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Thomas Baty

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Thomas Baty
Baty c. 1915–1920
Born(1869-02-08)8 February 1869
Stanwix, Cumberland, England
Died9 February 1954(1954-02-09) (aged 85)
Ichinomiya, Chiba, Japan
Resting placeAoyama Cemetery, Japan
35°39′58″N 139°43′20″E / 35.66605°N 139.72229°E / 35.66605; 139.72229
Other namesIrene Clyde, Theta
Education
Occupation(s)Lawyer, writer, activist
AwardsOrder of the Sacred Treasure (third class, 1920; second class, 1936)
Signature

Thomas Baty (8 February 1869 – 9 February 1954), also known by the name Irene Clyde, was an English transgender lawyer and expert on international law who spent much of their career working for the Imperial Japanese government.[1] In 1909, they published Beatrice the Sixteenth, a utopian science fiction novel, set in a postgender society. They also co-edited Urania, a privately printed feminist gender studies journal, alongside Eva Gore-Booth, Esther Roper, Dorothy Cornish, and Jessey Wade.[2]

Biography

Thomas Baty was born 8 February 1869, in Stanwix, Cumberland, England.[3] Their father was a cabinet-maker, who died when Baty was 7.[4] At school, they were a very gifted student and they were given a scholarship to study at The Queen's College, Oxford. They entered that establishment in 1888, and got their bachelor's degree in Jurisprudence in 1892. In June 1901 they received the degree of LL.M. from Trinity College, Cambridge.[5] They got their D.C.L. from Oxford in 1901 and their LL.D. from Cambridge in 1903.[6] Their expertise was in the field of international law. They taught law at Nottingham, Oxford, London and Liverpool Universities. At that time, they became a prolific writer on international law.[6]

In 1909, Baty published Beatrice the Sixteenth, their first book under the name Irene Clyde. Set in Armeria, it describes a genderless land of people with feminine characteristics who form life partnerships together.[7] In 1916, along with Esther Roper, Eva Gore-Booth, Dorothy Cornish, and Jessey Wade, Baty, again using the name Irene Clyde, founded Urania, a privately circulated journal which expressed their pioneering views on gender and sexuality, opposing the "insistent differentiation" of people into a binary of two genders.[8][9][10] They also wrote under the name Theta.[11]

Following the outbreak of the First World War, Baty took part in the establishment of the Grotius Society, established in London in 1915. As one of the original members of that society, Baty got to know Isaburo Yoshida, Second Secretary of the Japanese Embassy in London and an international law scholar from the graduate school of the Tokyo Imperial University. The Japanese government was at that time searching for a foreign legal adviser following the death of Henry Willard Denison, a US citizen who served in that position until his death in 1914. Baty applied for that position in February 1915. The Japanese government accepted their application, and they came to Tokyo in May 1916 to start their work. In 1920, they were awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, third class, for their service as a legal adviser.[12] They renewed their working contracts with the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs several times, until in 1928 they became a permanent employee of that ministry. During their work for the Japanese government, Baty developed the notion that China was not worthy of recognition as a state under international law, a view that was later used to justify invasion of China.[1] In 1936, they were awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, second class.[13]

In 1927, they were part of the Japanese delegation to the Geneva Naval Conference on disarmament. This was their only public appearance as legal adviser to the Japanese government, as the rest of their work involved mainly writing legal opinions. In 1932, following the Japanese invasion of North China and the formation of Manchukuo, Baty defended the Japanese position in the League of Nations and called to accept the new state to league membership. They also wrote legal opinions in defense of the Japanese invasion of China in 1937.[14]

In 1934, as Irene Clyde, Baty published Eve's Sour Apples, a series of essays in which they attacked sex-based distinctions and marriage.[7]

In July 1941, the Japanese government froze the assets of foreigners residing in Japan or any of its colonial possessions in retaliation for the same move against Japanese assets in the US, but Baty was exempt from this due to their service for the Japanese government. Baty decided to remain in Japan even following the outbreak of war between that country and the British Empire in December 1941. They rejected the efforts by the British Embassy to repatriate them, and kept working for the Japanese government even during the war. They defended the Japanese policy of conquest as a remedy to western colonialism in Asia.[1] In late 1944, they questioned the legitimacy of the pro-Allied governments established following the end of the German occupation in Belgium and France.[citation needed]

Following the Japanese surrender in 1945, the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs was considering indicting Baty for treason, but the Central Liaison Office (a British government agency operating in Japan) provided an opinion stating that Baty's involvement with the Japanese government during the war was insignificant. In addition, some legal advisers within the British government shielded Baty from possible prosecution on the grounds that they were too old to stand trial. Instead, the British government decided to revoke Baty's British citizenship and leave them in Japan.[citation needed]

Baty died of a cerebral haemorrhage in Ichinomiya, Chiba, Japan, on 9 February 1954.[15] The Emperor of Japan sent floral tributes, as did many of the people who knew Baty. Eulogies were delivered by Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, Foreign Minister Katsuo Okazaki, Saburo Yamada (President of the Japanese Society of International Law) and Mr Iyemasa Tokugawa (a former colleague). They were buried in Aoyama Cemetery, Tokyo, alongside their sister and mother.[4]

Baty's legal philosophy evolved as they worked for the Japanese government and was designed to justify Japanese actions of encroaching upon the sovereignty of China. Their main argument was that the recognition of states must depend on one factor alone – effective control by the military and security forces of the government over the state's territory, and not on preconceived definitions of what the state should be. For that reason they opposed the procedure of according de facto recognition, claiming that only final and irrevocable recognition must be used, and accusing the western international community of hypocrisy in using the de facto recognition as a means to allow some transactions with governments of states unfriendly to them without making the definite commitment to accept them fully into the family of nations.[16]

Personal life

Baty never married. Some evidence suggests that they hated sex, as they were disillusioned with Victorian sexual norms and disgusted by the then accepted notions of male domination over women.[17] They described themself as a radical feminist and a pacifist.[2] Baty lived out the gender non-conforming principles promoted by Urania, and for this reason is sometimes remembered as non-binary,[18] transgender or as a trans woman when discussed in connection with Urania.[9][10][19]

An important person in their life was their sister, who went with them to Japan in 1916, and lived with them until her death in 1945.[4]

Baty was a strict vegetarian since the age of 19; they were later Vice-President of the British Vegetarian Society.[4] They were also a member of the Humanitarian League.[20]

Works

Books

As Thomas Baty
  • Academic Colours (Tokyo: Kenkyusha Press, 1934)
  • International Law in Twilight (Tokyo: Maruzen Publishing Co., 1954)
  • Alone in Japan (Tokyo: Maruzen Publishing Co., 1959), memoirs
  • (ed. Julian Franklyn) Vital Heraldry (Edinburgh: The Armorial Register, 1962)
As Irene Clyde

Articles

  • "The Root of the Matter". Macmillan's Magazine. Vol. 88. 1902–1903. pp. 194–198.
  • "The Aëthnic Union". The Freewoman. 1 (14): 278–279. 22 February 1912.
  • "Can an Anarchy be a State?" American Journal of International Law, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Jul., 1934), pp. 444–455
  • "Abuse of Terms: 'Recognition': 'War'" American Journal of International Law, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Jul., 1936), pp. 377–399 (advocating the recognition of Manchukuo)
  • "The 'Private International Law' of Japan" Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Jul., 1939), pp. 386–408
  • "The Literary Introduction of Japan to Europe" Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 7, No. 1/2 (1951), pp. 24–39, Vol. 8, No. 1/2 (1952), pp. 15–46, Vol. 9, No. 1/2 (1953), pp. 62–82 and Vol. 10, No. 1/2 (1954), pp. 65–80

References

  1. ^ a b c Oblas, Peter (December 2005). "Britain's first traitor of the Pacific War: Employment and obsession" (PDF). NZASIA. 7 (2).
  2. ^ a b Daphne Patai & Angela Ingram, 'Fantasy and Identity: The Double Life of a Victorian Sexual Radical', in Ingram & Patai, eds., Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British Women Writers 1889-1939, 1993, pp. 265–304.
  3. ^ Venn, John (2011). Alumni Cantabrigienses: A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 190. ISBN 978-1-108-03611-5.
  4. ^ a b c d Murase, Shinya (1 January 2003). "Thomas Baty in Japan: Seeing Through the Twilight". British Yearbook of International Law. 73 (1): 315–342. doi:10.1093/bybil/73.1.315. ISSN 0068-2691.
  5. ^ "University intelligence". The Times. No. 36486. London. 20 June 1901. p. 6.
  6. ^ a b Oblas, Peter (1 March 2004). "Naturalist Law and Japan's Legitimization of Empire in Manchuria: Thomas Baty and Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs". Diplomacy & Statecraft. 15 (1): 35–55. doi:10.1080/09592290490438051. ISSN 0959-2296. S2CID 154830939.
  7. ^ a b White, Jenny (18 May 2021). "Jenny White reflects on the legacy of Urania". LSE Review of Books. Archived from the original on 18 May 2021. Retrieved 4 November 2021.
  8. ^ Tiernan, Sonja (2008). McAuliffe, Mary; Tiernan, Sonja (eds.). 'Engagements Dissolved:' Eva Gore-Booth, Urania and the Challenge to Marriage. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 128–144. ISBN 978-1-84718-592-1. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  9. ^ a b Delap, Lucy (2007). The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 279. ISBN 978-0-521-87651-3. the lawyer and transgender activist Thomas Baty, who advertised his 'Aethnic Union' in The Free-woman. This group explicitly rejected sexual differentiation...
  10. ^ a b DiCenzo, M.; Ryan, Leila; Delap, Lucy, eds. (2010). Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere. Springer. p. 183. ISBN 978-0-230-29907-8. Thomas Baty, a transgender lawyer and later, publisher of the private journal Urania, wrote to advertise his "Aethnic Union," a society dedicated to sweeping away the "gigantic superstructure of artificial convention" in sexual matters, and resisting the "insistent differentiation" into two genders...
  11. ^ Smith, Judith Ann (2008). Genealogies of desire: "Uranianism", mysticism and science in Britain, 1889-1940 (Thesis). University of British Columbia. doi:10.14288/1.0066742.
  12. ^ Oblas, Peter (1 March 2004). "Naturalist Law and Japan's Legitimization of Empire in Manchuria: Thomas Baty and Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs". Diplomacy & Statecraft. 15 (1): 35–55. doi:10.1080/09592290490438051. ISSN 0959-2296. S2CID 154830939.
  13. ^ Oblas, Peter (December 2005). "Britain's First Traitor of the Pacific War: Employment and Obsession" (PDF). New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies. 7 (2): 109–133.
  14. ^ "Timeline of Events in Japan". Facing History and Ourselves. Retrieved 29 November 2020.
  15. ^ "British Jurist Baty Dies at 85 in Japan". Honolulu Star-Bulletin. 9 February 1954. Retrieved 4 November 2021.
  16. ^ Baty, Thomas (1936). "Abuse of Terms: 'Recognition': 'War'". The American Journal of International Law. 30 (3): 377–399. doi:10.2307/2191011. ISSN 0002-9300.
  17. ^ Oblas, Peter (December 2001). "In Defense of Japan in China: One Man's Quest for the Logic of Sovereignty" (PDF). New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies. 3 (2): 73–90.
  18. ^ Moran, Maeve (16 October 2019). "Unheard Voices: Eva Gore-Booth". Palatinate Online. Retrieved 30 June 2020.
  19. ^ "Talking Back". Historic England. Retrieved 30 June 2020.
  20. ^ Weinbren, Dan (1994). "Against All Cruelty: The Humanitarian League, 1891-1919" (PDF). History Workshop (38): 86–105. ISSN 0309-2984. JSTOR 4289320.

Further reading

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