Pressing Matters (Vol 2)

By Christine Burns

Press for Change (founded in 1992) was a hugely successful campaign for the civil rights of transgender people in the UK — achieving in the first 12 years a string of legislative successes that included protection against discrimination in employment, the right to NHS treatment and ultimately the process for full legal recognition of transsexual people in their acquired gender in 2004. The organisation continues to this day.

These are the memoirs of Christine Burns MBE, one of the leading figures in that campaign until 2007. Christine tells the story of how she personally became involved in campaigning and how that involvement entwined in her home, work and political life.

This is no conventional trans biography, nor is it a conventional political history. Christine tells the story of a remarkably successful campaign from her personal perspective, at the centre of much of the action. Her perspectives provide valuable insights into how such a successful campaign planned its strategy and grew, working all the while on a minuscule budget.

The historical perspective is backed up with extensive contemporaneous material (including her personal correspondence) written to document events as they happened. And the personal perspective is full of revealing insights into Christine’s inner life, her loves, her setbacks and concerns.

Nobody has ever before published an account of this amazing period in the development of civil rights for trans people. And few transsexual people have written in this detail about their lives and career development on the “other side” of the transition from one gender to the other.

This second volume covers the period from 1998 onwards — successes and failures — leading to the passage of the Gender Recognition Act in 2004.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christine Burns
• Release date: Feb 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310020841

Christine Burns

CHRISTINE BURNS LIVES in Manchester, England. For many years she was a professional IT and business consultant, working for a range of companies from global corporations to her own one-woman business. Her clients ranged from blue chip household name corporations to small businesses. She then consciously switched careers and built a second reputation as an equalities expert, in the course of which she was awarded an MBE by the Queen. Her interests range widely. Apart from being a published writer and poet, she has been a prolific blogger and podcast maker, a keen photographer and also likes to cycle for pleasure. Her publications have included the deeply technical and the mischievously trivial.

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Pressing Matters

A Trans Activism Memoir

Volume 2 (1998-2007)

By Christine Burns MBE

Copyright © Christine Burns 2014-16

Dedication

To Ellie, my beautiful daughter, who is more of an inspiration to me than she might ever realise.

To my Grandchildren, Harvey and Daisy, who will one day be old enough to read what their Granny got up to before they were born.

Also to my parents, Les and Peggy, who never ever stopped believing in me. My only regret is that I didn’t realise that sooner, so that I could have asked for help when it all looked so terrifying and lonely.

People might mistakenly imagine that people like me are drawn into activism and changing the world to obtain something exceptional. They couldn’t be more wrong. The pursuit of equality isn’t about seeking special rights or concessions. It is about wanting the same rights that others, by accident of birth and being compliant, take for granted.

You don’t realise how precious equality is unless you are born without it or have it taken away when you cross one of society’s boundaries. And inequality stings most when it interferes with our capacity to love and enjoy the company of our families and friends.

When society marginalised me it also hurt the people I love. The pursuit of equality meant that I could grow to be a more complete parent to my daughter, granny to her children, and daughter to my parents.

About The Author

Christine Burns was born in February 1954 in what is now the London Borough of Redbridge. Her father was an electrical engineer and her mother a former singer. In the early 1960s her parents moved to Kent and became first publicans and then the proprietors of a corner sweet shop. After leaving school she earned a First Class Honours degree in Computer Science at Manchester University, followed by a Masters degree, before dropping out of further PhD study because of her desire to change gender role.

After leaving her academic life she became a writer of computer training courses and then marketing publications before settling into a long career as an IT and business consultant and director of various companies. Her IT career culminated in a five year spell as a Principal Consultant for the multinational systems house Cap Gemini, where she was also elected to represent over 8,000 colleagues in the firm’s national and international works councils.

In 2002 Christine abandoned that career to focus instead on equalities. She started out as the operations manager for a business delivering social care services for people with long term mental health conditions and learning difficulties. In parallel she set up her own company, Plain Sense Limited. She was elected three years in succession to chair North West England’s Equality and Diversity Group, bringing together more than a hundred public, private and voluntary sector groups to promote a wide ranging equalities strategy for the region.

In 2006 she was also invited to chair the Department of Health’s new transgender work stream in the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Advisory Group (SOGIAG) — writing the Department’s policy guidance Trans: A Practical Guide for the NHS and commissioning the development of a range of other trans-related publications by other authors. It was through this regional and national exposure that she was invited to do work for the Equality, Inclusion and Human Rights team at NHS North West in 2008, becoming the team’s Programme Manager the following year. Her previous book Making Equality Work, published with former colleagues who left the NHS together in 2013, is based on that collaboration.

Christine’s first active contemplation of switching gender roles came whilst she was undertaking her PhD research in 1976. The abandonment of that attempt the following year is the reason she dropped out of academic life. Volume One of this memoir explains how Christine transitioned and was living in stealth, self employed as an IT consultant, when she first became involved with the fledgling Press for Change campaign in 1993. That volume also explains how she came out again very publicly to chair fringe meetings at the Conservative and Labour party conferences in the autumn of 1995. She was, at that time, the secretary of a local Conservative party branch, although her politics rapidly matured and changed. She left the Conservative party in 1997 when, as she jokes, she realised that it was more embarrassing to tell people I was a Conservative than to stand up and say I was a trans woman.

Christine led in a variety of areas within Press for Change and this book picks up the story when she had already been involved with Press for Change for more than four years and had moved into a senior consultancy role with the multinational Information Technology business Cap Gemini.

In 2004 Christine was awarded an MBE for her contribution to bringing about the Gender Recognition Act. Subsequently she went on to pursue other areas of equality work and trans rights on her own before retiring in the Spring of 2013.

For more details see WikiPedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Burns

Christine in 2013

Other books by this author…

Fishing for Birds

Making Equality Work

Pressing Matters (Volume 1)

Letters from Australia

Trans: A Practical Guide for the NHS

Christine also blogs and has produced podcasts on equality themes under the title ‘Just Plain Sense’.

http://blog.plain-sense.co.uk/

http://podcast.plain-sense.co.uk/

Copyright

First published November 2014 by Christine Burns.

Copyright  ©  Christine Burns, 2014-16

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, screen shots, recording or storage in any information retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the author.

The right of Christine Burns to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Newspaper cuttings are included under the provisions of ‘fair use’.

Cover design and all photography copyright © Christine Burns except where otherwise indicated.

Smash words Edition, License Notes

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Foreword

THE GENDER RECOGNITION Bill completed its Report Stage and Third Reading in the House of Commons at 7.11pm on Tuesday 25th May 2004. It was passed by 355 votes to 46. My colleague Claire McNab and I witnessed that historical moment from the Strangers Gallery, having sat through more than five hours of debate that afternoon, passing scribbled notes to each other. We had worked with civil servants and ministers on this legislation for nearly two years, helping them fend off determined attempts to derail it. To suddenly reach the finishing line was a confusing sensation, as we jostled with the rest of the public to exit the gallery.

We stood shell-shocked in the Central Lobby for a few minutes as Members of Parliament came up to us with warm words of congratulation. Our opposition — organised by a small faction of Evangelical Christians — licked their wounds with their Parliamentary supporters a few yards away. I urged colleagues to be gracious, in a way that those men and women had never been to us. They had borne false witness on so many occasions in their efforts to prevent this legislation being passed, or to at least defeat its purpose by wrecking amendments. One had to wonder whether they consciously blanked out the most important messages in the Bible about loving and accepting your neighbour. I also wondered whether the bulk of Evangelical Christians — good people — had ever realised what had been done in the name of their faith.

Our keenest allies, the Labour MP Dr Lynne Jones and Liberal Democrat Dr Evan Harris, whisked us off to the Commons Bar for a celebratory drink. Then another Liberal Democrat MP, Richard Younger-Ross, put a bottle of Champagne on his tab and we spent a pleasant couple of hours drinking it with him on the outside Terrace beside the Thames. As I began to feel warm and fuzzy, and we picked our way up Victoria Street to our railway stations and hotels, it all felt a bit unreal.

The process wasn’t completely over. The Gender Recognition Bill, amended by a Commons committee and two long debates on the floor of the House, returned to the Lords where it had first commenced debate six months previously. Although only now a formality, that final review wasn’t completed until 8th June. With all Parliamentary stages completed, the Bill finally received Royal Assent and became an Act of Parliament on 1st July 2004.

It was almost exactly two years since the European Court of Human Rights had unanimously found in favour of two British trans women, the last in a line of many stretching back to the 1980s. They had all argued that the absence of formal legal recognition of transsexual people’s acquired gender by the United Kingdom contravened their rights to private life and the ability to marry and found a family. Our strategy of using judicial means to force the Government into legislating for our rights had finally paid off, but it had taken a total of more than twelve years of concerted and often unglamorous work to get there. Volume One of this memoir explains how that initially came about and charts the path of the formative years of our campaign until the end of 1997. This volume picks up the story and charts the significant milestones and my personal recollections of the seven years between 1998 and 2004.

To say that we were tired, emotional and shellshocked after such a long struggle in the summer of 2004 would be an understatement. We all knew very well that there was so much else to do, but we also needed to take stock. The Gender Recognition Act and the legislation we had already won to create trans employment protections and confirm people’s rights to NHS treatment had altered the landscape. People would have the tools to assert their rights. Yet the social setting in which trans people lived was still the same. Newspapers, television and film routinely misrepresented us. NHS doctors and administrators routinely played the system to deny us fair access to quality medical treatment on a par with others. People were bullied and harassed in public, in the workplace and sometimes at home. And we knew very well that the advances we had won still only mainly applied to a specific section of the trans population — the ones who neatly fitted the medical definition and treatment model for transsexual people. We also still had a lot of work ahead to help ensure that civil servants actually implemented the Gender Recognition Act properly, in the way we had personally envisaged.

This book is mainly about achieving our original goal: the legal recognition process. However, I think it is vitally important to set the unfinished business in its context. Back in 2004 we could not readily foresee the longer term effects of what we had achieved. We had intimations though…

I think we all felt it in our separate ways. It was hard to put a finger upon it at first but something bigger had changed. My colleague Claire was the first to articulate it. She told me how she suddenly felt different walking down the street on the outskirts of Bradford where she lived. She felt more confident — more as though she had a right to be there and to assert certain expectations of others. Once she had described it I realised that I felt it too. Our self regard had changed. I believe, in hindsight, that that was when the seeds of the modern, wider, confident, outward-reaching, more inclusive and more complex trans movement were planted.

Looking back from more than ten years after that milestone, it is hard for many to imagine how much the trans community has changed on the back of that first coordinated push for basic trans rights. When we achieved the passage of the Gender Recognition Act the number of us who were out and willing to be identified as trans campaigners was absolutely tiny. The core of the campaign was a handful of us working in our bedrooms: Stephen Whittle and his partner Sarah; Alex Whinnom; Susan Marshall; Tracy Dean; Claire McNab and myself.  Other groups had similarly tiny leadership teams, often still closeted. When we asked people to do things the majority were still afraid to be identified. We planned what we could ask from people on the basis of expecting that they would wish to remain anonymous, or only approach people like members of Parliament with guarantees of privacy and anonymity. We published our photos and did interviews under our own names with the specific intention of showing that it could be safe to do so. Yet we knew that few were ready, even in 2004, to follow suit. Now it feels like every trans person with breath in their lungs has a Facebook page with a real live picture on it.

In the years leading up to 2004 we had also learned to be deliberately vague about what the word trans meant. Indeed we had enthusiastically adopted it because it permitted us to try and be more inclusive than the legal decisions — our weapons arsenal — permitted. I reflected in Volume One how the terminology of trans campaigning evolved. At the end of 1997 the vast majority of trans discourse on most fronts was still in terms of transsexual people. Some of our natural supporters were uncomfortable about getting our objectives associated with the concerns of people who either cross-dressed or who were adopting more complex identities such as transgender and non-binary. The legal cases involved transsexual people. Any case law we could exploit was technically limited to that group. We knew there was a whole range of more diverse trans identities. Using the word trans to talk about newly established rights we tried to include them as far as possible without spelling it out obviously. We were still some years from the modern landscape however — full of all these more diverse people feeling able to tweet and blog and even write in mainstream newspapers about their nuanced identities and their claim to the same rights.

The (quite reasonable) unwillingness of so many people to be out in a public way was one of the givens we had had to work with. Our way of using online media to organise people operated on that assumption. We limited our use of public gatherings and petitions. We wrote about people’s experiences in the third person and put a lot of effort into persuading people they could write letters or privately visit Members of Parliament at important moments, in a fashion that they felt safe with.

The modern trans movement has achieved so much more in the ten years since the Gender Recognition Act largely because the vast majority of trans people — especially the young — learned to let go of that fear that kept them in the shadows, hiding for safety. Nowadays it feels as though you cannot open a paper, turn on the TV or go online without encountering a new breed of confident trans people advocating for themselves without much orchestration by any single overarching campaign. They are doing it for themselves more often than not.

That’s the big change. But how and why did it come about? Social media has had a big effect. In that new space trans people almost all suddenly decided to be out in a way that was previously unthinkable. At least that’s how it has seemed. Some great new role models have encouraged a snowball effect too. I think it helped that some of us got ourselves out of the way — my biggest fear, after us being the campaign top dogs for so long, was that people might feel constrained about acting on their own. People would write and ask if it was OK to do things. I went out of my way to encourage them to just go ahead and be confident in telling their own truths. The relative silence of Press for Change after I left it in November 2007 created the vacuum that was perhaps needed.

All that activity is what has propelled the next phase of trans activism on the social awareness front. Today’s advances couldn’t be handled by half a dozen people in their spare time. It works because trans people are talking to society en masse in a way that cannot now be ignored. Some of it is chaotic. But most of it is wonderful.

Did we really kick start that? History will form a view but personally I suspect that it began in the way that our self regard was changed by the Gender Recognition Act in the summer of 2004. About 4,000 people have benefitted directly from the legislation by obtaining Gender Recognition Certificates and the newly minted birth certificates which they facilitate. That’s only half of the 8,000 or so trans people that the Department of Work and Pensions knows about by dint of people changing their names in social security and tax records. That leads some to critique the legislation in terms of those it wasn’t able to include. As this book explains, we tried hard to include more — politics so often involves tradeoffs of how far you can push at a moment in time. But I think the long term value of the campaign to bring about legal recognition includes a lot more than the simple mechanics of changing documents and being able to get married. Privacy was a big thing on people’s minds ten years ago and yet already that aspect of the Act seems almost quaint. People aren’t terrified of exposure when exposure no longer has life threatening consequences for them. Those people who would qualify for Gender Recognition and don’t pursue it emphasise, through their confidence and freedom to make that choice, that something more fundamental has changed.

I believe that, above all, the long term legacy of our twelve most active years — 1992 to 2004 — lay in the possibility model that we created. Campaigning for basic rights wasn’t an impossible dream any more. The very highest courts and then Parliament had looked at our case, debated it, scrutinised it, and agreed we were right. We had built our campaign by providing a narrative for rights. We shared the true history of trans people to bring self awareness to our own kind. We explained events. We provided information to counter the destructive notions so often peddled by the media. We found allies in the strangest of places. We took people and told them that they too could be campaigners. All our key legal victories were won by ordinary private trans people pursuing their own rights. Many of those people remain unsung because we won for them the freedom to pursue their cases with reporting restrictions. P vs S and Cornwall County Council. X, Y and Z vs UK. A, D and G vs North Lancashire Health Authority. A vs West Yorkshire Police. Goodwin and I vs UK. The alphabet is long and we owe all those people an immense debt of gratitude for becoming the levers of change.

This volume picks up where Volume One left off.  By the end of that volume we had all the elements of a functional campaigning machine. We had a clear goal and a strategy. We had a team and a means to engage people’s energies. We had brushed with a Tory government who turned out to be planning in secret how they might look at our demands. We had begun to talk to a newly elected Labour government which had made even more specific promises. We had won a case in Europe's Court of Justice and we had also lost other cases which people by then expected us to have a good chance of winning. At the start of this volume (in 1998)  we still didn't know how we would achieve a breakthrough. However, we had learned that you don't get to choose your breaks. The important part is to have a clear goal and strategic aims to support it, so you know which breaks to seize upon. A lot of this book is about riding that crazy beast — events — figuring out when to capitalise on opportunities and when to just let them go sizzling past. Above all, it is about knowing that pressing over and over for change really does matter.

Christine Burns

Manchester, 2014

The A to Z of Trans Discrimination

Volume 1 of this book contained a detailed timeline of events between the early 1970s and the achievement of the Gender Recognition Act in 2004. That volume also ended with a stock take of where the Press for Change campaign stood at the start of 1998. Rather than repeat those resources, I thought it would be more informative to include a summary of the issues that faced trans people all the time — the problems which we needed to explain to people when they asked what all the fuss was about..

The idea for an alphabetised list of problems first occurred to me one evening in the hotel where I was staying during a long consultancy assignment in 1998. I thought an A to Z would implicitly convey the all-encompassing nature of the issues that trans people still faced. There was no problem with coming up with something distinct for every letter of the alphabet. My campaign colleague Claire McNab then added some more ideas, which we further refined and updated from time to time. This version of the A to Z was published in December 1999, so it includes some things which were yet to occur in the opening chapters of this book and many things which we had happily addressed by the end.

More than ten years after the Gender Recognition Act, and following significant social advances in how trans people are viewed, it may be hard to appreciate why legal recognition, privacy and the right to marry in one’s acquired gender were considered core campaign objectives for Press for Change. This A to Z highlights a raft of more specific issues and yet most of them required legal recognition (and everything which stemmed from that) in order to be addressed.

A is for…

April Ashley — whose divorce from Arthur Corbett in 1969 created the flawed legal precedent which has dogged the lives of British trans people for thirty years.  It was a decision only intended to address the definition of a trans person’s sex for the purpose of marriage law, yet it rapidly became the touchstone upon which virtually every aspect of our lives came to be judged.  see also O for Ormrod.

A is also for Arson: within days of appearing on a television programme about trans issues in early 1998, trans woman Terri Anne Walker and her family had petrol poured under their front door and ignited.

B is for…

Birth certificates — which, the government has repeatedly told the European Court of Human Rights, are not a proof of identity.  However, many government agencies insist that they will not accept any other document instead.  All but four of the 39 Council of Europe states has provision to correct the birth certificates of their trans citizens, and hence accord them a legal status which matches the reality of their lives.  Britain, along with Ireland, Andorra and Albania has so far refused to concede that a mechanism to do this can be found.

B also stands for British Transport Police, who not only refused to allow Lynsay Watson to transition at work, as a normal part of her prescribed treatment, but then went on to harass her when travelling with her updated documents.

C is for…

Children — to whom transsexual parents are still regularly denied access.  The only scientific studies that have been conducted into the effects of a transsexual parent upon young children have shown that there are no problems associated with such parents continuing to have normal access and an active involvement in the upbringing of their children.  Any problems tend to be those created by other adults, and are based on ignorance and fear of the unfamiliar.  The Press for Change Birth Parents Working Party is helping parents resist the attempts of others to subvert the law into denying them access to the children they love.

C also stands for Granada Television’s Coronation Street, an unlikely but powerful opportunity which Press for Change has seized to educate the public about the realities of trans people’s lives and the problems they face.  (see also H)

C should also be for Christian but, for trans people, it all too often means contempt.  One trans woman was refused communion by her Church of England vicar; others have found that, after transition, their marriage has been annulled by a Roman Catholic Church which still will not accept them in their true gender, casting them into a living limbo.

D is for…

Degree certificates — which many colleges and universities still refuse to re-issue for graduates who have changed gender roles.  Such refusal means that a trans person may either have to apply for jobs with employers who aren’t going to ask to see their certificates, or voluntarily disclose their medical history during application.  Needless to say, the latter will very often be the end of any prospect of a job offer. Even if this is not the case, the forced declaration is humiliating for the applicant.

D also stands for Dana International, who demonstrated rather spectacularly in March 1998 that an Israeli trans woman can not only sing and look good, but that she can also sweep the board for public support among an audience of 350 million, carrying off the Eurovision trophy due to the votes of the viewers who award the prize.  Her reward at home includes facing death threats from fundamentalists, of course.

Sadly D also stands for Death, which haunts all British trans people.  The law does not define how sex is to be recorded, but the Office of National Statistics informs us in correspondence that the registrar would generally expect this information to correspond with the sex recorded on the medical certificate of cause of death issued by the doctor who certified the cause of death.  So we’re all in the hands of the doctor: if he follows Ormrod’s definitions of sex, or if a dead trans person’s genitalia are ambiguous, he may record sex as it was recorded at birth.

A dilemma also awaits living trans people if they go to register the death of a friend or relative.  The law demands that they identify themselves, and that the information given is true to the best of the informant’s knowledge and belief.  A trans person knows what sex they are, but the law believes the opposite — so we are left with a choice between a declaration we know to be false and one the law believes to be false.

Finally, D stands for DSS [the Department for Social Security] — which does not alter its records to truly reflect a change of official gender.  New names are merely treated as aliases and the gender of the person concerned is unchanged. This results in people like Liz Bellinger (see L) reporting cases of blackmail or intimidation.  Files can be flagged as private, so that only local managers can see the contents but, for many, this results in tremendous inconvenience dealing with benefit claims.  Either way, many trans people (such as PFC co-founder Mark Rees) report cases of correspondence being sent to them in their original names and with the wrong title.  This was graphically illustrated by the experience of the fictional character Hayley Patterson in the soap opera, Coronation Street (see H).

E is for…

Employment Rights — which the Department for Education and Employment was all set to take away in a consultation document published in January 1998.  Swift and effective action by Press for Change resulted in the ministry receiving over 300 highly critical responses, whereupon the minister invited the Parliamentary Forum on Transsexualism to draft new guidelines for employers, which will be reviewed early in 1999.

E is also for European Court of Human Rights, which has repeatedly ducked the issue of challenging a risible defence by the British Government to charges levelled by a succession of trans plaintiffs.  In fairness, mind you, even the court is getting tired of hearing the excuses.  Following the Mark Rees case in 1986, the Caroline Cossey case in 1990 and the XYZ case in 1997 the court, whilst rejecting the claims of Rachel Horsham and Kristina Sheffield in 1998, strongly criticised the government for its failure to implement repeated promises to the court to review arrangements.

E is for evidence too — which spells a risk of a breach of privacy for any trans person involved in Court proceedings, whether they are involved in civil proceedings, charged with an offence, giving evidence, or standing surety for a friend.  A Commons written answer from the Lord Chancellor’s Department in November 1999 confirms PFC’s legal advice that the courts have discretion to require disclosure of any former name(s) if they decide it is relevant to the proceedings.  Whatever the likelihood of this actually happening, the risk of forced disclosure may deter some trans people from seeking justice through the courts.

F is for…