.
Born into a decent but broke family in 1789, it seems to me that she was part of a minor conspiracy of family and friends to get her enrolled in medical school, posing as male. I’ve read that the original plan was for her to graduate and then revert to open womanhood and travel to somewhere in South America where she could practice medicine as a feeeemale, but that didn’t work out and she continued to live as a man, and became a British army surgeon.
The trans cult is pretty into this woman, variously claiming as evidence that her family’s seeming lack of interest in marrying her off was evidence that she might be iNTeRsEX, and of course insisting that she was a true and honest dude.
Counter evidence: she was essentially her own and her mother’s sole support at a time when jobs for gentlewomen were extremely limited and poorly paid (to maintain your social status you were pretty well limited to being a companion or a governess), and the way people casually assert that her family’s seeming lack of interest in marriage meant anything is retarded. It was very difficult for a woman of no dowry, social connections, or unusual degree of beauty to marry well. Like a third of noble girls at this time didn’t marry because there just weren’t enough men who could support a family to go around. It is evidence of nothing.
Anyway, I’m also a tard, but my read of things is that Barry was unusually intelligent and driven and her passing as a man and becoming a surgeon was a way for her to escape the circumstances of her birth, make money and have an interesting life. There is evidence that she had what sounds to me like a heterosexual affair while deployed to Africa, and when she died, there are claims that a party dress from her youth was found hidden in her trunk. There are also claims that pregnancy stretch marks were found on her body at death.
Her female sex was not revealed until her death, but a number of times throughout her life and career, people were openly skeptical that she was just another dude. When she enrolled in medical school, she was so short, slender and hairless than people suspected she was actually an adolescent boy, later in her life there was an incident where she as very sick and the young doctors caring for her were apparently deeply shocked by what they found while undressing her (but remained silent), and in later days, there’s an anecdote where a young officer saw her in a military context in Canada and was apparently like “…what is wrong with all of you? That is obviously a woman???”
And still it wasn’t until her death that the truth came out. In her own time people seemed very clear that she was a woman pretending to be a man, not “a man”. Which is funny and sad, that Victorian Britons had a better sense of why a woman might do such a thing than we moderns.
TLDR, I agree that in a culture where men and women inhabit separate spheres and dress very differently from each other, a performance of maleness might not have to be that good to get most people to go along with it. The alternative would have been, for instance, for the officer-gentlemen Barry served with to acknowledge something deeply taboo, that a lady sat and dined with them while they said rude things, that a lady rode with them under dangerous circumstances, that a lady had seen them naked and tended to their wounds. All utterly haram to men socialized in the mold of 19th century English gentlemen.
Our own culture is so blurry and messed up about sex that IMO it’s really difficult to understand how weird this would have been for people. Something like if your dog started talking about physics, maybe your brain would just blank it out.
This shit really is just straight with extra steps.
: Haha, I don't need to use protection because I'm a man!