In the year 1853, London’s East End was an ethnically diverse, poverty-stricken, industrial cesspool. The world’s poor clustered in overcrowded hovels ten and twelve to a room, fought and drank and fornicated with rough sailors from every port city on the globe, and traded every disease known to humanity.
Women carrying unborn children swallowed quack medical remedies laced with arsenic and strychnine and heavy metals like sugar of lead. Men who would become fathers worked in metal-smelting foundries and shipyards, which in turn poured heavy metals into the drinking water and the soil. Sanitation consisted of open ditches where raw sewage was dumped, human waste was poured, and drinking water was secured. In such areas, a certain percentage of embryos whose dividing cells, programmed with delicate genetic codes, inevitably underwent massive genetic and teratogenic alterations.
And so it was that in Middlesex Street, Whitechapel, in that year of 1853, after a protracted debate, many condemnations of a God who would permit such a child to be born, and a number of drunken rages culminating in beatings of the woman who had produced this particular unfortunate offspring, the child was named John Boleslaus Lachley and reared as a son in a family which had already produced four dowerless sisters. Because he survived, and grew to manhood in London’s East End, where he was tormented into acquiring a blazing ambition and the means to escape, the infant born without a verifiable gender grew in ways no innocent should ever have to grow. And once grown, John Lachley made very certain that the world would never, ever forget what it had done to him.