Hello, everybody. And hope you are doing OK, so I called back on the chair of the LGBT Plus Advisory Group,
thank you so much for joining us tonight and we're going to keep it very brief,
but the basic housekeeping bill, so and we do ask that, you know, any conversations be kept respectful here tonight we will be open.
We will have a question and answer session and later on in the in the talk so you can type your questions into the Q&A function.
And there they will be passed on to Stephen.
Time permitted and in terms of how many we can get through and and other than that, that's that's about it.
And I will say that we do have someone who is doing a live transcription.
So if you need that, then you can enable that transcription. And with that, I'd like to pass over to Louise Richardson.
Hello, my name is Louise Richardson. I'm the vice chancellor of the University of Oxford,
and I'm absolutely delighted to have this chance to introduce the 13th annual LGBT History Month
lecture organised by the university's LGBT Plus Advisory Group and the Equality and Diversity Union.
This lecture has been going on for 13 years, and I'm delighted to say that I've had the privilege of introducing everyone during my tenure as wishing.
And I think the success of these lectures are testament to the vibrant and committed LGBT Plus community and their allies that we have here in Oxford,
and I would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for all you do
throughout the year and for the work that you've done in bringing this lecture together.
As we all know, a great deal of work is done throughout the year to advance equality and diversity here at the university,
but in an institution as large and as dispersed as this one, very often we don't hear about see the work,
the important work that has quietly happening in the background.
So if you know of an initiative or a person who has been working hard and unrecognised
in enhancing equality and inclusion and diversity here at the university,
I'd like to ask you to nominate them for one of the Vice Chancellors Diversity Awards.
The call for nominations closes on March 18th.
So please do get your nominations and again before introducing our speaker.
I have one other very happy note to mention, and that is in keeping with the lectures, theme history, law and activism.
I want to draw your attention to a brand new professorship that has just been created.
It is a professorship in the history of sexualities established in the history faculty and with an association with Mansfield College,
which is called the Jonathan Cooper chair in the history of Sexualities.
And it will lead and expand the study and teaching of LGBT Plus history here at Oxford and indeed nationally.
And I hope globally too, it is, as far as we know,
the first fully and professorship in of this type in the UK and it has been made
possible thanks to the generosity of Dr. Elizabeth Razzing and Professor Peter Baldwin,
both historians and co-founders of the Arcadia Fund.
The chair has been named in honour of Jonathan Cooper OBE. I'm sure he will be known to some of you in the audience.
He was a barrister with an expertise in international human rights.
He has anybody who ever met him, who was an inspiring and tireless advocate, an activist for LGBTQ plus rights across the globe.
He was a commentator on issues such as trans rights, conversion therapy and the rights of people living with HIV.
He died tragically prematurely and in and in his honour.
Elizabeth and Peter created this chair, which will ensure that he's never forgotten,
and the issues that he cared about will be studied by generations of students at Oxford.
And so now I'd like to introduce our distinguished speaker today, Professor Stephen Whittle,
who started his academic career teaching family lives and social policy with the Open University.
He then joined Manchester Metropolitan University as a lecturer and was made a professor of equalities law in 2006.
Professor Wood transition from female to male male in 1975.
He already had a degree in geography in African and Asian studies from Sussex University.
But he, after having the experience of losing many jobs because he was transgender,
he decided to obtain legal training on the part time LLB evening course at Manchester Metropolitan.
He wanted to challenge the discrimination he and other trans people have experienced, so he went on to obtain a Masters, then a PhD in.
Professor Ritter was a co-founder of Press for Change, the UK's trans rights slogan Press for Changes.
Campaigns have resulted in several major case law successes at the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights,
which has led to significant legal changes, including the Gender Recognition Act of 2004 and full protection under the Equality Act of 2010.
Professor Whittle has advised on transgender rights and not the UK, Scottish, Irish, Italian, Japanese,
Hong Kong and South African governments, as well as the European Union, European Commission and the Council of Europe.
He regularly advises lawyers and writes briefs or as an expert witness for courts worldwide,
and has authored many academic papers, non-academic articles and several books.
Professor Whitlam's work has been recognised with an OBE for work on gender rights.
In addition, he also advised the University of the Arts in London when creating an exhibition on
what it means to be trans and Liverpool Museum's exhibition Portrait of a Lady.
The history of transsexual people in the UK seems like a good opportunity to remind you that
there's still time to visit the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Beyond the binary exhibition there.
We share stories on LGBT IQ plus identities and highlights some of the ways people have reclaimed
power over their bodies and sexual and gender identities and have forged thriving communities.
So we're in for a treat with a lecture from Professor Stephen wasn't, so I hope you will join me in welcoming him this evening.
Thank you. My name is Stephen Whitfield.
I will be very pleased to be coming and welcoming attending via Zoom to do this presentation today because it gives us a real opportunity
to talk about something that's still very live issues that really actually at the cutting edge of thinking about what our well,
sorry priorities were. Treybig people's lives,
the challenges and the contradictions of the people who just pushed their like to rule the
rocks constantly is a really difficult set of issues for us to discuss about as lawyers,
as sociologists, as historians framing it all together to understand the entire story is very important.
I've lived this life, so it's really important at this point.
Back in 2005, it seemed that the situation's been resolved the world to change for what I was transitioning in 1975.
People in Britain were far more accepting. I would do trading sessions.
I've asked people, You know, how many of you know, a trans person?
We did that in 1993 while had go, maybe by 2005, the whole world was putting its hands.
Or maybe a co-worker, maybe a family, maybe a neighbour.
People knew us as human beings and.
What we have seen happen more recently is a sort of move back to dehumanise sugar.
So what this presentation is really about is to try to look at what happened between 1970 and 2020 and to frame the context of that.
So I'm going to share BuzzFeed, which is a presentation. Most of the time you will see images, but I will carry on talking through it.
Now, just let me get to that point to that right and talk about what is 50 years of trans activism.
1971. I contacted the first gender.
I knew I wanted a sex change, and I've known that for several years.
In fact, I discovered it when I was 10,
when I read a newspaper story in the Sunday newspapers and a sort of realisation that some people could actually change their sex.
But all the stories about people who went for being men to be with it.
One of them was about somebody who went from being a woman to being a man.
So though I knew what I wanted, the idea that it would ever happen in 1971 was still far away.
In 1971, what we oops, he said, just go back in 1971, we saw a flashlight feature very heavily in the newspapers.
She had married a minor aristocrat.
They bought property together in Spain. They had a restaurant in Kensington in London.
He turned out not to be great for her as she sought a divorce,
and he countersued on the basis that it was never a marriage because she was always about.
If he would that case, it meant that all the property in that relationship, which was in his day,
those days remember this in 1970 1971, women did get their names on property deeds.
All the property would have gone ahead. None of it would be buried with her, even though she had been the person working most of the time.
She worked as a model, she worked as a nightclub hostess. She worked as a dancer.
She left school at 14 to become a cabin boy on a seagoing ship in order to survive.
She gave incredible poverty in Liverpool. She became, by the mid 60s, one of the u.k.'s best-known, most favourite models.
It was well known that she was transgender, but it never occurred to anybody that that was somehow something awful.
At that point, there were always stories in magazines or outlets in two newspapers, the news of the World and this of the people,
which was the elephant scurrilous and implied that somehow people who had sex changes were sexual perverts.
But there was no substance to any of those stories ever.
They have featured a story about somebody who was working as a schoolteacher or somebody who was working at a shop.
Where was the school aspect to it? So it was all a bit, you know, rather low key and these innuendos that went on.
When April lost the divorce case and the judge declared that she was a man for the purposes of marriage.
That suddenly saw bikes that we had been very people had sort of casually applied
through systems whereby they could get their birth certificates changed.
If that parent was willing to say that when they were born, they didn't think they would necessarily fall boy or girl.
And if they had a doctor who would cooperate with that, lots of people actually managed to change birth certificates at that point.
But it certainly all went people who were in legal marriages.
And one of the cases somebody I knew very well had married a woman from Estonia had
asked the immigration officer to ask the tax officer whether that was acceptable.
But after the plastic case, he said they have no idea what marriage was really all about.
It actually collapsed the whole sort of system against it when he retired and in 2005 sort
gender recognition of the Gender Recognition Act and was told that their marriage was clouded.
She owed hundreds thousands of twenty eight thousand pounds back National Insurance and she wasn't legally bound to marry.
It was a long story. Let's face it, let's get. We got to the point where the tax office withdrew and we got it settled,
but it was very hard work at the time, and the implications for that couple were dreadful.
We also see picture here of Chad Myers being interviewed in 1974. Chambliss was very famous as a reporter for the Times newspaper,
had kind of the best of a large part of Everest with Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing in 1953,
when they could Everest and had to the first report back to Britain of the climb and had done an amazing amount of work on travel reports.
It was very, very well known, and she took the same route as April, which was the only thing available at that time.
But that was to make your way to Casablanca and have your sex change surgery that we should or should go on her return.
She was hounded, so she decided to speak publicly.
And if you ever watch the interviews top 1974, you will wince as you still think this has set against these.
Two women survived, but they survived really well.
April went on to ultimately get an MBA. John got a CBE in the ad for her.
I think they both very recently died. But though neither of them were activists, natives, actually people actively engaged in the campaign,
the fact that they stuck around and said We're here and we're not going away.
It was a huge boost to the rest of the community.
So that was it between 1974 and 1992.
Not very much happened. Most of us lost jobs repeatedly. Most of us couldn't get jobs in the first place.
In many cases, I remember being at university by Dean, saying to me in 1978, Can I have a word?
Sorry, go ahead. But just because it was this school you say you went to.
So I said, Well, I went to that school and said, That's a girl school.
And I said I was a girl and. I asked him very nicely not to tell anybody.
Two hours later, I was harassed and pushed to the corridor by students and by two lecturers making jokes about Middlesex and you know,
oh god, I just I can't even think about that. So awful, I remember.
But just the key is this forever. It seemed that way.
Nothing much happened. Then in nineteen ninety two, they actually achieved that one.
My partner south of that point thirty years said she wanted to have a baby.
And that meant we had to try and get fertility treatment to adopt, see the doctor who suggested he had to have an affair with my wife.
So we lost him very quickly. We could not finally referred to a clinic with Liverpool.
We were about starchy vegetables, pregnancy advice service The Sun newspaper featured a story all about Virgin Birth,
a woman who apparently had had a daughter who said they should give birth but never had a sexual relationship with BPA.
Back to office, they referred us to somebody else who was a man who talked about my babies and
my ladies all the time when we talked about fertility told somebody should.
He said, Well, you don't need to be factored in the father's Did it come? And we went.
I wonder what he talks about my babies, how many babies are his babies?
So we opted out and it was awful. It was absolutely good.
You know, did I resort? Did we resort to what to do, which was, you know, that heartless and had a one night stand to get pregnant?
All of this was not the way to start a family, ever.
I always felt that way. And it wasn't just me, my wife was well, but it did nothing except try to be good citizens.
I've been a scout leader by that point for 10 years. You know, I was doing nothing except trying to do my best.
But it was constantly the barrage of not you're not actually wonder what we found the clinic actually about.
You said Great doctor here. But everything he could about trans people, he said it was more than happy to go ahead.
He wanted his ethics committee at the hospital to review the case.
Have no wish to pick to my colleagues.
Bob, you were on the ethics committee and then we got the letter I'm paraphrasing because he didn't quite say what they said to Sarah.
You will never be a good enough woman for us to ever consider you as a potential lover whilst you live with somebody like that.
And that was the day I realised that all my legal training could make me into a lawyer and we were going to fight back.
We found the right to appeal and they separated tablets and we went to the doors of the court and finally they said yes,
and she got pregnant two weeks later.
Booked in that process, my anger at what was taking place not to me, but to her, was such that I just had two friends within the community.
We have to do something. I did a law degree to try and discover why I was being dismissed from work all the time.
But I've now got it. I don't know an awful lot about what happens to us, and I think we need to pursue this.
In 1992, along with Marquis, who was the first person from the UK first Trans Mountain in the UK to take a
course to take a case to the European Court of Human Rights and suddenly move.
We arranged a meeting with Alex Carlisle. Now we did all the things that are listed on this presentation,
but I could tell you the most significant thing about this was it was the first time trans people travelled together.
It occurred. We got on the tube together. We got the tube together.
We walked through Parliament Square together and we got to say Stephen's entrance to the House of Commons and we
walked through the police check together and across the main lobby down to Alex Carlisle's office and every.
I was honest, and that was why we had never, ever before walked together in a third.
But we did it on that occasion. We have had high. We spoke to Alex.
He said If you want to change things, you have to organise yourself as a professional.
You have to know what it is you're seeking.
He said these things do not use transsexual in the title because you want if you want your message to be read, he said.
Put it halfway down the second page, but not before then.
It shouldn't be a struggle, although he said you need to make yourself very visible as good citizens that tell this story over and over again,
over and over and over again. So I went off to have a cup of coffee at the cafe over the road and we said, What are we going to call ourselves?
We scrambled together a better body between us, and we sort of started very loud, which we said we want to create change.
But actually, we realised the things that we regret. I just think that we have to change most was the presentation of us.
I still probably in that situation, but we ended up with the name pressed for change and it worked.
So the campaign itself, you know, was not an easy one to stop.
What were our problems? We had no funding. Well, we never had funding.
I think the most successful change ever had in the bank in 25 years was about 2000 pounds, and that was a good year.
We had a terrible public image. You know, we were the worst of the worst somehow.
And there was a massive amount of social stigma that made trans people not want to talk about the issue, not want to put their head a box of Typekit.
The whole thing of our presentation of physical image was terrifying.
And most of us were very ashamed of who we were.
We also had a massive range of diversity in the community in those days, we were not just transvestites, transsexuals and drag queens.
But actually, we all knew amongst the community people that we lived in, probably by this Typekit, you know,
where 2000 trans people in this country alone, that actually that diversity that we had was all part of a process travelling along the road.
Many of us started in one place. I moved to another place. Some of us thought we were somewhere, but actually went back to somewhere before that.
It was not the easiest thing in the world to obtain gender reassignment treatment.
It was much more difficult if you had a decent job and a family to support you and wanted to support them.
I had a house. You were pay the mortgage. For most people who transitioned throughout the eighties and into the early 90s will lose their families.
They would lose their homes, they would lose their jobs.
That community diversity that we were dealing with meant we had to really think hard about what it was we were asking for,
which was how we came up with.
We wanted respect, the quality, the intact, be the sick, all trans people, whatever shape or form we took, this was like having blue cloud eyes.
It was a simple fact. We just who we were.
Most of us would say we had, you know, minimal control and we'd known for very you gauges what was we really needed to do.
And most of us were very aware that if we didn't do something at the end,
we'd probably do the thing that would end it because that's what many community did.
I think what's really important about realising that when you are doing something like a lobbying campaign,
you have to really think about how are you going to do it and where you can succeed?
And a lot of books are lobbying the public pressure group politics.
And then we sat down. This was just a core group of about 12.
We said, these are the key things we have to do. We have to listen to our community, that diverse community.
We have to obtain a universal mandate because it has to be a mandate that all of us could speak to better value the rights of all of our communities.
If we have to reconcile all the different philosophies that were people who said, Oh, well,
if somebody doesn't have gender reassignment, they're not really a transsexual or a transgender person.
Let's roll that back. Let's think about what you're saying about the implications of saying that everybody
must have this intense amount of surgery if that old or disabled or whatever.
And what is the relationship and they've got a cop who also has to say the whole thing?
Stop. Let us try to think about how we can get our thinking together on this, how we can compromise.
And one of the things we realised, I think Catholic community, which was Baghdad.
I think the first workshop meeting we have a day when we all sat down, really tried to think about pulling out about a hundred of us in the room,
which we realised we have to be selfless because we had to have a real commitment to doing this.
We have to do things that none of us ever thought we were going to do.
So to speak in public. Talk to politicians, etc. We had to have some discipline about doing it because if we weren't disciplined,
you know, we would kind of fall apart along the way. And we had to retain our integrity about what it was we were doing.
But one of the things that came up, of course, was this was 1990 to 1993, my first job and that view was as a lecturer,
but also as being the person who introduced computers into the law school.
I've always been a computer nerd, loads of trans people or computer nerds.
We were right at the founding of the two that you'd actually do your history or discover that we are trans people.
If we knew about computers and we knew about it, that we knew about online talking to each other,
and we knew how to make newsletters and magazines and stuff things that other people were only just learning.
So we brought those skills into this class, which was really flat.
It was a loose cell structure almost and enables individual participation from the tiny to the very big.
You could literally like an email to somebody about some of the issues,
or you could go and talk to committee in the Parliament and the parliamentary committee on behalf of the issues.
And people would try to be connected to a marriage vehicle like cheating that we developed.
They work together, but they were separate. They have skills, but they also linked to learn from each other and we develop this professional approach.
People often said, well, you know what, what what is this structure? Is it what?
It's just a group of people or volunteers. No body that. You know, we're just trans people who want to create change.
And the best example are often thought of. Africans still think it was Frank who was a trans bob.
I thought to like, be more violent with me, who decided to lead about Europe and the courts in Europe and how directives were made.
He adapted David Law after A-levels. You've never done anything like this.
He left school at 15, but he became vice president for European affairs and it was about 1998 when he was talking to had the European Commission,
who said to him, Sir, how long have you worked in the field? In fact, it was four years, but I'm just a volunteer.
You know, all of us are just volunteers. Alright, so what's your profession?
And he says, I'm a postman. I deliver letters and this chaps face just was a picture because he had been talking
to some newscasters so well and it had boarded exactly precisely what we were about.
We did, you know, the various party conferences we did events where we had somebody actually paid
for us to have a stall at the Labour Party conference in nineteen ninety eight,
which was, you know, they cost a lot of money with an average possibly paid for it.
And you know, we had Tony Blair and Cherie Blair come up and shake hands of both Butler, but various other people.
And it was like this we are getting our voices heard and getting some form of recognition wasn't easy.
One of its suburbs hat was that people thought the issues were about birth certificates.
Because if you read it, in 1991, I when I started my Ph.D., I read 201 legal papers,
existing ones in English, every single one of them that existed in English.
I read it. All of them said that trans people are they know about trans women wanted to have their birth certificates
changed so that they could get married in order to disappear into global heteronormative sort of life.
That was it. And in fact, if you went to the doctors at any time between 1975 when I went in 1995.
That was what was expected of you. You were meant to say, you know, I only fancy people of the same sex as I was labelled at birth,
but actually that makes me heterosexual by you, gender well.
And if you said anything else, you would be no trouble. And I was one of those people who said simply, girls can be bisexual.
A disaster. But. This was who we were meant to be, just people wanted to disappear somehow.
And I don't want to disappear. None of us wanted to disappear.
We wanted to be part of the communities in which we lived and worked and be full people in that that but package as well.
So not the Walsh was very little research existed at that time, but I was doing a PhD, so it seemed obvious thing to do was to ask this question.
So I asked had 800 people from the community filling survey forms and interviewed quite a lot of what were the results?
But what people wanted and needed was equal access to employment to be able to get a job,
to be able to retain a job where they did it well, to not be the first person out.
Any time anything went wrong with the business. That meant that was so much because without equal access to employment, you know,
for many who have families who said they were still paying out for those families,
but they were also having to rent and buy a new wardrobe because that's what the doctor required of them.
And without money, you could buy the secondary treatment, such as bed removal binders for your chest,
all the other things that actually needed to do that you did not get on the NHS.
You have to pay for if you didn't keep your job, you had deep trouble.
So job was number one. Number two was personal safety in public and private.
Everybody had been beaten up by somebody, whether it was their dad, possibly in the street or both,
or raped by somebody they thought was going to their boyfriend or the guy who lived downstairs or the landlord.
It was just that constant, constant, constant.
I heard these stories repeatedly of the violence the community faced.
And what people wanted was just to be safe. Big hit all the time, they wanted equal access to medical provision, not just for gender reassignment.
So everything else. The minute you were somebody was having the sex change, everything became psychosomatic.
Have a bad back or it's just psychosomatic, you broke you like, oh, it's just psychosomatic.
I've got a brain tumour. He's probably psychosomatic and it felt like that constantly.
I know it did because it took them twenty two years to diagnose me as having multiple sclerosis.
But I knew for 22 years that's how they put a doctor told me.
But nobody else was going to diagnose it because I was not somebody worth treating.
So, you know, those three things were first, secondary issues where we needed to change public attitudes.
People really, really wanted people to respect, be some way.
People began to realise there was a need for relationship recognition, and that became absolutely clear to me because.
So my wife, we've had all these problems getting separation treatment.
The government we had actually go right to the highest ranks of government and
asked if I could be recognised as the father of the children's best Typekit.
And we were told, no, I couldn't be registered.
But that actually meant the worst thing happened, which is if my wife died, my children would become homeless orphans.
Sort of to laugh at it, but it would have meant at the time which social workers would have step to remove
the children from the home placed into foster care because there were four of
them almost certainly split them up whilst they spent two years assessing whether
I was going to be a critical person to buy them and there'd be no guarantee.
So that notion of relationship recognition was becoming increasingly important.
You again, somebody once said to me that they talk about birth certificates, look at me, she said.
She said, we should even look at me. I'm six foot six. I am a trucker in the flock.
Do you think a new birth certificate? Let's make a blind bit of difference to the quality of my life.
What would make a difference? They keep my job. What would make a difference is if people actually gave a little bit of respect
to the fact that Barry had been lived together quite happily as a couple.
And what would make a real big difference? You know, I did have to fight the doctor every time I went for anything.
Mark, down on the list was privacy, and the reason it was right down to the left were because most tomfoolery and years of their
life at that point as a woman would be very visibly travel hormones were not that effective.
We have, you know, they got low dose treatments. They weren't as efficacious as they could be.
So there is no sense of privacy just for your daily life and trans man who called on one hand, become very masculine, very quickly.
Because of the lack of surgeons in this country, the minute we took off our clothes,
everybody in a hospital setting would know exactly precisely what we were.
Privacy was way down the list. A cluster change because I talked about developing expertise in lobby group efforts.
It was a really key part of moving that agenda forward. We had to change public attitudes.
We have to change that agenda from birth to marriage to the over things that the community wanted.
And in order to do that, we took a whole series of court cases from 1995, wherein '93 onwards we started with court cases.
The court cases were all whipped up to the punch. We worked out, we have nobody, so we did it.
People who had lost their jobs probably or were, you know, students or the equivalent, very low.
We needed people who had a clear case that could challenge the current framing of the law and preferably which
could be taken up the court ultimately ensure because we did not expect any positive outcome here in the UK.
We were right not to expect it because right up until winning Goodwill II in 2002, two months earlier.
The Supreme Court, you know, the House of Lords that say in those days would say the UK had contravened all rights,
but it was up to parliament to do something about it. We knew we had to get into Europe,
so we actually planned cases in advance with that went out to the community and said we take anybody who lost their job.
Does anybody got children who have not been very blessed as part of a family,
as anybody got a partner who's got a long term chronic sickness illness and they can't get Social Security support for it and so on and so forth?
And finally, the final part of the Academy's legislative change, which ultimately came with that discrimination regulations,
which followed a case earlier and then the Gender Recognition Act,
the changing public attitudes was one of the most difficult things, but at the same time, one of the easiest way that a lot of changing to do.
But I remember so well, a colleague at work said to me, Well, if you want to change the law and when court cases.
That's good news, that means you've got to change judges, wives first.
And I remember looking at it as well, the judge might be a little bit sad to see the courts don't be so stupid.
There were some books they actually said, you need to change the conversations that take place at breakfast in those houses,
which means you have to get in the morning newspapers into the pages that women read.
Trans people were, you know, we have we've had a way for the newspapers. We don't smoke who been caught, you know?
I mean, when we had our first baby, we were hounded and then caught in the public street and photographed to the
extent that my open university student rang me a pulse of the morning and said,
OK, you know, you're on the phone to the people. I went to know how that happened.
So when you got the paper said, How did you know it was me?
So we can tell you a box of anywhere that says a lot about that legacy of a female bomber male, obviously.
But. They knew and they were great about it, but there are lots of people who work there, the dog [INAUDIBLE] came through the door,
the bricks banged on the window with, you know, we want you perverts, Afterpay, hair etc, etc., etc. All happened.
But we actually did was we ran the newspapers and we literally said, This is 93.0.
Do you want a story about a child sexual? So they would say yes, how much?
And we say it's for free for their child. The person will have talk to you on one condition.
They said, Well, we said no editorial control. We know that, sure. But they want to be able to say that the quotes that they give you put in the
real context that they're not manipulated to say something that wasn't set.
And we got tons of press, you know, particularly in the Times, the Telegraph, those the daily ballots after they wanted these stories back later.
So we learnt to be professional people, you know, to be truly respectable in every way.
All of us used to laugh at none of us could have ever had an affair with anybody because we'd have been, you know,
added up all over these papers to say we were presenting ourselves as the best sort of citizens goody goody two shoes in the world.
But we got that it worked class for change itself became massive, and it became mostly massive through the website.
The team who created the website started 1994 to the point that by 1996 was a thousand pages of it had 100000 hits a month from over 80 countries,
one million plus visitors every year and completely free.
It was the resource that people went to for transgender law, completely only resource that existed above anything of the sort.
In fact, it was the biggest political website in the world until 1999,
which actually really says something from the team that created it produced something quite amazing with it,
not just in terms of providing a resource for the entire world, but actually educational source for our community.
You needed to do anything. You went to the Press for Change website.
So we have pressed for change the this political lobbying by 1998 as a national community.
And it's really important to think that back in 1975, a new one transfer said.
By 1989, when I set up what was then the FGM network for trans men and U14 trans men, I'm probably three times that many trans women, but that was it.
But I 1998, we had these major organisations all voluntary,
all working to support the community to provide educational information, medical information.
I think if that was you back just to get people confidence in themselves, to learn,
to laugh at ourselves and to realise we didn't need to be ashamed of ourselves in terms of that whole process of collective working,
the news media, etc. It was very effective, but was the biggest and most effective campaigns we ever had.
Was started about 1995, when in one of the weekend workshops,
it was agreed that we would find the major soaps that on every channel where they were filmed,
whether scriptwriters, that days the script practise baton.
And we would have teams from the community going into that bar with a script by a suspect.
So it was a Thursday night we went for a drink. We were there having the drink.
And later that night, we could. We count sometimes two events a week, to be fair.
You got started to be talking to until finally in 1998.
ITV Good after tape picked up the idea of recruiting somebody who was trying.
The first. Presentation of Hayley Cropper was particularly aptly doable.
So we sort of immediately wrote it aside,
what is the point it is having done the work if we don't listen to us and listen to the reality of our story?
You just had Hayley Cropper pulled up on a passport that apparently has the wrong sex and et cetera, et cetera.
That is not the happens. The first thing we will change is our passport because it's the thing we can change so that we've changed our date.
You need to get this right.
If you're going to do it and they agreed to have one of the community, I want to change activist being a consultant on the programme.
That was Ali Wallace, who all these years later was the first trans person to play a trans person on British television,
the first trans actress to play a trans person on British television soap in Hollyoaks.
She was the advisor because she did local amateur dramatics.
Everybody just we pushed and pushed and pushed the conspiracy to act and said, Why don't you go to college?
Why don't you come to this? Cape's you? She passed and you know, she tried for a long time to get professional work, not being trans.
And then when this job came to Hollyoaks, she thought, Well, here I am.
I'm well, bloody well, be the person. And so she became the first person to get what she did to work on Coronation Street.
Now what that meant was the scene on the 21st of April 1999, we were really struggling to get the Labour government to move on this.
Lots of sympathy. But Jack Straw, the Home Office was very negative.
That meant that we were sort of a bit knocking our heads against brick walls.
So we proposed the marriage story in which Royston Haley fell in love and tried to get married, and it was unsuccessful.
On the 21st of April 1999, that marriage was unsuccessful.
Could it be done? Had to end up being a sham marriage at the local cafe where they both worked.
But interestingly, the work on the soap.
It reached the parts that we couldn't reach any other way.
And in fact, they received the government received 300000 letters in advance of that wedding, saying we gather that they will be able to marry.
That's wrong. These were people who didn't necessarily know trans people.
Many of them probably did, but haven't really thought about it before, whether they looked at what was going on.
They certainly got their pens and papers out, and they they wrote. And on the day of the marriage didn't happen.
Jack Straw, still in parliament, has said, We're going to have a legitimate medical working group of this matter.
We're going to see what the issues are, etc. And finally, we had cracked it.
We have got into a place where government was going to listen.
The first meeting we had with the department's working group was that it was quite interesting.
They gave us 20 minutes, 10 minutes to do a presentation, 10 minutes question that I just they all lead one side of the table.
We had seven lawyers on our side of the table and a couple of people working on, you know, things like statesmen,
New Statesman, things, those sorts of max eight seven lawyers of various different shapes and sizes.
As many as 12 people come in for 20 session.
We left four hours later.
We went down the pub with the tape because what really was the problem at that point was everybody thought we have horns and tails.
They didn't lay eyes. We would just like them. But by getting into a space with actually talking, getting to those people who you know,
they started, Oh, well, that's wrong, because I know that person.
I can't see by, surely. And.
We started to move the agenda, which meant that by the time we started to win cases in the European court, we were beginning to get her properly.
So the very first major case that we would fight back in 1996,
which was first that Google had to cancel and that gave employment protection to trans people throughout Europe,
not just employment but also notification of trading.
So if you were doing medicine at university, for example, or this trading or just trying to be a welder, you were protected from discrimination.
Which meant that was sort of like the stepping stone. Now everybody had to give us a joke.
In 1999, we suddenly got notified with three weeks notice that the government was putting out a white paper for consultation.
The paper basically said this has been a decision that people have found very difficult and closed out like, so this is what we are proposing.
And if I just highlight probably the worst proposal and that was that we would be allowed to use the toilet of a
new gender identity when senior managers had decided we look reasonable enough that they should you try to work.
They also have got to ensure that no doctor could work and no trans doctor was going to have to keep that job.
No trans death, no drugs teacher, no tracks disabilities.
Anybody who was in an educational role or might see somebody in a semi or dressed role, even though they were fully dressed themselves, you know?
You got to lose your job. We fought back on every single one of those things and we won every single one
of those people came forward with the cases where they were challenged at work,
and by the end of 2000, we'd regained every single one of the blacks that they had tried to fit the 1998 regulations.
Those cases to the European Court of Human Rights, X, Y and Z was actually the case concerning.
I was ex my wife, so it was why was she my client then?
And that was her first child, who the time we actually got the court was at that to.
At the time was very difficult to listen to, it came through at eight o'clock in the morning,
it was being fed in one ear and then the other here I was doing what I did.
Twenty seven interviews that morning, BBC opened their studios up to literally all of the services as well.
Covered do interviews with basically out of the news and we quickly spread and we said, OK, you know, we lost the case but were proudly Typekit.
We think our children should have the protections of everybody else's.
Children have every other child. And furthermore, the court itself said, We were a family.
We weren't a disparate group of individuals. We were a family family.
Family means something a little.
Eventually, you know, after several of the cases, we got good way to die, which the court said we had a right to personal autonomy.
The NHS provided that, you know, gender reassignment. So why the [INAUDIBLE] did we do a follow up on what is it providing for you?
Provide the extra little legal battle with my mom. So I could say that ever since you did this?
Yes. And. Yeah, we there was that whole question of personal privacy on the late night and Article 12 blocks allowed to marry so that.
To the legislation, we also during that time to had cases through the national courts, employment cases,
medical access cases, relationship cases, one of the things we were very clear of in the Press for Change campaign,
which is sort of ironic now when I think about what's been going on in the last five years is that we said we would never,
ever do anything that removes the rights from any other group of people.
So we thought processes under the Gender Recognition Act, for example, that would allow us to marry.
We were busy pointing out same conversations that actually you began writing people with two penises get married.
You'll be letting people with two vaginas get married. So why we don't do a gay or lesbian marriage at the same time.
We worked with so well, and we brought Civil Partnership Act forward by at least two years at that point,
because it became crucial also that we had the couples that were currently married couples.
I used to call the bi blue rinse group off to the library of the trans women had been,
you know, senior public servants had been in the forces or in the police services.
They took their time, they got their pensions,
which protected their spouse before they got divorced because they were in those days, public sector forces pensions.
Their spouse would lose their right to the survivor pension benefits.
So they had a choice that did they go for the right that they had under European law to become women?
Or did they stay married in order to protect the right of the spouse who stood by them through thick and fell,
including a gentle process of gender reassignment?
Did they, you know, stay stay in that situation of being legally allowed to ensure their spouse had to survive a pension benefit?
The deal that we did with government? What's the Civil Partnership Act coming forward?
And there were cases about pension rights, et cetera, that told you that beautifully documented and that you see this process,
this arc that led ultimately to the Gender Recognition Act.
You have to get a gender recognition certificate, which gave you a new birth certificate,
which gave you the right to marry or enter a civil partnership and the right to privacy.
The rights of the acquired gender for all legal purposes had its limits happen to,
you know, not be married for the sex, etc. Those things we knew would.
But I remember way back at the beginning, just as the act was you the final thought where we had to agree that we were happy with it.
I remember being sat in the meeting say we're I'm happy with it, looks happy at all with this and this,
this and the fact that you still want us to have a diagnosis that we are psychiatrically disturbed in some way,
shape or form because that's what you're requiring of us for doctors to, you know, have the faintest idea of what it's really like to be this.
And we're going to have to go through that process and we disagree with that. We disagree with this.
But we are going to go with the act because it will give 95 percent of what 95 percent of the community needs.
The other five percent in both cases is not forgotten, and we will continue to fight for those things.
We also ultimately ended up with the Equality Act,
which meant that anybody intending to delay wanted to go to having undergone gender reassignment was protected.
And most importantly, gender reassignment under the Act is a social process, not a medical one.
Anybody who is, you know, anybody who's been in the process of trying to obtain gender reassignment treatment,
you will now know how long the waiting lists are, how.
And so I mean,
I spoke to somebody the other day who paid on the waiting list for a first consultation down in Exeter for eight years because the GP's had broken up.
And so the first three years was wasted. And then the second three years when she should have had a report before the pandemic came along.
And. Certainly, she's just been left in limbo living as a woman.
By hormones over the odds that from India for eight years, with no sense of her life moving forward,
she can't even get the diagnosis in order to get recognised in that new gender in which she's been living for eight years.
So there are huge problems with the court system.
2017 So a challenge that none of us expected and I will admit to have a big court completely on top by this one.
I was very used. In the stuff that we have done with the Equality Act and with the Gender Recognition Act,
it was very used to the fact that Christian evangelicals particularly had challenged us over every
single thing that put a lot of money into challenging the processes that we were going through.
The gaining of legal rights amongst the legal base that people within the LGBT beat LGBT community were saying, hold on a minute.
The women who in the women's movement, who we had been absolute allies to all the way through were saying, hold on a minute.
These people are not. What they were actually focussing on was trans women.
But as. You know, all of us say, and in fact, as my now wife says, it's also a challenge to me as a woman who is married to you,
because what does that say about who you are and about who I am?
We know we are not out who we are, but it's a constant like niggle at the back of you constantly undermining the whole process in the last five years.
Somebody has written to the university or somebody from the university at least three times every year,
sometimes more suggesting they'd asked that I should be removed from my job because I'm not up to it.
But it has been incredibly difficult for some people within the university.
You feel it's been very challenging and they not sure if they have a university.
That's a post-1982 university. I really want to take on those challenges.
And what if it becomes a legal action and what if because that's what these people are now doing?
We are seeing increasingly people who are just doing their jobs are doing them well and not discriminating against any lesbian, gay by trans person,
actually finding themselves being challenged through the courts for something they've said that's meant to be libellous,
not even to the person themselves, but even about the person who's making the complaint.
But the very nature put in that challenging the court, having got the funding from God knows where for it.
It's having devastating effects. I'm waiting constantly for my club, you know,
but maybe they've got more than offset enough sense not to try and challenge me personally over these issues.
Writing advising at this moment in time on three cases, two of which have been bought by the same person,
one by a person who I suspect might be the same person but very involved in the LGB Alliance and.
What what what is going to be the result, both the results of those are people whose individual professionals are devastated by the attack upon them.
But this new challenge has become really difficult. You know this fact life living in this women's place?
We've had people attacking the Girl Guide Association for saying that they accept trans kids,
you know, saying that boys are going to be raping girls in tents.
I just, you know, it's almost like beyond my imagination, some of the things that they make.
They're sort of what's called the gender critical walls.
They came about after Theresa May, in one of her gentler, more nice moves and having met trans people,
agreed to put forward proposals to amend the Gender Recognition Act in 2022.
17 other states have already told this. They removed the Berkeley Colaiste requirement in line with the new W.H.O. ICD 11 diagnostic statement,
which says that we don't have a mental health condition, we have gender code goods that it can be treated.
They want to remove the excessive two-year waiting time.
They want to make it quicker, cheaper, less intrusive. The medical requirements we tried hard to get rid of from the original Gender Recognition Act.
The two year waiting time came about because the government asked the passport office back in 2003.
This is how many people ask for their passport be changed and how many people asked for it to be changed back.
What do they get changed the landscape that very few always within the first two years?
So that was the two year waiting tab was put on to make sure.
And also that was put there because there was a real fear that certain newspapers would have
their reporters try and obtain gender recognition Typekit in order to sort of show the system.
So we wanted to believe that it's about time and make it quicker, cheaper and less true.
Save all the discussions that went about this.
I have to say I was incredibly cautious. I was incredibly cautious about what it would be.
I was very concerned that we didn't, you know, open up spaces in which people stopped being protected,
in which gender recognition did it mean very much. But, you know.
I have reviewed the other countries and other states that have told this.
I have seen and this was the particular thing to me was to see this in Ireland.
Young people could go to school until the 18 get last eight years, so I assumed they would arrive in university as the person they wanted to be.
Obviously, like all of us in those early stages, you'll think trust I look really androgynous that, oh, this is really difficult, but you do it.
But it gave people confidence. It gave those young people confidence that somebody like me could not have imagined in those days when I was that age.
The proposals for the Gender Recognition Act amendment are the ones in Scotland have no impact at all on the Equality Act 2010 title,
it's not changed. The prison rules have not changed. Women's own spaces have not changed.
I married sir in 2005, shortly after getting my gender recognition certificate, and I want to show you almost the joy of the occasion.
But it still brings me sort of a lot less work because I have never seen her happier than on that day.
The kids just had an amazing time where I wanted to do a little quiet.
It's a registry office, but you know what? Within about two weeks or so, we were married.
We had a hundred and twenty people had already invited themselves to the event, never mind us.
So we had, in the end, 108 people crammed into a chapel for 80 people on the hottest day of the year.
And it was amazing. And. I lay in my bed much later that night, it was hot, too,
that it was and I lay my bed thinking about the day and realised something that really was quite profound to me.
I always worried myself sick that the work that I had done in this area was somehow very selfish.
It was all about me. And on that day, I realised that the people who had been left out of the system completely as well as me, the people who look me.
My mom was overjoyed letting me be able to get married.
After all this time, it's 26 years. We've been together, lots of friends that we came to come and celebrate the relationship that we knew would last.
We're not thinking, will it last a year as many marriages are?
And.
Thinking, you know, like I think he realised that the people who had really benefited from the gender wasn't me, I lost my privacy a long time ago.
Everybody knew what I was. I was what was born. Female body to now sort of pretended I was around.
You know it all big done. You know, the whole world knew that the people who really benefited.
Well, my wife, the four children we have and that I was able to become their legal father so that if anything ever happened to Zahra,
they would be whipped by social workers. I just see my mom's face and says, God, no, this crisis has brought us face.
But seeing this event take place, we don't often.
Very few people in the trans community get a gender recognition certificate and legal gender recognition for themselves.
This often means very little. They may be getting attention as a day for a date.
We all get it later, the transmettre we did four years and the troubles when we got it earlier.
But now it's no different. So equalised.
What really meant for all of us was to give security back to the people who had supported us through thick and thin.
My family have never let me down. They've never not known who I am.
Never questioned. My children have always had a bob who gave a gift to spare.
Why? But they also they do have that full stop.
My wife rang me up to take you literally two days having having met me at having been told she rang up and said to a to don't make for any longer,
do they? You know? Within six weeks, we're partners.
She knew who I was.
These are the people who also get left out by not having the system that we now have in place and which could be so much better than it is now.
There's a lot of work still to be done. It's not going to be easy, but I'm hoping we can achieve something.
OK, I'm going to stop sharing my screen. That's really the end.
I always finish off the fact that, you know, this is about real human beings.
Thank you. OK. Hello. I'm Catherine Walter.
I'm the chair of the Sister Advisory Group, which is the Disability Advisory Group.
I was supposed to manage the questions and answers, but the only questions that we really have are about the problems with the audio dropouts.
I promise you personally, we will get a transcript out there one way or the other.
And if I have to go and twist Stephen's arm a bit, so I'll do it again.
Well, we can help you fill in the bit that dropped out. We will do it for you.
This has been fantastic. I will turn over to set to Sarah now.
And will we've got your back? Thank you. OK, thank you.
Sarah, I mean, Flora. Hey, everyone.
Yeah, those are fantastic talk. Thank you so much.
So many interesting things.
It's really interesting to know the battles that are being fought and have been fought and as personally made an awful lot of impact on me.
And I will say that there's a question there for a sandy who says that as a trans man, that brought me to tears.
Your story has resonated with so many of us, and I can I can only say thank you so much.
And I'd also like to thank everyone in the audience for listening.
It's been really fantastic talk and thank you for everyone that has stuck around and listened to us.
I'd like to thank Kathryn for hosting and doing the wrap up just then, and I'd like to thank the team.
Kathryn. Caroline Walters and and Alan Warragul and and Karen from it.
And I think with that, I'd like to thank everyone. We will have the podcast available and we will try and get the.
And we will get the transcripts filled out. And with that, thank you.
Once again, Stephen. That was absolutely amazing. And with that, I have a lovely evening, everyone.
Can I just say this to the audience? I'm sorry about the drop out.
You know, as I say, we've had problems. It's been storms that have ended up huge problems with the internet throughout the country.
If you have questions that you would like to ask eBay, you could find me on the Imam You Law School website.
My email address is there. Just email me. You know, I'm I'm not very fattening.
I don't blame somebody else. I'd rather people actually ask questions that I doubt so they can actually hear the real answers.
I will say this is my first year students.
I getting the first lecture with me, you know, at the end of it, actually, by the way, I'm the one who's had the sex change.
And, you know, the past they step about used to drive up and down with tend to clap, which is very reassuring.
But I also say to the ask, We don't talk amongst yourselves because you won't know the answer, you know?
So if you have questions about anything you want to come back, please aspect.
Thank you so much for that. That's really generous of you. Thank you so much.
And and yes, so please people either go through me or go to Stephen Direct, as he says, is not scary.
And once again, thank you so much and have a lovely evening, everyone.