Thomas Baty

Thomas Baty (8 February 1869 – 9 February 1954), also known by the name Irene Clyde, was an English transgender lawyer and expert on international law who spent much of his career working for the Imperial Japanese government.[1] He published Beatrice the Sixteenth, a 1909 utopian science fiction novel, set in an egalitarian postgender society. He also co-edited Urania, a privately printed feminist gender studies journal, alongside Eva Gore-Booth, Esther Roper, Dorothy Cornish, and Jessey Wade.[2]

Thomas Baty
Born(1869-02-08)8 February 1869
Stanwix, Cumberland, England
Died9 February 1954(1954-02-09) (aged 85)
Ichinomiya, Chiba, Japan
Other namesIrene Clyde, Theta
EducationThe Queen's College, Oxford (A.B., 1892)
Trinity College, Cambridge (LL.M., 1901)
Oxford (D.C.L., 1901)
Cambridge (LL.D., 1903)
OccupationLawyer, writer, activist
AwardsOrder of the Sacred Treasure (third class, 1920; second class, 1936)

Baty was born in Stanwix, Cumberland, England, to a middle-class family. At school, he was a very gifted student and he was given a scholarship to study at The Queen's College, Oxford. He entered that establishment in 1888, and got his bachelor's degree in Jurisprudence in 1892. In June 1901 he received the degree of LL.M. from Trinity College, Cambridge.[3] He got his D.C.L. from Oxford in 1901 and his LL.D. from Cambridge in 1903.[4] His expertise was in the field of international law. He taught law at Nottingham, Oxford, London and Liverpool Universities. At that time, he became a prolific writer on international law.[4]

Following the outbreak of the First World War, Baty took part in the establishment of the Hugo Grotius Society, established in London in 1915. As one of the original members of that society, Baty got to know Isaburo Yoshida, Second Secretary of the Japanese Embassy in London and an international law scholar from the graduate school of the Tokyo Imperial University. The Japanese government was searching at that time a foreign legal adviser following the death of Henry Willard Denison, a US citizen who served in that position until his death in 1914. Baty applied for that position in February 1915. The Japanese government accepted his application, and he came to Tokyo in May 1916 to start his work. In 1920, he was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, third class, for his service as a legal adviser.[5] He renewed his working contracts with the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs several times, until in 1928 he became a permanent employee of that ministry. In 1936, he was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, second class.[6]

During his work for the Japanese government, Baty developed the notion that China was not worthy of recognition as a state under international law, a view that was later used to justify invasion of China.[1]

In 1927, he was part of the Japanese delegation to the Geneva Naval Conference on disarmament. This was his only public appearance as legal adviser to the Japanese government, as the rest of his work involved mainly writing legal opinions. In 1932, following the Japanese invasion of north China and the formation of Manchukuo, Baty defended the Japanese position in the League of Nations and called to accept the new state to league membership. He also wrote legal opinions in defense of the Japanese invasion of China in 1937.[7]

In July 1941, the Japanese government froze the assets of foreigners residing in Japan or any of its colonial possessions in retaliation for the same move against Japanese assets in the US, but Baty was exempt from this due to his service for the Japanese government. Baty decided to remain in Japan even following the outbreak of war between that country and the British Empire in December 1941. He rejected the efforts by the British Embassy to repatriate him back to his country, and kept working for the Japanese government even during the war. He defended the Japanese policy of conquest as a remedy to western colonialism in Asia. In late 1944, he questioned the legitimacy of the pro-Allied governments established following the end of the German occupation in Belgium and France.

Following the Japanese surrender in 1945, the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs was considering indicting Baty for treason, but the Central Liaison Office (a British government agency operating in Japan) provided an opinion stating that Baty's involvement with the Japanese government during the war was insignificant. In addition, some legal advisers within the British government shielded Baty from possible prosecution on the grounds that he was too old to stand trial. Instead, the British government decided to revoke Baty's British nationality and leave him in Japan. He died in Ichinomiya, Chiba, Japan, on 9 February 1954.

Baty's legal philosophy evolved as he worked for the Japanese government and was designed to justify Japanese actions of encroaching upon the sovereignty of China. His main argument was that the recognition of states must depend on one factor alone — effective control by the military and security forces of the government over the state's territory, and not on preconceived definitions of what the state should be. For that reason he opposed the procedure of according de facto recognition, claiming that only final and irrevocable recognition must be used, and accusing the western international community of hypocrisy in using the de facto recognition as a means to allow some transactions with governments of states unfriendly to him without making the definite commitment to accept him fully into the family of nations.[8]

Personal life

Baty never married. Some evidence suggests that he hated sex, as he was disillusioned with Victorian sexual norms and disgusted by the then accepted notions of male domination over women.[9] He described himself as a radical feminist and a pacifist.[2]

In 1916, along with Esther Roper and Eva Gore-Booth, Baty, using the name Irene Clyde, founded Urania, a privately circulated journal which expressed his pioneering views on gender and sexuality, opposing the "insistent differentiation" of people into a binary of two genders.[10][11][12] Baty lived out the gender non-conforming principles promoted by Urania, and for this reason is sometimes remembered as non-binary,[13] transgender or as a trans woman when discussed in connection with Urania.[11][12][14] He also wrote under the name Theta.[15]

An important person in his life was his sister, who went with him to Japan in 1916, and lived with him until her death in 1944.

Baty was a strict vegetarian since the age of 19; he was later Vice-President of the British Vegetarian Society.[16]

Works

Books
As Thomas Baty
  • International Law in South Africa (1900)
  • International Law (1909)
  • (with John H. Morgan) War: Its Conduct and Legal Results (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co. 1915)
  • The Canons of International Law (London: John Murray 1930)
  • Academic Colours (Tokyo: Kenkyusha Press 1934)
  • International Law in Twilight (Tokyo: Maruzen 1954)
  • Alone in Japan (Tokyo: Maruzen, 1959), memoirs
As Irene Clyde

Articles
  • "Can an Anarchy be a State?" American Journal of International Law, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Jul., 1934), pp. 444–455
  • "Abuse of Terms: 'Recognition': 'War'" American Journal of International Law, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Jul., 1936), pp. 377–399 (advocating the recognition of Manchukuo)
  • "The 'Private International Law' of Japan" Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Jul., 1939), pp. 386–408
  • "The Literary Introduction of Japan to Europe" Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 7, No. 1/2 (1951), pp. 24–39, Vol. 8, No. 1/2 (1952), pp. 15–46, Vol. 9, No. 1/2 (1953), pp. 62–82 and Vol. 10, No. 1/2 (1954), pp. 65–80

Notes
  1. Oblas, Peter (1 December 2005). "Britain's first traitor of the Pacific War: Employment and obsession" (PDF). NZASIA.
  2. Daphne Patai & Angela Ingram, 'Fantasy and Identity: The Double Life of a Victorian Sexual Radical', in Ingram & Patai, eds., Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British Women Writers 1889-1939, 1993, pp. 265–304.
  3. "University intelligence". The Times (36486). London. 20 June 1901. p. 6.
  4. OBLAS, PETER (1 March 2004). "Naturalist Law and Japan's Legitimization of Empire in Manchuria: Thomas Baty and Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs". Diplomacy & Statecraft. 15 (1): 35–55. doi:10.1080/09592290490438051. ISSN 0959-2296.
  5. Oblas, Peter (1 March 2004). "Naturalist Law and Japan's Legitimization of Empire in Manchuria: Thomas Baty and Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs". Diplomacy & Statecraft. 15 (1): 35–55. doi:10.1080/09592290490438051. ISSN 0959-2296.
  6. Oblas, Peter (December 2005). "Britain's First Traitor of the Pacific War: Employment and Obsession" (PDF). New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies. 7 (2): 109–133.
  7. "Timeline of Events in Japan". Facing History and Ourselves. Retrieved 29 November 2020.
  8. American Journal of International Law, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Jul., 1936) p. 377-380
  9. "In Defence of Japan in China" p. 74
  10. Tiernan, Sonja (2008). McAuliffe, Mary; Tiernan, Sonja (eds.). 'Engagements Dissolved:' Eva Gore-Booth, Urania and the Challenge to Marriage. Tribades, Tommies and Transgressives: Histories of Sexualities. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 128–144. ISBN 978-1-84718-592-1.
  11. Delap, Lucy (2007). The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 279. ISBN 978-0-521-87651-3. the lawyer and transgender activist Thomas Baty, who advertised his 'Aethnic Union' in The Free-woman. This group explicitly rejected sexual differentiation...
  12. DiCenzo, M.; Ryan, Leila; Delap, Lucy, eds. (2010). Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere. Springer. p. 183. ISBN 978-0-230-29907-8. Thomas Baty, a transgender lawyer and later, publisher of the private journal Urania, wrote to advertise his "Aethnic Union," a society dedicated to sweeping away the "gigantic superstructure of artificial convention" in sexual matters, and resisting the "insistent differentiation" into two genders...
  13. Moran, Maeve (16 October 2019). "Unheard Voices: Eva Gore-Booth". Palatinate Online. Retrieved 30 June 2020.
  14. "Talking Back". Historic England. Retrieved 30 June 2020.
  15. Smith, Judith Ann (2008). Genealogies of desire: "Uranianism", mysticism and science in Britain, 1889-1940 (Thesis). University of British Columbia. doi:10.14288/1.0066742.
  16. Murase, Shinya (1 January 2003). "Thomas Baty in Japan: Seeing Through the Twilight". British Yearbook of International Law. 73 (1): 315–342. doi:10.1093/bybil/73.1.315. ISSN 0068-2691.
  17. "Clyde, Irene". SFE. Retrieved 25 April 2018.

References
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.