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 THE
Understanding
“This valuable book provides an innovative approach to trans health weaving
personal narrative, sociological theories and activist perspectives. It makes a
vital contribution to promoting health equality for trans people.”

SUCCESS
Julie Fish, Centre for LGBTQ research, De Montfort University, Leicester

“One of the most impressive trans books I’ve read. Pearce’s research
is of the utmost importance – her writing accessible, her conclusions
transformational.”
CN Lester, author of Trans Like Me

trans
“An important, well-researched and original book ... a rich blend of theory and

PARADOX
research ... A crucial new addition to the growing body of work on transgender
experience.”

health Ruth
Jack Halberstam, Columbia University, author of Trans*: A Quick and Quirky
Guide to Gender Variability

“This highly topical book addresses the key issues of trans people’s health,
identity, and social change. It offers an innovative critical perspective
regarding the medical establishment and trans activism.”

Graeme
Surya Monro, University of Huddersfield

Pearce Atherton
What does it mean for someone to be ‘trans’? What are the implications of

UNDERSTANDING
this for healthcare provision?

TRANS
Drawing on the findings of an extensive research project, this book addresses
urgent challenges and debates in trans health. It interweaves patient voices
with social theory and autobiography, offering an innovative look at how
shifting language, patient mistrust, waiting lists and professional power shape
clinical encounters, and exploring what a better future might look like for trans
patients.

HEALTH
Ruth Pearce is a Research Fellow in the School of Sociology and Social Policy
at the University of Leeds. Her research looks at patterns of inequality,
marginalisation, power, and political struggle in institutional contexts, with a
focus on trans, queer, and women’s issues.

ISBN 978-1-4473-4235-9
Discourse, power and possibility

www.policypress.co.uk
PolicyPress @policypress
9 781447 342359
Ruth Pearce
UNDERSTANDING TRANS HEALTH
Discourse, power and possibility
Ruth Pearce
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

Policy Press North America office:

University of Bristol Policy Press
1-9 Old Park Hill c/o The University of Chicago Press
Bristol 1427 East 60th Street
BS2 8BB Chicago, IL 60637, USA
UK t: +1 773 702 7700
t: +44 (0)117 954 5940 f: +1 773-702-9756
[email protected] [email protected]
www.policypress.co.uk www.press.uchicago.edu

© Policy Press 2018

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 978-1-4473-4235-9 paperback

ISBN 978-1-4473-4233-5 hardcover
ISBN 978-1-4473-4236-6 ePub
ISBN 978-1-4473-4237-3 Mobi
ISBN 978-1-4473-4234-2 ePdf

The right of Ruth Pearce to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise without the prior permission of Policy Press.

The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the author
and not of the University of Bristol or Policy Press. The University of Bristol and Policy
Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material
published in this publication.

Policy Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race,

disability, age and sexuality.

Cover design by Robin Hawes

Front cover image: istock
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd,
Croydon, CR0 4YY
Policy Press uses environmentally responsible print partners
This book is dedicated to the memory of

Deborah Lynn Steinberg,

who made it possible, in so many ways.

 Contents
List of abbreviations vi
Acknowledgements vii

Part One: The context of care 1

one Introduction: coming to terms with trans health 3
two Condition or movement? A genealogy of trans discourse 19
three Trans health in practice: conditions of care 51

Part Two: Navigating health services 81

four (Re)defining trans 83
five Trans temporalities: imagining a future in the time 119
of anticipation

Part Three: Changing trans health 157

six The politics of trans health: negotiating credible knowledge 159
seven Towards affirmative care 197

Appendix: notes on fieldwork, methods and ethics 209

List of key terms 219
References 227
Index 247

v
 Understanding trans health

List of abbreviations
CCG Clinical Commissioning Group
CRG Clinical Reference Group
DSM American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (followed by
edition number)
FTM female-to-male
GATE Global Action for Trans* Equality
GIC Gender identity clinic
GIRES Gender Identity Research and Education Society
GMC General Medical Council
GP general practitioner
GRA Gender Recognition Act 2004
GRC Gender Recognition Certificate
HBS Harry Benjamin Syndrome
HRT hormone replacement therapy
ICD World Health Organization, International Classification of
Diseases and Related Health Problems (followed by edition
number)
LGBT lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans
MTF male-to-female
NHS National Health Service
PCT Primary Care Trust
RLE Real Life Experience
WPATH World Professional Association for Transgender Health

vi
 Acknowledgements
How to begin?
In this book, I talk a lot about the collective work that goes into
bringing about change, and also touch upon how often people’s
actions are erased when a single author effectively takes credit for an
enormous group effort.
This book is my own work, the result of seven years of hard graft:
research, writing, revisions. I have kept working as friends have died,
due in part to failures in the NHS; I have kept working to pull myself
out of a deep depression as the emotional impact of these deaths
intersected with the stresses of precarious employment.
Nevertheless, I could not have done this without the support of so
many incredible people. If you have been in my life during this time:
thank you. I could not have done this without the inspiration of my
trans siblings, past and present: if you have written super-cool theory
or poems or songs, if you have spoken out or protested or organised
or simply survived on your own terms and lived to tell the tale for a
few glorious years: thank you. I could not have done this without the
contributions of so many research participants who bared their soul and
permitted me to tell their stories, and from the healthcare practitioners
who have dedicated their lives to helping others. Thank you.
I could not have done this without the support of academic colleagues
who believed in me and made me believe in myself. Deborah Lynn
Steinberg, Maria do Mar Pereira and Karen Throsby provided vital
guidance and mentorship. Mick Carpenter and Nickie Charles offered
me important opportunities and – on more than one occasion –
righteous and pure political solidarity. Igi Moon, Kat Gupta, Hel
Robin Gurney and Mark Carrigan were partners in crime as we plotted
excellent events and collaborative writing that helped me develop my
own ideas and deepen my understanding of the field. Zowie Davy,
Surya Monro, Sally Hines, Gaví Ansara, Michael Toze, Noah Adams,
Jaimie Veale and Beth Clark have inspired me to broaden my academic
horizons. Fellow PhD students Helen Anderson, Anna Reynolds
Cooper, Joanna Cuttell, Louise Ellis, Izzy Gutteridge, Morteza
Hashemi, Nazia Hussein, Michelle Kempson, Milena Kremakova,
Ana Paula Magalhaes, Joelin Quigley-Berg, Monae Verbeke and Reva
Yunus were true friends, from whom I learned so much. Thank you.
I could not have done this without the support of Policy Press, who
have provided me with robust support and genuinely believe in the
work they are doing. In particular, I have benefited enormously from

vii
 Understanding trans health

the advice, feedback and general cheeriness of editor Victoria Pittman,

production editor Jess Mitchell and editorial assistant Shannon Kneis.
Thank you.
I could not have done this without the support of numerous people
who read various early versions of this text, sometimes over and over
again. Maria, I have already mentioned you once, but truly you were
the queen of constructive feedback and none will best you. Freja
Sohn Frøkjær-Jensen, you were a harsh and unrelenting proof-reader
and I love you for it. Ro Bevan, Joanna Cuttell, Daniel William Kerr,
Frederique Retsema and Ben Vincent, your feedback was invaluable.
Thank you.
I could not have done this without the support of my friends,
particularly those with whom I lived, partied, schemed and/or played
music. Helen Thomas, I miss you immensely, now and forever,
but will never forget your joy and warmth. Jo Oldham, you are a
beautiful human being and an incredible friend. Greg the cat, you’ll
never read this because you’re a cat, but I’m grateful anyway. To you
and all the denizens of Trans Manor, and all my bandmates in Not
Right, Abandoned Life, Bad News Everyone, and Dispute Settlement
Mechanism, and all the people who came to Revolt and all the queers
and freaks and riot grrrls and rockers and revolutionaries and glorious
weirdos in the Midlands and beyond: thank you.
I could not have done this without the support of my parents, John
and Yvonne Pearce. I don’t know if you ever really understood what
I was studying or why, but I always knew I had your unconditional
love and backing regardless. Thank you.
Finally, I could not have done this without the support of my partner,
Dr Kirsty Lohman, the woman with a PhD in Punk. You have been the
most incisive academic colleague, the most dedicated reader, the most
excellent bandmate, the best of friends and true family. Thank you.

viii
 Part One
The context of care

1
 ONE

Introduction: coming to terms with

trans health

No social study that does not come back to the problems

of biography, of history and of their intersections within a
society has completed its intellectual journey. (C. Wright
Mills, 1959)

Trans health … who cares?

The origins of this book lie in the emergence of sexology in the late 19th century
as learned doctors sought to describe and categorise the deviant behaviour of
those who failed to conform to norms of sex and gender.

The origins of this book lie in the emergence of transsexualism in the 20th
century as a means by which individuals desiring social and physical transitions
from one gender to ‘the other’ could be identified and managed.

The origins of this book lie in the emergence of the trans movement in the
1990s, which sought to redefine and recognise a great range of gender-variant
identities and experiences as an aspect of human diversity, rather than as
conditions requiring treatment.

The origins of this book lie in the emergence of my own trans identity in
the early years of the 21st century, as a lonely teenager reaching out for solace,
support, understanding and community on the internet.

The origins of this book lie … in a warm Birmingham meeting room

gently devoid of character, in which I sat listening to a talk in March
2009. Spring was (in theory) just around the corner, but that wasn’t
apparent on this overcast day, with its blustery wind and occasional
showers of rain. I was attending a seminar entitled ‘LGBT Health …
Who Cares?’ as a representative of internet-based advocacy and support
group Trans Youth Network.1 The short walk to the seminar venue
from the train station had been somewhat challenging; I was in the
latter months of a gruelling recovery from surgery undertaken the

3
 Understanding trans health

previous summer, in what I imagined at the time to be the final stage

of my long transition from ‘male’ to ‘female’.
I sat through numerous fascinating presentations on LGBT
(lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans) health that day, delivered variously
by practitioners, social researchers and community activists. What
played on my mind after the event, however, was not any particular
item of information I had picked up. Rather, it was the expressed
lack of information on trans experiences of healthcare in the UK, as
exemplified in a report launched by Catherine Meads and colleagues
during the day.

[T]rans health research was originally going to be included

in this systematic review. Unfortunately, having trawled
through all of the literature, no peer-reviewed and published
UK-specific information was found on the general health
of trans people. (Meads et al, 2009: 81)

Meads and colleagues used trans as an umbrella term, incorporating a

range of identities and experiences such as ‘transsexual’, ‘transgender’,
‘transvestite’ and ‘crossgender’. This approach links ‘trans’ to both
medical accounts and collective social movement, with connections
forged on the grounds of shared marginalisation. The Trans Youth
Network conceptualisation of ‘trans’ was wider still, reflecting a move
towards open-ended accounts of gender-variant possibility within the
connected worlds of trans activism and academia. Similarly, Stephen
Whittle (2006: xi) describes trans identities as accessible ‘to anyone
who does not feel comfortable in the gender role they were attributed
with at birth, or has a gender identity at odds with the labels “man”
or “woman” credited to them by formal authorities’.
It is this ‘open’ definition of trans possibility that informs my own use
of the term throughout this book. I use it to refer to a wide repertoire
of identities, experiences and modes of gender presentation. The trans
possibilities found within this repertoire are frequently – but not always
– linked to a notion of social and/or physical transition. Transition
refers to a move away from the gender that was assigned to a person
at birth and towards to an alternative preferred, desired or felt state of
gendered (or non-gendered) being.
I learned from Meads and colleagues that studies on trans health
typically focus only on the transition process; indeed, the authors’
extensive review of UK literature failed to uncover a single peer-
reviewed article looking at trans health more widely. Moreover, I
would soon discover that research on the UK’s gender identity

4
 Introduction

services, which facilitate physical transition through the provision

of hormones, surgeries, hair removal and voice therapy, is also rare
outside of medical journals. This is because the intellectual field of
trans health has historically been shaped by the health professionals
who oversee gender identity services. However, in recent years a range
of alternative academic approaches to understanding categorisation,
diagnosis and treatment have begun to emerge from the trans rights
movement, reflecting and drawing upon similar contestations in the
realms of queer and feminist health (Hanssmann, 2016). It is within
this tradition that this book is located.
I left ‘LGBT Health … Who Cares?’ feeling inspired and motivated
to address some of the gaps that exist in our knowledge. As both a
trans patient and an active member of trans community groups, I
felt intimately connected to the challenges faced by trans people in
accessing healthcare services. My transition had been a lengthy process,
mediated by multiple appointments, assessments and waits. Having first
approached my general practitioner (GP) for help with feelings of severe
dysphoria at the age of 16, I eventually attended a first appointment at
London’s Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic over three years later.
I received approval for hormone therapy around the time of my 20th
birthday, and acquired my first hormone prescription after a further
wait of around four months. I was nearly 22 by the time I underwent
an operation to surgically reconfigure my genitals. In the meantime,
I found my GP to be indifferent at best and obstructive at worst; he
was dismissive in appointments, denied me access to the regular blood
tests required by the gender clinic and continued to refer to me as male
in my medical records.
This book is written from a sociological perspective. Like many
sociologists, I am interested in the connection between ‘personal
troubles’ and wider ‘public issues’ (Mills, 1959: 8). Back in 2009, I
had yet to embark on my training as a researcher, but was already
aware that my own frustrating experience of long waits, extensive
assessment procedures, ignorance and rudeness within healthcare
settings paled in comparison to challenges faced by many of my
peers. I felt that my transition, long and difficult as it was, had been
a relatively straightforward process. This was facilitated by my luck in
the ‘postcode lottery’ of local public health commissioning bodies, and
the manner in which my relatively normative (white, middle-class,
abled, English) female gender identity happened to ‘fit’ the existing
diagnostic models and modes of assessment. By contrast, I knew
trans people who had spent years fighting for access to specialist care,
and others – particularly those whose gender identities could not

5
 Understanding trans health

be categorised straightforwardly into a male/female binary – who

had trouble meeting the clinical criteria for treatment even as they
experienced severe dysphoria. Within the wider realm of healthcare
beyond the gender identity services, an enormous number of trans
people I knew had been insulted or harassed (sometimes sexually)
by health professionals, and denied routine treatments for all kinds of
ailments due to their trans status.
I therefore realised there was a vital need to better understand why
and how this happened, in order to address the issues reported by trans
patients. I embarked on a research project that came to define my life for
many years. I immersed myself in trans people’s stories and experiences,
their (our) hopes, fears and dreams. I followed passionate arguments
and heated debates within online activist groups and carefully read
health practitioners’ accounts of working with trans patients. This
book is the culmination of that project. It offers an insight into some
of the narratives and contentions that characterise conversations around
trans health, and I hope that it will be useful to patients as well as
practitioners, activists as well as academics.
While my research focused primarily on trans healthcare services in
a UK setting, many of the ideas and debates I draw upon and discuss
in this book have a wider relevance. In addressing issues of power,
identity, language and contestation with regard to health, I draw upon
and contribute to international conversations about trans rights and
access to services. This book will be particularly relevant to readers in
countries with a strong tradition of public health and institutionalised
gender identity services, but also speaks to ideas and concerns identified
by scholars and activists in other contexts, particularly the United
States. I also draw upon insights from wider critical health literatures,
having noted parallels between patient activism in trans health and in
other arenas, such as AIDS and cancer care. In turn, this book will be
useful to social scholars of health working outside of the specific arena
of transgender studies.
This book is not concerned with establishing what gender ‘is’ (or,
for that matter, what sex ‘is’), or how this relates to trans identities,
experiences and bodies. I regard both gender and sex as socially
constructed categories with a complex relationship to biological
difference, following theorists such as Judith Butler (1999) and Julia
Serano (2007). My deeper thoughts on the matter of gender, sex and
trans discourse would form the basis of an entirely separate book!
However, this work is based on an acknowledgement that trans
people are real, valid and deserving of affirmation, and the observation

6
 Introduction

that trans people experience health inequalities that require specific

attention.2

Discourse, power and possibility

I soon came to realise that it is insufficient to merely fill a perceived
‘gap’ in academic knowledge on social experiences of trans health.
If it was enough simply to note that trans people face widespread
discrimination and ignorance in public life, then many of the troubles
trans people face might have been tackled decisively some time ago.
Instead, I began to seek a deeper understanding of how and why the
troubles that trans people face have emerged.
Many such troubles are not rooted in malice on the part of health
professionals, but can instead by linked to different understandings
of what it means to be trans and/or gendered. For example, the broad
scope of trans possibility as understood by writers such as Whittle and
grassroots organisations such as Trans Youth Network contrasted with
more rigid forms of categorisation employed by the health professionals
who assessed me for gender dysphoria at the gender clinic. Similarly,
my understanding of myself as a woman contrasts with my former GP’s
view that I was ‘really’ a man, as evidenced by his use of male pronouns
to refer to me in my medical notes.
This book therefore goes beyond simply chronicling the challenges
faced by trans patients. I ask why differences of perspective occur, how
they might be characterised and in what ways they might be linked
to the complex interaction of ‘medical’ and ‘trans’ ideas both historic
and contemporary.
The main concept I use to make sense of this is discourse. Discourse
refers to the authoritative ways in which we talk about ideas within and
as a society. This concept can be linked to the operation of power, and
the manner in which some ways of living might seem possible while
others do not. Discourses do not simply describe the world: they also
work to reproduce how the world is seen and experienced (Foucault,
1978). This does not necessarily mean that discourses come from a
place of power. While some discourses are ‘hegemonic’ – meaning that
they hold sway as the predominant way of seeing the world within a
particular social context – counter-discourses may also emerge from
the social margins. For example, the hegemonic discourse around
gender within Western society holds that there are two and only two
genders – female and male – and that everyone ‘fits’ into only one
of these categories. This is not simply an idea that describes how the
world works: it is an idea with power, shaping how the world works.

7
 Understanding trans health

By contrast, trans, feminist and decolonial counter-discourses of non-

binary gender draw attention to the diversity and complexity of both
biology and social life, enabling us to recognise a world that is not
divided simplistically between two overarching ideals of sex and gender
(Kessler and McKenna, 1978; Bornstein, 1994; Patel, 2017). As I shall
show in this book, such ideas have come to challenge the hegemony
of binary gender discourse.
Through analysing discourse, I seek to centre the importance of
narrative in generating possibility and mediating relations of power.
In doing so, I employ a poststructuralist framework. Poststructuralism
‘asks us to consider the ways in which subjects are constituted in and
through social institutions and the language employed by these …
bodies’, thereby enabling scholars to ‘examine the constitution of
subjectivity in social life’ (Namaste, 2000: 16–17). However, I also
follow poststructuralist transgender studies scholars such as Surya
Monro (2005), Sally Hines (2007) and Zowie Davy (2011) in looking
beyond language in and of itself, linking my discussion of discourse to
an acknowledgement of the material conditions of trans health.3

Condition and movement

In this book, I ask two key questions about discourses of trans health:

1. How are ‘trans’ possibilities produced, reified and legitimated

through health discourses and practices?
2. How are discourses of trans health negotiated within and between
trans community groups, trans activists and health professionals?
How are they disseminated, and how are they contested?

These questions aim to uncover how trans identities and experiences,

along with conceptualisations of trans health, are understood in
multiple contexts. My purpose is to grasp the social processes at play
in encounters where trans patients feel marginalised, misunderstood
and/or discriminated against. With these questions I also recognise
that (like this book) the term ‘trans’ and concepts of ‘trans health’ have
multiple points of origin and definition.
The first question asks how trans meanings and possibilities are
produced, reified and legitimated through health discourses and
practices. In unpacking and responding to this question, I describe
‘trans’ in terms of two intersecting discursive repertoires: ‘trans as
condition’, and ‘trans as movement’.

8
 Introduction

Discourses of trans as condition frame ‘trans’ as fixed and fixable.

‘Trans’ in this sense is also resolvable: whether as medical condition or
social condition, it can be clearly defined and delineated, while the
problems it raises can be addressed and managed in a particular way.
Fixing or resolving ‘trans’ typically entails a certain level of expertise: in
this context, ‘trans’ can be understood as conditional, in that it requires
identification from a qualified expert such as a health professional,
with reference to a set of quite static criteria that are usually rooted in
binary conceptions of gender.
Discourses of trans as movement recognise the potentiality and
actuality of changes to theory, subjectivity, embodiment, space and time
taking place through continual creation, fluidity and world-building.
Rather than being a categorical matter, ‘trans’ in this context describes
an open-ended ‘movement across a socially imposed boundary away
from an unchosen starting place’ (Stryker, 2008: 1). Trans as movement
can hence refer to collective social movements – that is, ‘politicised
communities of identity’ (Stryker, 2006: 5) – but I also use the phrase
to describe queer discourses of individual identity and experience.
Expertise on ‘trans’ possibility is in this context typically located in
‘the movement’, be that social movement or individual subjectivity
(Green, 2017).
Movement-oriented understandings of trans identity and experience
– in particular, the notion of trans itself – emerged from critiques
of trans as condition by academics such as Sandy Stone (1991) and
activists such as Silvia Rivera (2002) and Leslie Feinberg (1992). These
interventions are often said to have heralded a change in medical
paradigm. For instance, Walter Bockting (2009: 104) describes ‘a
shift from a disease-based model (something went wrong during
the individual’s development that needs to be corrected) toward an
identity-based model of transgender health’. However, accounts such
as this risk creating a simplistic binary, in which ‘trans’ is understood
as disease/pathology on the one hand, or social/political identity
on the other. While the research findings discussed in this book do
broadly support Bockting’s account of a discursive shift, I also show
how conditional notions of trans as pathology continue to powerfully
frame both the provision of healthcare services and the construction of
trans subjectivity. Moreover, through the wider concept of ‘condition’,
I seek to explore the discursive links between medical accounts of
disease and pathology, trans notions of fixed and definable identity
and, briefly, gender essentialist and radical feminist accounts of trans
impossibility. In describing ‘discursive repertoires’, therefore, I intend

9
 Understanding trans health

to broadly categorise ideas on the basis of discursive similarity, while

also creating space for difference and contestation within categories.
The second question asks how discourses of trans healthcare provision
are negotiated within and between trans community groups, trans
activists and health professionals. Like Maria do Mar Pereira, I regard
negotiation as an ongoing social process in which change arises from
constant and continual interventions.

Negotiation is formed by the [Latin] particle neg (translating

as ‘not’), and otium (‘leisure’ or rest) ... and so literally means
‘there is no rest’. Thinking of [the negotiation of meaning]
as something that allows no rest helps to underscore the
fact that its production is continuous and never complete,
and also that it demands active (boundary-)work. (Pereira,
2017: 61)

Trans health can be negotiated on a personal level as patients and

practitioners navigate practical, emotional and temporal challenges
within healthcare systems; it can be negotiated on a collective level
as community members engage in identity work and/or practices of
mutual support and care; and it can be negotiated on a political level
as various parties seek particular changes or continuities within the
realm of service provision. In light of these complexities, I follow Kyra
Landzelius (2006: 536) in understanding ‘patienthood’ not simply
as a site of ‘affliction, treatment and research’ but also as a ‘field of
contention’ and the possible basis for ‘experiment[s] in power-sharing’.
When I refer to people as ‘patients’, therefore, I do not simply regard
them as passive recipients of care, but as active agents involved in the
work of negotiation.

The research project

My account of the discursive repertoires of ‘trans as condition’ and
‘trans as movement’, plus the negotiation of these discourses by multiple
groups, is grounded in the findings of an ethnographic research project
undertaken between 2010 and 2017. Ethnography involves immersive
participant observation within a particular social context, with the
aim of understanding and providing an account of the culture and
behaviour in this setting.
The fieldwork for this project was undertaken on the internet, in
recognition of the great importance of online communities for bringing
together the largely disparate and frequently invisible trans population

10
 Introduction

(Whittle, 1998; Shapiro, 2004). Internet ethnography is a well-

established form of social research (Hine, 2000; Kendall, 2002), and
this approach enabled me to observe conversations taking place within
trans community spaces and activist groups over an extended period
of time. It also provided me access to a wide range of blogs and media
articles written by trans people, alongside websites and documents
produced by and for health professionals and service providers.
With ethnography requiring immersive participation on the part of
the researcher, I acquired data in a manner informed by the networked
nature of the internet, through pursuing the connections that could
be made by any individual navigating trans spaces online. I therefore
allowed myself to also encounter new research sites as I followed links
from one internet space to another. In contrast to the rigid sampling
techniques typically used within quantitative ‘big data’ exercises, this
was a form of intentionally human mediation, reflecting the ‘messiness’
of everyday social interaction (Postill and Pink, 2012; Lohman, 2017).
In this sense, my behaviour as researcher was shaped by my role as a
participant in trans spaces and discourses; a situation both aided and
complicated by my pre-existing connections to trans communities.
I used one primary criterion to prevent information overload and
ensure focus in my findings: I focused on posts, comments, articles
and documents that related specifically to healthcare provision for trans
people, in terms of the provision of medical services by a public or
private individual or institution.
A number of sites and spaces operated as ‘starting points’ for research.
Two of these were UK-based trans web forums, which I selected from
the first page of results displayed by a search engine. I also started my
fieldwork from a small number of Facebook activist groups in which
I was already a member. To ensure a range of voices and perspectives
from across the trans spectrum, this original selection included forums
and groups that, together, hosted a diverse range of trans users. From
these starting points, I acquired links to over 100 websites and social
media spaces, including additional activist Facebook groups, Twitter
hashtags, blog posts, media articles, National Health Service (NHS)
websites, reports and documents. These constituted the ethnographic
field for the purposes of participant observation and analysis.
In discussing my research findings, I divide the areas in which
fieldwork took place into three broad sub-‘spheres’ from within what
I regard as a wider ‘transphere’ of online spaces. These are the ‘activist’
sphere, the ‘community’ sphere and the ‘practitioner’ sphere. I do not
intend to claim that there is any necessary distinction between either
individuals or text within these three areas; indeed, there are plenty

11
 Understanding trans health

of activists who participate in community groups or have written

documentation as/for practitioners. Instead, I use these overarching
groupings to make sense of broad trends and some of the ways in which
particular spaces and platforms might facilitate particular activities at
a particular point in time.
The activist sphere consists of social media space and blog/media
articles created with the explicit intention of discussing political
issues for trans people and/or organising collective action. For the
purposes of this project, the field included seven Facebook groups,
the Twitter hashtag #transdocfail (along with related hashtags such as
#transdocwin), and a great many articles written for blogs and media
organisations. A wide range of political tactics were discussed and/or
implemented by individuals organising within these spaces, including
protests/pickets, letter-writing campaigns, petitions, information/
awareness drives, event organisation, event disruption and the lobbying
of politicians.
For research within the community sphere, I primarily followed
discussions taking place on two internet forums (also known as
message boards). Some of the activist spaces discussed in the previous
section were also arguably communities in their own right (or one
constituent part of a larger community). However, I use ‘community’
in this context to refer to the manner in which the forums visited
for fieldwork primarily operated as social spaces: their purpose was
specifically to provide a basis for community in terms of people with
a shared experience being able to gather and talk in a casual manner.
This differed from the more purposeful, action-oriented nature of
spaces within the activist sphere.
The practitioner sphere consists of information written both
by and/or for medical practitioners on the subject of trans health. I
encountered relatively little public discussion involving practitioners.
Within this sphere I therefore focused largely on informative websites
and documents addressing issues around trans health from the
perspective of health professionals within the UK. These included
guidance and advice documents for NHS staff and patients, clinical
guidance and protocols, gender clinic websites and information on
public consultations. The majority of this material was, therefore,
written by non-trans professionals who work with trans people.
However, there were a number of key documents written and/or
influenced by trans professionals and activists.
This book includes a number of indicative quotes from trans people
talking about their experiences, used to illustrate common discursive
themes present within the field. These are drawn from across the activist

12
 Introduction

and community spheres, as well as from a number of publications

produced by other writers. All participants in this project were adults,
meaning that I focus largely on adults’ experiences and accounts
of healthcare services in this book. However, some younger adults
(particularly those in their late teens) did reflect on recent experiences
of child and adolescent services. While some of these accounts are
now a few years old, I have ensured that the quotes used in this book
reflected discourses and contemporary reported experiences that I
continued to observe into late 2017.
I obtained informed consent from these research participants to
reproduce quotes from the web forums as well as Facebook and Twitter.
I have taken care to provide anonymity to participants from private
spaces, which include the web forums and several ‘closed’ and ‘secret’
Facebook groups. I use pseudonyms to refer to these individuals, and in
some cases have redacted certain information or quoted my fieldwork
diary to ensure that their privacy is protected. In contrast, I wish to
openly acknowledge the contribution of individuals writing in public
contexts such as Twitter, blog posts and media articles. I therefore
refer to these individuals with the usernames they chose themselves.
All quotes have been reproduced faithfully where possible in order to
retain the original ‘feel’. For instance, in some cases a limited use of
punctuation serves to potentially reflect an individual’s anxiety. Further
discussion of my methodological decisions in these matters can be
found in the Appendix.
I myself am present in the research findings. My data corpus includes
blog posts, Facebook comments and tweets that I wrote at various
points in the past, observed for the project in instances where they were
linked to by other participants. I am further present in my interaction
with the field as researcher, my creation of meaning through analysis
of data and my own experiences as a trans woman who has accessed
a range of healthcare services in the UK, and I draw analytic insight
from this. In this sense, my research project was also autoethnographic.
Autoethnography combines ‘ethnography’ with ‘autobiography’,
thereby drawing upon personal experience to understand the social
world (Ngunjiri et al, 2010). Like Heewon Chang (2016), I seek to
combine the artful, emotive insight of ‘evocative’ autoethnography with
a committedly ‘analytic’ approach to the social world. I thus position
myself as a full participant in the research setting, becoming visible as
such through personal vignettes such as the story about my experiences
at the ‘LGBT Health … Who Cares?’ event. This approach draws
upon a substantial intellectual tradition of autobiographical insight
from trans academics,4 and provides an important contribution to

13
 Understanding trans health

our theoretical (and, by extension, material) understandings of social

phenomena (Anderson, 2006).
I do not regard ethnography (let alone autoethnography) as a means
to absolute authority in describing the material world; after all, the data
generated through the project described in this book broadly represents
what is said about trans health. However, I work from the foundational
assumption that ‘[l]anguage and speech do not mirror experience;
they create experience’ (Denzin, 1994: 296, emphasis in original). In
conducting this study, therefore, I set out how understandings of trans
health that shape people’s experiences of the world are constructed
through discussion and representation, in both everyday and institutional
contexts.

Structure of the book

This book is located within the field of transgender studies. The
field coalesced in response to the othering of trans people within
academic literatures prior to the 1990s, with trans people presented
as deviant bodies, medical curiosities and/or metaphorical figures
stripped of agency in a range of disciplines (Stone, 1991; Stryker,
2006). Transgender studies therefore speaks to discourses around trans
possibility and the lived experiences of trans people, but also looks
beyond these in demonstrating the relevance of ‘trans’ insights for wider
understandings of social and political phenomena (Stryker and Aizura,
2013). It is an interdisciplinary field, and this is an interdisciplinary
book: while I write from a broadly sociological perspective, I also draw
upon feminist theory and speak to literatures of trans health within
psychological, psychiatric and therapeutic fields.
The next two chapters of this book provide some initial responses to
the questions I have raised about discourse, power and possibility. Like
this chapter, they provide an important context for later discussions, by
describing the historical and social background to activist, community
and practitioners’ discourses and experiences of trans health.
Chapter Two offers a genealogical account of the discursive
repertoires of trans as condition and trans as movement. In this chapter,
I describe the negotiation of differing positions on trans condition and
movement by health professionals and radical feminists as well as trans
patients, activists and academics. In addition to providing a roughly
chronological history of ideas, I explore how contemporary trans
possibilities have emerged through categorisation and contestation,
and explain why medical discourse has played a particularly important
role in this process.

14
 Introduction

Chapter Three focuses on UK healthcare provision in the 2010s. In

this chapter, I describe the material context of my research project in
terms of both public and private healthcare provision, making visible
the systems that trans patients must negotiate to access care. I outline
the medical pathway and extensive assessment procedures for the
trans ‘condition’ with reference to clinical guidance and public health
documents, while also examining the challenges faced by patients
outside of trans-specific services. I show how this context has been
shaped by recent political events such as the passage of the Equality
Act 2010 and the Health and Social Care Act 2012, as well as by
international guidance such as the World Professional Association for
Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care. The discussion is
framed by a description of the power differentials that persist between
practitioner and patient.
Two chapters then draw on my research findings in depth, to show
how trans people navigate medical discourses and systems. Chapter
Four looks primarily at how a considerable number of the ideas
and conflicts discussed within Chapter Two remain relevant, as the
discursive repertoires of trans as condition and trans as movement
continue to operate within the contemporary settings of trans health
in the UK. I examine how trans possibilities are both constructed and
constrained within and between health services and trans community
groups. I draw upon the concept of cisgenderism to show how some
trans narratives are rendered impossible within certain healthcare
settings, due to the power differential between practitioner and patient.
I link this process to the challenges that many trans patients encounter
in accessing treatment in a range of settings, with reference to the
discursive clashes that can occur when health professionals and trans
patients subscribe to different notions of trans possibility.
Chapter Five focuses on transitioning patients’ collective temporal
engagements with systems of healthcare provision that prioritise
understandings of trans as condition. This chapter unpacks the
emotional experience of waiting, theorising this through a model of
‘anticipation’. I examine how the temporal and emotional process of
anticipation can shape patients’ hopes, worries and despairs, as well as
a common mistrust of health professionals. My analysis here utilises
theories of trans and queer temporality to show how transitioning
patients draw upon community discourses in negotiating the often
stringent requirements of assessment and diagnosis.
The last two chapters of the book look at processes and possibilities
of change for trans health. In Chapter Six I provide an analysis of
‘epistemic politics’: that is, the politics of knowledge production. I

15
 Understanding trans health

focus particularly on the process of trans patient advocacy, looking

at how individual interventions may contribute to collective efforts
for discursive and material change. Drawing on examples from the
depathologisation movement, I further examine how trans activists
have sought to challenge the practitioner/patient power differential
in both the micro-setting of the healthcare encounter and the macro-
setting of medical discourse. I demonstrate that these challenges are
most successful when trans knowledges are reproduced and established
as credible through continual acts of mutual recognition and iterative
citation across multiple spaces and contexts.
Finally, in Chapter Seven, I conclude the book with a summary of
my arguments, relating these to the two main questions raised in this
introduction. I also take a further look at the discursive power wielded
by gender identity specialists, and relate this to the manner by which
‘trans health’ is constituted through the operation of this power. I argue
that to best meet the needs of trans patients it is necessary for healthcare
service providers to take a more affirmative approach that empowers
trans people to more easily take decisions about their own lives.

A transgender tipping point?

The 2010s have been a time of both great change and considerable
continuity for trans people. Even as I emerged from a seminar into the
grey Birmingham streets with a sense of optimism back in 2009, I could
not have anticipated the shifts in public, medical and trans discourse
that were to take place over just a few years. The Equality Act 2010
enshrined in law protections from harassment and discrimination for
a great many trans people in most areas of public life. The once quite
private concerns of trans community and activist groups have become
very public, buoyed by the opportunities afforded to them by new
platforms in the mainstream and social media. Terms such as trans,
genderqueer and non-binary have found their way into dictionaries
and newspaper columns, as trans people appear more regularly on
television and in film, in dramas, on reality television and in news
programmes. In 2014, US magazine Time featured out trans woman
and Orange Is The New Black actress Laverne Cox on its front cover,
and declared that ‘the transgender tipping point’ was at hand; a claim
that has since been repeated or interrogated by numerous columnists
within the UK media. As I shall show, this very public emergence of
trans has also been accompanied by the growing presence and influence
of trans people and trans ideas within the sphere of health.

16
 Introduction

However, as I cast my gaze back, the recent past disappointingly

resembles the decades which preceded it. Yes, the present ‘tipping
point’ is perhaps unprecedented in offering some acknowledgement of
contemporary movement-oriented trans discourse (as opposed to the
more condition-oriented discourses of transvestism and transsexualism
that dominated popular discussion in the 20th and early 21st centuries).
However, the emergence of high-profile US trans celebrities only
echoes the media frenzy over ‘GI turned blond bombshell’ Christine
Jorgensen in the 1950s, whose transition attracted more attention in
the news than either the Korean War or the development of the polio
vaccine (Stryker, 2008). Moreover, an increased public awareness
of trans people and the establishment of new legal rights have not
necessarily led to an immediate improvement in the lives of many trans
people, particularly with the realm of health. As Aren Aizura (2017:
607) argues, ‘recognition may have arrived, but justice for transgender
people has not yet begun’. Where gains have occurred, they been
uneven, mediated by geography, national and clinical politics and
intersecting inequalities on the grounds of class, ethnicity/race, dis/
ability and sexuality (Raha, 2017).
It is no coincidence that I write this book as a white, middle-class
person. I have encountered significant difficulties as a trans woman
within the academic world as in healthcare systems, but my class
and race privilege have aided me enormously in overcoming these
challenges. To ensure real, progressive change, it is vital that those of
us with any form of privilege use it to lift others up, rather than simply
to pursue our own personal goals. I hope that my work within and
beyond this book might contribute in some small way to the erosion
of intersecting inequalities, helping us to build collectively towards
trans liberation.
The very gradual, complex process of change described in the
chapters that follow highlights the difficulty and constant challenges
of this collective work. There is not one easy narrative in my tale of
trans health, with a clear beginning and a neat set of findings and
conclusions. However, I identify stories that can help us to understand
the shape of the field, the origin and journey of ideas, the interplay
of discourse and material experience. The ‘tipping point’ is too blunt
a narrative for this task, denoting as it does a supposed point in time
where one state simply gives way to another. By contrast, the threads
of ‘condition’ and ‘movement’ – and negotiation within and between
the two – enable a coherent and productive story to emerge, even
as this book delves deep into the myriad investments and multiple
complications of trans health.

17
 Understanding trans health

Notes
1
Trans Youth Network was a semi-autonomous branch of Queer Youth Network,
a primarily internet-based activist and community support group run by and for
young LGBTQ people in the UK during the 2000s. A different network with a
similar name (The National Trans Youth Network) was created by an alliance of
youth groups in 2013.
2
I do, however, regard ‘reality’ as socially constructed too, a matter discussed in detail
in later chapters of this book. This approach does not undermine the fundamental
importance of recognising and affirming people’s experiences: rather, it is a
philosophical claim about how we perceive the world and generate knowledge.
3
I generally use ‘transgender’ interchangeably with ‘trans’ in this book, as both
are employed in a range of settings as umbrella terms and/or fluid categories in a
manner similar to that described by Whittle (2006). While my own preference is
for ‘trans’, context occasionally dictates that ‘transgender’ is more appropriate. For
instance, given the great range of words that include the prefix ‘trans-’, ‘transgender’
is often used for cataloguing academic work within contemporary online databases
and search engines; hence ‘transgender studies’. Similarly, as I discuss in Chapter
Two, the ‘trans movement’ initially used ‘transgender’ to denote solidarity between
gender-variant people.
4
For examples, see Prosser (1998); Ravine (2014); cárdenas (2016); Nicolazzo
(2017); Raha (2017).

18
 TWO

Condition or movement? A
genealogy of trans discourse

Here on the gender borders at the close of the twentieth

century, with the faltering of phallocentric hegemony
and the bumptious appearance of heteroglossic origin
accounts, we find the epistemologies of white male medical
practice, the rage of radical feminist theories and the chaos
of lived gendered experience meeting on the battlefield
of the transsexual body: a hotly contested site of cultural
inscription, a meaning machine for the production of ideal
type. (Sandy Stone, 1991)

Discursive repertoires: unpacking trans possibility

The language of trans identities and experiences is multifaceted and
contested. Trans – along with related identities such as non-binary
and genderqueer, and concepts such as transition, gender dysphoria,
gender diversity and gender-nonconformity – can be variously used to
describe individual or collective bodies and histories, medical diagnoses
and treatments, social and political phenomena, feelings and emotions.
The term ‘trans’ may be used an adjective (describing an aspect of
personhood, as in ‘they are a trans person’) or as a verb (describing what
people do, as in ‘to trans’); it is sometimes also employed as a noun.
While the introduction to this book offered a brief definition of
‘trans’, this chapter unpacks the multiple, competing and sometimes
contradictory means by which the term might be understood. I look at
how differing models of trans possibility (and impossibility) have arisen
from the historical interplay of medical literatures, radical feminist
theories and an emergent trans social movement.
‘Trans’ is historically and socially contingent (Enke, 2012): that is
to say, like any other social category it is historically located, and is
therefore meaningful in a specific time and place. We might be able
to recognise experiences and behaviours in a different time and place as
somehow trans, but this doesn’t mean that they are straightforwardly
trans, particularly if they weren’t or aren’t recognised as such by the
individuals having these experiences and exhibiting these behaviours.

19
 Understanding trans health

The language of gender diversity I use in this book emerged largely

in the West, primarily within the English and German languages; the
stand-alone ‘trans’ effectively evolved from identities/diagnoses such
as ‘transsexual’ and ‘transvestite’, while also incorporating political and
social influences from lesbian, gay, drag and queer subcultures (Pearce
et al, 2018).1
This chapter therefore traces a genealogy of trans language in the
Western world, exploring where contemporary UK understandings of
trans health ‘came from’. A genealogical approach acknowledges and
examines how subjectivities are constructed through social processes:
‘[w]here a positivist assumes that better science or a more nuanced
history could accurately identify and distinguish between categories of
sexuality or gender, a genealogist refuses the assumption that individuals
exist apart from the historically changing categories that made them’
(Rubin, 2003: 483).
In taking a genealogical approach, I do not seek to abstract trans
identity through discussion of socio-historical context, nor do I engage
extensively in debates around what trans might mean for the supposed
naturalisation or destabilisation of binary gender. Rather, I focus on the
discourses that have made trans language – and by extension, trans lives
as we might understand them today – possible. I am interested in how
trans lives can become comprehensible, imaginable and liveable. This is
necessarily a story about trans health: in terms of the medical discourse
from which contemporary trans language has evolved, in terms of the
counter-discourses that have emerged from trans communities and in
terms of scholarly critiques of medical research from the humanities
and social sciences.

Repertoires of possibility

In the previous chapter, I identified two main discursive repertoires

of trans possibility: trans as condition, and trans as movement. The
repertoire of condition entails understandings of trans as fixed, fixable
and/or conditional. Trans in this sense can be clearly defined and
also resolved, often (but not necessarily) through some form of cure
or treatment. In this chapter, I explore understandings of trans as
condition in the context of evolving medical discourses, ‘transgenderist’
subjectivities and radical feminist accounts.
The repertoire of movement entails a continual potential for and
actuality of change, being linked to queer notions of fluidity and the
constant work of negotiation (Green, 2017; Pereira, 2017). This can
entail individual movement – through identities that are not necessarily

20
 Condition or movement? A genealogy of trans discourse

fixed or resolvable – as well as collective social movement; I explore

the relationship between the two through a discussion of transgender
studies and the notion of trans solidarity.
In addition to exploring difference and diversity within these broad
categories, I examine how the two repertoires intersect and influence
one another. The final two sections of this chapter work to avoid
the limiting notion of a condition/movement binary by respectively
exploring the place of ‘condition’ within understandings of trans
as movement, and of ‘movement’ within understandings of trans as
condition. The former section looks at how recent sociological studies
incorporated condition-oriented identities within broadly movement-
oriented accounts of trans community, focusing particularly on Surya
Monro’s concept of ‘gender pluralism’. The latter shows how recent
interventions from health professionals have sought to acknowledge
movement-oriented trans identities and experiences.

Condition and cure: fixing trans

Sexual inversion

Late 19th century and early 20th century accounts of gender diversity
often conflated experiences that we now describe as ‘trans’ with wider
forms of gendered and sexual difference, including intersex bodies,
gay, lesbian, bisexual and/or asexual preferences, and acts of gender
nonconformity. Sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1877
[2006]) sought to account for gender/sexual diversity through an
extensive process of differential categorisation, identifying a myriad
of deviant traits such as ‘androgyny’, ‘gynandry’ and ‘defemination’.
However, ‘umbrella terms’ also emerged to more broadly refer
to individuals who deviated from sexual norms by behaving (or
identifying their behaviour) in a manner associated with the ‘opposite’
sex. One such term was invert, popularised by sexologist Havelock
Ellis (Stryker, 2008) For example, a ‘female invert’ – that is, a gender-
variant individual assigned a female gender at birth2 – might have a
‘male’ frame, dress and smoke like a man, be assertive, uninterested in
needlework and sexually attracted to (or active with) women (Prosser,
1998; Rubin, 2003).
While his views on the matter were to shift with time, Krafft-Ebing
initially regarded individuals exhibiting what we might now understand
as lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans behaviour as ‘profoundly disturbed’,
and described any desire on their part for ‘self-affirming transformation’
as psychotic (Stryker and Whittle, 2006: 21). Henry Rubin (2003)

21
 Understanding trans health

argues that such accounts laid the groundwork for treatments that
aimed to ‘cure’ inverts of their ‘condition’. From the 1930s through
to the 1950s, endocrinologists drew upon the emerging science of
hormones to administer hormone therapy to inverts. If the inversion
was considered ‘acquired’ (through social factors such as nurture),
then a ‘homo-sexual’ hormone regime – ‘oestrogens for [assigned]
females and testosterone for [assigned] males’ – was seen as necessary to
restore normal sexual behaviour (Rubin, 2003: 489). Conversely, if the
inversion was considered ‘innate’, then ‘hetero-sexual’ hormones could
be used to ‘hormonally castrate inverts and prevent them from acting
out their pathological nature’ (Rubin, 2003: 498). ‘Hetero-sexual’
hormonal treatments were most often employed in the administration
of oestrogen to assigned male patients.3 The provision of testosterone
to ‘female’ inverts was seen as risky, as it could increase their libido,
thereby undermining the normative role of women as sexually passive.
The apparent failure of endocrinology to cure inversion informed
a shift towards psychological and psychiatric treatments in the 1950s,
including psychoanalysis and aversion therapy. With reference to
a corpus of case notes from the 1950s and 1960s, Rubin (2003:
493–496) contends that nascent female-to-male (FTM) accounts can
be identified in these notes, with a number of patients requesting
access to hormone therapies in order to facilitate a physical transition
from female to male.4 However, as in the early work of Krafft-Ebing,
the health professionals in these instances typically regarded their
patients as deluded. Rubin (2003: 496) describes a range of practices
that misgendered and pathologised patients: ‘[t]he use of the female
pronoun throughout these cases, plus the ubiquitous comments on
the normal physiological condition of these patients, indicates the
psychologists’ beliefs that these patients are delusional’. This attitude
towards perceived gender deviance can be understood as one just part of
a wider pathologisation of all and any gendered behaviour that departed
from upper- and middle-class white male norms. As Jemma Tosh
(2016) observes, psychiatric terminology and treatments for ‘abnormal’
sexual expression evolved alongside diagnoses such as ‘hysteria’, which
pathologised and punished women both for conforming to social norms
and expectations regarding appropriate feminine behaviour and for
rejecting these norms too strenuously.
The logic of inversion could, however, also be used to affirm the
gendered experiences of those who deviated from the norm. The most
prominent example of this can be found in Radclyffe Hall’s (1928)
novel The Well of Loneliness, which sees (assigned female) protagonist
Stephen Gordon struggle at length with normative expectations of

22
 Condition or movement? A genealogy of trans discourse

gender and sexuality, due to her desire to live as a boy and her sexual
attraction to women. Upon reading Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis,
Stephen comes to regard her5 difference as pathological and herself
as inherently damaged; however, she later comes across the more
affirmative work of Havelock Ellis, who regarded inversion as a form
of natural difference. Although Stephen arguably never fully comes to
terms with her deviance from sexual norms, the book functions to both
promote the category of inversion and reflect the sexual identity of its
author (Prosser, 1998; Rubin, 2003). Inversion is, of course, as much a
historically and socially contingent identity as trans, which is illustrated
in Jay Prosser’s (1998) reading of Stephen as a trans man. However, the
important point here is that inversion could be embraced as a productive
identity and account of selfhood in a similar manner to the ‘trans’
terminologies of transvestism, transsexualism and transgenderism that
would follow. As a condition, inversion did not simply entail invasive
medical management; it also opened up certain possibilities, providing
a basis for self-understanding and stable non-normative subjectivity.

Transvestism and transsexualism: grounds for transition?

Magnus Hirschfeld’s book The Transvestites offered an alternative

model to inversion, which recognised a difference between what we
might now refer to as sexuality and gender expression. In a forerunner
of feminist work on the sex/gender distinction, as well as trans and
intersex accounts of sex/gender complexity, Hirschfeld’s (1910 [1991])
theory of sexual intermediaries distinguishes four distinct aspects of
sexual difference: ‘sexual organs’, ‘other physical characteristics’, ‘sex
drive’ and ‘other emotional characteristics’. This account contrasts with
the conflation of these characteristics within discourses of inversion,
and provided grounds for distinguishing between transvestites and
homosexuals. Moreover, Hirschfeld seeks to highlight the social
contingency of certain gendered norms: for instance, he provides a
proverbial account of a young, naked boy unable to recognise similarly
naked girls as girls because they were undressed. That is to say: it
is the girls’ clothing that makes them girls in the eyes of the young
boy. This aspect of Hirschfeld’s work foreshadows later trans-positive
feminist accounts of the role that gender presentation plays in shaping
presumptions about genital status. For example, Suzanne Kessler and
Wendy McKenna (1978) draw on the work of Harold Garfinkel to
discuss how an individual’s gender is socially assigned on the basis of
their (assumed) genital status. Since genitals are not usually seen in
Western society, observers rely on an individual’s (imagined) ‘cultural

23
 Understanding trans health

genitals’, which are in turn shaped by how an individual appears to ‘do’

gender. Talia Mae Bettcher (2007: 54) expands on these observations,
noting that ‘the very gendered attire which is designed to conceal [the]
body … represents genital status’.
In contrast to later uses of the term transvestite, however,
Hirschfeld’s work does not simply refer to individuals who desired
to engage in gender-variant behaviour such as cross-dressing. For
Hirschfeld, ‘transvestite’ signals a range of subject conditions that might
– according to patient need or desire – be affirmed and/or cured.
In 1919 he founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for
Sexual Science) in Berlin, which both employed transvestites and – in
collaboration with endocrinologists and surgeons – provided some of
the first tailored medical procedures for patients seeking to transition
from male to female or vice-versa (Stryker, 2008: 39).
Later writers sought to delineate different forms of gender-variant
condition. Where transvestism came to refer specifically to the practice
of (and/or an identity centred on) cross-dressing, transsexualism
(or transsexuality) – popularised by Harry Benjamin (1966) in The
Transsexual Phenomenon – specifically described individuals who sought
to live permanently in the ‘opposite sex’. The figure of the transsexual
emerged through extensive negotiation between practitioners and
patients across a number of decades as individuals actively sought
treatment by approaching health professionals – including Hirschfeld
and his one-time colleague Benjamin – to request medical interventions
such as hormone therapy and genital or chest surgeries (Stone, 1991;
Meyerowitz, 2002; Rubin, 2003). Benjamin’s work represented
an attempt to take these patients seriously, with his 1966 book in
particular providing a guide for both the diagnosis of transsexualism
and the management of transition. Consequently, ‘transsexuals became
recognizable’ – possible – and treatments became more widely available
(Rubin, 2003: 489).
As with Radclyffe Hall’s experience of inversion, the transvestite
and transsexual models have provided a liveable identity for many
(Namaste, 2000; Ekins and King, 2006; Hines, 2007; Davy, 2011).
This was particularly the case with transsexualism after the ‘male-
to-female’ (MTF) transition story of Christine Jorgensen – a patient
of Benjamin’s – received a great deal of media attention in 1952
(Stryker, 2008: 48–49). Jorgensen’s sudden fame served to popularise a
terminology and language by which gender-variant individuals might
come to describe themselves and reify their experiences, particularly as
Benjamin ultimately used the incident as an opportunity to promote
his model of a supposed transvestite/transsexual distinction. Both

24
 Condition or movement? A genealogy of trans discourse

Jorgensen’s story and Benjamin’s work ultimately provided a language

by which individuals wishing to transition could understand themselves
as transsexual and seek treatment accordingly. I explore contemporary
examples of this in Chapter Four.
However, many health professionals continued to regard
transsexualism, like inversion, as the product of a deficient mind and/
or body. For example, David Cauldwell (1949: 274) describes the
‘psychopathic transexual [sic]’ as ‘an individual who is unfavorably
affected psychologically [and] determines to live and appear as a
member of the sex to which he or she does not belong’. While
Cauldwell – citing Hirschfeld – acknowledges that transsexual
individuals can live productive and ‘useful’ lives, his own account
(drawing upon a single FTM case study) portrays the transsexual as
a figure prone to lies and deceit, misleading practitioners, his family
and – most of all – himself.6 The trope of the ‘deceptive transsexual’
would later populate large parts of the medical literature (Stone,
1991), and has also become common within wider social and political
discourses (Bettcher, 2007; Serano, 2007).7 In this way, transsexualism
can be regarded as a condition associated with wider mental health
issues, requiring psychological, psychiatric and/or psychotherapeutic
management rather than medically mediated physical interventions.
Benjamin, by contrast, acknowledged that many of his patients
could benefit from physical transition. He regarded transvestism and
transsexualism as complex phenomena, and sought to distinguish the
different ways in which these conditions might manifest. He initially
outlined three forms of MTF desire and behaviour. The ‘principally
psychogenic transvestite’ does not ‘want to be changed, but wants
society’s attitude towards him [sic] to change’, seeking typically to
dress ‘in the clothes of a female’ and ‘lead a woman’s life’ (Benjamin,
1954: 48–49). The ‘somatopsychic transsexualist’, however, exhibits
an ‘intense and often obsessive desire to change the entire sexual
status including anatomical structure’ (46). Therefore, while the MTF
transvestite ‘enacts the role of a woman, the transsexualist wants to be
one and function as one’ (46, emphasis in original). Recognising that
his patients didn’t always fit neatly into these two categories, Benjamin
also noted the existence of ‘the intermediate type’, who ‘inclines
towards transsexualism, but is at other times content with merely
dressing and acting as a woman’ (49). While the transvestite and the
intermediate type can, according to Benjamin, generally be provided
with psychotherapy to help them manage their condition, this is not
the case with the transsexualist, for whom this is a ‘waste of time’
(51). It is for this reason that Benjamin advocates for the provision of

25
 Understanding trans health

‘conversion surgery’ for such individuals, with hormone therapy to

follow in order to mitigate the impact of physical castration. However,
he also argued that psychiatrists should play a role in assessing patients
to ensure their psychological suitability for the procedure. This laid
the groundwork for a mode of treatment that continues to this day.
By the 1980s, ‘a routine set of procedures and protocols for medically
managing transgender populations had fallen into place’ (Stryker, 2008:
112). In 1979 the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria
Association (later the World Professional Association for Transgender
Health, or WPATH) was created by clinicians working broadly within
the paradigm Benjamin had established. They issued a document
entitled The Standards of Care, which outlined how transsexualism could
be assessed and managed. A year later, in 1980, differential diagnoses
for transsexualism – as ‘gender identity disorder’ – and transvestism
were published in the third edition of the American Psychiatric
Association’s internationally recognised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders (DSM-III). An updated version of this diagnosis
– gender dysphoria – can be found in the current edition of the
manual, DSM-5.
A number of gender identity disorders (including ‘transsexualism’
and ‘dual role transvestism’, along with ‘fetishistic transvestism’ as a
‘disorder of sexual preference’) are also included in the 10th edition
of the World Health Organization’s (1992) International Classification of
Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10). At the time of writing,
this is the current edition of the ICD: however, ICD-11 is due to
be published in 2018. This will replace the current gender identity
diagnoses with a new category, gender incongruence.

The power of a diagnosis

The creation of gender identity disorder (and gender dysphoria)

diagnoses has had four important consequences for trans people. Firstly,
it placed a capstone on the process of pathologisation that had gradually
unfolded for over a century. In seeking to categorise gender-variant
conditions, sexologists succeeded in framing deviation from (binary)
gender norms as pathological – that is, a disease, illness or medical
condition – even when the deviating individuals in question do not
seek a medical intervention of any kind.
Secondly, gender identity disorders have relied on binary divisions
between female and male, transvestism and transsexualism that persist
to this day, even as ‘intermediate types’ (Benjamin, 1954) proliferate
within trans communities and medical accounts. While the actual term

26
 Condition or movement? A genealogy of trans discourse

‘transvestite’ is less popular as a contemporary form of identification,

a line continues to be drawn between trans people who ‘require’
physical transition and those who (supposedly) do not, within both
medical and social contexts. This has placed an onus upon trans
people to prove themselves ‘trans enough’ within both community
and healthcare settings (Catalano, 2015; Vincent, 2016), informing
the emergence of hierarchies of trans identity that sometimes valorise
medical interventions and other times celebrate the ‘transgressive’
nature of those who do not desire physical transition (Bornstein, 1994;
Serano, 2007).
Thirdly, while many health professionals who are not gender
identity specialists continue to echo Cauldwell (1949) in regarding
transsexualism primarily as a mental health issue that cannot be treated
through physical intervention (Schonfield and Gardner, 2008; Bailey
and McNeil, 2013), formal diagnoses can ensure that treatment is available.8
In the UK, access to gender identity services through the NHS is a
legal right, following a number of important court victories for trans
rights advocates in the 1990s and 2000s. A number of trans health
specialists have argued that the existence of gender identity diagnoses
underpins this right, providing a clear basis for public funds to be
allocated to gender identity services (Richards et al, 2015; Barrett,
2016; Drescher et al, 2016).
Fourthly and finally, the creation of gender identity disorders has
worked to construct a professional class of gender identity experts, who
may act as gatekeepers for trans-specific healthcare. These individuals
are variously responsible for assessing and managing patients seeking
physical transition, discussing quantitative research and case studies
in the clinical literatures, preparing protocols and care pathways for
patients and peer-reviewing these studies, protocols and care pathways
(Lev, 2009; De Cuypere et al, 2013; Bouman et al, 2014). This process
of knowledge production has granted health professionals power
not only over medical processes, but also over the trans identities that
emerge from these processes (Stone, 1991; Davy, 2015). It can also work
to delegitimise accounts emerging from trans people working in the
social sciences and humanities, reflecting wider epistemic hierarchies
in which work on gender from marginalised peoples (as in feminist
scholarship) is framed as partially outside the realm of proper knowledge
(Hird, 2003; Pereira, 2012). This can be observed in an imbalance of
citation between the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies –
in which the medical literatures are frequently referenced – and the
medical literatures of gender identity, in which authors often only cite
and speak to others in the field (although this is beginning to change,

27
 Understanding trans health

as I discuss later).9 Similarly, Zowie Davy describes how the DSM-5

workgroup ‘disregarded the plethora of work in feminist social science
which criticizes the inherency of gender roles, gender identities, and
sex differences, as well as research in transgender studies that depicts
non-dysphoric transpeople, desires for different embodiments, non-
conventional transitioning trajectories, and sexualities’ (Davy, 2015:
1170).
There are, nevertheless, multiple discourses of trans possibility present
within the medical literatures (Richards et al, 2014). For example, in
recent years many specialists working with transitioning patients have
argued against the pathologisation of trans identities and experiences
(Bockting, 2009; Bouman et al, 2010; Richards et al, 2015). An
alternative medical model instead emphasises psychological distress
for the purposes of diagnosis (Nieder et al, 2016). Some writers have
focused upon the distress of gendered incongruence (such as Nieder and
Strauss, 2015), while others have emphasised the distress of belonging
to a marginalised social group: ‘it is the discrimination rather than
the membership of this specific group which is psychopathogenic’
(Richards et al, 2016: 97). These positions are, however, complicated
by the maintenance of assessment procedures that continue to centre
expert diagnosis conducted by gender identity specialists (Ahmad et al,
2013; Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2013). Endocrinologist Leighton
Seal argues that psychiatric assessment and diagnosis of transitioning
patients is necessary to ensure that:

other possible diagnoses are excluded where hormonal and

surgical intervention is not of benefit, such as psychosis,
bipolar depression, or dysmorphia. With a rise in queer
culture and exploration of gender identity, medical
treatment is not always in the patient’s best interest in people
with gender non-conformity. (Seal, cited in Morgan, 2016:
207)

The resulting tension between depathologisation and the role of

clinical expertise can be seen for instance in Version 7 of the WPATH
Standards of Care (Davy et al, 2018). Furthermore, misunderstandings
continue to play out within clinical settings between gender identity
specialists and patients who do not easily ‘fit’ diagnostic categories, as
well as those who object to the strict criteria and extensive process of
assessment associated with physical transition pathways (Bauer et al,
2009; Burke, 2011; Davy, 2011; Ellis et al, 2015).

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 Condition or movement? A genealogy of trans discourse

In contrast to these tentative moves towards depathologisation,

misgendering practices comparable to those described by Henry Rubin
have persisted within the literatures of psychology and psychiatry. Y
Gavriel Ansara and Peter Hegarty (2012) describe how the practice
of casting trans patient experiences into doubt by disregarding their
stated gender identities and/or preferred gendered pronouns has
been maintained in the field of psychology by an ‘invisible college’,
centred around prolific American-Canadian author Kenneth Zucker.
The invisible college consists of a network of collaborating authors
who work to maintain their collective academic profile through
co-authorship, mutual peer review and publishing in one another’s
journals. This has enabled authors such as Zucker to represent forms
of ethnocentric, anti-trans ‘aversive conditioning’ as good practice;
examples include working with parents to restrict gender expression
in children (Hird, 2003; Ansara and Hegarty, 2012), or ‘shaming’
children and parents into pursuing conformity (Pyne, 2014). In this
way, Zucker – a co-author of DSM-5 and the Version 7 WPATH
Standards of Care – maintained his academic credentials and role as head
of a Toronto gender clinic for many years, even as numerous allegations
of unethical, controlling or otherwise inappropriate behaviour were
made by academics, activists and former patients (Hird, 2003; Tosh,
2011; Pyne, 2014).10
Medical diagnoses can therefore work to both make trans lives
possible and limit the liveable scope of these possibilities. The following
chapters of this book demonstrate how the interaction of the outlined
four consequences of diagnosis has complexly impacted upon the
liveability of trans lives.

An ‘intermediate type’: the transgenderists

I have previously noted that sexological categories of condition –

including inversion, transvestism and transsexualism – provided the
basis for personal identity claims through the reification of gender-
variant experience. I now turn to examine how non-medical condition-
oriented trans identities can emerge, through an examination of US
activist, academic and community organiser Virginia Prince’s work.
This discussion accordingly draws upon the wider notion of ‘condition’
outlined in the introduction to this book; a fixed or resolvable, yet
conditional mode of being.
Prince (1973 [2005]) draws upon the work of Magnus Hirschfeld
and the ideas of the fledgling women’s liberation movement to argue
for a distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ within accounts of MTF

29
 Understanding trans health

experience. Like Harry Benjamin, she seeks to distinguish between

transsexuals and transvestites, arguing that while both groups ‘do’ the
same thing – that is, wear the clothes of the ‘opposite’ gender – they do
so for different reasons. She further distinguishes between transvestites
who cross-dress for sexual reasons (a category inclusive of both gay men
and the ‘fetishistic transvestite’ who was later to appear in the DSM and
ICD) and ‘femiphile’ transvestites. While MTF transsexuals seek a sex
change to live as women, femiphile transvestites seek recognition as women
without having to physically transition: ‘my gender, my self-identity
is between my ears, not between my legs’ (Prince, 1973 [2005]: 30).
As Prince’s thinking developed, she came to regard some femiphilic
transvestites – including herself – as ‘transgenderists’.11 She outlines
her thinking in this regard in an article entitled ‘The “transcendents”
or “trans” people’ (Prince, 1978 [2005]); an early example of the
stand-alone ‘trans’ being used as an umbrella term for a range of
gender-variant identities and experiences. In contrast to those
femiphiles who shifted between ‘female’ and ‘male’ modes of living
and gendered presentation (later to be termed ‘dual role transvestites’
in ICD-10), transgenderists ‘are people who have adopted the exterior
manifestations of the opposite sex on a full-time basis but without
any surgical intervention’ (Prince, 1978 [2005]: 43). In this sense,
they are an alternative form of ‘intermediate type’ to that described
by Benjamin (1954).
Prince’s writings – distributed largely through her magazine
Transvestia – are therefore important in offering an alternative form of
knowledge to medical accounts of trans phenomena. However, her works
also resemble these accounts in providing a categorical, prescriptive
sense of trans possibility. The bounds of femiphile and transgenderist
possibility are quite clearly delineated: such people are assigned male at
birth, necessarily sexually attracted to women, do not (in the long term)
have a sexual motivation for cross-dressing and do not wish to physically
transition. These are, therefore, accounts that ultimately rely upon the
binary divisions of male/female and masculine/feminine while working
to exclude FTM and non-binary expressions of gendered possibility,
reflecting the strict rules by which Prince controlled membership of
the social groups she oversaw (Stryker, 2008: 55; Hill, 2013). Moreover,
the dissemination of Prince’s writings within the professional realm
was limited by the aforementioned positioning of medical practitioners
as ‘trans experts’ who presided over both the transition process and
wider expressions of trans identity. Susan Stryker (2005) notes that
in a preamble to Prince’s first-known article in a formal academic
journal she is ‘vouched for’ by Harry Benjamin. This demonstrates

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 Condition or movement? A genealogy of trans discourse

the manner in which expertise was historically located not simply in

the medical professions, but also within the detached perspective of
non-trans writers. As Susan Stryker (2005: xvi) notes, ‘[Prince] was a
superbly well-educated person with medical credentials of her own …
yet, because she was openly a transvestite, Prince could speak “only” as a
transvestite, and not as a medical expert whose professional knowledges
and competencies were respected by her professional peers.’

Shadows of the empire: radical feminist critiques

An alternative non-medical model of trans as condition is articulated

by a particular branch of radical feminist thinking. During the
1970s, a number of feminists began to critique what they saw as an
unquestioning reification of sexist gender norms by trans people and
health professionals alike. This is exemplified in Janice Raymond’s
(1979) The Transsexual Empire, a book that Sandy Stone (1991: 223)
characterises as arguing that ‘transsexuals are constructs of an evil
phallocentric empire and were designed to invade women’s spaces and
appropriate women’s power’.
In a similar manner to the poststructuralist trans theorists I cited
towards the beginning of this chapter, Raymond (1979: xv) notes
the historical contingency of the transsexual phenomenon, and the
manner by which practitioners such as Benjamin ‘make transsexualism
a reality’ by offering treatment. However, she differs in positing that
transsexualism has been constructed as an ‘individual solution’ to the
social problem of rigid sexual stereotyping within ‘a patriarchial society,
which generates norms of masculinity and femininity’ (Raymond, 1979:
70). Instead of fighting these norms, surgeons and psychologists have
reified them by creating a means by which ‘men’ can be ‘transsexually
constructed’ into women.
Raymond (1979: 26–27) ultimately regards transsexualism as a male
activity: ‘a creation of men, initially developed for men’, with the
‘female-to-constructed-male transsexual’ being ‘the token that saves face
for the male “transsexual empire”’ (emphasis in original). She observes
that the vast majority of authors writing within the contemporaneous
medical field of transsexualism were men, even as psychiatric accounts
of the transsexual condition frequently attributed its genesis to the
role of unruly women, with (for example) overbearing mothers held
responsible for feminising children assigned a male gender at birth.12
Moreover, she draws upon interview data, anecdotes, media reports
and transsexual autobiographies to argue that trans women define
themselves as female ‘in terms of the classic feminine stereotype’ (78).

31
 Understanding trans health

This entails passive, nurturing behaviour, an interest in feminine

clothes and make-up, a belief in traditional heterosexual gender roles
and a preference for occupations such as housework and secretarial
employment. The exception to this can be found in the ‘transsexually
constructed lesbian-feminist’, who brings ‘masculinity and masculinist
behaviour’ into women-only feminist spaces (101). In this way, the
activities of stereotypically heterosexual, feminine trans women and the
behaviour of lesbian-feminist trans women represent different means
by which ‘men’ might problematically occupy womanhood: ‘[a]ll
transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to
an artefact, appropriating this body for themselves’ (104). Raymond
therefore asserts that ‘[t]ranssexuals are not women … they are deviant
males’ (183, emphasis in original). With Raymond taking the view that
gender is socially and biologically determined in line with (binary)
designations at birth, she recommends an alternative, feminist solution
to this deviant condition: that of counselling and peer support through
feminist consciousness-raising.
The Transsexual Empire provides an ideological and analytic basis for
a strand of ‘trans-exclusionary’ radical feminist thought that continues
to be represented in both academic and popular media contexts to this
day. Writers such as Bernice Hausman (1995) and Germaine Greer
(1999) argue that trans women embody and reify sexist stereotypes
of womanhood; Sheila Jeffreys (2014) echoes Raymond in accusing
transsexuals of ‘invading’ women’s spaces; Julie Bindel (2009) has
called for hormone therapies and genital surgeries to be replaced
with counselling and therapy. However, these accounts have done
little to build upon Raymond’s (1979) theoretical and empirical work.
Moreover, they have been largely superseded by trans-affirming and
trans feminist accounts in terms of wider ideological resonance and
praxis within contemporary feminist scholarship and activism (Bettcher,
2009; Elliot, 2009; Bunch, 2013).
Ironically, for all that Raymond and her followers criticise the medical
establishment, their accounts also echo certain medical discourses of
trans possibility. Even as they denounce transsexual people and health
professionals for reinforcing sexist stereotypes, they subscribe to a binary
notion of sex and gender rooted in biological determinism, through
asserting that trans women will always really be men, trans men will
always really be women, and that sex/gender can be understood only
in terms of a male/female binary. This perspective goes beyond the
somewhat binary thinking of Benjamin (1966), who at least provides
some narrative space and clinical provision for the possibility of
movement through sex change. It ultimately echoes the view of the

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 Condition or movement? A genealogy of trans discourse

1950s psychologists described by Rubin (2003), and informs a practice

of misgendering and misrecognition similar to that described within
contemporary psychological and psychiatric literatures by Ansara
and Hegarty (2012). In taking this perspective – and in effectively
outlining a form of treatment for transsexual deviancy – Raymond and
her followers thereby similarly regard trans as condition: definable,
resolvable, fixable, curable. Furthermore, they position non-trans
expertise as the appropriate basis for knowledge about trans lives,
thereby effectively objectifying and silencing trans voices (Namaste,
2000; Serano, 2007).

‘A movement whose time has come’: the emergence of

‘trans’
Sandy Stone’s (1991) The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto
provides a nuanced response to Raymond. Stone rejects many of
Raymond’s more outlandish claims, but also accepts and expands
upon her arguments regarding sexism and the reification of traditional
gender roles within medical systems. Together with works such as
Leslie Feinberg’s (1992) influential pamphlet Transgender Liberation:
A Movement Whose Time Has Come, this laid the groundwork for the
emergence of transgender studies (Stryker, 2006). Drawing upon
the insights of feminist and queer theories, the embodied realities
of marginalised trans peoples and the extensive medical literature
of transsexualism, transgender studies enabled the ‘establishment of
subjects in new modes, regulated by different codes of intelligibility’
(Stryker, 1994: 248). I characterise these as modes of movement, shaped
by new codes of individual and collective trans understanding.

Individual movement: the gender outlaws

Stone (1991) argues that Raymond’s portrayal of transsexual women

as intentionally complicit in upholding and reifying gender norms is
both simplistic and misleading. She focuses her analysis particularly
on the role that gender identity specialists play in socially constructing
transsexualism. Raymond (1979: 135) states that gender identity
specialists engage in ‘behavioural modification’ procedures, but she
does not analyse these processes in any depth, nor does she link
this discussion back to her earlier account of passive, stereotypically
feminine heterosexual trans women. Stone therefore examines
Raymond’s claims with reference to a wider field of evidence. She
focuses upon the gendered discourses present within transsexual

33
 Understanding trans health

women’s autobiographies, noting that – at first sight – the concerns

raised by Raymond and her followers seem quite legitimate:

All these [transsexual] authors replicate the stereotypical

male account of the constitution of woman: dress,
makeup, and delicate fainting at the sight of blood. Each
of these adventurers passes directly from one pole of sexual
experience [male, attracted to women] to the other [female,
attracted to men]. If there is any intervening space in the
continuum of sexuality, it is invisible.… No wonder feminist
theorists have been suspicious. Hell, I’m suspicious. (Stone,
1991: 227, emphasis in original)

Later trans feminist theorists such as Julia Serano (2007) argue that
Raymond’s account holds trans women to a different standard to
non-trans women, as plenty of women from all backgrounds adhere
to gendered norms. Others have noted the restrictive cultural
conditions under which these accounts were published: ‘[u]p until
the last few years, all we’d be able to write and get published were our
autobiographies, tales of women trapped in the bodies of men or men
pining away in the bodies of women … the romantic stuff which set
our image as long-suffering, not the challenging stuff’ (Bornstein,
1994: 12–13, emphasis in original).
Stone’s critique, however, focuses on the role of medical literature
and practice in constructing the traditional transsexual narrative
found within autobiographical accounts. Acknowledging that the early
gender clinics were ultimately ‘in the business of helping people’, Stone
(1991: 227–228) explains how their treatment criteria nevertheless
favoured patients who seemed most likely to ‘succeed’ in navigating
the world in their new gender role: ‘[i]n practice this meant that the
candidates for surgery were evaluated on the basis of their performance
in their gender of choice’ (emphasis in original); a performance that
extended to autobiographical accounts. Stone further examines how
the publication of Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon effectively
provided a manual for patients seeking to transition. This created a
discursive feedback loop in which many patients met the expectations of
health professionals (or pretended to do so) in order to access treatment,
thereby reinforcing the idea that ‘true’ transsexuals necessarily conform
to such stereotypes. The resulting situation was clearly not conducive
either to the advancement of medical knowledge or to the long-term
possibility of gender fluidity for those who transitioned.

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 Condition or movement? A genealogy of trans discourse

Stone therefore concludes her article by calling for the creation of a

‘posttranssexual’ counter-discourse. Where the traditional transsexual is
‘totalized’ by conditional discourses, Stone advocates for posttranssexual
identities and experiences that are diverse and complex. Where the
traditional transsexual is ‘programmed to disappear’ by undertaking an
appropriate gender performance, she calls upon the posttranssexual to
‘forgo passing, to be consciously “read”, to read oneself aloud – and
by this troubling and productive reading, to write oneself into the
discourses by which one has been written’ (Stone, 1991: 232). In
this way, Stone imagines a new mode of being: a form of living that
acknowledges and embraces movement in terms of gendered discourse,
identity and embodiment. Further posttranssexual accounts of gendered
possibility would follow. Like Stone, these works typically drew upon
recent innovations in feminist and gender theory, including the cyborg
feminism of Donna Haraway (1991) and Judith Butler’s (1999) account
of gender as performative: that is, constructed and reified through
continual social (inter)action.
In response to an invocation of Frankenstein (and his monster) by
Raymond (1979) in her discussion of the medical construction of
transsexual bodies, Susan Stryker (1994) theorises transsexualism as
‘monstrous’ in her paper ‘My words to Victor Frankenstein above
the village of Chamounix: performing transgender rage’. While
the paper does not explicitly reference her work, Stryker effectively
echoes Haraway’s (1991) ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ in celebrating the
revolutionary feminist potential in transformative technologies of
the body: ‘[t]o encounter the transsexual body, to apprehend a
transsexual consciousness articulating itself, is to risk a revelation of
the constructedness of the natural order’ (Stryker, 1994: 250). This
process of articulation is grounded in transgender rage, a ‘queer fury’
that arises in response to the unliveability of normative gender roles.
Stryker illustrates the origins of transgender rage with a story about
the birth of her lover’s baby. As the baby is born, somebody declares,
‘it’s a girl’. In this utterance, Stryker locates an important moment of
gendered violence: the non-consensual assignment of gender at birth.
At this moment various norms are imposed upon the gendered body;
norms that form the basis of patriarchal power relations, norms that
will eventually compel the trans subject to enter ‘a domain of abjected
bodies, a field of deformation’ (Butler, 1993: 16). Transgender rage
provides a means of revolt against this ‘naturalized order’: ‘by mobilizing
gendered identities and rendering them provisional, open to strategic
development and occupation’ (Stryker, 1994: 248). Transgender rage
therefore responds to the fixity of binary gender norms – and to the

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 Understanding trans health

seeming fixity of the transsexual condition – through reimagining

notions of gendered identity, imbuing them with a sense of fluidity
and movement that reflects the constructedness of the transsexual body.
An altogether more playful account of identity as movement can be
found in Kate Bornstein’s (1994) book Gender Outlaw. Like Stryker
(1994), Bornstein draws extensively upon her personal experiences of
transition to illustrate an account of gendered possibility through revolt
against the ‘natural’ order. ‘Standing outside of a “natural” gender’,
she explains, ‘I thought I was some kind of monster, I thought it was
my fault’ (Bornstein, 1994: 12). Building on Butler’s description of
gender performativity, Bornstein questions how she might render
the artificial bounds of gender visible, and furthermore seek to live
beyond these bounds as neither female nor male. Having originally
transitioned from male to female in line with the traditional transsexual
narrative, Bornstein finds herself feeling that her experience is neither
that of a ‘man’ or of a ‘woman’. Her account therefore paves the way
for a multiplicity of gendered possibilities beyond the male/female
binary: ‘there are as many truthful experiences of gender as there are
people who think they have a gender’ (Bornstein, 1994: 8). While
an acceptance of gendered multiplicity, complexity and fluidity is
portrayed by Bornstein as a potentially liberating means to make
‘gender outlaw’ lives more liveable, she does not have a clear account
of how this might be achieved. ‘I love the idea of being without an
identity, it gives me a lot of room to play around’, she states, ‘but it
makes me dizzy, having nowhere to hang my hat’ (Bornstein, 1994: 39).
I therefore move next to explore how Stone, Stryker and Bornstein’s
imagined ‘different codes of intelligibility’ (Stryker, 1994: 248) were
implemented through the collective action of a new social movement.

Social movement: collective transgender solidarity

The term transgender certainly existed prior to its use by Leslie

Feinberg. However, it tended to refer to individual relationships
to gender diversity, as in Prince’s (1978 [2005]) ‘transgenderist’,
which specifically described male-assigned individuals seeking to live
permanently as women without medical intervention. In calling for
transgender solidarity, Feinberg played an important role in popularising
transgender – and later, the stand-alone ‘trans’ – as the basis for a social
movement, a politicised version of Prince’s (1978 [2005]) ‘trans people’.
Feinberg argues that a language is needed to bring together people
with a shared experience of marginalisation on the grounds of gender
variance, while also recognising differences between these people.

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 Condition or movement? A genealogy of trans discourse

This would be a language by and for trans people, as an alternative to

externally imposed terminologies.

When I first worked in the factories of Buffalo as a teenager,

women like me were called ‘he-shes’ … There are other
words used to express the wide range of “gender outlaws”:
transvestites, transsexuals, drag queens and drag kings, cross-
dressers, bull-daggers, stone butches, androgynes, diesel
dykes … We didn’t choose these words. They don’t fit all of
us. It’s hard to fight oppression without a name connoting
pride, a language that honours us. (Feinberg, 1992: 206)

Notably, Feinberg lists the medical terms ‘transvestite’ and ‘transsexual’

alongside a range of other stigmatised identities. There is a racial and
class dimension to this divide between medical and non-medical
terminology, particularly within the US context in which Feinberg was
writing. The cultural and financial capital required to access medical
literature and/or a formal diagnosis was historically more likely to
be held by white, middle- and upper-class trans people (Koyama,
2004; Stryker, 2008). Subcultures such as drag scenes, sex worker
collectives and butch/femme communities therefore offered a means
by which more marginalised individuals could build community around
gender diversity (Munt, 1998; Rivera, 2002; Valentine, 2007; Ware,
2017). There also tended to be a divide between the more restrained,
assimilationist advocacy undertaken by relatively privileged individuals
such as Virginia Prince, and the more militant activism undertaken by
economically and racially marginalised trans people through groups
such as New York’s Street Tranvestite Action Revolutionaries.
Feinberg’s priority is unity between transgender people, regardless
of their background. In stating that ‘[g]enuine bonds of solidarity can
be forged between people who respect each other’s differences’, sie
argues from a Marxist perspective for a single trans movement, united
through shared but diverse experiences of oppression (Feinberg, 1992:
220). In this way, hir work incorporated movement away from strictly
delineated identities and externally imposed gender identities in a
similar manner to Stone, Stryker and Bornstein, while also seeking
to incorporate these individual movements into a collective social
movement inspired by the activism of working-class trans people, trans
people of colour, sex workers, drag kings and drag queens. While
inversion, transvestism and transsexualism each came to represent
a somewhat monolithic categorical account of gendered possibility
and impossibility, ‘trans’ as imagined by Feinberg enables a myriad of

37
 Understanding trans health

identifications and experiences within its loose, unbound contingent

category.

The transsexual condition: rejecting movement?

In explicitly including transsexuals, Feinberg’s notion of a trans

movement theoretically creates space for the inclusion of individuals
who regard their gender movement – the act of transitioning – as
resolvable; those who ‘do not seek to queer or destabilize categories
of gender but to successfully embody them’ (Elliot, 2009: 11). These
are traditionally men or women who seek to live permanently in a
‘binary’ gender role that contrasts with the gender they were coercively
assigned at birth, following a physical transition.
Prior to the 1990s, the traditional transsexual narrative – incorporating
a particular form of social and medical transition – was the primary
mode of identity available to ‘binary’ trans men and women. With the
advent of transgender studies, writers such as Prosser (1998), Namaste
(2000) and Rubin (2003) sought to create space within poststructuralist
theory for a transsexual subjectivity defined neither by the conditional
demands of the medical literature nor by the emerging queer language
of transgenderism with its focus on fluidity and change. They warn
that trans theory grounded purely in discourses of movement ‘erases
transsexual specificity’ (Namaste, 2000: 62), and therefore aim to
account for the particular individual and social experiences of the
transitioned subject, as well as the means by which they might traverse
the ‘borderlands’ between genders to find a gendered ‘home’ (Prosser,
1998): an embodied sense of belonging and resolution. Trans feminist
writer Julia Serano – a biologist by profession – would later build on
this work with her account of the physical and psychological changes
wrought by hormone therapy, linking the alleviation of dysphoric
feelings through this process to an innate sense of ‘subconscious sex’
(Serano, 2007). While these accounts provide an alternative to the
medical literature, they can be understood as grounded in discourses
of trans as condition in a similar manner to Virgina Prince’s models of
femiphile transvestism and transgenderism. At the same time, they also
provide for the possibility of movement – albeit resolvable movement
– in the ‘migration’ (Prosser, 1998; Ekins and King, 2006) from one
gender role to another. This can also be coupled with a pointed feminist
rejection of sexist stereotypes (Namaste, 2000; Serano, 2007).
A substantial debate unfolded during the late 1990s and early 2000s
as queer ‘transgender’ and binary ‘transsexual’ theorists critiqued one
another’s accounts of trans possibility and authenticity. Where many

38
 Condition or movement? A genealogy of trans discourse

transgender theorists argued that transsexual accounts were rooted

in a form of biological essentialism, transsexual theorists stated that
transgender accounts left little room for the lived experience of
transsexual individuals (Halberstam, 1998; Elliot, 2009). However,
even as this conversation unfolded, Feinberg’s model of a collective trans
social movement increasingly informed all sides of the debate. Namaste
(2000) and Serano (2007) both write of ‘transsexual and transgender’
experience, while Jack Halberstam (2005) – positioned largely within
the queer/transgender camp – increasingly sought to acknowledge
and account for experiences of lived physical transition. Moreover,
ideas of affirmative sexed embodiment have increasingly been taken
up by individuals seeking to undergo a queer physical transition
without a traditional binary resolution, thereby creating a ‘home in
the borderlands’ (Vähäpassi, 2013).

Trans movement language and activism

The internet provided a vital catalyst for the trans social movement
to grow and change, as a formerly largely invisible and geographically
dispersed population was empowered to come together and organise
on an unprecedented scale. Within communities of marginalised
people, solitary ‘experiences’ can be converted into accounts of ‘being’,
‘through the construction of stories of identity’ (Plummer, 1995: 118,
emphasis in original). Stephen Whittle (1998) notes that diverse trans
communities on the internet provide valuable space for the negotiation
of Stryker’s (1994) ‘new modes’ and ‘different codes’ of (trans)gendered
possibility. I understand these modes and codes as reproduced through
mutual recognition, and an iterative citation of emergent language
by community members. Writings by Stone, Feinberg and Stryker
have played a role in this broad process of discursive change, having
been made available by their authors and/or by others on web pages
and in e-zines, while more extensive works such as Gender Outlaw
(Bornstein, 1994) are commonly recommended within community
spaces and easily available in online bookstores. However, as access
to the internet has increased and trans communities have grown, the
sophistication of informal theorisation and the rapid distribution of
ideas have increased also. Trans theory within community and activist
spaces is increasingly intersectional and reflexive, reflecting the growing
prominence of a diversity of voices. As Natasha Curson (2010: 142)
argues: ‘some thinking and writing on the nature of gender by trans
individuals, often in non-academic contexts, goes beyond the current
level of thinking and sophistication in transgender studies itself ’. I have

39
 Understanding trans health

therefore sought to acknowledge the theoretical work of certain non-

academic trans writers (including research participants for this project)
in my discussion of research data in following chapters.
Eve Shapiro (2004: 166–167) observes that online connectivity
has enabled trans activists to more easily ‘educate themselves and
others … make contacts’ and ‘foster collective identity’. In the UK,
this increased level of education and connectivity intersected with
offline activism for trans legal rights by groups such as Liberty and
Press For Change, in what Whittle (1998: 393) has described as the
‘street-Net-street effect’. Trans activists have successfully fought for
inclusion within LGBT organisations, the universal provision of trans-
specific medical services through the NHS and legal recognition in
legislation such as the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and Equality Act
2010.13 The internet has also facilitated shifts in language, with trans
people seeking to create an inclusive terminology for the purposes of
community organising and activism. The shift from ‘transgender’ to
‘trans’ is an example of this. So too is the emergence of non-binary
and non-gendered forms of language, which provide a means by which
the fluidity Bornstein sought can be achieved. For instance, in Trans
Liberation Feinberg describes hir use of gender-neutral pronouns in the
context of the normative language of binary gender.

I am a human being who would prefer not to be addressed

as Ms. or Mr., ma’am or sir. I prefer to use gender-neutral
pronouns like sie (pronounced like ‘see’) and hir (pronounced
like ‘here’) to describe myself. I am a person who faces
almost insurmountable difficulty when instructed to check
off an ‘F’ or an ‘M’ box on identification papers … I simply
do not fit the prevalent Western concepts of what a woman
or a man ‘should’ look like. (Feinberg, 1999: 1, emphasis
in original)

The adoption of gender-neutral pronouns – in the form sie/hir as

used by Feinberg, or in other forms such as the singular ‘they’ used
by numerous participants in this project – has limited impact as an
individual act. However, the collective adoption of new pronoun
systems within trans communities on the internet provided a means by
which new forms of trans language could first be implemented (and
experimented with) in affirmative environments.
Interventions such as the introduction of gender-neutral pronouns are
most commonly undertaken by and for individuals who, like Feinberg,
do not consider themselves to be (straightforwardly, exclusively or at

40
 Condition or movement? A genealogy of trans discourse

all) female or male. A myriad of terms have been coined to describe

these gendered (and/or non-gendered) possibilities, such as agender, bi-
gender, boi, enby, genderblender, genderfluid, genderfuck, neutrois and
polygender, to name just a few. These sit alongside older identities that
predate the contemporary trans movement, but can be incorporated
into it, such as the ‘transvestites … drag queens and drag kings, cross-
dressers, bull-daggers, stone butches, androgynes [and] diesel dykes’
described by Feinberg (1992: 206).
The most common such terms at the time of writing are non-
binary and genderqueer, which are also frequently employed
as umbrella terms for the wider repertoire of identities described
above (Yeadon-Lee, 2016). Like Feinberg’s interpretation of trans/
transgender, and in contrast to the fixity of both traditional medical
terminology and social identities such as ‘transgenderist’, neither non-
binary nor genderqueer has an absolute, clearly delineated meaning.
Instead, they denote personal and/or collective gendered movement
in terms of rejecting binary gendered norms. For instance, the edited
collection Genderqueer addresses a great number of differently gendered
subjectivities belonging to individuals who might previously have been
categorised as transsexual, as cross-dressers or as gender nonconforming
gay, lesbian and/or bi people utilising terms such as butch, femme
or boi (Nestle et al, 2002). In this way, space is created within non-
binary and genderqueer identity categories both for individuals
intending to physically transition and those who have no desire to
do so.14 Non-binary and genderqueer language therefore creates a
means by which collective movement can occur – in terms of social
understanding and political recognition – even as traditional categorical
boundaries are broken down, reassembled and broken down again.
This collective movement is beginning to achieve the political goal of
social affirmation through recognition in numerous settings, having
successfully campaigned for the inclusion of non-binary identifiers in
contexts ranging from United Nations reports to the formal records
of the UK’s Royal Mail (Richards et al, 2016).
Feinberg’s vision of a collective trans movement has been enabled
through the wide dissemination of writing by hirself and others,
academic and non-academic. Trans has become both a ‘politicized
identity category’ and something that people do (Enke, 2012: 236).15
Trans language is forged through intersections of the academic, the
political and the everyday, facilitated greatly by the internet. The trans
movement is collectively succeeding in challenging the hegemonic
discourse of binary gender, and in gaining forms of social and
legal recognition. Such achievements are intrinsically linked to the

41
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
8th September. The night was bitterly cold. I could not sleep;
experienced much oppression of chest, and could not contrive to
keep my feet warm, all I could do—three pair of worsted socks on,
drawers and trowsers, double blanket, felt namba, and flannel jacket
and mackintosh over that, on the foot of the bed. In the night I got
flannel trowsers, and wrapped my feet in them, but produced no
warmth. The frost was very sharp, the stream turned to ice. The
sun, however, was bright and cheery, and under its genial influence
all were in good spirits. After breakfast we hunters started in
advance. We soon saw a herd of antelope. But they also saw us,
when we reached a low hill, behind which they slowly retired. I went
after them with Subhan, and opened them about three hundred
yards off. They soon increased that to four hundred, when some five
or six being grouped together, I took a shot at them with Whitworth,
and the bolt only just cleared their backs by an inch or so. Off they
scudded, and I fired the Enfield, both balls seemingly falling right
amidst them, but stopping none.
We crossed the plain where, on coming, we were so fortunate,
bucks jumping up under our very noses. Now we just caught a
glimpse of some in the distance, which were off at once. A piercing
blast, blowing off the snowy Karakorum, met us in the teeth, cutting
us through and through. I never felt anything like it. It seemed to
enter my eyes, and wither my brain. My nose and lips were in a
terrible state. Moving on, head down, I was aroused by Subhan's
signal, and saw in front, in a watercourse we were about to
descend, five antelope apparently asleep. I dismounted, and strove
to get at them; but, the ground offering no covert, no nullah, they
soon saw us, and away they sped into space. I now walked on, and
descended into the wide interminable shingle plain, stretching from
the base of the Karakorum. On turning an angle, I saw something
move. It was a miserable horse left here to linger out its last
moments in agonies. Two days, I suppose, it must have lingered,
deserted by the unfeeling owner, a Bokhara man, who had passed
us at Sugheit. He must have suffered heavy loss, as we have already
passed eight or nine of his dead horses. The throats of the others
had been mercifully cut. I put this poor animal to rest with a bullet in
his brain.
Hence, on to our former bleak and dreary camp ground, the wind if
possible more keen as we neared its primary source. I was glad to
dismount, and wrap my head in a blanket, turning my back to this
inhospitable blast. Soon up came Buddoo, the trusty, ever-cheerful,
quiet Buddoo, and not very long after, the invaluable, energetic
Abdoolah; and all the coolies came in by dusk. I have resolved, in
consequence of our very limited quantity of rations, to make a short
march to-morrow, though Sunday, to a place in the middle of the
Karakorum gorge, where I hope to find a little sprinkling of grass, as
we saw many antelope there, on coming through. This will give us
an easy march over the pass to a spot beyond the wretched charnel-
house, where we camped last time, and lost our first horse—offering
the important advantage of a bite or two of grass, and, I think, fuel.
I ordered a sheep to be killed, intending to regale my servants and
shikarries with flesh, the better to enable them to stand the cold—an
addition to their simple farinaceous diet most acceptable. Resorting
to every possible precaution to promote warmth, I put on three
flannel shirts, one amazingly thick, drawers, flannel trowsers, flannel
coat, nightcap tied on by a voluminous merino neckcloth also
encircling my throat, and on my feet, my principal place of suffering,
three pair of woollen socks, then over all a woollen gun-cover, in
which my feet are inserted, then the long ends folded round and
secured. Thus clad, with double blanket, felt ditto, mackintosh, and
warm choga enveloping me, I may surely hope for enough of caloric
for comfort and repose; though that terrible wind is howling its
menaces, and the frost set in hard. I wish I was safe in the Lobrah
valley. Well, well, a few days—say seven—and we shall (please God)
be at Chanloong; formerly, how despicable a place! now, how
ardently longed for!
9th September. Sunday. A very indifferent night; my feet numbed
and chill, in spite of all my manifold coverings; my lungs much
oppressed, and continually calling me to consciousness by a sense of
impending suffocation. On the sun's rays being distinctly recognised
by the growing transparency of my tent, I emerged from my many
wrappers. The outer atmosphere was intensely severe; ice
everywhere it was possible; and a wind that found its way to one's
marrow. My tent had been well secured at foot to exclude this
assailant, as also, by-the-bye, the poor goats, which, unhappy
sufferers, made several efforts to repeat their invasion of Friday
night, when two of them established themselves under my bed,
driven to this bold intrusion by the severe cold, and little Sara, as
though in appreciation of their sufferings, and compassionating
them, offered no opposition. Nor should I have taken measures to
exclude them, poor things! but that they kept me awake by their
constant restlessness and unusual noises.
I attempted to be, and to look, cheerful—on the Mark Tapley
principle. My attendants looked very black and pinched. No wonder;
there is some difference between this temperature and that of their
fervid plains. At breakfast Abdoolah told me, that the party generally
would prefer halting here to-day, as they needed rest. The coolies
wanted to mend their boots, and promised to go through to the halt
I had designed to-morrow. He observed, too, that the flour was all
but out, and as the Yarkand kafila would come up to-day, we could
indent upon them for their promised contribution. I had no objection
at all to remaining; on the contrary, it would enable me to maintain
my Sunday practice, proposed to be interrupted only on necessity.
I passed the day within, reading and writing; received report of the
death of a horse, knocked up yesterday, one with a dreadful sore
back, which I had remarked, and predicted its certain death. The
Bhooties in attendance on the horses cannot be induced to look
after them, or attempt to remedy the effects of the saddle-galls, by
mending or altering, or applications of any sort. The loss will be
theirs and their employers', as I have explained to them, with
repeated injunctions to look after the animals; but all in vain. The
Yarkandies came up in the afternoon. Abdoolah went to beg, and
only succeeded in obtaining twenty-six seers of atta. I was angry
with him for having either deceived me as to the quantity of flour in
hand, on my making particular enquiries on Monday, or for having
exceeded the proportion of issues he had then told me was
necessary daily, having led me to expect that we had ten days'
supply, when here on the sixth we were consuming the last day's
rations. He made some unintelligible explanations of having omitted
in his estimate some of the Bhooties who had hitherto subsisted on
their own provision; but all this should have been correctly
ascertained. I suspect that Abdoolah, in his anxiety to prevent my
prosecuting my intended inroad into the Yarkand territory, rather
exaggerated our resources, or under-reckoned our wants knowingly
—a very grave fault in our circumstances. But we have the
provisions, written and sent for, to hope and expect. Kamal is a
thoroughly trustworthy messenger, and will be probably fallen in with
at Bursey or Moorgaby.
The thermometer this morning at 7 A.M. was six degrees below
freezing in my tent.
10th September. While yet dark, poor shivering Buddoo came in to
take out bullock-trunk and chair for the coolies, now ready to start.
Oh! how cold the rush of external air! The tent again closed, I
enjoyed a sort of sense of comfort by comparison, and waited till the
first appearance of dawn; then speedily got ready, and, muffled up,
moved off. All the streams, though rapid, were frozen over thickly. I
tramped on as fast as the rough shingle and a pair of new
ammunition-boots, of great strength and corresponding hardness
and stiffness, allowed me. A gentle ascent of some eight miles, I
think, had to be surmounted ere we reached the actual pass of the
Karakorum, and this up a valley or river-way. Having gained partial
warmth after two hours' walk, and my boots chafing, I mounted,
and took Sara before me. But, though the sun was now illuming this
valley, the frost did not yield, and my moustache and beard were
firmly united in a mass of icicles from my congealing breath, so that
it was inconvenient (to use no stronger term) to open my mouth, as
it needed the parting or extraction of some hairs to effect. With
every contrivance to wrap them up, and with two pair of woollen
gloves—one, certainly, all rents—my hands became so painful I
could no longer keep poor little Sara under my cloak before me, so
set him down; and, soon after, we made a turn to the left, opening
the pass, from the snowy peaks of which came rushing an icy blast
that quite curdled my blood. My eyes ached, my brain seemed
congealed, and a pain in my back and side, and every now and then
a gasping for breath, completed my misery. I was soon obliged to
dismount, in spite of sore feet, to endeavour to restore the
circulation by walking as rapidly as possible. But the difficulty of
breathing was terrible. On I struggled, until a bend to the right into
a narrow ravine presented itself, whose lofty banks gave some
promise of shelter from this killing blast. For this I hastened; and,
finding a little nook in a bank, down I threw myself, lifting my face to
the sun, and so sought, and soon found, partial relief.
The shikarries came up, and we were all, I should think, half an hour
before attempting a remark. Then, having thawed a little, we could
find an objurgation or two against the country and climate. My
breakfast bundle unfolded displayed milk frozen in bottle to a lump—
tea, ditto. This was enveloped in a thick blanket, and carried on a
man's shoulder. It was soon liquidized in the sun. I remained an hour
or so basking: then, the worst over, away and up over the pass, and
down, down into the valley beyond, where the temperature under
the sun's increased power was tolerable. We passed the former
halting-place, Pulu, and, after resting an hour, continued our course
to Dupsang, where we chose our camp on an extensive plain, with a
scanty patch or two of grass. The effects came up late, coolies later;
but all got in. I determined to start the coolies very early, and leave,
myself and mounted party, at 8.30, after breakfast, to give the
horses more time to get a bite of grass.
11th September. On turning out I found a very severe frost, as I had
expected from my experience within. Abdoolah proposed to give me
an omelet for breakfast, but produced chops instead, explaining that
the eggs were frozen into stones, and he had hard work to separate
the meat.
We had to cross the elevated table-land, before described, now just
covered with a thin layer of snow. A bitter wind blew in our teeth,
putting all enjoyment of the scenery, or any pleasing train of
meditation, out of the question. All was silent endurance, grinning
discomfort. Yet I did give a glance, and sentiment or so of
admiration, to some magnificent forms of mountains in their pure
and brilliant garb of snow. But I was glad to be rid of their frozen
features, and descend into a narrow ravine, where, screened from
the wind, and cheered by the sun, my temperature and temper
regained their customary tone. Here we met a party conveying
goods of Bella Shah's—dyed leather—to Yarkand; and one of them
was the unfortunate owner of the horses with me, a merchant who
had been long in prison at Leh, and recently released. On gaining
freedom, he, of course, looked for his horses, and was very glad to
hear that they had been engaged for me. He now collected his
clothes, and turned back with my party, much questioning and
answering going on between him and the shikarries; he had read my
first note to the kardar at Panamik for supplies, and had pointed out
to that individual the necessity of implicit compliance; had met
Kamal on the hill over Chanloong, now six days back. This was
satisfactory. We need now have no apprehensions, but of a day's
scarcity—perhaps, a half ration. We continued on, far beyond our
original halt, and finally pulled up on the shingle, near a small thread
of a stream which was lost in the shingle. When we previously
ascended, this water-bed was intersected in every direction by rapid
streams: now water was difficult to find. The traps arrived late, and I
did not enter my tent till dark. There was a perceptible difference in
the atmosphere, though still frosty.
12th September. I intended to start the whole party early, in order to
bring the horses to the grass at Moorgaby, as soon as possible, but
found them all astray, having wandered away in search of grass
during the night. I could not wait in the cold, so started, my horse at
hand following as usual. I strode away best pace, and passed coolies
and Murad's party, and was deep in thought, when a rattling of earth
aroused my attention, and looking up, there were some thirty nâpu
close by me, on the hill-side on my right hand, not above fifty yards
off, all of a heap. They were leisurely moving upwards, a capital
shot. No shikarry, no gun near, that wretched Mooktoo having
lagged far behind. Abdool coming on, driving my horse before him, I
made frantic gestures to him to stop; but, head down, eyes on the
ground, not heeding, in stupid absorption, on he came, nor could I
gain his attention, till I picked up a stone and threw it at his head.
Then he ducked, and halted, and began to talk. Mooktoo, awake to
the circumstances, now came running up, rifle in case; fumbled at
that, then to cap—his fingers so numbed, I suppose, he bungled
sadly. The animals were now far up the mountain. I got the rifle, and
pulling trigger, no effects—the cap bad. At last I got off both barrels,
but the objects were too far off for this weapon—a polygroove.
We arrived at a point where the path, quitting the river-bed,
ascended the rugged mountain-side to a great height, and re-
descended. There being now no water, I thought we might go
straight on, but Abdool would not hear of the horse going. He said,
"man might go, but no horse could;" so Mooktoo and I, followed by
Lussoo, breakfast-bearer, entered the defile which delighted us at
first by its easy, accessible ingress. We soon, however, learned to
respect Abdool's opinion, at which and his experience we had been
scoffing. We found ourselves entangled in a confusion of rocks which
at last quite blocked up the passage. There was nothing for it, then,
but to retrace our steps, or climb the steep on either side. I set to
work at one point, Mooktoo at another. Making slow progress, and
slipping back often—for I had no staff to support me, and my boots
were ill fitted for climbing—I gained the ledge with much exertion,
and, after clambering along some hundred yards, found I must re-
descend into the bed of the torrent, all further progress being cut off
by a yawning precipice. Nerving myself for the attempt, I succeeded
in getting down, showers of loose stones accompanying me. I could
not pause for observation, but fixing my eyes on certain points
apparently firm I dashed at them, and off again before my weight
had detached them, leaving them to fall with awful resounding
crashes into the depths below. I got down all right, not a little
pleased and relieved thereat, and found the way now practicable.
Looking up, there were Mooktoo and Lussoo craning over the chasm.
I hailed them to try another place, and then went on, and heard
stones and rocks thundering down the steep. Reaching the point
where Abdool and horse should cross, they were not yet in sight, but
soon appeared, and in due time joined me. Half an hour had elapsed
since I left the other two in difficulties, and, becoming alarmed, I
despatched Abdool to look after them; who after ten minutes or so
reappeared, abusing them and Cashmiries in general as good for
nothing. They were close at hand, and came up, Subhan and
Phuttoo also. They had to extricate Lussoo who, terror-stricken, had
stuck half-way down the steep.
Here I breakfasted, and then went on to Moorgaby. No Kamal: but
an encampment—some of the people, and horses, and goods of the
Bokhara man. Horses lay dead around; and a man was engaged in
skinning and cutting up one for meat. My people did not make their
appearance till six or seven hours after me.
13th September. A cold frosty morning. I stepped out smartly for a
couple of hours, and then mounted, and found the Bokhara man
encamped, who to enquiries said that he had lost six horses, and the
others were so feeble that he must leave his goods behind, and take
them on to Lobrah to recover their condition. I found the torrent,
from wading and crossing which so many times, when coming, I had
suffered such agonies of cold, now a narrow gentle stream, much to
my satisfaction. On nearing Sassar a man with a loaded ass
appeared, who turned out to be one of the party come with my
supplies: the others were at Sassar. Kamal remained at Panamik,
footsore. We found the river at Sassar, so formidable when last
crossed, now easily forded in any place. Men, donkeys, and loads
there: others encamped with yâks designed for hire by merchants
whose horses might knock up.
Subhan rummaged out a sheepskin bag containing some dozen
letters and heaps of papers for me. I greedily seized and ran through
the former. Good news from home—all well, thank God! Excellent
accounts of the corps at Amritsir; no casualties from the date of my
leaving to the 20th July. The Baboo, writing the 20th ult., makes no
allusion to the receipt of my packet from Leh, or from Diskit. This is
perplexing and serious. If my letters, application for extension of
leave, &c., have miscarried, I shall be in a considerable fix. He says,
however, that he had previously despatched these letters by a coolie
who, after twelve days' absence, returned, saying that he was taken
ill on the road. Perhaps, in his letter first sent he mentioned the
receipt of those packets, and forgot to note the same in his second.
I hope so; but must suffer suspense and anxiety till my arrival at
Leh.
14th September. Up betimes for the arduous passage of the Sassar,
which I quite dreaded, so frightfully rough and fatiguing is it, without
a redeeming feature. The coolies had preceded us, so we had no
idea of meeting with shikar up the valley; but as I strode ahead,
Subhan signalled me, and I at once saw a large flock of nâpu
feeding in tranquillity on the steep hill-side on my right hand. They
might have been three hundred yards off. I took the Whitworth from
Phuttoo, and, followed by Subhan with the Enfield, moved gently up
the hill, straight for the animals, there being no other course. Luckily
the wind was down. I got to a big stone about a hundred and fifty
yards from the flock, scattered feeding a few yards apart, and was
obliged to wait some seconds for breath and composure. The
animals were quite unconscious of our neighbourhood. At last,
taking the opportunity of two coming together, one of which seemed
to me the largest there, and to have horns, I aimed. It was most
difficult to aim surely and with nicety, owing to the grey light of
morning, the grey colour of the animals, and that of the ground,
rendering the object very indistinct. Whispering this to Subhan, I let
drive, and down rolled one of the animals; when, to my infinite
astonishment, off dashed little Sara at speed, whose presence I was
not aware of. He had, however, followed silently my every
movement. He flew straight at the wounded animal, and seized it as
it struggled. I called him to come back: but in vain. So, taking the
double rifle, I looked for another shot, and fired at two passing
nâpu, I believe without effect, but the ball seeming to go through
one.
And now ensued an exciting and ludicrous scene. The wounded
nâpu, an animal as large as a fallow doe, partially recovered the
blow, and, shaking off the worrying Sara violently, came with
irregular bounds rapidly down the hill, pursued frantically by the
gallant little dog close at its haunches. I raised the rifle. Subhan
adjured me not to fire, lest I should injure the dog. But fearing that
the animal, apparently yet vigorous, might escape, I aimed well
forward, and over it rolled. Sara was at its head immediately, and
seized it by the ear, when a desperate struggle took place. The
animal bounded into the air; but the tenacious little rascal kept his
hold firm. Down they came, the dog undermost, never relaxing but
to get a better grip. And thus the contest continued, until I got hold
of the hind legs of the violently-struggling creature, and Subhan the
head. Then Sara, coming to my aid, fixed his teeth in the haunch,
and there held on, never yielding till life was extinct. His excitement
then subsided, and he lay down panting, and looking as if really
ashamed of his exploits.
Cheered by this incident, we pursued our way which was yet terribly
trying. However, the passage was in time accomplished, and after
reposing and refreshing for a couple of hours or so, during which
time Buddoo and tent passed us, and the other servants came up,
we went on and bivouacked on the hill above the Bhoot goatherds'
encampment, a spot producing a fair supply of grass. At Abdoolah's
suggestion I had engaged three of the yâks to relieve my tottering
horses and carry the baggage, the horses coming on unloaded, by
which plan I hope to save their lives.
We intend to go through to Chanloong to-morrow—a stiff journey,
with the tremendous mountain to get over, which, however, is not so
bad from this side. We are all elated at the near prospects of a
better land and a better climate than we have recently sojourned in.
I hear a deal of good-natured banter going on around, and feel very
'koosh' myself, and have been congratulating everybody upon our
having bid an eternal farewell to the Karakorum and Sassar horrors.
The Bokhara man sent for some corn. He lost three horses
yesterday. Two or three of mine look as though they would not
survive, poor wretches! in spite of being freed from their burdens.
15th September. Still bitterly cold, my camp being close to enormous
glaciers, in addition to the snow on the mountains. I led off at a
round pace down to the shepherds' huts, and saw donkeys there
loaded, which turned out to be an additional supply convoyed by the
faithful Kamal who had been detained by a sore foot. I renewed the
well-remembered horrors of this vale of stones and bones, to the
latter of which there were now many additions. The air breathed on
the mountain-side was quite pestiferous from the many rotting
carcases.
It was a terrible long drag up. Having reached the top, I ordered a
general dismount, or Phuttoo and Mooktoo would have assuredly
bestridden their poor jaded beasts all the way down. We stopped a
few minutes at a fine clear spring to refresh; and then on to the
willow groves of Chanloong. The descent occupied about an hour
and a half, best pace. How delightful and refreshing appeared the
struggling willows of this scrubby piece of cultivation! Selecting the
most umbrageous, I threw myself under it, and experienced such
delicious sensations as the privations I had recently undergone could
alone have procured me. Bees and insects in numbers were buzzing
and humming about, and the freshness of vivid vegetation was
strongly perceptible in the atmosphere. Excepting the valley of
Sugheit, the air of which was fine and agreeable, that I have been
breathing and exposed to may well be likened to a perpetual east
wind, the rawest and most intense experienced in March in England.
I revelled in the pleasant change, lying down in the shade, giving
the reins to memory and imagination, until gentle slumber stole over
me.
My attendants, baggage, and cattle, except one horse, came in. The
absent animal was obliged to be deserted on the mountain summit.
I ordered a man with corn to be sent up to make a last effort to save
him. How delighted all the poor fellows were to get down!
I eat my dinner again 'al fresco,' and sat out as long as the light
enabled me to read, occasionally casting a glance over the scenery,
always grand though savage, and in the evening-subdued light
endued with softer beauties: then turned in anticipating a good
night's rest.
16th September. I did enjoy an untroubled night of calm repose,
such as I have not experienced since I left Sugheit; no violent
palpitations and struggles for respiration, no biting wind penetrating
my every covering, and—oh! satisfaction indescribable—warm feet.
I rose early, the air cool and fresh, and just sauntered about among
the straggling bushes, feeling truly sensible, I trust, of the mercies
and blessings vouchsafed me. So far I had returned safe and sound.
I now look forward with pleasure to my return to my duties and
usual avocations. I passed a pleasant, cheerful day; and retired in
suitable mood again to enjoy a night of delicious, healthy sleep.
 CHAPTER XV.
LEH AND LADÂK.

17th September. Everybody astir early. Even the coolies were

anxious for a start. Not their wont by any means: it has always been
a hard matter to rouse them up. But they, poor mortals! have their
affections, and are now looking forward to return to their homes and
families.
Having seen many hares and partridges when coming this stage, I
had my gun and shot ready, wishing to give little Sara some
diversion. Arriving at fields and cultivation after six or seven miles of
horrid barren country, I dismounted, and flushed a snipe in some
swampy ground, whilst a hare was visible running off in the
distance. I thought Master Snipey a certain bag after the hare, so
did not fire at him, though an easy shot. The hare made off through
a fence, and a teal rising I knocked it over. Now I tried for the 'long-
bill.' But whether the report of the gun had awakened dormant
hereditary suspicions—for he could never have been shot at—I know
not; but he proved himself the most 'cute and wide-awake creature
imaginable, and, after many dodges, finally took flight. So I tried
after the hare. No find. Then I took down a stream, and shot a long-
billed bird which, when sitting, I thought must be a woodcock: but it
was only some kind of plover, the head and bill exactly like the
woodcock's. I saw the 'long-bill.' There was but this one, and again I
sought his life. In vain: he was off long ere I got near him. Then I
tried a swamp; found nothing, and stopped to breakfast. All the
people and traps came up and passed. I felt resolved to have that
snipe. And, as he had gone off in the direction of the spot first found
in, I had no doubt of seeing him there, so went back. There he was,
quite conspicuous, feeding about, but still wide-awake, and ever
fluttering on out of shot; and at last, when my attentions became
too pressing, he took a long flight, but came back a long round, and
settled in some sedges. I was relentless, and resolved to compass
his death by treachery; so, taking advantage of a fence covering my
approach, I stole upon him. Reconnoitring carefully, I saw him
evidently on the 'qui vive,' and had to advance still some way to
make sure. I peeped again: he was not visible. Suspecting a 'ruse,' I
went on a little further, and looking over the hedge saw my fine
fellow, his head on one side, evidently listening. Without any
compunction, I blew out his brains then and there. Soon after, I shot
a hare, and then, turning towards the horses, a good long beat lying
between, I fired at four others ineffectually; a just punishment for
the persecution and murder of the solitary snipe.
I found my tent pitched at Panamik in the old spot; and in the
afternoon transacted a deal of business. The moonshi, Ahmet Shah's
relative, met me on the road. He and Abdoolah had come to some
understanding on prices and charges, and we got on very well. The
horse left on the hill died yesterday, making five in all out of the
seventeen taken from Panamik, which gives a fair idea of the nature
of the journey. The hire of each horse for the forty days, after due
deductions, is eight rupees, one anna. I was very glad to have the
matter settled, and attacked my stew with additional zest. Some
turnips and pumpkins obtained yesterday were a great treat after a
month's forced abstinence from all vegetables. No fruit to be got
here. I push on to-morrow beyond the corresponding stage when
coming, and, as the river is now low, shall probably avoid Diskit
altogether.
18th September. A more than usually tiresome march, the glare from
the surrounding bare sandy ground excessively trying to the eyes.
The moonshi overtook and accompanied me, and on arrival at
Lanjoong procured me some melons and apples which, though
indifferent of their kind, were most acceptable. Here I discharged
Tar-gness who appeared delighted with his rate of wages, doing
obeisance in a most servile manner. The kardar arrived from Diskit,
and I tipped him five rupees, much to his satisfaction.
19th September. A long and most wearisome march, repeating all
the disagreeables of yesterday in a magnified degree, the road lying
through an interminable tract of shingle and deep sand by the river
side. I shot a hare at the village where we stopped to breakfast, and
disturbed a young brood of chakore there. The hen bird exposing
herself to certain destruction to draw off attention from her
nestlings, I forbore to injure her, respecting her maternal solicitude
and magnanimous self-devotion. We finally brought up at a small
village on the right bank, having passed by Diskit and Kalsar, and
thus gaining a position almost opposite the ravine leading down
from Karbong. The sheep arrived from Diskit looking well, all but the
solitary survivor of the Wurdwan lot which, whether from pining in
strange company in an uncongenial climate, or other cause
unknown, is in very poor case.
20th September. After two or three miles of very deep sand, we
crossed the river where divided into several channels. Its waters are
diminished in depth and force, otherwise it is not fordable when
comprised in its main channel. We had now a rough path up a
rugged ravine, with some very steep pitches to ascend, and did not
reach Karbong until eleven, and had to wait for breakfast till twelve.
The owner of the horses of my expedition, who is accompanying me
to Leh, there to receive his money, came up and reported that five
of the coolies had bolted at our camp, and every male had
disappeared from the village, so that Abdoolah had adopted the only
course left, and gone back to another village with the sepoy to
impress other coolies. This mishap compelled me to give up all
thoughts of going further to-day, which will necessitate a double
march to-morrow, including that horrid mountain.
21st September. A very severe frost, and the cold intense on this
elevated plateau, surrounded by snow-covered mountains. I rose at
the first glimpse of dawn, and tramped fast and long before
acquiring any glow. After a heavy drag up hill for four hours I halted
to breakfast about a mile and a half from the foot of the ascent;
which I then accomplished, not without sundry slips and tumbles,
the ice beneath the snow being hard and slippery. The descent was
steep and rugged, down a horrid stony path running through corn
fields now under the reapers' hands, to the immediate precincts of
Leh, passing under the rock and its crowning palace; and thence
turning across the fields we entered the enclosure where was our
camp, and were warmly welcomed by Suleiman and domestics. The
former was much relieved at our appearance, having suffered, he
said, much suspense from want of authentic information regarding
us, and flying rumours of misfortune.
Major Tryon had taken his unfortunate servant with him in a doolie.
He had lost some of his fingers which had dropped off, but was
thought to be getting better.
No letters or papers for me, nor any news of those transmitted
hence having reached the Baboo. I am thus in a fix, not knowing
whether I have leave or no, nor even if my application for leave was
ever received. I must hasten on to Cashmere, expecting to meet the
Baboo's explanations 'en route.'
The thanadar was very civil in messages, sending apples and a
sheep, bed and bedding too. Abdoolah arrived and reported things
on the way, yet far behind. Buddoo and bedding arrived, so I was
well provided for. I sat chatting by the fire some time, and then
turned into my large tent, quite a mansion, and read for an hour or
so. One small snooze—and then I was roused and kept awake for
hours by an inharmonious combination of sounds—people wandering
about, coolies arriving holloaing at each other, servants and
followers all jabbering away together, horses neighing, a jackass
braying, yâks grunting, and Sara and Fan rushing out of the tent and
adding their shrill yelps to the general outcry. I summoned patience,
and dwelling on my safety and comfort forbore to interrupt my
retainers in the outpouring of their mutual gossip on reunion; but lay
and endured it all, hoping for a lull in the storm, which at length
arriving, I submitted joyfully to the sweet bonds of sleep.
22nd September. A delightful fresh morning. I just sauntered about
around my tent, and ordered two sheep, rice, flour, and tea for the
entertainment of my establishment, to commemorate the safe return
of the expedition. Suleiman reports that he had distributed all the
Scriptures and tracts, but a few which he had kept in reserve in case
we should visit Kopalu. He had met with some attentive listeners,
one a Sikh from Lucknow, now resident in this country, who said his
mind was full and troubled after reading the Gospel, and wished he
could consult with a 'padre.' He is going to Kopalu, and Suleiman
was going to entrust him with some books for the Rajah of that
place, a very intelligent man, and one with whom Suleiman, in his
former travels in this country with Colonel Martin, had held
communication and discourse, of whom too he was hopeful. But we
learn that the Rajah is now in Sirinuggur attending the durbar, so we
hope to meet him in person.
There is also an old man, a bunga, native of Feruckabad, who has
been here some years, and has married a native woman, by whom
he has three young children: he is earnest in his enquiries, and
professes a conviction of the truth of Christianity. He proposes to go
under my escort to the mission at Amritsir. But to remove and deport
a family of the Maharajah's subjects without full sanction would be
going much too far. And, then, how would my friends, the
missionaries, approve of my burdening them so heavily? After
pondering over the subject, I resolved, if the customs and laws of
the land permitted, to run all risks and encounter the trouble and
expense, for the sake of the children—nice, lively, dirty, naked, little
wretches, always merry and chattering. So I sent Abdoolah and the
moonshi to enquire of the thanadar about the matter, who replies
that, when a foreigner marries a native of the country, he ought not
to quit without due authority from the Maharajah. So I thought the
utmost prudence necessary in such a case. I was sorry to reject the
poor man's petition, and, pitying his disappointment, said I would
endeavour to get a purwanah from the Maharajah for his exit,
should I have an interview with his highness.
Poor old Basti Ram is ailing, and obliged to be bled, so I have
announced my intention to pay him a visit.
23rd September. Sunday. A quiet morning. About breakfast time
Bella Shah, the moonshi, Murad, and other folk and attendants came
to see me. Murad, who looked remarkably down and conscious,
excused himself from going on with me, stating that his horses were
lame, and, when this was contradicted, he then declared that he
owed Bella Shah money, which if I paid he would go. Bella Shah had
then taken leave. I declined it, and told him he was at liberty to
choose his own route, time, &c., and so dismissed him.
24th September. I paid all wages and claims before breakfast, and
afterwards off to the town to Bella Shah's, and inspected some rugs,
and damask silks, and other goods. The silks were described as from
Russia, but had a stamp with the arms of England, lion and unicorn,
on them. If they are from England, a far less circuitous route might
be found for such merchandise. Questioning Bella Shah as to
Murad's being indebted to him, he said it was true; he had borrowed
money at Yarkand from his nephew to be repaid here, but that this
should be no obstacle to his accompanying me. I had thought much
last night over Murad's conduct, and the best course to take in
regard to it, and had come to the conclusion that it was my duty to
take possession of the head of the deceased gentleman, leaving the
other things with Murad.
I now went to Basti Ram's, and was ushered into the old
gentleman's presence with due ceremony. He is feeble, but his eye is
bright and his voice strong. A large group of slovenly attendants and
my own suite were admitted to the presence. We had much chat
about my journey, and then brought Murad upon the 'tapis.' Basti
Ram became excited and energetic, declaring that he would force
him along with me, and send an escort with him: had he not come
under my protection, he would have been imprisoned immediately
on his arrival, so strong were the suspicions entertained against him:
there were merchants of the first respectability now in Leh aware of
all the circumstances of M. Schlagentweit's murder, who distinctly
taxed Murad with connivance and complicity in the treachery that
betrayed him to Walli Khan. The old man was quite roused as he
dwelt on this topic. I now made up my mind, and explained my
wishes to Basti Ram that he should summons all the credible
persons from Yarkand, who were cognisant of any of the facts of this
wicked business, examine them, and duly and officially record their
depositions in Persian, attaching his sign manual thereto; and that
the same parties should also give evidence before me. To this he
readily assented, issuing the necessary orders on the spot. He told
me that there was a merchant, a man of importance, in the town,
who was actually present when M. Schlagentweit was killed. This
arranged, I took leave.
There was food for reflection in the information just received, and
my resolve thereupon at once taken I sent the jemadar, who
followed me from Basti Ram, to bring me the head from Murad, and
then returned to camp. After a while the jemadar arrived with
Murad, the head, book, and instrument. The head, taken from the
box and unwrapped, exhibited a skull complete with facial bones.
Earth and dust adhered to it as when it was exhumed. The upper
front teeth were remarkably prominent, the two centre ones large.
The jemadar, who had been well acquainted with the deceased, had
no doubt of the identity. There was a deep cut in the bone just
above the nape of the neck. The few roots of hair on the skull were
black. I ordered these relics to be placed in my tent, and Murad was
made aware that he must accompany me. He only demurred at the
difficulties of feeding himself and horses on the road. But this was at
once overruled, as Basti Ram had engaged to settle all such matters,
or I would have done so. The witnesses are to be paraded before
me this evening, when something definite, one way or the other,
may be elicited. I have taken measures to have them interrogated
separately, and much ado I had to get this understood. Natives will
follow their own train of ideas, and pervert one's words in conformity
thereto.
Murad and the witnesses having come, after fruitless efforts to
conduct an examination in any useful form—it being impossible to
obtain definite answers, and equally out of the question keeping a
witness to the point, and preventing interruptions from my
attendants, all wanting to have a say—I gave up the attempt in
despair, and sent the whole party off to the thanadar to be examined
on their oaths.
Abdoolah returned from the inquisition with Murad and a paper
containing the summary of evidence taken on oath before the
thanadar, who sent me word that there was nothing whatever
stated, which could in any way incriminate Murad; his suspicions
against him were now entirely removed, and he believed his
narrative to be substantially true. This result gives me the greatest
satisfaction. I congratulated Murad upon it, and pointed out how
necessary it was for his own sake that the rumours to his prejudice
should have been sifted and refuted. He now holds up his head
again, and is quite ready to accompany me, but requires an advance
of cash; so I gave him the sum he asked, twenty rupees.
25th September. Bella Shah and his nephew and other people came
to see me, and we had a long and interesting conversation on the
circumstances connected with M. Schlagentweit's journey and death.
Bella Shah's relative says, that the Chinese authorities of Yarkand
are not inimical to the British, and would have treated M.
Schlagentweit hospitably and with honour. The borders of the
country of Andejan are three days' march from the city of Yarkand.
This territory contains eleven large cities, is a month's journey in
width, and joins its frontiers to the provinces of Russia, which
country has recently erected and established a military cantonment
on its frontier, after some opposition and fighting. Peace now
prevails, and a large amount of trade is carried on. Even British
goods find their way by this route through Bokhara, where only any
duty is levied, and that light, computed at two and a half per cent. I
questioned Bella Shah as to why he, an eminent merchant, did not
introduce British manufacturers by the Ladâk route. He replied, that
the exactions were too heavy, and the difficulties of the route caused
heavy expenses. He did send calicoes and piece goods, but
sometimes found the market overstocked by consignments from
Russia. It was so at present: such goods were selling in Yarkand for
half their original value. It seems unfortunate that the Indian
government did not support Moorcroft in his schemes for opening up
these vast regions to British commercial enterprise. Russia has now
established her influence here, and makes a good thing of it.
I have been purchasing some warm articles of felt clothing for my fat
friend the lumbadar of Eish Mackahm; then took a warm farewell of
Bella Shah. Yesterday evening, when Murad returned from the
thanadar, that functionary sent with him a man denounced by Murad
as having in his possession property to the value of 1008 rupees of
M. Schlagentweit's. The man admitted to having been entrusted with
goods to that amount by M. Schlagentweit who had sent him on
arrival at Khylian to a neighbouring village to dispose of them. He
followed M. Schlagentweit on to Yarkand, thinking to find him there,
and was himself made prisoner. The goods, he said, were safe in the
hands of other parties in Yarkand. Mahomed Dahomey had sent a
sepahu to him from the Andejan country to give up this property, but
he had refused to comply without due authority. The thanadar sent
me word that, if the man did not give up the goods at my bidding,
he would send him to Lahore to be dealt with. I sent directions to
the thanadar to act himself in the matter, and take such steps as he
deemed best to procure the property, and transmit it to British
authority. He sent to me this morning to write him an order so to
act. I have, therefore, given him an official authority, as a British
officer, in the absence of other legitimate authority, to search for,
and possess himself of, all or any effects or papers of the deceased,
and duly apprise the Punjab government when he may succeed. This
seemed to me the rational course to take.
26th September. Every one astir ere dawn amid a scene of bustle
and confusion. The shikarries and even all my servants, Abdoolah
told me, had resolved to indulge themselves with tattoos. Not the
remotest objection on my part, as I would only pay for Abdoolah's
and the moonshi's. I tipped jemadar, gopal, and the old bunga who
was anxious that I should not forget his name, in order to bring his
case before the Maharajah. Abdool, the whilom guide, appeared and
undertook to lead the way out of the labyrinth of paths, and then
took his leave with proper salaams. I believe the poor creature is
really grateful for the treatment he has received from me, a rare
feeling among Asiatics.
We arrived without any adventure at Mimah, and camped in an
enclosure. The evening was delightfully fresh, even rather chill,
rendering a clear crackling fire pleasant to sit and think or chat over.
My nights now, unbroken by that terrible oppression of lungs
experienced further north, pass in tranquil and refreshing repose. If
I do awake, it is but to enjoy the realisation of my condition of
health and security under God's blessing and providence.
27th September. We altered our course from that in coming, Subhan
recommending the road by Sassapool instead of Hemschi, the
abatement of the waters of the Indus now having rendered the
lower road practicable. No ways loath, mindful of the stony hilly
demerits of the other, it was so ruled. The road as far as Sassapool
was very fair. Subhan recommended a move on to Noorla, as it was
yet early, about 9.30 A.M., and that place not distant. In this,
however, he was much mistaken. The path led along the banks of
the Indus, up and down precipitous rocks, rough, difficult, and most
wearisome, the distance such that we did not reach Noorla till 4 P.M.
There was little hope of the baggage coming up till night, and the
Cashmere coolies could hardly be expected at all. I determined to
make the best of the lots of walnuts to be had for the pelting, and
some apples.
At dusk Ali Bucks came up with the disagreeable news of all the
Bhoot coolies, who were taken in relay at Sassapool, having bolted;
that a few things only were coming on, and that Abdoolah and the
sepoy were endeavouring to press other people. I soon had some
chupatties made, which with some cold meat formed an excellent
dinner: I got some Yarkand tea also which was quite flavourless, but
being hot did well enough. Buddoo and the large tent now came up,
but no bed or bedding. However, I contrived very well with part of
the outer fly of the tent and one or two nambas spread on the
ground; and Abdoolah, the sturdy, invincible Abdoolah, having
arrived and reported things all on the way, though far distant,
describing the difficulties and struggles attending the flight of the
former coolies and the forcible enlistment of the new lot, I rolled
myself up, little Fan nestled close on one side, and Sara stretched
out under the covering on the other, and passed a fair night, though
often disturbed by the irregular arrival of the grumbling coolies. The
gopal of this place was reported to be drunk from 'bang,' when we
arrived, and was not only useless, but saucy and obstructive. I sent
him a threatening message, when the fumes were leaving his
faculties somewhat clearer, which had the desired effect of providing
for our wants.
28th September. Finding that everything had arrived during the
night, I determined to reach Lama Yurru to-day. I enjoyed a pleasant
walk at a good pace to Kalsee, to which place Kamal had been
despatched an hour ere dawn to direct a relay of coolies. It was here
that I purchased the crop of corn for my camp. On enquiring of the
gopal, he pointed to the produce remaining stuck up in the walnut
tree. I amused myself by the consternation with which he received
my demand for the restitution of a rupee in consideration of this
harvest. My followers, however, helped themselves liberally to
walnuts on the strength of it. The jemadar of the bridge fort, who
had been uncommonly civil and obliging when coming, advanced
from his fortalice to salute me, and, on my entering the doorway,
presented a tray of apples, congratulating me on my safe return. A
Co. rupee 'backsheesh' called forth abundant thanks, and I passed
the wooden bridge over the Indus, and was soon in that tremendous
gorge leading up to Lama Yurru, the scenery truly magnificent in its
savage grandeur, the road full of precipitous ups and downs, and
running as a mere ledge over fearful depths and chasms. My old
nag, on which I was mounted, was a little nervous at these slight
shelves so projecting, some of which were formed on pieces of
timber let into the smooth side of the perpendicular cliff, and,
besides having an ominous leaning downwards, were very shaky and
full of holes. The old Yarkandi snorted with alarm, craned in front,
and dashed forward when urged, trying to jump the suspicious
spots. But for this pusillanimous conduct he sought to make amends
by dashing at the stairlike path up hill, and springing up at full
gallop. I much enjoyed the excitement of this hap-hazard ride. The
weather was delightful, and the surrounding scenery full of romantic
charms.
We reached the halting-place, and things arrived in due time. I made
enquiries after the yâk I had wounded. The villagers interrogated
pretended ignorance, which naturally persuaded us that the animal
had recovered, and on the gopal arriving he at once told us that it
was so. My ponies' shoes requiring replacing, nailing, &c., I had sent
off for a smith who resided some six miles off. Night approached,
but no man of iron. Lamenting this as a serious mishap, the gopal
volunteered to do the job, and set to work, and in such a manner as
to keep me on tenter hooks, lest he should lame my nags; his
hammer, a little round-headed tool, falling with unsteady aim, driving
the nail this way and that. One only having been driven home, and
another with difficulty extracted, he relinquished the attempt until
morning, daylight now quite failing. Should I ever undertake a
similar journey in such barbarous regions, I will go provided with
farrier's tools, shoes, and nails, and do my own shoeing.
It was very cold here, snow falling on the mountains; and a bitter
cutting wind blowing with sharp frost reminds me of the Karakorum.
But I can find means here to repel the cold, which there no
precaution could effect.
29th September. Leaving the gopal at work at the horses, I marched
off, wishing to outstrip the coolies already started, as there was
some chance of seeing shâpu as on the former occasion. But many
people were passing to and fro, so that any animals were scared
from the neighbourhood of the path. It was a stiff pull up the
mountain to the pir, but I did not dislike the work, the lungs here
playing freely; then, down again by a long slope into a valley where
the trusty Kamal had provided a fire and fresh milk. Having
breakfasted, I mounted and had gone but a few paces, when a duck
rose from the stream and resettled. The gun was at hand, and the
bird soon potted. On nearing Karbo, our halting place, as I was
descending to the stream watering the valley, the shikarries signalled
me and I was at once aware of a number of teal in the ford just
under us. I got the gun, and creeping to a position to enfilade them
delivered right and left as they rose, stopping six of their number. As
they appeared to settle some way down stream, I followed along the
bank, and again came upon them. Three fell to one barrel, the other
did not go off. But I had committed slaughter enough.
Waterfowl are not numerous in this country, there being no 'jheels'
or feeding grounds for them apparently. But in Chan-than and
Roopschoo, where these qualifications are plentiful, they abound. In
Cashmere, at this season, they swarm in the lakes and rivers; snipe
also are numerous, and that splendid bird, the woodcock, not rare in
the jungles; so that, what with pheasants and partridges, the shot-
sportsman may find ample amusement. Should I obtain my
extension, I must try a day or two by way of experiment to see what
there really is to be got.
30th September. Sunday. An exceedingly sharp frost. I took a stroll,
morning and evening; the weather all that could be desired, and
scenery magnificent, though monotonous in colour. The remains of
an extensive fort crown the lofty height immediately over the village.
One is led to wonder under what condition of circumstances this
small valley could have been of sufficient importance to be worth
such a considerable defensive work. Many like ruins are met with in
these valleys, mostly perched on inaccessible rocks. The shikarries—
not reliable historians—tell me that the population generally
inhabited these strongholds, prior to the conquest of Lower Thibet
by Golab Sing, being subject to frequent inroads and depredations
by roving bands of freebooters. So, in fact, I suppose that the
cultivators of every one of these strips of valleys retired from their
daily labours to the security of these forts, their only residence.
I enjoyed my day's halt and repose, and took the opportunity of
pointing out to the shikarries and others assembled round the fire
the wisdom and beneficence of the Sabbath ordinance, well
exemplified in the enjoyment displayed by the coolies and horses in
this respite from their toils. I tried to describe a Sunday in England,
with the general stillness and tranquility prevailing, save the bells
ringing out from the many churches, and the troops of worshippers
to be seen wending their way in obedience to that cheerful mandate.
My audience seemed to approve much of such a rule and practice,
but did not, I imagine, think it applicable to themselves.
 CHAPTER XVI.
THE BARA SING.

1st October. A fine, sharp, frosty morning. I got off at half-past five,
my usual time of starting now, as the sun's fierceness is much
abated at this season. The path followed the stream which was
broken into many rivulets. A brace of teal were espied, which I
potted at one shot. We had then a long hill to get up, and
descending the other side came to a village where Kamal had
prepared a fire and fresh milk. He goes on ahead for the purpose
now every morning. We reached Shazgool at mid-day. Looking about
over the valley, I saw some birds, and when viewing them through
the glass found them to be chakore. I took the gun, and went after
them, but they were on the alert and off ere we got well up to them.
However, I knocked two over, right and left; but on Subhan running
to pick them up, one found strength enough to fly away, and the
other gave us a chase. At the report of the gun down came the dogs
from camp, and commenced hunting: they would both do well with
practice and teaching.
2nd October. To Kargyl: a long stage this, but midway very pleasant,
traversing a cultivated vale, and passing under a long grove of trees
whose shade was agreeable, although the air was fresh. Through
Pashgyam, and then over the bare uplands where the sun was
oppressive and the glare great, till we descended into the smiling
valley of Kargyl, with its many willows, fine brawling river, and
unsightly whitewashed fort. I noticed here, as several times
previously 'en route,' some curious cooking vessels from Iskardo.
They are chiselled out of solid stone, of various sizes, from half a
gallon to two or three, are no thicker than the ordinary earthenware
pots, and, I am told, stand the fire better. Although there must be
much labour and skill required in their manufacture, though left
quite rough, the price is but six annas or so, according to size. The
colour of the stone is grey. Another description of vessel of smaller
size is carved from stone at Iskardo, of a greenish-yellow colour, and
soft in substance. These are more for ornament than use, I believe.
The former are highly esteemed for ordinary purposes, and supply
the place both of metal and earthenware utensils in these parts.
3rd October. To Tazgan: a long and very rough march, the path
hanging on the mountain side over the torrent descending a narrow
valley which leads to the pass of Soonamurgh. Some patches of
cultivation with two or three huts here and there on either side—
evident signs of increased fertility of soil—are now discernible.
Straggling bushes, some stunted fir trees, and many deformed, limb-
twisted junipers, dot the sides of the mountains, which are broken
into stupendous ranges of magnificent forms, and shew bright tints
in the watercourses seaming their declivities, where rank grasses
and thick-growing shrubs find suitable soil and moisture. Other
coarse herbage also gives a pleasant hue of green, though now
yellowing, to the general surface—all being a prelude to the coming
beauties of Cashmere.
The halting place is by a sort of warehouse for the deposit of the
Maharajah's merchandise in transit, who I find is the principal
merchant of his realms, speculating largely in all produce, and
exercising a monopoly of tea and pasham, chiefly imported from
Las; yet, not to be called a speculation, because he must always
make immense profits, as he pays no dues, fixes his own prices, and
forces sales on his unwilling but submissive subjects. Thus he always
ensures a winning game.
4th October. On turning out, I found that many coolies had deserted.
They were engaged to complete this day's march to Dras. I thought
there was something amiss last night, as the fellows kept up a
jabbering uproar long after I had turned in. Leaving the energetic
Abdoolah and the sepoy to extract other 'slavies' from the few
houses straggling in the neighbourhood—which must shelter a
population of forty or fifty, I imagine, exclusive of women and bairns
—I stepped out quickly to the tune of the crackling ice and crisp
ground under me. The scenery was similar to that of yesterday,
except that more open levels were met with, and the path much
improved. The valley widened, admitting a considerable extent of
grassy undulations and flats as we neared Dras—a large maidan,
boasting a fort of the usual form, in good repair and of
unexceptionable whitewash. A large enclosure serves for camping. A
jemadar and some twelve sepoys are here. Enquiring about my last
letter forwarded, I learned to my vexation that it had only left Dras
three days; so I arranged to send in Kamal by tattoo dâk to
Sirinuggur, where he will probably arrive a day sooner than the so-
called post, and rejoin me the other side Soonamurgh. The traps
arrived in good time, coolies having been provided.
5th October. The people all astir unusually early, long before dawn. I
turned out by moonlight—a severe frost, and so fine and fresh—and
tramped away merrily over the frosty, ringing ground, and crossed
many an ice-bound stream; and after some eight miles or so, during
which I had left all my followers far behind, I reached a hamlet
called Pendras, and sending for the head man (mukadam) requested
fresh milk and firewood, shewing a 'jo' as the compensation, which I
always find assists my vocal appeals admirably, and invariably
succeeds in obtaining the trifles I require. After a bit, Mooktoo and
others came up; and then, on again. Ere long a signal from Subhan,
close behind me, brought to notice three fowl below us in the river, a
duck and two teal. I stole down upon them, and dropped the duck
as it neared the opposite bank, and the two teal with the other
barrel. Further on I spied half a dozen teal across the river. We rode
down to cross at a shallow, when a couple of ducks rose, and,
having gone down stream, returned and were passing high over
head, when aiming well forward I fired and down whirled the leader,
falling into some bushes. On reaching him I found Sara already in
full possession. I thought the teal seen were still undisturbed. Syces,
Subhan, and moonshi came up and reported them still visible from
above; so, cautiously stealing to the place, I found three remaining,
and waiting till their dabbling brought them together knocked them
all over. Sara, at the discharge, rushed into the stream, and dragged
a struggling victim to shore. 'Sha-bash! Sara.'
We had a stiff pull up a hill abutting into the valley, at the base of
which two streams, issuing severally from deep narrow gorges,
united; and following up the course of that on our right hand, high
up above it, we wound along many a bend and turn. The mountains
on our left were now well clothed with birch woods stretching
downwards. Rich heavy growth of vegetation is now general from
rocky summit to base, and the watercourses are distinguishable by
the bright emerald tint of their grasses, diminishing in brilliancy
outwardly, the colouring gradually assuming a yellowish hue as it
recedes from the water. The foliage, generally, has now assumed a
yellow hue from the effects of the severe frosts; and some of the
more sensitive shrubs already glow in the deepest tints of orange,
portions here and there showing like broad red stripes down the
mountain; so vivid is the colour, and the whole effect of outline and
detail is enchanting. Feasting my eyes on these lovely scenes, I
suddenly became aware of an unusual object on one of those
emerald slopes. A moment for the eye to dwell, and I was
convinced, and shouted, "Balloo, balloo." There was the first bear.
He was far away—high up on the other side the river.
Now descending a bit, we came to three stone huts at the foot of an
enormous glacier, whence issued a torrent from eastward. Our
further route lay up the prolongation of the valley we were
ascending, southward. But our day's march was terminated. The
bear was on the opposite mountain-side, straight across; and lying
down I watched its movements, not thinking it worth while to
undergo the fatigue of an attempt on him, from the open character
of the ground, and the extreme probability of his soon returning
satiated to his lair. Still he grubbed, and now and again ascending a
rise to reconnoitre returned to his repast. I dozed: woke up, and
there he was still. And so the parties remained till the arrival of
Mooktoo who bore the spyglass. Through this I now inspected the
distant beast, and found it a very large one. Very soon he moved
off; and, after patiently following his eccentric movements, I marked
him down, behind a jutting rock high up on the mountain.
Summoning Phuttoo and Mooktoo, I made my own bunderbus for
the assault; rode Mooktoo across the river, and was obliged to
ascend the mountain by a gulley to windward of the bear's retreat,
but hoped, by getting above, to weather on him. It was hard work
getting up—the grass very slippery, and I had only common shoes
on. We reached right over the spot I thought Bruin occupied; closely
examined the rock I thought he harboured by; but of him we saw
nothing. Nor could we get a glimpse of him elsewhere; so,
supposing he had withdrawn unobserved, we prepared for our
difficult descent, in which we were engaged, Phuttoo assisting my
sliding feet, when he uttered an exclamation, and, following his eye,
I saw the dust flying, as the bear, till now in a fast snooze, scuttled
off. Phuttoo handed me the Whitworth, and, luckily, the brute turned
round on a rise far above us to have a look at the disturbers of his
repose. That moment of curiosity was fatal; as, taking advantage of
the glimpse of him, I sent a bolt into his neck, and staggered him.
Growling savagely, he made his way some little distance, and
climbed on to a prominent piece of rock—a fine mark, about a
hundred and fifty yards off. Phuttoo, quickly loading, handed me the
rifle, and the discharge of its contents brought Bruin from his lofty
perch. Mooktoo, who was far above us, made for the spot, and
dragging the carcase from a cleft in which it had lodged, it came
spinning and rolling, over and over, on to a snowdrift in a ravine. I
hastened to inspect it—a fine large female, in full fur, and fat as
butter. I resolved to pack off all the traps, and wait till the skin and
fat were brought in, in the morning.
6th October. All the baggage off, and Mooktoo with two coolies gone
for the spoils, I sat by the fire two hours at least ere the skinning
party returned; then off immediately, and crossed several snowdrifts
—the valley narrow with a gradual, almost imperceptible ascent. We
had arrived at an extensive mass of snow over which ran the path,
when Subhan, as I was crossing it, pointed out some wild fowl on a
frozen pool below. They were far off, and rose wild. As they
squattered over the ice, I fired both barrels and dropped one bird, a
duck; then crossed the snow, and scrutinising the stream saw wild
fowl in a bend under some overhanging snow; crawled up and
dropped five of them—a duck, a widgeon, and three teal.
We continued our route, crossing over to the other side on an
enormous mass of snow filling the ravine—no longer a valley—and
bridging the torrent. A sharp climb up, then a gradual ascent, and
we were on the top of the pass, though not on the top of the
mountain. A view of transcendent magnificence and beauty opened
upon us. Every conceivable form and colour of loveliness in
landscape seemed here united. The mountains, opening out into
valleys and dells clad in the richest verdure, with foliage of infinite
variety—only, perhaps, rather too general a tint of yellow—stretched
in ranges on either hand far away back, giving beautiful distances
with their infinite shades of blue. Close at hand, their savage rugged
crests, riven and split into all imaginable forms of pinnacle and peak,
here and there a snow-covered mass more level separating them,
frowned overhead. Lovely peeps downward to the torrent glistening
below were offered through the vistas of the foliage. Indeed, all was
seen from out a frame, and from under a canopy, of bright foliage.
While from below was wafted up a delicious fresh fragrance of rich
and abundant vegetation, giving an idea of teeming fertility, but all
of nature's wildest. I felt that had I done nothing more in this long
excursion than just bring myself to this spot to feast upon these
charms of nature, I had been amply repaid.
I had dismounted, and now descended, the way running down in
short sharp zigzags, the declivity on this side being of great length
and extremely steep. Pausing, now and again, on some prominence
to gaze out upon the glorious picture around, thus I went down my
way rejoicing into a fine grassy vale: then mounted and rode some
ten miles along it, with an occasional stretch of intervening pine
woods to cross—the mountains on either side glorious; those on the
left more thickly timbered. Luxuriating in such scenery—so widely
different from that recently quitted—I reached our halting place, a
sweet spot, a level turf close by a river, over which is thrown a rude
but picturesque bridge. A straggling hamlet being hard by, a few
acres of cultivation, irregular and unfenced, are spread around, the
grain now in sheaves. The valley has opened out into an expanse of
downs; but lofty mountains, mostly covered to their summits with
vegetation or timber, overlook and shut it in. One remarkable
mountain, richly clad below, but his hoary summit bare rock broken
into countless pinnacles, stands as a gaunt sentinel over the hamlet.
I was charmed with so delightful a spot for a bivouac, and
determined to halt to-morrow (Sunday), though I should have to
send for provisions, that is, flour. Subhan went off on his tat to visit
a shepherd on a neighbouring mountain, and obtain reliable
information of shikar. He returned after my dinner, the moonshi
Suleiman with him, who had taken a fancy to accompany him on
foot. The shepherd declared he had heard the bellowing of a stag for
the last four or five nights, and had seen several hinds with one
enormous stag in their midst a few days since; and that there was a
pool with a well-trodden track to it, where these animals passed
constantly. Coming back Suleiman, having started before Subhan,
encountered a bear midway. It was now dusk, and, being unarmed,
he had fled amain. Subhan, just seeing him from an eminence going
at top speed, and disappearing in the distance, could not imagine
what possessed him. Poor Suleiman had evidently exerted himself.
He was streaming with perspiration—his long locks in great disorder.
He is too short and stout for continued speed without disagreeable
consequences. I had a little fun with him, which he enjoyed too. The
shepherd had promised to come to camp early in the morning, and
bring further intelligence of the voices of the night.
7th October. Sunday. The morning very cold, a sharp frost as usual.
The sun was well up, and the depths of the valley even smiling
under his genial beams ere I set out for a stroll towards the place
indicated as the shepherd's encampment. All around me replete with
picturesque charms—a perfect landscape—and the atmosphere clear
and deliciously invigorating, my mind could not divest itself of the
thoughts and speculations conjured up by the previous day's reports
of the game hereabouts, which the aspect of the surrounding scene
was well calculated to encourage. It seemed the very 'beau ideal' of
a sporting locality. I strolled on to the top of a hill overlooking a deep
valley covered with rich vegetation, and the woods standing thick
around it. This must be the haunt of the deer, I thought. An old
deserted wooden hut stood on the left hand, but I saw no trace of
the shepherd's camp.
Retracing my steps I paused to admire one or two charming sites for
a sketch, bringing in my camp, the village, river, and bridge, with a
long perspective up the valley descended yesterday, and on the left
the huge hoary-headed mountain, conspicuous above its fellows,
and remarkable in its serrated ridge. What a picture it would have
made! But I have quite given up sketching, feeling how entirely
incapable I am of portraying such sublime magnificence—how
inadequate would be my most successful efforts to represent such
scenes!
The shepherd had arrived. Indeed, I had met him, but took him for
the mukadam. He had not noticed the bellowing of the stag during
the night, but thought there was no doubt of his being still
somewhere thereabout. I arranged to move up to his place in the
evening after dinner, simply taking my bedding and food for the day
following, and to give chase to the stag on Monday.
In the middle of the day Subhan came, and said it would be well for
himself and Phuttoo to start at once for the ground, and make a
reconnaissance: to this I consented. After dinner I set out myself,
and met the shepherd on the way, who whispered something in a
peculiar manner to Mooktoo. On my enquiring what it was, he told
me the bara sing was dead, shot by Subhan. I was exceedingly
annoyed: the act was so altogether contrary to usage and orders. I
was guided to the place, not more than two miles from my camp,
and there lay the stag, a noble specimen with fine branching horns
of great beauty, Subhan looking guilty and agitated, Phuttoo also
putting on a demure look of doubtful expectation. Reprimanding my
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