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Olivia O’Leary presents the series which brings together two people who have had profound and similar experiences, to hear their individual stories and compare the long-term effects on each of their lives.

In this candid broadcast from 17 July 2008, two spouses of transsexual people discuss how they have coped with their partners’ gender transition.

On March 14^th — 16^th, 2008 the Gender Equity Resource Center of University of California, Berkeley hosted the 3^rd Annual Transgender Leadership Summit. One of our readers, Cheryl Morgan, was lucky enough to be able to attend. Her report of the event is below. She was also able to take the opportunity to interview Masen Davis, the Executive Director and Kristina Wertz, the Legal Director of the Transgender Law Center in downtown San Francisco.

California Transgender Leadership Summit

Being lucky enough to spend a lot of time in the San Francisco Bay Area (with my very wonderful boyfriend), I happened to be here at the same time as the 3rd Annual California Transgender Leadership Summit was taking place. It sounded interesting, and PFC said they’d welcome a report, so I went along.

Things got going on the Thursday night with a welcome party at Asia SF, a restaurant in San Francisco staffed by trans people. It was a little early for most of the out of town people, but it got me to see a place I’d heard a lot of good things about. I must go back and try the food sometime.

The conference proper began on Friday evening on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, a location that is synonymous with the civil rights movement. Huge thanks are due to Billy Curtis and his staff at the university’s Gender Equity Center for helping stage the event. (Go Bears!) Thanks also to the Transgender Law Center who did most of the work to make it happen.

The evening began with a selection of speeches from politicians. These varied from local councilors up through the State Assembly and Senate to the Federal Government in the shape of a representative from Berkeley’s Congresswoman, Barbara Lee. The theme of the conference was “trans grows up”, and this was cleverly showcased in the opening session by using two speakers, one of whom worked with trans youth and the other of whom admitted to being “60 and perhaps a few years more”.

Shannon Garcia of Trans Youth Family Allies (TYFA) is an amazing woman. She’s a mother of six, an achievement in itself, including a trans daughter, and she’s fighting for her little girl’s rights with a huge amount of motherly pride, affection and determination. Much of what she said can be found in an online article at The Bilerico Project, but perhaps the most moving part of her presentation was when she described the time she took her family away for a week’s holiday and allowed her daughter to present as a girl in public for the first time. Her husband, who had been somewhat reluctant about the project, was blown away by the transformation of his shy, sullen and depressed son into a happy, confident and outgoing girl. It was a magnificent affirmation of how easily allowing trans people to be themselves can make such a huge difference to their lives.

Miss Major, an African-American trans woman, didn’t say much about being old, aside from complaining about not being allowed to move into a retirement home along with her parents even though she was of an age to qualify for entry. I’m not sure that being old is part of her vocabulary. She’s much more at home being sassy and funny and entertaining. If you are looking for a good trans speaker, this woman is for you.

Saturday opened with more political speeches and an overview of work being done by trans activist groups and their allies in California. It is a mistake to view the USA as a single country. State laws can vary dramatically – sometimes even more so than they do in Europe. In California trans people have many of the same sorts of legal protections and rights as they do in the UK. In some areas they may even be ahead of us. Others states, however, are far less enlightened, and the Federal Government is also lagging sadly behind.

The next three sessions were devoted to workshops, of which there was a huge variety on offer. You could learn about fund raising, about political lobbying, about working with youth or deaf people, and about how to tackle an uncooperative health insurance company. I spent much of the day in the media stream, mainly because I’ve been involved in PR and journalism in other areas of my life so it was an area I could contribute to. We spent a lot of time talking about images of trans people in the media, how they are improving, and what we can do to make things even better. Given the number of smart, enthusiastic and talented people I met (several of whom were from Los Angeles and were involved in film and TV), I have no doubt that this will happen.

I did, however, take time out to listen to Mara Keisling of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE). Tackling America’s Federal Government on trans issues is very much a full time task. Americans may talk a lot about limiting the role of government, but like any other bureaucracy Washington generates regulations at an astounding rate, and many of them impact trans people in unexpected ways. A very simple example is that men who dodged the draft for Vietnam are not allowed to enter law school, but what happens if you were exempt from the draft because you were a woman at the time? Mara and her colleagues have not only fought that one, but have ensured that the certificate of exemption does not state the reason why you were exempt.

In many ways NCTE’s work mirrors what happens in the UK. America doesn’t have a national health service, but the creation of one is very much on the political agenda. (In California Governor Schwarzenegger has expressed support for the idea, and he’s a Republican.) Making sure that trans people are fairly treated by such a system, if it happens, will be a major challenge. The US government is also trying to introduce a national ID card, and all of the same issues of data protection apply. (In this case Mara finds herself allied to Libertarians from Montana – the same people who have threatened to secede from the US if their right to own guns is ever curtailed – politics surely does make for strange bedfellows.)

Federal issues were also to the fore in the final session of the day where we all got back together to discuss the future of the Employment Non Discrimination Act (ENDA, which isn’t strictly an Act in the UK sense as it didn’t get passed). If you follow trans issues on the Internet you will doubtless know the story of how the Democrat leadership and gay lobby group, the Human Rights Campaign, got cold feet over this bill and stripped out protection for trans people because they felt it wouldn’t get passed otherwise. The end result was an outpouring of support for the trans community from just about every other LGBT organization in the country, and the bill going nowhere as a result. It was, in retrospect, a rather foolish move to make over a bill that the White House had already promised to veto. With the prospect of a Democrat President in the near future, LGBT groups are planning for another push next year. In the meantime trans activists are being mobilized to get themselves in front of their congressmen to do a bit of consciousness raising. Mara noted that many Congressmen claim to have never met a trans person and to not have any trans people in their districts. This is going to change.

Saturday evening saw the focus move back to San Francisco for a party at the city’s LGBT center. I confess to having skipped that, and going home to cheer on Lewis Hamilton instead, but by all reports the younger attendees were dancing well into the night.

On Sunday morning I had a weirdly British-like experience. The local commuter rail service, BART, had decided to do some engineering work, with the result that my partner and I were almost an hour late getting to Berkeley. “Who do they think they are?” he muttered, “Network Rail?” (He’s a bit of a train buff, my boy, so he knows this stuff despite being American.)

The final session featured Donna Rose and Jamison Green. I missed Donna’s speech, but Jamison was as fabulous as ever, reprising a rousing speech/performance he had made to a San Francisco Pride parade a few years ago. They then went on to hold an open discussion on the future of the trans movement. The conference had attracted 432 registered members and maybe 20 or so walk-ins, and it had become clear over the weekend that we were a very diverse group. There were delegates who were African-American, Native American, Hispanic and from the Pacific Islands (and even one from Peru) as well as white. There were teenagers and retired people. There were people who ran support groups for sex workers and the homeless, and others who held high profile, well-paid jobs. There were people who were out, and people who were stealth (a portion of the main auditorium was marked off as being a photography-free zone). There were people who were Christians, and people who resented even being described as “spiritual”. There were people who were gender-queer and questioning, and people who were utterly certain of their gender identity. And of course there were trans men, trans women, and all shades of gender in between, not to mention friends, supporters, lovers and parents of trans people. The trans movement, we repeatedly told each other, is extremely diverse. No one group stands much chance of moving forward on its own, and no one group has any right to consider themselves “true” trans people. If we are to have a future, then we will have to earn it by working together. And maybe along the way we can teach the rest of humanity a few things about respecting difference.

Cheryl

	Amelia Bullmore as Mrs Inbetweeny

A new one-off comedy drama, Mrs Inbetweeny, appeared on BBC Three in March 2008. Notwithstanding the excruciating title, the one hour show is centred around a depiction of a transsexual woman that is radically different to anything attempted before.

The central part of ’Emma’ is played by a familiar and much liked British actress, Amelia Bullmore.

Christine Burns met up with Amelia a few days after Mrs Inbetweeny was screened and, after sharing a lunch of scrambled eggs on toast, she asked her about her acting and writing career and how she had approached the challenges of playing a trans woman.

One of the big new areas of discussion in the last few months, and on both sides of the Atlantic, has been the question of how best to support and treat young people (both young children and teenagers) when they assert the desire to be the opposite gender to the one in which they’ve been born and raised. In the US, much of the debate centres around schooling, and the actions that are necessary if a young child is to be supported to explore their feelings in role to the full. In the UK, with two recent health service booklets already published, the current focus is more actively centred on the issue of whether hormone blocking drugs should be prescribed in order to put puberty on hold for older children, so that they can buy time to be sure of their course in life before irreversible changes of either kind are allowed to take place in their bodies. Treatment of this kind has already been practiced for several years in the Netherlands and United States. UK clinicians have other views.

This BBC Radio Four Womans Hour discussion, broadcast on 28th Feb 2008, features Lee Gale, a trans man in his twenties, who first talks about his own childhood experiences. Lee is then joined by Manchester University bioethics lecturer Dr Simona Giordano, who is critical of current UK practice, and Dr Polly Carmichael. Dr Carmichael is a consultant clinical psychologist at the Gender Identity Development Service at Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust - the UK’s only centre treating young people, and which believes hormone blocking medication should not be prescribed until normal puberty has completed, around the age of 16.

	Mark Rees

Press for Change founder Mark Rees is a quintessentially charming man whose greatest misfortune, perhaps, was to have been born in 1942 with a female body. The story of Mark’s dawning realisation of his masculine identity, and the struggle to express that, is told through his original autobiography, “Dear Sir or Madam”, which will shortly be republished in a greatly revised form.

Mark’s contributions to trans history in Britain are two-fold. In the mid 1980’s he was the first transsexual person to pursue a case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights for the right to change his birth certificate. He lost. Undaunted he carried on, looking for support and, in 1992, was one of the founders who gathered in the Westminster café where Press for Change was born.

Persuading Mark to be interviewed wasn’t easy at first; he is modest about the importance of his own role in trans history. We eventually met in the coffee shop of the Friends Meeting House, on Euston Road in London. Squeezing ourselves into a quiet corner beside the web surfers, I began by asking him about his childhood.

	Julie Bindel

One of the unplanned diversions of summer 2007 was the reappearance of a debate first attempted by Lesbian Feminist Julie Bindel, somewhat provocatively, in the pages of the Guardian’s weekend magazine in January 2004, in the midst of Parliamentary debate on the Gender Recognition Bill.

Julie is a highly respected campaigner and writer in her normally chosen field. She writes for the Guardian newspaper and Weekend magazine, and various other British and European newspapers and magazines. She is the co-editor of The Map of My Life: The Story of Emma Humphreys (Astraia Press, 2003) and several book chapters and research papers on sexual violence and the criminal justice system. A founder member of the feminist law reform campaign Justice for Women, she has also written investigative features on international prostitution, sex tourism in Jamaica, stalking and harassment, being a lesbian schoolgirl, the beauty industry and serial killers. On some of these topics her writing provokes strong views on either side; however it is doubtful whether any article of hers has ever drawn as much angry criticism as when she wrote that one article, “Gender Benders Beware”.

In this strictly managed debate, recorded at the Royal Society of Medicine, Julie faces an array of well-known names who argue against her proposition. The opposing panel consists of Peter Tatchell, Michelle Bridgman, Professor Stephen Whittle and Kevan Wylie.

(First broadcast on BBC Radio 4; 1st August 2007)

One of the unplanned diversions of summer 2007 was the reappearance of a debate first attempted by Lesbian Feminist Julie Bindel, somewhat provocatively, in the pages of the Guardian’s weekend magazine in January 2004, in the midst of Parliamentary debate on the Gender Recognition Bill.

Julie is a highly respected campaigner and writer in her normally chosen field. She writes for the Guardian newspaper and Weekend magazine, and various other British and European newspapers and magazines. She is the co-editor of The Map of My Life: The Story of Emma Humphreys (Astraia Press, 2003) and several book chapters and research papers on sexual violence and the criminal justice system. A founder member of the feminist law reform campaign Justice for Women, she has also written investigative features on international prostitution, sex tourism in Jamaica, stalking and harassment, being a lesbian schoolgirl, the beauty industry and serial killers. On some of these topics her writing provokes strong views on either side; however it is doubtful whether any article of hers has ever drawn as much angry criticism as when she wrote that one article, “Gender Benders Beware” — leading to a substantial published apology, two weeks later, by the paper’s Readers’ Editor.

In fairness it has to be said that Julie has since apologised for the language she chose, and was perhaps surprised, on meeting some real trans people for an earlier BBC Radio 4 recording, that they wanted to talk rather than be angry with her. That underlines the point that when people can speak and hear each other they can often find much more common ground and understanding than when simply reading the words on the page.

Julie’s views also deserved to be debated. If there was a particular criticism of the earlier Guardian debacle it was that the newspaper never set out to present a balanced view — simply one. This is what therefore makes this very civilised live radio discussion between two very articulate people so interesting and engaging.

Do make sure you listen to the whole programme — and don’t jump to conclusions from the first five minutes in which Julie sets out her beliefs. What emerges is something that comes a lot closer to bridging a seemingly impossible divide. The irony is that trans campaigners tend to share the essence of some of Julie’s views about gender — just maybe from a slightly different angle. However the dialogue has to happen, and the tone of the voices needs to be heard, in order for that commonality to be appreciated.

Links:

• Gender Benders Beware (The Guardian)
• A Change, Of Course

	Dr. Kevan Wylie

The Porterbrook NHS Gender Identity Clinic in Sheffield opened in its current form in January 1998, so was about to celebrate its tenth birthday when Christine Burns visited its lead clinician, Dr Kevan Wylie, on Jan 2nd, 2008.

Kevan is not just a gender specialist, nor is his clinic solely concerned with trans people and their issues. He chairs the British Society for Sexual Medicine and is President of the International Scientific Committee for the World Association for Sexual Health — to list just two of his other hats.

In addition to his role as lead clinician at the Porterbrook Clinic Dr Wylie also chairs a committee set up under the auspices of the Royal College of Psychiatrists to develop new guidelines for care of people being treated for gender issues in the UK - so the way in which he approaches the whole topic of care is of vital interest to trans people. He agreed to be interviewed and Christine began by asking him how he came to the field.

The Porterbrook Clinic: http://www.porterbrookclinic.org.uk/services.html

	Richard Curtis

The Transgender 2007 Conference took place at the University of East Anglia during the weekend of 16th — 17th June, and drew many speakers to talk about the historical and contemporary issues concerning trans people’s lives. One of the guests at the event was Dr Richard Curtis, who owns and runs “Trans Health”, the London Gender Clinic. Richard was cornered by BBC Norfolk reporter Jenny Kumah, who agreed to Christine Burns eavesdropping with her own microphone.

Trans Health: http://www.transhealth.co.uk

In the summer of 2007, during the course of the second LGBT Health Summit in Manchester, Christine volunteered to step out of her normal comfort zone as a trans rights speaker and try her hand as a stand-up entertainer instead. Armed with her book of poems, penned over the course of the past 30 years, she stepped up to the floor mic in Canal Street’s noisy and bustling “Taurus” Bar and invited the drinkers and revellers to a lesson in how to fish for birds.