Trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people have always been here. We’ve also always been writing speculative fiction! Beatrice the Sixteenth, first published in 1909 by transfeminine author Irene Clyde, is just one example. This radical-feminist utopian novel, reissued this year as part of MIT Press’s Radium Age series of neglected speculative fiction, contains a new, modern introduction and a clean, affordable text for new generations to appreciate and study.
Buy a copy if you’re interested, but skip the introduction. Lucy Sante, who wrote it, engages only superficially with scholarship about Clyde’s double life and career, complains about the book’s steady pace and large cast, and dismissively compares Beatrice to a “fluttering Victorian comedy of manners, such as those published in Godey’s Lady’s Book and the like.” A dedicated amateur could produce a better introduction. Fortunately, I’m a dedicated amateur with the details and receipts to help us make better sense of this fascinating book.
Reading Beatrice the Sixteenth is an experience in deep strangeness. Clyde’s novel follows the adventures of Mary Hatherley. A desert explorer, Mary ends up in an alternative reality in a country called Armeria. Populated by people with Greekish names who refer to an ancient Greekish pantheon with either missing or debased male deities, Armeria’s world seems related to ours, albeit slantwise. Armeria rejects this world’s masculine/feminine gender binary. Clyde’s consequent use of pronouns—largely avoiding them and then settling into a preponderance of “she”—reifies this lack of gender for us and provides the first oddity that we encounter. (Clyde’s antiwar, antimasculine bias shows up, however, because Mary consistently labels Galêsa, a spy for the warlike neighboring state Uras, with masculine pronouns.)
Along with the destabilizing use of pronouns, the pace of Beatrice the Sixteenth also heightens its strangeness. Mary’s story progresses evenly, with regular introductions of new characters, sumptuous sets, and casual conversations in which the characters discuss their feelings with considerate frankness. Though Mary does chase spies and escape assassination, most action, including war with Uras, occurs offscreen, treated in the same carefully descriptive manner as Mary’s discussions on cultural differences. Structurally speaking, then, the pacifist Clyde deprioritizes war, instead foregrounding harmonious relationships. Beatrice the Sixteenth is dreamlike because of its clarity of conversational moments, its wealth of set dressing, its combined sense of discovery and inevitability, and its odd distance between narrator and events. This dreamlike quality enhances the utopian, otherworldly sense of the work, for, as Thomas More taught us, the word utopia comes from the Greek eutopia, or a good place (at least to the narrator and the author), and outopia, or no place.
Is Armeria truly a good place, though? Some recent coverage praises Clyde as a trans and feminist pioneer and portrays Armeria positively as a peaceful, reasonable land liberated from the problems imposed by our gender binary. For example, in her introduction, Sante calls Beatrice the Sixteenth “a vision of an ideal society” and indeed “a shared dream that has lived in individual minds for millennia.” The promotional blurb for the MIT Press edition continues the positive perspective. The paragraph touts Beatrice as a “productively discombobulating” and “pioneering feminist adventure in an alternate world—without the concept of gender.” This description mischaracterizes Beatrice the Sixteenth in two ways. First, Armeria most emphatically does have concepts of gender, just different ones than we are used to. Second, Armeria has some aspects that are less “productively discombobulating” and more morally objectionable to today’s readers.
Barely suppressed tensions exist just beneath the surface of Armerian society. Mary admires Armerian elites, particularly her stalwart guide Ilex, a close friend of the equally noble and benevolent ruler Beatrice. Under Mary’s approving eyes, the Armerian nobility eat a vegetarian diet and pass their days philosophizing, inventing, and making art. They replace biological family ties with chosen affiliations of friendship or love, though Armerian society does glorify the union of two people in a marriage-like relationship known as conjux. Menaced by soldiers from Uras, Armeria charms Mary with its calm, reasonable, orderly society. Mary loves Armeria so much that she accepts the classism, child trafficking, and slavery on which it runs.
Yes, slavery. Armerians do not sexually reproduce (for indeterminate reasons), but instead purchase children from supposedly uncivilized people. Despite acknowledging that all Armerians, including Beatrice, derive from the same adopted stock, Armeria forces some to be slaves, who, though allegedly “well treated,” have no autonomy and little hope of freedom. Though she discusses the unfairness of slavery with her own slave Nîa, Mary loves Armeria more than she hates exploitation.
The plot proceeds accordingly. When Uras threatens invasion, Mary unquestioningly cleaves to the queen, exposes Urassian spies, and supports Ilex’s fighting on behalf of a badly outmatched Armeria. Despite the odds, Armeria’s feminine virtue and superiority triumph. Mary and Ilex become each other’s conjux. Mary decides to stay in Armeria, though she sends an account of her adventures back to our world.
The juxtaposition between the apparently beneficent, enlightened Armerian nobility and their miserable slaves adds uneasiness to the text, particularly for readers today. Melanie Taylor sums up the ambivalence of Beatrice the Sixteenth well in a thesis entitled “Changing Subjects: Transgender Consciousness and the 1920s,” observing, “Far from being the ideal state it sets out to be, [Armeria] is riddled with its own divisions and conflicts. Hierarchical and binary distinctions are the foundational poles of this alternative existence—Armeria/Uras, free people/slaves, civilised/barbarians—whilst in its practices of ‘conjux’ … the Western conventions of monogamy and marriage are upheld.”
What’s going on here in this long-neglected piece of speculative fiction? An examination of the author’s childhood, career, and politics—contextualized with words written by the author wherever possible—can illuminate the text.
The author of Beatrice the Sixteenth has proved difficult for scholars to comprehend. Clyde was assigned male at birth, named Thomas Baty, and known as thus during a long career as a foreign legal advisor to Japan. As Irene, Clyde pursued an equally long, though more secretive, vocation as an activist who organized a discussion group of fellow radicals, the Aëthnic Union, and subsequently edited, funded, and wrote for a private journal entitled Urania. These two aspects of Baty/Clyde’s life remained so well separated that only in 1993, when Angela Ingram and Daphne Patai published a chapter about Baty/Clyde in Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British Women Writers, 1889–1939, did scholars recognize that Baty and Clyde were the same person. [1]
Unfortunately, the conceptual division between Thomas Baty and Irene Clyde persists. Discussions of Baty’s controversial legal career treat Clyde’s controversial feminist works as a footnote and vice versa. Scholars of Baty’s legal accomplishments focus on works published as Baty, and scholars of Clyde’s radical feminism focus on works published as Clyde, with little overlap. [2] As a result, Baty scholars know that Baty published a memoir, Alone in Japan: The Reminiscences of an International Jurist Resident in Japan 1916–1954 (1959), but Clyde scholars have yet to apply Baty’s own words to Clyde’s works. [3]
Irene Clyde (1869–1954) was an intellectual and social critic who experienced the death of father William at the age of seven. A paragraph from Alone in Japan gives the author’s perspective on the development of values guiding lifelong writing and activism:
When the writer was a child round 1880, I lived in a varied household—my widowed mother, the latter’s two brothers, and a younger sister. … And I can say without the least hesitation that we had not, any of us, the least shade of idea of feminine inferiority or submission to “men.” We were quite content that the dull business of politics and commerce should be left to “men,” … but as for submission or inferiority [qua] girl or lady, such a thing never remotely entered our heads. On the contrary, the girls distinctly compassionated “men” as debarred from their heights of elegance and charm. (p. 45)
Baty passed formative years in a fatherless household and developed early on beliefs that surfaced in later writings. Rejecting the notion that women and girls were inferior and subject to men, Baty instead believed that women held a privileged, superior position in Victorian society because they were free from the boring requirements of business and community action outside the home. Baty believed that being shielded from manly pursuits allowed women the leisure to develop the “heights of elegance and charm” that more pathetic men, too busy to better themselves, could not.
This view of femininity was obviously racialized and dependent on class, reserved only for a small number of privileged White women who directly or indirectly exploited the labor of working-class people and people of color—none of whom were considered “refined” enough to the White elites. Middle class and educated at Oxford and Cambridge, Baty, a scholar and lawyer, wrote or coauthored eight books about international law. Baty also cultivated a lifelong interest in Japan, writing in Alone in Japan, “I had read, since I was a child, all that I possibly could concerning Japan: except Hearn’s works, which seemed to me intolerably full of affection. Miss Bird’s book had quite effectively warned me against roseate visions of fairyland” (p. 91).
Baty moved to Japan in 1916 and became legal advisor to the Japanese government. In this role, Baty justified the 1932 Japanese invasion of China and Japanese imperial expansion throughout World War II. The British government rebuked Baty’s Japanese allegiance by revoking British citizenship after the war, so Baty remained in Japan until death, ostracized from the rest of the expatriate community.
Among a smaller international group of friends and fellow radical feminists, however, Baty was known as Irene Clyde. Though Baty’s legal scholarship supported an authoritarian, martial regime, Clyde apparently thrived at the intersection of radical feminists, vegetarians, and advocates of Montessori education, egalitarianism, and pacifism, founding the Aëthnic Union in London around 1911. The union, wrote Baty on February 22, 1912, in The Freewoman, recognized that “upon the fact of sex [or gender in modern parlance] there has been built up a gigantic superstructure of artificial convention which urgently needs to be swept away. And [the union] does not see how it is to be swept away unless sex is resolutely ignored.” The union’s rejection of the gender binary attracted other members, particularly women at the same overlap of suffrage, education reform, pacifism, and the rights of non-human animals. The group met regularly for three years for discussion and debate.
Clyde’s sympathy for authority and aristocracy complicated the subsequent project of Urania (1916–1940), a privately circulated feminist journal formed with a subgroup of Aëthnic Union members. Though ostensibly devoted to the abolition of the masculine/feminine gender binary, Urania repeatedly championed a femininity that its writers thought superior to masculinity. Clyde’s personal celebration of femininity even united with a belief in aristocracy. Writing as “Theta,” Clyde argued in the July–August 1919 issue of Urania that “the delicacy and consideration for others which are the marks of aristocracy are the essential condition of peace. At the same time they are the distinguishing marks of the feminine ideal.” Fellow Urania contributors Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper, who believed in the worth and dignity of all social classes, disputed Clyde’s perspective. [4]
Beatrice the Sixteenth, Clyde’s only foray into fiction, embodies Clyde’s values for good and for ill. Most obviously, Armeria represents Clyde’s ideal of a republic that has transcended bellicose masculinity and embraced “the delicacy and consideration for others”—which, in Clyde’s mind, distinguish both aristocracy and femininity. The idiosyncratic use of pronouns in Beatrice, mostly eschewing them except to equate the masculine with treachery and the feminine with nobility, places us as readers inside this point of view. Clyde reconstructs the universally feminine Armeria here in this realm, if only temporarily and in our imaginations. The stately prose, with its focus on respectful conversation and beauty, casts Beatrice the Sixteenth as a dream and, indeed, a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Clyde’s fusion of femininity with aristocracy in Beatrice the Sixteenth reveals the same classism that troubled the Aëthnic Union and Urania. A hereditary monarchy appeals to Mary, the Armerians, and Clyde; Beatrice, paragon of bravery, justice, modesty, and tact, is clearly the best leader of the land. Armenian elites such as Beatrice, Ilex, and Mary regard poor people and foreigners as uncouth, unreasonable, and uncivilized. Slavery supports their way of life, and Mary, like the rich Armerians around her, soon learns how to easily dehumanize Nîa and other slaves. In one striking example at the end, Mary hears how Nîa, crushed by shame over a mistake she made during the war with Uras, cannot bear to see her partner Zôcris. After a scene detailing Nîa’s emotional devastation, Mary concludes, “This is not a tragedy; and I have no intention of making it such. Nîa is still living.” She then adds, “But she never smiles and she never stands up straight,” before launching into a rapturous recount of her conjux with Ilex, a union that Nîa is denied. Clyde apparently agrees with Mary that there is no tragedy, for this all occurs in a chapter entitled “The Triumph,” which ends with Mary’s decision to stay in Armeria. The reality of exploitation continually breaks through Armeria’s placid facade, and the text does not address these ruptures.
Besides being a feminist text, a utopian text, and a trans text, Beatrice the Sixteenth is also an Orientalist one. Remarks in Baty’s Alone in Japan suggest that the author considered Japan a bastion of the refinement, delicate sentiment, and beauty so inextricably linked to femininity, aristocracy, and superiority in Baty’s mind. For example, Baty writes, “It would be the greatest mistake to infer from this tolerance of sex [by which seems to be meant frank public acknowledgment of heterosexuality] that the Japanese are gross and sensual. They are delicate, refined, and clean” (p. 35). Though Beatrice the Sixteenth was first published before Clyde traveled to Japan and supported its imperialism through legal scholarship, the book shows Clyde’s bias toward Japanese language and culture: Clyde’s view of Japan partakes of the same selective attention by which Armeria, despite its slavery, is elevated as virtuous.
Certainly Mary, who so loves Armeria, shares Clyde’s belief in the superiority of Japanese culture. In an interesting offhand comment in chapter two, “The City,” Mary describes the Armerians’ greetings as “half-Japanese coos of salutation.” Clyde appears to be referring to the melodious sounds of Armerian and Japanese, using “coos” to connote the foreign words as gentle, sweet, and musical. Both languages themselves become gentle, sweet, and pleasing by extension, as do the lands and cultures. Japan seems to represent refinement, politeness, and harmony, as does Armeria. [5]
Clyde was not alone in the vexed celebration of femininity expressed in Beatrice the Sixteenth. Other feminist utopian literature of the period explores similar concerns. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), for example, tells of three modern men’s intrusion into an isolated society of women, dubbed Herland by the interlopers. Parthenogenesis obviates sexual reproduction in Herland, and the citizens prize motherhood dependent on negative eugenics. With its representation of elites concerned with racial purity and dependent on servants or slaves, Gilman’s depiction of a pure, clean Utopia in Herland is similar to Clyde’s depiction of rarefied, refined femininity in Beatrice the Sixteenth.
Is it desirable for the tranquility in the society (at least for the slaveowners) it describes? Is it nightmarish because of the Armerian complacency toward slavery? For me, Armeria’s freedom from the societal problems caused and worsened by our gender binary come at too great a price: that of enslavement. In the end, Clyde’s Armeria seems to me most like Le Guin’s Omelas: Mary recognizes the exploitation at the core, and Beatrice the Sixteenth justifies her decision to stay.
Endnotes
[1] Baty/Clyde has been described by moderns as transgender, transfeminine, bigender, nonbinary, or genderfluid. Some writers choose to call the author Thomas Baty and use masculine pronouns. Some writers choose to call the author Irene Clyde and use feminine pronouns. The Wikipedia article on Baty selects the masculine name and avoids pronouns. In my perspective, Baty/Clyde seems to have had different names and different genders in different contexts, so going with a single name and gender feels wrong and disrespectful. At the same time, “transfeminine” seems to be an appropriate adjective for Clyde, who was initially assigned a masculine gender. For the purposes of this discussion, I use one or both names depending on the context and avoid pronouns because Beatrice the Sixteenth mostly does. [return]
[2] Ealasaid Gilfillan proves to be the exception, having amassed many previously uncited secondary sources in a series of magnificently annotated blog posts about all aspects of Baty/Clyde’s life on LGBT+ Language and Archives: Cumbria’s Queer Heritage. [return]
[3] If you can’t secure a copy of the rare Alone in Japan, Peter Oblas’s article “Britain’s First Traitor of the Pacific War: Employment and Obsession,” archived here from the New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, includes a representative sample of quotations. [return]
[4] If you’re interested in the Aëthnic Union and Urania, check out T. Maait Pepperell’s thesis, which concludes that both arguments over class and the rise of fascism prevented Urania’s utopian project from flowering fully. [return]
[5] Later in the same chapter, Mary looks into a small room containing “a cabinet, filling one end of the apartment, and full of cupboards, somewhat after the Japanese fashion.” In chapter three, “The Palace,” Mary notices that, in Armerian writing, “the letters represented syllables, like those of the Japanese.” The most revealing connection of Armerian culture to Japanese culture occurs in chapter three as well, when Mary appreciates an Armerian artist’s drawing: “This [work] struck me as Japanese work has often struck me, though it was more elaborate and not so dashing as Japanese paintings. It had a vividness and directness which seemed absent from our Western galleries—a pith and point which evidenced a thorough love for and sympathy with Nature. Every crystal drop seemed to quiver with life.” [return]