Saturday 13th January 2001

Believe it or not, this woman was once a man.  In the week a top public school revealed a senior master has become a Miss, this former naval officer describes the agony of living in the wrong body…

by Rebecca Fowler

A DISCREETLY feminine air fills the bursar’s study in the Oxford college.  An elegant cashmere coat hangs casually from the door.  A leather handbag rests beside the chair, and the mantelpiece is lined with affectionate hand-written cards to Susan.

As soon as the door creaks open, Susan herself jumps up from behind her desk in welcome.  She is an attractive woman in her 50s, dressed in a smart oatmeal-colourer suit and pearls, who exudes understated style.  She is also reassuringly relaxed, and flashes a beaming smile.

Only the photograph of a rather splendid ship in the background hints at the world she left behind forever.

A decade ago, Susan Marshall was living as a man, with a beloved wife and two daughters, who had swopped a prestigious career as a naval barrister to become a college bursar.

She is now a transsexual woman who underwent traumatic hormone treatment and surgery to become the gender she is convinced she should have been born in the first place.  It followed years of nightmarish secrecy and turmoil.

When the tortured issue of transsexualism loomed again this week with the announcement that a long-serving schoolmaster at the historic Charterhouse School in Surrey will return for the new term next week as a woman, Susan was overwhelmed by a familiar feeling of empathy.

These days, barely a month goes by without another transsexual story breaking in the news including Ian, the Oxford tutor who recently became Isabella; Bill, the Welsh preacher who became Dian; and Simon, the Church of England vicar who re-emerged as Carol and received a standing ovation from her congregation on her return.

Gradually, attitudes to the 7,000 transsexual people in Britain have turned from hostility to sympathy.  What was once one of the last great taboos, is now being dealt with openly by some of the most traditional institutions including the Church of England, Oxford University, the police force, the Armed Services and historic schools.

SUSAN MARSHALL has agreed to tell her own story in the hope that it may take people a step further to understanding the ’unbearable’ nature of the transsexual’s situation.  She is a member of a parliamentary pressure group campaigning for change and hopes to win legal recognition for transsexuals who are not yet allowed to change the gender of their birth certificates, marry or adopt children in their new gender.

The last time I met Susan more than ten years ago when I was an undergraduate at Exeter College, she had not undergone ’the big change’.  In her old guise, the bursar appeared a rather formidable figure, meticulous in tweeds and brogues that clicked distinctively across the quad.

But when the kitchen roof in our flat on the Woodstock Road caved in, my flatmate Nicola and I were rather taken aback I by how kind and humorous the bursar was in a crisis — rather maternal, in fact.

As she describes what she as going through at that time, it suddenly dawns on me that while we were glumly scraping plaster off the floor and the bursar was gamely cheering us up, she was, in fact facing the biggest and most tormented decision of her life.

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THE case of Susan Marshall, she sighs, is the classic story of a transsexual woman.  She was a born a healthy baby boy into a loving, middle-class family with a military background in the Midlands.  But she knew, even as a tiny child, something was wrong.

By the time she was ten years old she knew with powerful certainty that there had been some dreadful biological mistake, and she was a girl somehow assigned a boy’s body.  It was an overwhelming and terrifying feeling, but she could share it with no one.

In those days, the early Sixties, transsexualism was still virtually unheard of, let alone openly discussed.  So Susan lived with her secret in silent fear.  When she was sent to a traditional all-boys school, her misery and confusion intensified.

’I didn’t feel there was anybody else in the world like me,’ says Susan.  ’And I was terrified of someone finding out.  I knew I shouldn’t be growing up as a boy, but I had no idea why I was feeling this.  Who on earth could I talk to?  There was absolutely nobody.’

When Susan became a teenager, she decided there was no escape and she was trapped forever.

Her only option was to throw herself into living the life of man.  In 1965 she chose the most masculine vocation she could think of — the Royal Navy.

’I later found out that lots of people in my situation do the same thing,’ she says.  ’They opt for the most male world that they can find.  The male role models are very sharply defined there, so you learn how you should behave more clearly.

’It was enormously successful.  After a bad time at school, I did very well in the Navy.  And then, after a year, I met a woman.  We were introduced at a party on a submarine, and I fell totally in love.  So did she.  It was incredibly romantic, really wonderful.

’It’s a medical fact that the male body is at its prime between the ages of 18-22, with testosterone coursing everywhere.  It made it much easier to convince myself I could make this work, by containing the strong female component of myself.’

The couple decided to get engaged almost immediately, but the girlfriend’s parents were worried they were too young.  They sent their daughter to stay with relatives in New Zealand to ’cool off’.  During that time, Susan decided to confide in her and divulge her own secret for the first time.

’I wrote her a letter telling her about it,’ she says.  ’It seemed the fairest way to do it because if she didn’t feel she could cope, she had the option of not replying.  Instead, she wrote back saying that we could work it out.  I thought the same.  Unfortunately, we were both wrong.’

THEY married soon after that, and Susan quickly fathered two daughters.  At that time, she was desperate to make her life as a man work because, in spite of her confusion over her gender, she was devoted to her family.

But within a few years of marriage, the overwhelming feelings of being a woman returned, and in 1975 Susan hit a turning point.

By chance, she saw a copy of the book Conundrum by Jan Morris, a transsexual woman writer who was one of the first people to talk openly about her condition and treatment.

’Suddenly, here was someone whose life was so like mine, describing exactly what I was going through,’ says Susan.  ’It opened my eyes to two crucial things.  First, I realised there were other people like me in the world.  Second, I suddenly understood there was something I could do about it — there was treatment.

’But by this time I was also married with a family I loved very much.  I could not see a way out and I was terribly depressed by the time I hit my 40s.  There was this feeling of, “Am I ever really going to allow myself to be me?”

’This is not a situation I would wish on anyone.  But once you find yourself in it, either you do something about it, or you grit your teeth or you kill yourself — and yes, I did think about that.’

WHILE she continued to thrive professionally and trained as a naval barrister, the strain of I her secret was deepening.  In her spare time, she would cross-dress as a woman and ’Susan’ — the name she had always imagined for herself — emerged from the shadows.

By 1988, she had become terrified that Susan might be discovered, and the Royal Navy would be dragged into a scandal.  ’Since I was a naval lawyer, responsible for naval discipline, it would have seemed a betrayal,’ she says.  ’And I couldn’t have borne that.’

Instead, Susan moved with her family to Oxford to take up the bursar’s job at Exeter College.  She now knew that she could not carry on as a man.  It was intolerable.  Yet she still loved her wife, and she knew that the price might be enormous.

’In the end there was no choice,’ says Susan.  ’I had to be treated.  My children had already left school and I discussed it with my wife.  We had always been able to discuss it, and we just hoped that somehow it would be all right and we would be able to stay together.’

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THE treatment of transsexual men and women has been available at Charing Cross Hospital in London since the Fifties.  In a complex procedure, that has gradually been updated over the years, patients are given hormone treatment and may later undergo surgery to alter their sexual organs.

If born female, they are given the male hormone testosterone; if born male, they receive the female hormone oestrogen which encourages a more feminine physique and inhibits body and facial hair growth.

In male-to-female procedures, this is followed by a gruelling course of electrolysis.  The patient may then opt for one of two forms of plastic surgery.

The first is cosmetic and involves removing the penis and testes, and forming labia.  The second is full gender reassignment which involves removing the penis and fashioning a vagina internally from the remaining skin and tissue.

There can be few more dramatic operations and consultant psychiatrist Dr Russell Reid has treated many of those who have opted for sex change.  He also still runs counselling sessions with some of the original transsexual patients from Charing Cross Hospital who are now in their 80s.

’For the most part people adjust well,’ he says.  ’This is an unusual psychiatric condition in as much a there is an effective treatment for it.  If the transsexuals don’t have the treatment, the suicide rate soars.  If they do, and it is dealt with sensitively, the success rate is around 90 percent.

’There is an even higher success rate in the female-to-male operations.  The effect of male hormones on women is much more powerful, and it kicks in within a few weeks.  It is also irreversible.  Once your voice has broken you cannot unbreak it.  It’s a bit more complicated the other way round.’

During recent years, Dr Reid has watched research into transsexualism swing towards evidence that support a biological cause.  Biologists believe this is set in motion during foetal development, and may also be reinforced by a genetic link.

Their research suggests that for every one foetus in 10,000, at just seven to eight weeks old the area of the brain responsible for gender develops in contrary way to the sexual organs.

Why this should happen is no known.  But there is mounting evidence to support the theory that if a foetus is exposed to a sudden surge of the female hormone oestrogen in the womb, although the child may be born male it could develop as transsexual.

One controversial medical study suggests boys born into families with a high number of older male siblings are more likely to be transsexual.

This is because the mother has, in the course of previous pregnancies, possibly built up a high number of ’anti-male’ antigens in the womb to ’protect’ her own body from the developing male foetus.

The theory proposes that the anti-male antigens in some way feminise the foetus, but how or why this might happen is not fully understood.

Another biological factor may be the role of an intricate part of the brain, the hypothalamus, which is a control centre for physical and emotional behaviour, and also regulates genital function.  The hypothalamus is usually bigger in a man than a woman, but is smaller in male-to-female transsexuals.

This growing biological evidence has helped transsexuals retain the right to the £8,000 operation on the National Health Service.  In a landmark judgment by the Court of Appeal last year, the judge ruled transsexualism was a legitimate ’illness’.

BUT the status of transsexuals once they have been operated on, has turned into a legal minefield.  Although they may now appeal against prejudice from employers under the Sex Discrimination Act, they cannot marry under their new genders.

Everything is still an issue — from which jails they can be sent to and when they are allowed to collect their pensions.  They are not allowed new birth certificates, and they cannot marry or adopt a child under their new gender.

In the meantime, only one in five marriages survive once a partner has opted for surgery to change their gender.  Although many couples hope to stay together, often the strain is simply too much.

’Inevitably it’s very difficult,’ says Dr Reid.  ’A wife will say: “I married a man not a woman.” And for a transsexual, how they come out and deal with their families will always be one of the issues that looms largest.’

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WHEN Susan Marshall travelled to the West Country where her parents were living to explain to them that she was about to embark on treatment to become a transsexual woman, it was perhaps one of the hardest journeys she has ever made.  They simply had no inkling of her situation.

At that time she was still the son they were so proud of, who had fulfilled an their middle class expectations and who had taken such a traditionally masculine path.  As far as they were concerned, their child could not have turned out better.

Gradually, to her enormous relief and gratitude, both parents came to understand that ’Susan’ was the same human being they had always loved.

One of her most poignant memories is of her father kissing her for the first time after her treatment.  When Susan was a man, her father had only ever shaken her by the hand.  Susan’s mother died last year, but she says she is now closer to her father than she has ever been.

HOWEVER, Susan has not turned her back on the ghost of her former self.  Her daughters were anxious their memories of their father should still mean something.  Susan reassured them that only her gender had changed.  Everything else they had shared was still intact.

Eventually, and inevitably, Susan’s wife decided she could not stay with her.  She simply missed a relationship with a man, and she moved away from Oxford three-and-a-half years ago to start a new life, although they still remain friends.

’I miss her very much,’ says Susan.  ’It is the only relationship have had in my life.  It lasted nearly 30 years and it was very fulfilling.  Although I feel nothing but relief that I am finally myself and I had no choice but to follow that course, there was a high price to pay.

’I hope I do not end up spending the, rest of my life alone.  It does not suit me.

’I now feel like a heterosexual woman, although I find myself attracted to men who remind me of what I used to be like.  Perhaps I was making myself into the kind of man that, as a woman, I would have found attractive.’

Ironically, Susan had intended to move jobs and ’start from scratch’ when she changed her identity.  She was offered a job by the Crown I Prosecution Service.

But despite the former director of public prosecutions Barbara Mills’s reputation as a champion of equal opportunities, Susan was turned away after her sex change.

Instead, she stayed on at Exeter College where she says that the Fellows and students could not have been ’more humane or supportive’ in their acceptance of her.

When the news broke that the bursar had become a woman, it was impossible not to be gripped by the headlines — and the photographs.  Eight years on, it is impossible not to be overwhelmed by her courage which she quickly dismisses.

And these days, most people she meets are unaware she was ever anyone other than Susan Marshall, although she always tells them about her history if they become friends.

’I would never have chosen this,’ says Susan.  ’But I’ve had to make the best I can out of it, and that is what is so hard to explain to people.  Everything else had failed.  There was only one way out of it so I took it.  The relief is enormous and I am finally myself.

’I thought I would never feel that.  But I do not want to disappear back into the woodwork completely.  If people like me do not speak out, then nothing will change or improve for those just embarking on the journey that I have already made.’

Copyright © 2001, Daily Mail