Pressing Matters (Vol 1)

1

Epiphany

Do one thing every day that scares you.

— Eleanor Roosevelt

I NEVER PLANNED to become an activist. Politics wasn’t on the agenda so far as I was concerned when growing up in the 1960s and early 70s. But this might seem surprising, considering my roots…

My father was an electrical engineer from a working class background in East London. He qualified with City and Guilds Certificates by going to night school. By day he worked in a maintenance role, building and maintaining test equipment in an electronics factory. He went to work on a bike.

My mother came from a West London family that owned a small fleet of buses and had once been wealthy enough to afford a nanny for her as a child in the 1920s. Her family’s circumstances had taken a knock after the war. When she met my father she was living with her widowed mother and the daughter from her first marriage. The two were taking lodgers in a spare room to make ends meet. She retained a middle class aspiration but on a working class budget. Her love was to sing soprano on the stage. She had toured the country with ENSA — the organisation which entertained the troops during the Second World War — but she had been pressured to abandon her ambition when she married my father and then I came along in 1954.

Mum and Dad were what the spin doctors would nowadays call strivers. They had a strong work ethic and never borrowed money, except in the form of a mortgage which they slaved to pay off as soon as possible. They doffed their caps to authority and usually assumed anyone in an important sounding position was automatically wiser and better than themselves. They sought approval in such people. My Mum gleefully kept score of how many Police officers she was on first name terms with.

But they were individualistic and ambitious too. They refused to join my school’s parent teacher association because they suspected the head teacher viewed it as a way of keeping parents in line (they were probably right). Their ambition was to finish working for a boss as soon as possible and to have their own business. They were prepared to try again and again to achieve that goal of independence.

In the early 60s, under the trade name Flair Electrical we took in broken valve radios, television sets, vacuum cleaners and household irons for my Dad to mend on the dining table after work. In 1963 we moved from the London Borough of Redbridge, where I was born, to an empty and semi-derelict shop in North Kent, where they set up an ill-fated hardware business. My Mum looked after the shop most days (and I helped when not in school) whilst Dad earned a wage running a repair workshop in the back of the local TV and white goods dealers.

They learned from their mistakes. Early misjudgements included stacking the shelves with floor and lino polish at just the time when everyone else’s aspiration was to get fitted carpets. The shop was also too far from the nearby high street to really take off. Our home in the back came second in priority. For a whole year we bathed in a galvanised iron bath in the kitchen — once a week each — until my dad had had the time to knock down a wall and create a bathroom and indoor privvy.

My parents’ biggest move was to become publicans in the naval dockyard town of Chatham in November 1965. They sank everything they had to afford this opportunity — so much so that they couldn’t afford to buy me Christmas presents that year. The pub, which was built in 1913, didn’t have a bathroom. The brewery who owned the freehold didn’t see such things as a priority. But Mum and Dad found something they really enjoyed doing behind the bar. They loved entertaining and running a busy enterprise. It took the bulk of their time from first thing in the morning until last thing at night. Aged 11, I suddenly had to get used to looking after myself, from arriving home from school just before the evening session and all the way through until bedtime.

This solitary existence served me extremely well in my adult life. Being on my own doesn’t trouble me. I grew up learning how to fill my personal time productively. I had a rich inner world which developed according to where my own instincts led. I would probably never have become such a prolific writer or had the same creative interests if life at home had worked out differently. It also meant that I had hours of privacy in which to find the young Christine, without fear of discovery. My step sister, who had left home when I was five, had left behind a whole wardrobe of things, which my Mum had not had the heart to throw out.

We didn’t do much politics in the house. For one thing, my father generally stuck to the principle that publicans shouldn’t encourage talk about religion, politics or sex. There were hints he had fairly right wing views at times. I grew up with the conviction that neither parent would ever understand or love me if I revealed the painful yearnings of my inner world. I instinctively knew I must keep that entirely secret.

The only newspapers in the house were the two that I was sent out on Sunday mornings to collect from the newsagents — the News of the World and the Sunday Mirror. That’s where I first read that there was a name for people like me. I hoovered up what I could learn about April Ashley in the News of the World, kneeling in front of the solid fuel stove in the kitchen whilst my parents served the sunday midday regulars in the bar downstairs. I was 12 years old.

We didn’t do much politics at school either — or at least I didn’t. That wasn’t a subject on the curriculum for scholars doing maths, sciences and modern languages like me. The kids who did economics got full on politics in the sixth form, but they were generally the ones who had spent years bullying me. I didn’t move in their circles.

As a result I inherited my parents’ voting traditions. When the first elections came after my eighteenth birthday I trotted off self-consciously to the polling station and voted Conservative — a choice I never really questioned for myself for another 25 years. That was when, as I’ve joked many times since, I realised that it was far more embarrassing to tell people I was a Conservative, than to stand on a platform and say I was a trans woman.

In 1972 I left home and went to university in Manchester. Having grown up being used to my own space I chose a college that was far enough away to discourage the idea that I should go home too often. The holidays were quite enough.

By now my parents owned another new business — a corner sweetshop and tobacconists — so I had spent a couple of years with much more scrutiny than I was accustomed to. I could get from Manchester to Kent if I needed to. A return fare cost about £8 with a student rail card in those days. But I could also tell my Mum it was too expensive or too hard if she tried to twist my arm. We arranged they would ring my hall of residence and be put through to the phone on my floor at 12.30 every Sunday lunchtime. Later, when I moved from Hall into a shared house in Manchester’s suburbs, we had no phone. There were no mobile phones in those days. So, for a while, I drifted more and more away from my parents.

At the University of Manchester I studied Computer Science. I was passionately interested in the whole subject and consequently I also did well. Keeping my nose down in books was also a way of trying not to think about the cries from the woman in my head. I eventually graduated with the second highest marks in my year group. Science students weren’t encouraged to think about politics or activism though. After graduating I stayed on to obtain a Masters degree and pursue a PhD.

By then I was confident enough to have one proper extracurricular interest: I helped to make the weekly student magazine programme for the BBC local radio station and eventually took over as producer. On one occasion I accompanied a student invasion of the Senate, protesting the university’s investments in South Africa. I didn’t really think much about the issue but I wanted to record interviews on the scene. The vice chancellor was so angry that he physically ripped the microphone lead from the socket in the recorder. We got a piece in the Manchester Evening News for that and the station management were delighted — immediately buying us a newer and bigger microphone.

On another occasion I was admitted to a week-long sit in of the college buildings, protesting the Callaghan government’s cuts in public spending. I wasn’t technically a protester but my head of department left very clear hints that this wasn’t the sort of thing to be involved with if I had plans of joining the academic staff. That’s what everyone expected I would do until I suddenly dropped out in 1977.

All in all you could therefore say that I arrived where this memoir really begins — at the latter end of the 1980s — quite politically naïve. My instincts were actually quite left wing when issues were explained to me, but I voted Conservative because that’s what my parents did if they voted at all. I saw how authorities needed to be persuaded sometimes against their will to do things that were socially progressive. I had felt a bit of the thrill of being in the heart of the action. Yet I had mostly swallowed the kind of right wing spin about activism, and the people doing it, which came from the kind of newspapers I saw and the people I had socialised with.

My instincts after transition had also been conservative with a small c too. However, that is not to say that my gender transition was conventional. Doors that were closed to others just seemed to swing open for me.

I had first sought transition in 1976 — seeking help from the same doctors in the student health service that I had interviewed for the radio a week before. They seemed surprisingly positive. I just needed to say the word, really. Despite their enthusiastic encouragement, however, the sheer enormity of the step terrified the life out of me. I was 22 and assumed that transition would mean the end of all the things which filled my life at that time.

I assumed I wouldn’t be allowed to continue producing and presenting the show at Radio Manchester. And I assumed my fairly rumbustious young academic colleagues and professors would make it hard to continue as a research student or member of staff. The solution was to run away from the problem. I dropped out of my PhD (to the dismay of my supervisor and professor), I handed the reins of the radio show over to a younger student (who now runs a major independent production company) and I got a job in industry instead.

The cross-gender identification never went away of course. Suppressing it just made me ill. After five years I had a near meltdown when I packed my bags, told my parents, and prepared again to take the leap. I allowed myself to be talked down. And then, after another few years, I became so unhappy that I knew I was in danger of committing suicide if I didn’t face myself. I was already well on the way to becoming alcoholic, though hiding it well from most people.

When I finally decided to take the leap I knew from the past experience that it had to be a definitive move. I visited my GP as Christine. This confused the poor man, who asked if I was really sure I wanted to stop being a woman and become a man. Having straightened that out, he wrote me a prescription for a low dose of Oestrogen there and then.

Weeks later I obtained an appointment to see the specialist who represented the entire extent of Gender Identity services in Cheshire. Her training was in child psychology. She did transsexuals as a sort of professional hobby. After two appointments we decided that we were wasting each other’s time. Instead I wrote her periodic letters where I probed myself. Then, after a few months, we met so I could ask her for a referral to a surgeon in Brighton whom I’d seen on a TV programme a few years before. She duly wrote the letter, I met the man in question and (that same day) he arranged a meeting with a phlebotomist to take blood samples and a psychiatrist colleague for a second opinion — just a matter of form.

The psychiatrist and I chatted for an hour. He tossed trick questions my way and afterwards said I had given the most sensible answers he had ever heard. As I left he kissed my hand and wished me a happy life. A couple of months later I checked in for the surgery and my parents trekked the length of the country to come and hold my hand as I recovered. I really had misjudged my parents as a teenager and a student. My transition was a new start with them and we became close as never before in an adult relationship that lasted till their deaths a few years ago.

You might think that this charmed experience might be a poor preparation for understanding the awful problems experienced by others. On the contrary, it eventually meant I became an activist with a keen awareness of how transition could be in sensible hands. Yet I wasn’t ready for that at the time.

My instinct, once all the clinical business of transition was out of the way, was to settle down and have the life I’d always dreamed of, putting all the unhappy stuff behind me. That’s what you were supposed to do. By the mid 1980s I had already been my own boss. I had been one of four directors of a software house which grew from nothing in three years to employ almost 30 people. I had allowed myself to be bought out of that.

Shortly afterwards I set up another company on my own, anticipating that the best way of avoiding employment difficulties when transitioning was to be your own boss. I hadn’t known whether I would manage to keep my clients; however, they all magnificently stood by me when the day came.

The managing directors of those companies stood before their staff and told them in no uncertain terms that they supported and admired my journey and that anyone who gave me lip would have to account to them. In return for all that support I doubled down and got on with my work. In fact I was far more productive and creative, as my head was now clear.

With a successful consultancy business I resolved to settle down and be normal. I acquired a new house and a boyfriend. I had a social life. And I worked hard. My thoughts couldn’t have been further from activism — except that there were always events that would remind me.

In 1990 the papers reported the story that a trans woman, Caroline Cossey, had lost her case in the European Court of Human Rights, seeking the right to have an altered birth certificate (to protect her privacy) and the right to marry her boyfriend.

Caroline was better known as the model Tula. She had appeared in many campaigns — most notably on skis behind the Loch Ness monster for a vodka campaign. She had also been a bond girl. The revelation of Caroline’s trans background by the press ended her career. Modelling assignments dried up, the poster campaign was forgotten, and subsequent prints of the Bond movie omitted her name from the credits.

Caroline was not the first Briton to have taken the question of privacy and marriage rights to the court in Strasbourg. In 1986 a trans man named Mark Rees (now a very dear friend of mine) had come to the end of a similar seven year trek through the domestic courts and then progressed to the European Court of Human Rights as the ultimate arbiter.

Mark lost his case, but not without putting the issues on the map. Three international judges dissented from the majority view that backed the UK government. The legal and mainstream press wrote about his case. People could see and appreciate the problems for a man who was continually regarded as a woman for the purposes of the law.

The government argued that he wasn’t denied the right to marry — he could marry a man as he was legally female. The irony of that position being taken by counsel for a Conservative government was breathtaking.  The notorious Section 28 of the Local Government Act, outlawing the promotion of information about homosexual relationships as pretended family relationships, came into force in 1988.

Tula’s case was a reminder of the hard nosed refusal of officialdom to accept trans people as the men or women we are. Again the lawyers argued for Margaret Thatcher’s government that Caroline could marry a woman if she chose. And they argued that although her trans history would be revealed any time she was asked to produce her birth certificate, it was altogether too difficult for systems to be changed to accommodate her. The judges in this case were less convinced. The balance tilted in her direction compared with Mark’s case only four years previously, but not enough for her to win.

I felt the 1990 decision as a blow. I lived a mostly charmed life. I had work. I had acceptance. But I also had experience of how people could behave if they were told about my background. I didn’t know what I could do, but I felt moved enough to write to the editor of the Guardian when the paper reported on the outcome of the case, which many had expected she might win. The letter is part of a collection which I’ve already donated to the LGBT Archive at the London School of Economics.

September 27, 1990

Dear Sir, The decision by the European Court at Strasbourg in respect of Caroline Cossey’s right to enter into a marriage with a male, although it is a blow to all those of us placed in the same invidious position, is not an end to the debate about transsexuals’ roles in the community, merely a step on the road. The court’s conclusion was inevitable given the way in which a law dealing with human personal relations was cast in terms of a physical attribute present at the individual’s birth.

It was my first ever piece of activism. I hadn’t yet learned that letters intended for publication needed to be short. Mine was long and explanatory. However they clipped a part of it and published it in one of the editions. I focussed on the ass which the law made of itself, defining such an attractive and capable woman as something she was not.

Men, it seems, can meet Caroline, be attracted to her personality and decide (without knowledge of her background) that the ‘person’ they know is fully capable of meeting their need for a partner in life — her inability to conceive offspring makes her no different and no less qualified to be a wife than millions of unfortunate women who discover themselves to be born in the same position or who are rendered infertile by surgery. But for the law’s reliance on a statement of apparent facts observed at her birth over thirty years ago, the rest of us would require a training in gynaecology, urology or endocrinology to distinguish her from someone who had suffered the anguish of hysterectomy. I am hoping no reader would seriously question the latter’s right to financial and emotional security enshrined by law.

The letter was futile, of course. Letters like that weren’t going to change anything, and the experience exposed tensions for myself, as I wanted to say these things and yet preserve the private stealth existence I had created. I returned to concentrating on my business and my social life — working around the law, rather than confronting it.

That was how things continued for some considerable time. However that was to change in the run up to the general election in 1992. My boyfriend of the time had quite strong left wing views. He was also politically well read. He enjoyed winding me up over my Conservative voting background.

One weekend when I got home from being teased and berated I found a flyer on the mat. The branch of the Conservative party in my village was looking for volunteers. On the spur of the moment I decided to offer my help. In those days few people had computers at home. I wrote to explain that in my home-based business I owned several, along with laser printers and other useful tools like a fax machine. I had an entire office in what had been a utility room on the ground floor of my townhouse. I asked for how I might help and the Secretary of the branch contacted me back the same day to ask if I would like to come and meet them whilst they were canvassing votes in a nearby estate.

I turned up at the appointed place and time expecting to just tag along and watch. After ten minutes of being shown what to do, however, I was given a list and a street and sent off on my own. The local Conservative candidate was Sir Alastair Goodlad but I knocked on door after door explaining, Hello I’m here on behalf of Sir Alastair Goodbody, your Conservative Candidate. Can he rely on your vote?. Lord knows what damage I did to his considerable majority.

After a couple of hours when it was getting dark we all repaired to the local pub where there was huge interest in me. Most of the branch members were in their late fifties or sixties. I was 38. A young self-employed businesswoman was a novelty and they wanted to involve me more. I showed interest in response to their flattery and expected that I would be slowly admitted to that side of society in the Cheshire village where I lived. What happened next was entirely unexpected though.

Two days after the General Election of 1992, where Alastair Goodlad was elected with another big majority, I received a call to tell me that the branch secretary — the man who had invited me to go canvassing — had suddenly died from a heart attack. And then the even bigger bombshell: Would I consider becoming the branch secretary in his place?

Becoming the secretary of a heavily traditional Conservative branch committee had never been something I would have dreamed of. However, given how keen I was at the time to embed myself in conventional life, it was too good an offer to refuse. I also found I was good at it. I knew how to take good minutes at meetings. I had the means to type them up quickly. I clicked with the Chair — an elderly widow who turned out to have some very sophisticated ways of thinking. I could sell the all-important raffle tickets. I cooked with the other ladies for lunches and suppers. What’s more, as they encouraged me to join in local debates on policy, I found that my instinctive left of centre viewpoint (and the fact that I had prepared with research before meetings) was welcomed. By the mid summer it was assumed that I would like to attend the party’s annual conference, as part of the delegation from the constituency.

Before attending my first Conservative conference something else was going to happen. A friend who was also trans had told me about a conference organised by a new organisation called the Gender Trust. In fact I had heard about the organisation when it was formed in 1990. I also knew that in that year the Trust had held a conference called Gendys in Manchester. I didn’t attend on that occasion because I was on holiday in Jersey, and also because I found the experience of being surrounded by trans people a little disorienting. Here was I trying to put all that behind me.

However, I had already begun to realise that it wasn’t so easy to forget your roots, because there were always things to remind you when you least expected. For instance, that year my insurance brokers had found me a new and cheaper car insurance quote. The snag was that the brokers insisted they had to tell the new insurers my legal gender. The certificate showed my name as Christine, of course; however there was a box for the particular policy type which was unhelpfully prefixed Male.

I had a driving license which had been helpfully altered without trouble to say I was a woman. Yet I was expected to carry around an insurance certificate which contradicted that status and outed me to any police officer who pulled me over and wanted to see my documents. I complained.

The brokers suggested I avail myself of the legal support line which came with the policy. A lawyer on the advice line was sympathetic but reckoned there was nothing I could do. She suggested I form some sort of campaign. I pressed my brokers for more help, which they gave because I had been putting business their way for almost a decade with my previous companies. We threatened to take the business away and the insurance company came up with a fix. They changed the prefix for that policy type so that it said M-75 instead of Male-75. Not ideal, but at least it was a pragmatic fix of sorts.

Experiences like these meant I knew I couldn’t close my eyes and pretend. There were problems out there wherever you looked. And I had already felt moved enough to write once to the Guardian. A bit of me was ready for doing something rather than being done-to as well.

With all that in mind I decided to go and see what this Gendys conference was like. It was being held at Hulme Hall, a student hall of residence in the Rusholme district of Manchester, which I’d known well as a student. Some of my friends had been resident there. I registered and thought I would hang around on the periphery of events. I remember clearly thinking about what I should wear. I chose a very trendy set of patterned leggings with a baggy woollen sweater that I always felt good in. And, rather than sitting in the group for the opening talks on the Friday night, I sat on a desk at the back, hedging my bets.

The conference was organised by a friendly and slightly eccentric looking woman called Alice. Alice was a counsellor and qualified nurse. She was out as a lesbian woman but, in those days, a bit vague about her trans status. She was there with her girlfriend, who helped with the organisation.

During the proceedings I also saw two trans men with a bucket raising funds for a new campaign which they called Press for Change. Their names were Stephen Whittle and Alex Whinnom. I dutifully put some money in the bucket but didn’t think much more about it.

As the conference progressed I felt myself drawn in and feeling more confident. When questions arose after the various presentations in the following day’s sessions, I regularly had my hand in the air with something to ask or to say. Alice had certainly noticed me. She invited me later to come and visit where she lived on the south coast.

Thus it was that I got to know Alice Purnell. She organised women’s poetry groups at her home on occasional Friday nights. I drove all the way from Manchester (a six hour drive) to tentatively discover what they might be like.

With encouragement I eventually became emboldened to recite some favourite Hilaire Belloc cautionary tales, which my Mum had taught me to memorise and perform as a child. Then, with further encouragement, I recited a poem that I had written myself as a student. The other women in the group loved it and encouraged me to bring more the next time.

And Alice put her trust in me to sample other forbidden fruits. She was a member of a lesbian social organisation in Kent and Sussex called Kenric. They didn’t want transsexual women in their socials, but Alice took me along regardless. The events were lovely. Yet I can still recall the terror of being confronted and asked to leave. It never happened; however it was an uncomfortable sensation and provided a crash course in LGBT politics.

It was an irony I encountered frequently. Back home the local representatives of the party that had enacted Section 28 thought I was their blue eyed girl (and later supported me even when I came out to them). Here, in a social gathering at an isolated house in a Sussex wood, a group of Lesbians would eject me in a moment if they discovered my secret past.

I learned a lot from Alice and she undoubtedly stretched my thinking, even if I didn’t always realise it at the time. Then, in the spring of 1993, she asked me if I would be interested in accompanying her to an important conference in Amsterdam. We could have a bit of a holiday together too.

The event was a so-called colloquy (a formal conversation) organised by the Council of Europe in the wake of a succession of transsexual human rights cases — not just Mark Rees and Caroline Cossey, but also a transsexual French woman known by the initial B, who had achieved a partially successful outcome in the same court in 1992. In 1989 the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe had also debated and approved Recommendation 1117 On the condition of transsexuals, arguing that action was necessary.

The Council of Europe is not the same as the European Union. The council is an inter-government organisation set up in 1949 to promote co-operation between all countries of Europe in the areas of legal standards, human rights, democratic development, the rule of law and cultural co-operation. Its best known function is to run the European Court of Human Rights, implementing the Convention that had been introduced in 1950.

This 23rd Colloquy organised by them was entitled Transsexualism, Medicine and the Law and it was hosted by the Free University in Amsterdam. It would be Chaired by Professor Louis Gooren, the endocrinologist who headed the Dutch gender team and who had the distinction of holding the world’s only professorial chair in Transsexology).

The event sounded interesting and Alice was persistent. I had lots of accumulated British Airways air miles and was long overdue for a break. I agreed to get tickets for both of us with my points; we would share the hire of a car in the Netherlands; and Alice would fix the accommodation. She had a therapist friend, Tony Zandvliet, who lived in Amsterdam. Tony would borrow Alice’s house in England and we would borrow her Amsterdam flat in exchange.

Alice and I arrived late in Amsterdam on the weekend before the conference. We had taken a long detour from Schiphol airport to visit another of her friends who insisted we stop for a meal. We arrived after midnight at the dark flat, hauled our cases up a steep staircase and fell into the room. I noticed that the shower was piled high with furniture but didn’t think too much of it. I also noticed there were no curtains at the windows but also didn’t think too much of that either. We put the lights out and undressed for bed, sleeping till it was light.

That next morning we took stock. It was clear that Alice’s friend didn’t actually live in the flat. She lived with her lesbian partner and just used the flat as an office. There was no bathroom, no hot water and we were overlooked by neighbouring flats. I managed to light the Ascot heater in the kitchen so we could get some hot water, but the only way of washing was to fill a plastic bowl from the sink and squat with it on the floor. We took it in turns to splash soapy water in the most needy places whilst the other held up a towel to spare the neighbours’ gaze. Food wasn’t a problem. There was a grocers beneath the flat, but it wasn’t a good start.

That afternoon we arranged to drive our hire car out of the city to the town of Edam. Alice had arranged to pick up a young trans man on the way. It turned out to be Stephen Whittle again, and I don’t recall us hitting it off all that well at the time. For one thing I was still on edge from roughing it in the flat. I’m used to showering and washing thoroughly every day — in spite of that childhood upbringing with the tin baths. Also, when we began to share the driving I became an appallingly bad passenger.

Alice had difficulty judging clearances from the driving seat on the left hand side of the car. We kept coming perilously close to walls and parked cars and she felt that my repeated flinching was putting her off. And then it happened. We pranged. Our passenger side wing mirror smashed the drivers mirror of a parked car. It was tempting to make a run for it but the owners were too quick. We peeled off high denomination notes to settle for their costs on the spot, whilst Stephen fortunately discovered that our own mirror would just pop back into place. We were lucky. However, as the car was hired on my credit card, my stress levels went through the roof.

The rest of that day was miserable. We got to Edam but I felt so stressed that I just wanted to sit and be alone for a while. Alice and Stephen walked on into the town and left me for half an hour. I had the feeling he thought I was over-reacting. The next day we tried to improve things and drove all the way to Maastricht to explore. But there were still tensions. And tears from me. I was well outside of my comfort zone. Having grown up effectively as an only child (my step sister left home when I was five years old) I wasn’t used to accommodating people with very different attitudes to what mattered.

By that evening I was so unhappy that I wanted to be anywhere but in that flat with Alice. I packed my bag and hauled it down the steep stairs between sobs. I set off in the car at almost midnight without any clear idea of where I might go. A hotel? Back to the airport? I got lost. I was conscious I had been drinking and was afraid of being stopped. In the end I found my way back to the flat and hauled my bag back up the stairs with my tail between my legs. We made up and kissed. But I had been so close to going home and missing the event I had come to see. And history might then have been very different.

As it was, we put all of the weekend’s traumas behind us when we went to the Free University. The event was packed with a mix of international lawyers, doctors, civil servants and quite a few trans people. And the agenda changed my thinking forever. These were people who had all thought very hard about the status of transsexual people from their own perspectives.

The clinicians from the Dutch gender team presented the kinds of information I had never heard before. What they said completely challenged the ways in which I had learned to think about myself — until then full of internalised shame and guilt. The lawyers also brought new perspectives. I was hearing people who really wanted to win these human rights cases and challenge unfairness across Europe. I learned how other countries had legislated to recognise the outcomes of gender reassignment, and the problems they had created by the way they had done this, as many as 20 years before.

And I heard and spoke to trans people from the United States, Canada, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, France and Germany. Some of us had email accounts with the US online service CompuServe, so we exchanged details. It was amazing to realise that there were other people fighting these fights, having similar experiences and thinking the same thoughts. And it was invigorating to discuss our perspectives and see what we learned.

Not everyone viewed our plight in the same way. During one presentation a French psychiatrist put forward her views and seemed to be saying at one point that we were all mentally ill and certainly shouldn’t be anywhere near children. Her words hung in the air. As there was an audience microphone in the centre aisle I gesticulated wildly and asked the chair for permission to speak. As I walked forward I wondered what on earth I was doing. I had no prepared idea of what to say but I knew how it felt. My legs were trembling as though ready to give way and I clung to the microphone stand for support.

You’ll get a gist of what I said in the next chapter. I was the delegate from the floor — too modest to name myself in that essay about the events. It felt like a blur at the time but I could hear my words being translated into the conference languages on the headphones of everyone in the room. I spoke from the heart and received a standing ovation as I tottered back to my seat.

Afterwards I argued with the woman who had roused me in my pidgin French. I wasn’t the only one. She was flustered and defensive. I don’t think she had counted on people who answer back. The following year some new friends  took me out to dinner on the strength of it in New York and told the tale of how I had stood up to one of France’s premier psychiatrists, Madame Collette Chiland.

Mostly, however, the clinicians truly pushed the boat out. Louis Gooren opened and closed the conference and by the end I was in tears. I didn’t want to go away and leave this amazing world in which acceptance appeared to be the norm and new knowledge changed the whole basis of discussion. Gooren’s closing speech summed up so much:

When I address this audience as ladies and gentlemen, it is not my first association that I am addressing a group of human beings with vulvas and vaginas on the one hand, and a group with penises on the other hand. This introduction, this approach might sound abrupt, or even odd to you, but it brings us right to the core of the matter. When I address you as ladies and gentlemen, I am referring to the kind of person — woman or man — that you became after your birth, when your sex was determined by the criterion of the external genitalia. This being established, your boyhood or girlhood, your manhood or womanhood, became a matter of indirect evidence. Your genitalia are normally not apparent or obvious in your social environment. Clues as to your being a man or a woman come from indirect sources. When we grow up, we develop a sense of being a man or a woman, on which we hardly ever reflect. We are what we are, either a man or a woman. For this sense of belonging to one sex of the other the term gender identity has been coined. We communicate this sense of belonging to the one sex and not to the other to the outside world in our gender role.

The speech went on to explain the process of human sexual differentiation from the moment of conception and to elaborate on the Dutch team’s recent research on the physical signs in the brain — a subject which later became contentious in trans campaigning as people came to different conclusions on how much weight to accord to such research.

Were people to campaign for trans rights on the basis of contestable physical evidence claiming that trans people were measurably different with some kind of intersex condition? (Gooren used that word.) Or should the case be made on the purely human rights basis that trans people exist? You don’t need to know why they exist in order to acknowledge that they do, and to argue from there that they are as entitled to the same rights as anyone else.

In later years Louis Gooren admitted privately that he was pushing the significance of the available research to the limits of what could be claimed from it at the time. The priority was to shake up people’s thinking and leave them with a strong narrative to take back to their colleagues: sex and gender weren’t as cut and dried as everyone was taught in school.

As trans campaigning has matured, people have increasingly let go of the comfort blanket afforded by the brain sex arguments. It wasn’t necessary to secure employment rights. It wasn’t necessary to secure the right to NHS treatment. It wasn’t necessary to secure legal recognition, except insofar as continuing to demonstrate that scientists didn’t really understand why trans people existed and were different to other people.

In the end the European Court of Human Rights put it this way in 2002:

The Court is not persuaded therefore that the state of medical science or scientific knowledge provides any determining argument as regards the legal recognition of transsexuals.

The judges continued:

"In the twenty first century the right of transsexuals to personal development and to physical and moral security in the full sense enjoyed by others in society cannot be regarded as a matter of controversy requiring the lapse of time to cast clearer light on the issues involved. In short, the unsatisfactory situation in