1 Male breadwinners of ‘doubtful sex’

Abstract

Until the end of 1954, officers at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance had no reason to take note of Vincent Jones. 1 The twenty-sixyear-old held a steady job at a telephone exchange, paid his weekly insurance contributions at a standard male rate, and rented a small Catford flat with his wife, Joan Lee. However, in mid-December, Jones's performance of quiet, respectable masculine citizenship came to an abrupt, and very public, end. 2 On the afternoon of the thirteenth, at the Greenwich Magistrates Court, Jones and Lee pleaded guilty to the charge of making a false statement on their marriage licence. What the couple had neglected to inform the new vicar of their local church -a fact known to the previous vicar, who alerted the police when he learned of their union -was that Jones was registered as a girl on his birth certificate. 'I am a man,' Jones explained to a Daily Express reporter, 'but if you mean physically I still have female organs … I have been to doctors to get my sex changed and I am sick of waiting.' 3 Although Jones carried National Insurance documents affirming his male name and identity, the magistrate ruled that Jones's 'female organs' meant that he could not consummate a legal marriage in the role of a husband: the ceremony was merely a ploy to cover 'unnatural passion … with a false air of respectability'. 4 Jones, for his part, admitted the truth of the former charge, while strenuously contesting the latter. If he could work as a man, contribute to the nation's coffers as a man, but not form a legitimate family as a man, it was the law, not him, that had made false promises. 'I am guilty,' he declared, 'but something should be done for people like us.' Perhaps more striking than Jones's public demand for justice, however, was the active, albeit unpublicised, response it provoked in the upper echelons of the General Register Office (GRO) and the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance (MPNI). While Jones was hardly the first English 'female husband' to catch the attention of the Commonwealth press, the exposure of Jones's dual legal identities was a novel feature, casting a cloud of suspicion over the new contributory welfare system and its claims to efficiency, fairness, and transparency. 5 Faced with this direct challenge to its