A Clippings Scrapbook: Irene Clyde And Gender In The UK

May 2

One hundred years prior to the UK Supreme court decision to cease recognition of trans men and women as their respective genders, one writer spoke on the abolition of gender.

by Piper Bly

On April 16, 2025 the UK Supreme Court heard “For Women Scotland v. The Scottish Ministers”, and ruled that–for the purposes of the Equality Act of 2010–any references to gender referred to “biological sex, biological woman and biological man”. The

Over a hundred years before the case ever came to bar, however, one “T. Baty” contributed a column to feminist magazine The Freewoman about “The Aëthnic Union”, a “young organisation” which claimed that “the admission of the idea of sex inevitably c

The founder of said Union was international law scholar Thomas Baty – known as Irene Clyde to a select group of friends and Theta to readers of her feminist literary magazine Urania, which insisted “that there should be no such thing as a man or a w

A century to the year prior to For Woman Scotland, in the 1925 issue of Urania, Clyde called for gender abolitionism, stating “There is a vista before us of a spiritual progress which far transcends all political matters. It is the abolition of the

Despite the UK Supreme Court’s position that treating trans women as lesbians would result in a “loss of autonomy and dignity for lesbians, Clyde’s writings in Urania are also some of the UK’s earliest written defences of lesbian love, with Clyde st

One has to wonder what Irene would have to say about the current push to politicize gender, weaponize lesbianism against trans folk, and police love. I would like to think that, in both regards, she would simply disregard them. They had no place in

Sources:

Panel 1:

https://supremecourt.uk/uploads/uksc_2024_0042_judgment_aea6c48cee.pdf

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg7pqzk47zo

Panel 2:

https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:518277/PDF/

Panel 3:

https://repository.essex.ac.uk/35183/1/A%20Monastery%20of%20Their%20Own%20-%20Tallulah%20Maait%20Pepperell.pdf

Panel 4:

https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/Documents/Detail/urania.-1925/66918?item=66920

Panel 5:

https://supremecourt.uk/uploads/uksc_2024_0042_judgment_aea6c48cee.pdf

https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/Documents/Detail/urania.-1922/66858

https://repository.essex.ac.uk/35183/1/A%20Monastery%20of%20Their%20Own%20-%20Tallulah%20Maait%20Pepperell.pdf

Piper Bly is a professional illustrator and underground cartoonist. When she’s not busy plowing away at her drawing board, singing dirges in the moonlight, or wandering throughout the United States, she can often be found tending to her ivies, frying up some biscuits, spending unreasonable hours in the gym, or floating above the Mississippi River at midnight, waiting for the tide to wrap her in its loving embrace and take her away. Her whereabouts are currently undisclosed. You, however, can find her at piperbly.com.

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A Clippings Scrapbook: Irene Clyde And Gender In The UK

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