

1\. The Problem With Female Doctors
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/12/27/the-
probl...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/12/27/the-problem-with-
female-doctors/#51fa7c3b3080)

~~~
vertex-four
Of course, the actual solution to that is to build a society and culture in
which men take as much of a role in raising their children - and yes, that
means making sacrifices re their work - as women do. Otherwise, we're still
clinging onto the old concept of the man being the breadwinner and the woman
looking after the children, just in a new age where it's not economically
possible to raise children on one wage alone, and that's bound to cause issues
as we see in that article.

~~~
kalleboo
_Of course, the actual solution to that is to build a society and culture in
which men take as much of a role in raising their children_

The Nordic countries have been pushing hard to move things in that direction.
For example, in 2013 in Sweden, 25% of the parental leave days reimbursed were
taken by men.

The thinking is that if both men and women end up taking as much parental
leave after a birth, it evens out the "will this person suddenly disappear
because a kid came into the picture" hiring equation.

~~~
rokosbasilisk
I can't see this working in americas cut-throat corporate culture, where
people are already afraid of taking vacations.

