audio by title 'interview with mark rees'

	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.