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Christine Burns MBE has campaigned for a quarter of a century for the civil rights of transgender people, and has been involved with the trans community for more than forty years. She has worked as an equalities consultant, helped to put together new employment legislation and the Gender Recognition Act, and wrote the first ever official guidance about trans people for the Department of Health. She lives in Manchester.

Mermaids is the only charity in Britain specifically focused on supporting whole families with a transgender child or parent. Established in 1995, the organisation has always been parent led, and does vital educational and support work.

This is a book largely about the lives of adult transgender people. But many (if not all) grown-up trans people have a story to tell about their youth – usually involving the fear of expressing who they were and the negative and irreversible bodily changes that they have had to deal with as a result of going through the wrong puberty.

Our hope is for a future where another generation doesn’t face that need to hide and suffer in silence, with all the lost opportunity that involves.

The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and ebook wherever books are sold, in shops and online.

This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. At the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.

Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.

If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type trans5 in the promo code box when you check out.

2 1966 and All That: The History of Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic – Dr Stuart Lorimer

11 Section 28 and the Journey from the Gay Teachers’ Group to LGBT History Month – Professor Emeritus Sue Sanders of the Harvey Milk Institute with the assistance of Jeanne Nadeau

Foreword

Dr Aaron Devor has been studying and teaching about transgender topics for more than thirty-five years and holds the world’s only research chair in transgender studies. He was one of the authors of versions six and seven of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s (WPATH) Standards of Care and is overseeing the translation of version seven into world languages. He is a national award-winning teacher, an elected member of the elite International Academy of Sex Research, an elected Fellow of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, and has delivered more than twenty keynote addresses to audiences around the world. He is also the author of numerous well-cited scholarly articles, and the widely acclaimed books FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society (2016, 1997), Lambda Literary Awards finalist The Transgender Archives: Foundations for the Future (2014), and Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality (1989). Dr Devor, an out trans man, is the founder and academic director of the world’s largest transgender archives, a former dean of graduate studies (2002–12) and a professor of sociology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.

As Christine Burns has so aptly pointed out in this book, with all the media attention these days, it would be easy to be fooled into thinking that trans and non-binary people just appeared on the scene in the past few years. After all, it is almost impossible to look at any kind of media today and not see stories about trans and non-binary lives. Increasingly, commentators are working hard to be fair and accurate – even as there is still a long way to go – and more and more of them are trans and non-binary people themselves. However, as Christine illustrates in her introduction, the reality is that people who we would today think of as trans or gender non-binary have been around as long as we have been human (and probably even before that).

As the world’s only holder of a chair in transgender studies, the founder and academic director of the world’s largest transgender archives at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, and someone who has been around trans communities for more than thirty-five years, I know a very different reality. I know it from my own experiences as a gender nonconforming youth and adult, from countless hours spent with other trans people learning their stories from them, as a trans man, and from the history held in the extensive holdings of the Transgender Archives.

I’m old enough to remember when it was illegal to be LGBT, and queer was still a word that people spat at you because they either knew that you were gay, or they thought you were queer because of the way you spoke, dressed or acted. Back then, there were transvestites, drag queens (drag kings were unknown even to most gay people) and transsexuals – everything was very binary. As is so eloquently told by the narrators in part one, this was a time when everyone who was not straight (sexually or genderwise) lived in fear and, when they had the courage and the resources to seek out likeminded souls, gathered together in dark, hidden, out of the way places.

For trans and non-binary people of this era, locating others like themselves was fraught with possibilities for public disgrace and punishment. The overwhelming reality for trans and non-binary people, until the Internet changed it all, was profound isolation, secrecy, silence and shame. As you will read in the first-person accounts in this volume, pretty much every trans person over a certain age went through years, if not decades, of feeling that they were the only ones in the whole world who felt the way that they did; that they were unimaginable freaks for whom there were no respectable words or names. When they were unable, or unwilling, to hide their differences, the consequences were often dire: rejection by family and friends; loss of employment and housing; rejection by religious communities, social services and medical providers; incarceration in jails and mental hospitals; forced medication and electroshock; rapes; beatings; murder. There were no legal protections. There were no social support networks to speak of until the first pioneers started to band together into support groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Winning legal rights and social recognition required people to come together for more than individual support; they needed to build on the help they received from their peers, and the occasional cisgender (non-trans) allies, and create common cause for change. That activism, spearheaded by groups like Press for Change, took incredible courage, perseverance and just plain hard work in pre-Internet and pre-mobile phone days, when communications were much slower and more costly than they are today. At less than 1 per cent of the population, trans and non-binary people are few in number. This is compounded by the fact that many of us are unrecognisable as trans or non-binary unless we say something to identify ourselves as such. In the days before the Internet, this combined with immense social stigma, harsh laws, physical dangers and limited communications options meant that we had enormous obstacles to finding one another. Networking could only be done through face-to-face meetings, postal mail or telephone communications. However, travel was beyond many trans people’s budgets, and telephone communications were much more cumbersome, less private and more expensive than today. Radio and television broadcasts, print newspapers and magazines, and film were the main forms of public media; printing your own materials was costly and required specialised equipment. The media was in the hands of a few powerful agencies. Trans and non-binary people’s platforms for speaking for themselves were extremely limited.

Nonetheless, trans people did what needed to be done, as is so vividly recounted by the voices in part two, ‘Activism’. Multiple organisations worked together to change laws and open up social possibilities that a generation before were almost unimaginable. Letters and broadsides were written and distributed. Meetings were held with key decision-makers. Much lobbying was done. Demonstrations were held. Songs were sung. Documentaries were made. People told their stories and became real in the eyes of the public. Small steps in the 1970s built into significant momentum in the 1980s and 1990s. Milestone advances were won with the passage of the Sex Discrimination (Gender Reassignment) Regulations (1999) and the Gender Recognition Act (2004).

Laws, although essential, are not enough. Policies also need(ed) to be adjusted. Social attitudes and beliefs need(ed) to be brought into the twenty-first century. The Internet has been a great boon to the new generation who have taken up the cause as the pioneers are ageing and in need of successors. In the final section of Trans Britain we hear from some of the young people who came of age during a time when almost everything you needed to know about being trans or non-binary was a few clicks away, when anyone with access to the Internet could find others like them easily. Spared from extended periods of ignorance and isolation, they are ready and eager to do what it takes to claim lives of dignity for trans and non-binary people. As they do so, we will see the gender spectrum continue to diversify away from a forced binary into a more natural (statistically) ‘normal’ distribution (better known as a bell curve).

Trans Britain is, in many ways, a breathtaking story of courage and determination. It is told largely through the authentic voices of the people who were there, risking so very much, so that the rest of us could live safely and with some modicum of dignity and pride. It is a specific set of stories, told by a carefully selected group of people, representing a particular time and place. However, the arc of change described here is universal. Individuals finding and supporting each other, community building, activism for change, a new generation rising to new challenges: if you have ever worked to repair your world, you will see your own story here too. These are stories that need to be told, that need to be remembered. We need them to know who we are, where we came from. We need them to know where to go next. And we need them so that we can say thank you to the people who gave so much so that we can just be ourselves.

A Beginner’s Glossary

Trans / transgender: The preferred current-day adjectives used to describe anyone whose gender identity and/or presentation does not align stereotypically with the gender assigned to them at birth. These are broad ‘umbrella’ terms which encompass all more specific words for gender non-conformity including (but not limited to) transsexual people, non-binary or genderqueer people and those who cross-dress. The word ‘trans’ was introduced in Britain during the second half of the nineties and was promoted by activists at that time to replace words such as ‘transsexual’, which were seen as more problematic. ‘Transgender’ has a longer history and the meaning attached to it has become less specific since being coined in the 1960s.

Cross-dresser / transvestite: ‘Cross-dresser’ is nowadays considered a more polite way of referring to people who episodically adopt the dress of the opposite sex for relaxation or pleasure. People who cross-dress normally identify with the gender assigned to them at birth and have no desire to change more permanently. In the 1970s and earlier, the only two terms (besides ‘drag’) in common use were ‘transvestite’ (TV) and ‘transsexual’ (TS) – clearly distinguished by the permanency of the role change and how the person involved saw themselves. The origin of the term ‘transvestite’ is attributed to the Berlin-based clinician Magnus Hirschfeld, who first used it as a clinical descriptor in 1910.

Transsexual: ‘Transsexual’ is a clinical term used to describe people who specifically seek to change their gender on a permanent basis from that which was assigned to them at birth. It is partly attributed to Magnus Hirschfeld (‘transsexualismus’ – 1923) but credit is also due to American surgeon David Caldwell, who created the anglicised form in 1950. It was then popularised by the psychiatrist Harry Benjamin, regarded as the father of modern clinical treatment for trans people. Some people reject the term because of its medical origin but it is the most unambiguous way of describing people on the grounds of the permanence of their transition. Transsexual people may or may not seek hormonal treatment and/or ‘gender reassignment’ or ‘gender affirming’ surgeries. People who dislike the term will generally use trans or transgender as a synonym. Historically ‘transsexual’ was used by clinicians and commentators as a noun; however that usage is strongly deprecated by trans people, who prefer it to be used as an adjective. The arguments are similar to the reason ‘black’ is deprecated as a noun.

Introduction

The year 2015 was described by American Vogue magazine as ‘the year of trans visibility’. Around the world a tiny minority, whose media coverage had been historically confined to tabloid tales of shock and titillation, seemed to have gone seriously mainstream.

In the United States every age group appeared to be included. At one extreme sixty-seven-year-old Caitlyn Jenner’s ‘coming out’ as trans was a global news story. Jenner, famous as an Olympic gold-winning decathlete and the head of the Kardashian family, was the highest profile person known to have changed gender in America in popular memory – at least since former GI Christine Jorgensen was revealed to the world. The New York Daily News had broken that landmark story in December 1952, under the front-page headline ‘Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Bombshell’. During the intervening sixty years there had been stories of others, of course, but none so big, so global.

At the other end of the age spectrum, trans teenager Jazz Jennings – with a 2011 documentary and children’s book already to her credit – won a deal in March 2015 to appear in a series of commercials promoting a facial cleanser for pharmaceuticals giant Johnson and Johnson. Cable TV channel TLC also began screening her reality show I Am Jazz. That a big corporate advertiser should use Jennings as an ambassador for their product spoke volumes.

The same year Laverne Cox, co-starring in the popular Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, was named one of the world’s most beautiful women by People magazine. Amazon, meanwhile, was heavily promoting Golden Globe and Emmy award-winning comedy-drama Transparent, starring non-trans actor Jeffrey Tambor as an elderly patriarch beginning the change from man to woman surrounded by their family. As is the norm these days, such cultural events weren’t confined to North America. These shows were watched and discussed in many countries with satellite TV or streaming video services.

The surge didn’t actually start in 2015. Orange Is the New Black first streamed to viewers worldwide back in July 2013 and, by May 2014, Time magazine was featuring Cox on their cover, the editors declaring all this visibility to represent a ‘trans tipping point’.

It also wasn’t just about television. American magazine editor Janet Mock’s 2014 autobiography Redefining Realness was a bestseller after she revealed herself to be trans, and her book helped create the conversations which brought more American trans people to public notice. Mock’s controversial televised interviews about being trans, with high-profile interviewers such as Katie Couric and Oprah Winfrey, created what were dubbed by Couric as ‘teachable moments’ from inappropriate questioning, whilst a subsequent car-crash interview with Piers Morgan hammered those lessons home, as he stubbornly failed to acknowledge the points being made. From Hollywood, meanwhile, there was The Danish Girl starring Eddie Redmayne – a period piece about one of the trans community’s key historical figures, Lily Elbe – feeding a growing public debate about whether the parts of trans people should be played by trans actors.

Fashion and modelling had a part to play too. In May 2015 Yugoslavian trans model Andreja Pejić became the first openly transgender model profiled by Vogue, following in the footsteps of previous generations of beautiful transgender women like Britons Caroline Cossey and April Ashley. However, whereas Cossey and Ashley’s modelling careers were destroyed twenty years apart by salacious tabloid revelations of their trans backgrounds in the News of the World (Cossey, 1981) and the Sunday People (Ashley, 1961), Pejić and others were positively in demand for their exotic appeal and versatility. That year Allure magazine profiled ‘Eight Transgender Models You Need to Know’, including (alongside Pejić) Geena Rocero, Carmen Carrera, Lea T (raised in Italy), Hari Nef, Isis King and Ines Rau (from France). Aydian Dowling, also on that list of eight, became the first trans man to be featured on the cover of Men’s Health magazine, underscoring the point that people cross the gender divide in both directions. Hari Nef later became the first trans woman to grace the cover of Elle in the UK.

Visibility begets more visibility. By 2017 Nepalese transgender model Anjali Lama was the talk of the Indian catwalk shows and the New York Times was reporting on a new wave of agencies specialising in transgender models. Yet whilst media and fashion celebrity are important cultural forces, helping to determine what constitutes the zeitgeist, the majority of trans people pursue more sedate careers and are thus less likely to be seen. Nevertheless, the wave of international interest was opening up interest in some of them too.

In Australia, former senior army officer Cate McGregor was establishing herself as a very articulate voice; she was named Queenslander of the Year and became a finalist for 2016 Australian of the Year. New Zealand had even had the world’s first transgender Member of Parliament, Georgina Beyer, between 1999 and her retirement in 2007. Everywhere you looked there were beautiful, successful and articulate trans people in the public eye, putting forward the case for transgender equality. Yet a backlash was perhaps inevitable, with fundamentalist Christian think tanks and law firms in the United States advancing state-by-state attempts to make it difficult for trans adults and youth to go about their lives safely. The focus of these actions was to try and make it illegal for transgender people to use the public toilets in which they would be safest – so-called ‘bathroom bills’ – on the pretext of protecting cisgender (non-trans) people from a non-existent peril. If you can’t use public toilets safely then your freedom of movement in society is seriously affected. The backlash is very much ongoing as this book goes to press.

Britain had a part to play too during this dramatic upsurge in visibility. As in the rest of the world it began on television and in the print media – both areas that had hitherto been relative no-go areas for trans people speaking for themselves. But we can also trace the development back further.

In 2010 the Guardian was the first national newspaper in the UK to feature a series written by a trans person about trans issues. ‘A Transgender Journey’, in the paper’s online ‘Life and Style’ section, was a high-profile series by writer and historian Juliet Jacques, writing philosophically and practically about the issues surrounding her transition to womanhood. The series progressively taught readers about the realities of a complex process only previously tackled in confessional or scandalous exposé formats by the country’s tabloid newspapers. A vigorous cultural debate raged among readers ‘below the line’ after each new instalment was published. The following year broadcaster Channel 4 signed a memorandum of understanding with campaign group Trans Media Watch, formally marking the beginning of a turn within British media organisations towards thinking actively about how they represent trans people. One of the fruits of that was the groundbreaking fly-on-the-wall documentary My Transsexual Summer. Fox Fisher, one of those featured in the series, writes in chapter 18 about the work that grew out of that exposure.

In 2013 the Independent on Sunday’s annual ‘Pink List’ of the country’s leading LGBT figures placed trans journalist Paris Lees in the top spot, along with a hugely increased number of trans people across the other ninety-nine positions. Two years previously there had been very few trans figures in the list – that was how fast things were moving. Lees was suddenly guesting on the BBC’s flagship political debate show Question Time and later Newsnight. New writing and broadcasting opportunities soon followed.

Next came trans people from other high-profile walks of life. In 2014 the boxing promoter Francis ‘Frank’ Maloney (under threat of being outed by the tabloids) went ahead and announced publicly that they would henceforth be a woman, Kellie. That same year a nationally successful independent radio DJ revealed on BBC 5 Live that they intended to transition and become Stephanie. What would once have been a career-ending move became now just a minor career break, with a reborn Stephanie Hirst soon returning to host popular shows on BBC local radio. Fittingly, Stephanie rounds off the contributions to this book in chapter 19.

In TV drama, British producers took their cue from the United States, persuaded and helped by new and effective lobby groups and outreach projects like All About Trans, which focused on improving British media representation of trans people. The long running soap Coronation Street had featured a trans character, Hayley Cropper, since 1997 – played by cisgender (non-trans) actress Julie Hesmondhalgh. That character had a fictional death in 2014, bowing out just as a new wave of trans actors were seeing their first opportunity to play trans characters themselves.

Hollyoaks and EastEnders picked up where Coronation Street had left off, the latter by putting a trans man, Riley Carter Millington, on screen at the end of 2015. (‘Trans man’ refers to someone who was assigned female at birth but later ‘transitions’ to live as a man.) Hollyoaks, meanwhile, took on established trans actress Annie Wallace for a permanent role. In chapter 10 Annie examines the phenomenon of trans people in the media in more detail.

The following year trans performers moved into comedy too, with the debut of BBC Two’s specially commissioned series Boy Meets Girl, starring Rebecca Root. Even quiz shows got the transgender touch: Kellie Maloney and Rebecca Root both had recent appearances on celebrity editions of BBC’s Mastermind, whilst others began competing on shows such as Pointless and University Challenge.

And then there was politics. In 1994 trans activist Mark Rees (see chapter 7) appeared to have been the first ‘out’ trans man to be elected as a local councillor, representing the Liberal Democrats in Kent. But later we learned that Mark was not the first elected trans candidate. Militant Tendency activist Rachael Webb, who became a councillor in Lambeth during the early eighties, may be the one to hold that title – at least until another is unearthed. By the noughties, however, trans local council candidates were almost routine, with fourteen unbroken years of at least one electoral success for an increasing number of candidates between 2000 and 2014. The bigger prize to aim for by then was a seat in the Westminster elections. Liberal Democrat activist and candidate Zoe O’Connell, who tracks these things, reported four trans parliamentary candidates in 2015: Charlie Kiss and Stella Gardiner (both Green), Emily Brothers (contesting Sutton and Cheam for Labour) and Zoe herself as the Liberal Democrat candidate in Maldon. None of these candidates won a Westminster seat that year, but O’Connell took a seat on Cambridge City Council instead.

By the time of Theresa May’s snap general election in 2017 there were no fewer than nine trans parliamentary candidates: Helen Belcher, Charley Hasted and Zoe O’Connell (Liberal Democrat); Sophie Cook and Heather Peto (Labour); and Aimee Challenor, Andrew Creak, Dom Horsman and Lee-Anne Lawrance (Green). Nobody won a seat but three of the candidates achieved very respectable second places, showing that their trans status didn’t worry the electorate or the parties selecting them.

We must also not forget the trans candidates who may not have chosen to be ‘out’ when running or serving – and it can happen. The trans background of UKIP MEP Nikki Sinclaire, who served in Brussels from 2009 to 2014, was never mentioned when in office, but she was outed after standing down. All of this makes it increasingly likely that Britain will eventually elect an ‘out’ trans candidate to Parliament, joining New Zealand (Georgina Beyer), Italy (Vladimir Luxuria) and Poland (Anna Grodzka) as countries to have achieved that trans emancipation milestone.

With all of this exposure it was perhaps inevitable that some commentators would decide that the apparently sudden visibility of trans people everywhere was evidence of some kind of ‘fad’. Such an assertion is risible of course – less of a mere misapprehension, more a case of studied ignorance. If trans people in Britain were some sort of ‘overnight phenomenon’ then it was a long night, lasting generations. A fad would have disappeared by now; fads have a short half-life in our novelty-obsessed media. Fads have shallow roots, like fancy flowers that bloom once spectacularly and then die back completely. The roots of trans people’s journey into public consciousness were sown long ago. They reach deep and they have been growing for decades. That is what this book is about.

2015 shouldn’t be remembered as the year that trans people caught up in the race for media attention – it was the year the media caught up to the work that trans people have been doing for decades.

Katie Walsh, Daily Telegraph, 31 December 2015

It is difficult to say with any certainty where to pin the start of trans history. Labelling figures from antiquity with modern terms such as ‘transgender’ is a dangerous thing. People living hundreds of years ago couldn’t have ‘identified’ with such a term because it didn’t exist. We rely on the co-evolution of identities and the words available to describe them in order to provide the script for how to interpret our feelings and possibilities – the things we can be and embrace. What we can look for, however, are behaviours identified by ancient documents and historical analyses which provide the evidence for people living life in ways that apparently departed from a simple binary man-woman model of life. Those exist throughout recorded history and across cultures.

In his 1979 book Dressing Up, journalist Peter Ackroyd charts the evidence from anthropologists and social historians involving ancient cultures from around the world. He quotes the sociologist Edvard Westermarck (1862–1939), who declared in 1917 that, ‘In nearly every part of North America there seem to have been, since ancient times, men dressing themselves in the clothes and performing the functions of women.’

These phenomena are not limited to one part of the world – they appear seemingly everywhere. The Indian subcontinent has an ancient tradition of the hijra caste and Pakistan khawaja sira. Samoa has the fa’afafine, Thailand kathoey, Brazil cudinas, Hawaii mahu and Tahiti mahoos. The Inuit people have the third sex category of itijjuaq. Indeed, third and multiple gender categories are quite commonplace outside of the West. The idea of gender being strictly binary – restricted to just men and women as very separate categories – seems to be a peculiar exception that grew up in Western Christian culture in the last two thousand years, rather than the universal truth it is commonly supposed to be. Russian-born anthropologist Vladimir Bogoraz (1865–1936) lived among the Chukchi people of Siberia from 1890 to 1908 and describes no fewer than seven gender categories besides ‘man’ and ‘woman’. In comparison, the modern Western concept of non-binary identity (see chapter 15) seems rather late to the party.

You don’t have to go that far to find cultural evidence of humanity’s far-from-binary gender history. Rabbi Elliot Kukla lists no fewer than six gender categories in classical Jewish texts such as the Torah: zachar (male), nekeva (female), androgynos (having both male and female characteristics), tumtum (a person whose sexual characteristics are indeterminate), ay’lonit and saris (people who are identified one way at birth but who develop the characteristics of the opposite sex later). Admittedly, this sounds more like a detailed understanding of what we nowadays call intersex conditions rather than transgender identities, but it puts to shame our own culture’s attempts to erase intersex people from contemporary visibility and shows that ‘ancient’ is not ‘unsophisticated’.

Closer to the present time we see more specific instances of gender variance even within British and European culture. Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d’Éon de Beaumont (1728–1810) – commonly known as the Chevalier d’Éon – is perhaps the most widely known gender transgressor in modern history. D’Éon lived publicly as a man and pursued masculine occupations for his first forty-nine years, although an androgynous appearance greatly facilitated a 1756 spying mission where he successfully infiltrated the court of the Empress Elizabeth of Russia as a woman. For the latter thirty-three years of life d’Éon lived permanently as a woman – the classic definition of what we would now term trans or transgender – and claimed that she had been assigned this way at birth but had needed to present formerly as a man for reasons of inheritance. Inevitably the ‘true’ nature of the Chevalier’s sex became a hotly debated topic in British society. Large bets were placed on one possibility or the other in her later years. A cutting from the Chester Chronicle documents the mission to settle all bets with an autopsy after she died.

Intersex is a modern clinical term used for a whole range of naturally occurring differences in sexual characteristics that occur in humans and other mammals. Some of these differences are immediately visible, leading to accounts of so-called ‘hermaphrodites’ in many ancient societies. The classic idea of a hermaphrodite as someone possessing a full set of both male and female genitalia is relatively rare, but there are many other ways in which people’s genitals, internal sexual organs, chromosomes and biochemistry can differ from the two commonly expected patterns for male and female, resulting in dozens of different ways to be human. Add together those individually rare ways for people to be different and you end up with an overall phenomenon that accounts for more than 1 per cent of the population. Intersex conditions are therefore quite common, but the reason you might not have heard about them is the actions typically taken by doctors to ‘normalise’ babies and young children. It is those actions which give rise to an increasingly vocal lobby of intersex campaigners, angry about things done without their consent and the lies told to them as children. The history of intersex people is separate from that of trans people and there are different issues driving their activism. Nevertheless there are interests in common too. Some trans people have physical intersex traits. Some intersex people wanting to reverse the sex assignment imposed on them as babies find themselves going through the same medical transition process as other trans people. It’s a complex area with overlaps and shades of grey.

From the Chester Chronicle, 2 November 1810. Doctors set out to answer through a post mortem whether the Chevalier d’Éon was genitally male or female.

The case of the Chevalier d’Éon (who inspired the naming of the transgender Beaumont Society in 1966) was not an isolated instance. Some of the richest sources of evidence from the Victorian era are newspaper, police and court records. It was a period when all forms of cross-dressing were somewhat frowned upon. As-yet-unpublished research by writer and historian Juliet Jacques includes an 1859 inquest on fifty-year-old labourer Harry Stokes, who had married a woman and worked for thirty to forty years as a bricklayer. The autopsy revealed he had female genitals. In a similar and better-known case in 1865 the surgeon James Barry was found, after death, to have been female-bodied. In cases like this there is sometimes dispute over whether the individual should be claimed as a feminist icon (switching gender to access professions and benefits closed to women) or a lesbian heroine (switching to legitimise a same-sex relationship) or indeed a transgender pioneer. In truth we can never be entirely sure – the best guide is to see how people like this lived the totality of their lives, beyond mere appearances. The point here is not to claim one person or another as a trans historical figure but to underline that gender crossing has a lengthy history, even in Britain.

Moving into the early twentieth century there was a much clearer and more documented effort to investigate and understand gender-crossers. In 1910 Berlin-based clinician Magnus Hirschfeld published Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress, thus coining the term long used for people who episodically cross-dress. Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, founded in 1919, was very much a centre for research in this field. It was where pioneering surgical techniques were devised which would help trans people of that time achieve physical transition from one gender to the other. This is what led to the famous surgical reassignment of Danish painter Lili Elbe in 1931, although her surgery was not actually the first. That credit appears to go to Alan Hart (1890–1962), an Oregon physician and trans man, who underwent hysterectomy and gonadectomy in the United States in 1917 to facilitate living for the rest of his life as a man. Hart incidentally went on to pioneer the use of X-rays in diagnosing tuberculosis, thereby saving thousands of lives.

Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was pillaged by the Nazis in 1933. The photograph of books being burned on a huge pyre is iconic; few realise, however, that much of that work going up in flames was the first systematic research into helping trans people and other sexual minorities. Genderqueer activist, musician and writer CN Lester, in their book Trans Like Me says, ‘The destruction … set the emerging LGBT rights movement back by decades … the drives – legal, social, scientific – towards investigation, knowledge and compassionate acceptance were erased.’

There are many more documented cases, besides those of Lili Elbe and Alan Hart, during the first half of the twentieth century. In 1932 Colonel Sir Victor Barker’s Brighton marriage to Elfrida Howard was annulled upon discovery that he was born female. That same year the News of the World reported an ‘amazing change of sex’ involving a person from Sussex who apparently went from Margery to Maurice.

On 11 September 1933, the Dundee Evening Telegraph reported the case of Mark Woods (born Mary), who claimed to have spontaneously begun to change sex at the age of eighteen. In fact truly spontaneous changes of sex don’t happen in humans. The phenomenon occurs in some other species like fish but, in humans, alleged cases are more likely linked to one or other of the myriad physical intersex conditions with which people can be born. Even that isn’t certain as an explanation, however: as we’ll see shortly, a couple of documented cases underline that claims of an intersex diagnosis were sometimes employed to justify carrying out early gender reassignment surgeries when these were still medically frowned upon.

In 1936, the Portsmouth Evening News reported another case: that of Mark Weston of Plymouth who, unlike Colonel Barker, went on to marry a childhood friend, Miss Alberta Bray, apparently without legal incident. What is so interesting about this period in British history is that so many cases involved people going from female to male and that, by and large, the press were curious but not scandalised. That attitude was to change twenty years later. Journalist Jane Fae discusses the evolving role of the press in chapter 9. But, certainly during the thirties and forties, gender changing in Britain seemed to be fairly unremarkable, albeit quite rare.

The next interesting case began in the same era and involved the daughter of the heir to the baronetcy of Lismullen. The story of Michael Dillon (1915–62), who transitioned to male in 1942, has been especially well documented by the journalist and writer Liz Hodgkinson in her book From a Girl to a Man, based on Dillon’s own unpublished autobiography and (in the 2015 edition) a treasure trove of letters and documents donated by another trans pioneer, Roberta Cowell. It is through this work that we obtain a detailed picture of the effort required by people in that era to find a surgeon willing to help them. We also discover the white lies that were necessary to avoid the surgeon’s censure by the General Medical Council.

Dillon, who underwent a complete bilateral mastectomy in 1942 and then a series of genital transformation surgeries by pioneering plastic surgeon Sir Harold Gillies in 1945, used the pretext of a supposed intersex condition to protect Gillies. He also managed to get his birth certificate altered in 1942 – a practice that subsequently became closed to trans people for thirty-five years after an infamous legal case in 1970. What’s more, he even got his degree records at Oxford changed in order to avoid the embarrassment of having attended an all-women college (St Anne’s). Again, it was amazing how accommodating administrators and officials could be in that era – especially if you had the right class background.

Just to underline that issue of class, there is also the case of Ewan Forbes-Sempill, another child of Britain’s titled aristocracy. On 22 September 1952, Time magazine reported on a paid advertisement in the previous week’s Aberdeen Press and Journal, announcing that ‘Dr E. Forbes-Sempill, Brux Lodge, Alford wishes to intimate that in future he will be known as Dr Ewan Forbes-Sempill. All legal formalities have been completed.’ But what the advertisement hadn’t made clear, and which Time’s British stringers had spotted, was that the good doctor’s former name had been the Hon. Elizabeth Forbes-Sempill, second daughter of the 18th Baron Sempill. The story didn’t appear to spread in the UK – no doubt helped by the sealing of all the records by Scotland’s officials. Discussion of the case was even prohibited by the judge hearing the 1969 divorce case of April Ashley, greatly disappointing her legal team, who wanted to point to it as an example of precedent for official recognition of gender change. It’s clear that you could achieve a lot in terms of changing official status in the forties and fifties if you had the right background. Indeed, if changing status from female to male you could even put yourself in line to inherit hereditary titles.

Being an aristocrat also had a downside, though, as Michael Dillon was to discover. Whilst updating his own records he had been careless. He assumed that, after successfully requesting a discreet change to his details in Debrett’s, the rival Burke’s Peerage would automatically follow suit. They didn’t, however. And it was the disparity between those two entries that led to him being outed by the Sunday Express in 1958, whilst he was travelling the world as a ship’s physician. The trauma of his outing drove Michael to seek a new life as the first Western man to be ordained as a Tibetan monk. He died not long afterwards, in 1962.

Hodgkinson’s research also reveals the hitherto unappreciated relationship between Dillon and another British trans pioneer, Roberta Cowell (1918–2011). Dillon was for a time romantically obsessed by Cowell (she spurned his advances) and he even had a hand in carrying out a highly dubious kitchen-table surgery on Cowell to help build the case to persuade Sir Harold Gillies to complete the rest for her in 1951.

Roberta Cowell is generally recognised as the first of the modern-era British male to female transsexual women, but her fame was somewhat eclipsed by the much bigger international story of a former American GI, Christine Jorgensen (1926–89), whose physical transformation was carried out by surgeons in Denmark at about the same time. Roberta’s story was further eclipsed when Michael Dillon was outed in 1958 and the Sunday People exposed another of their contemporaries, April Ashley, in November 1961 under the headline ‘The Extraordinary Case of Top Model April Ashley – Her Secret Is Out’. These outings of Ashley and Dillon were to create the mould for how British trans people were to be treated by the press for another fifty years. The fear of being outed drove the pursuit of legal protection for privacy later in the nineties.

And so the story of pioneers, document changes and press exposures brings us to the mission of this book.

The thing that unites every one of the cases described in these last few pages, going back a century, was that trans people in those days were out on their own. There was no easy way to find information or role models. The lucky ones – for we only usually hear their stories – somehow found a way to obtain help with their passionate desire to change their gender. Adrienne Nash, in chapter 1, recounts her personal story of what it was like if your background was more ordinary than (say) Dillon, Cowell or Forbes-Sempill’s. The determined few would seek out surgeons – whether in Harley Street or Casablanca – get fixed and then try to settle down and disappear. Indeed, the cooperation of pioneering surgeons like Gillies was contingent on that assumption: that the patients would melt back into society. We know that during the sixties people changing their birth registration were marrying and settling down – the case of Georgina Somerset (1923–2013, neé George Edwin Turtle) being a classic example.

So how did things come to evolve? There must be something that accounts for the change between then – when solitary individuals sought out help for themselves, often in secret – and now, as a visible, organised, networked community of people have ‘suddenly’ become a global phenomenon.

That ‘something’ was the emergence, during the 1960s, of the concept of community between trans people – the formation of support organisations and safe meeting spaces where people could get together, realise they weren’t alone, discover what they had in common, and learn to help each other. It is from that watershed advance that everything else in the last fifty years has flowed.

First support, later activism: that is where the real story of ‘Trans Britain’ lies, and where our long journey from darkness, isolation and fear truly began.

The serialised story of Roberta Cowell in the Picture Post, as advertised in the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer in March 1954.

The National Transgender Remembrance Memorial is located in a shaded corner of Sackville Gardens in the Canal Street district of Manchester. Carved from a single piece of sycamore, the monument stands twelve feet tall. Originally planned as simply a trans memorial for Manchester, it soon became evident that this was going to be the first such monument nationally in the UK and therefore, by default, the National Transgender Remembrance Memorial. As a community facing escalating global violence, including hundreds of unsolved murders, trans people around the world remember their dead at ceremonies held on 20 November every year.

Part One

Survival

My childhood was spent every evening praying that God would put right this terrible mistake and that the following morning I would wake up a proper girl.

Is There Anyone Else Like Me?

The sixties began in much the same way as the fifties had ended as far as trans people were concerned. It was a time when the chances are that a person feeling like Michael Dillon or Roberta Cowell might not even know there were other people like themselves.

There was no Internet. There was nowhere to find out information, unless you had access to a medical library. What you found in such a library would not be very encouraging. Biographies about trans people were many years away. Conundrum, the first British mainstream trans autobiography, by historian and writer Jan Morris, would not appear until 1974. The most likely way for a newcomer to hear about trans people before that was through the salacious revelations that were becoming the stock-in-trade of the popular Sunday newspapers. The outing of Michael Dillon in 1958 had been pursued without any regard to the effect that it might have upon him, or anyone like him. The same was true when April Ashley’s story was splashed across a front page in 1961.

Not every newspaper story in those days was an ‘outing’. It is said that Roberta Cowell sold her story to the Picture Post in March 1954 to derive some income for herself – perhaps noting how Christine Jorgensen was monetising her status over in the United States. That is far from the norm, however. ‘Outing’ is more commonplace, and if the choice is between being splashed without consent or agreeing to cooperate, exert a little influence over the copy and be paid, most people would probably cut their losses. What we do know is that such stories were not one-offs. In what looks like a ‘me too’ story, the Sunday People were advertising in January 1955 a confessional feature about someone called Liz Wind.