The Beaumont Society: A Transvestite History of Britain from the 1950s

Sellers, Leila (2026) The Beaumont Society: A Transvestite History of Britain from the 1950s. Doctoral thesis, Northeastern University London.

Abstract

This project is the first history of the Beaumont Society, which formed in 1966 and was the first and, for some time, the largest trans support group in the UK. Anchored by the 12 oral history interviews I recorded with trans women (and one cis woman) from across the UK, across five, loosely chronological chapters, I use the Beaumont to draw together different histories of everyday life, domesticity, gender, heteronormativity, community, care, class, ageing and social change. In doing so, I trace the previously unexplored English history of transvestism and the changing position transvestites (and the Beaumont Society) have occupied both within trans communities and within modern society more broadly from the 1950s to the new the millennium, and beyond. Through the themes of everyday life, care, space and place, visibility and intersectionality that overarch this thesis, I explore how Beaumont Society members have negotiated their trans identities within the context of their apparently conventional heteronormative lives, while also finding ways to form communities and create social spaces that existed outside the boundaries of normative society. By exploring this history, the thesis captures the different ways it was possible to live a transvestite life in Britain in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, while also reflecting on the Beaumont’s enduring appeal.

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