 ’It sounds silly but I’ve nothing to wear’
 The Rev Peter Stone will be the first Church of England vicar to have a sex change. Cassandra Jardine meets him
THE signs that the Rev Peter Stone was embarking on a change of sex have been there for some time. First, he had his ears pierced. “As Peter, I wouldn’t dream of wearing earrings,” he says. “But some parishioners did notice the holes. ’You must have been a rocker,’ they would say. I just let them think what they wanted to.”
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| At home in the church: Peter’s parishioners were supportive. ’They said: “We loved him as Peter and as Carol we will give him our full support” ’ |
Then, last August, when he had a first operation and began taking female hormones, came further clues. Under his black clerical shirt, the gentle bulge of a pair of breasts is visible, and his cheeks are strangely smooth - the result of laser treatment to get rid of his beard.
Looking at the photographs that hang in his study at the vicarage of St Philip’s, Upper Stratton, you can see that his face has altered, too: lean cheeks have given way to a softer, more feminine appearance; bushy eyebrows have been thinned and shaped. It is possible now to imagine how he will look by the end of the year, when he has the final operation, and becomes Carol.
“I don’t know how I should be known,” he says, in a soft, but clearly masculine voice. “I’ve always been Father Peter. I thought of becoming Peta, but I’d spend the rest of my life spelling it, because one of the things they can’t change is the voice.”
Petra was another thought: “But I didn’t want to sound like the Blue Peter dog. So I settled on Carol, because it is pretty. I can’t be Mother Carol. Maybe the Rev Carol would be best.”
Talking like this is new and unnerving. Until last weekend, when the Bishop of Bristol, the Rt Rev Barry Rogerson, made an announcement to Peter’s 100-strong congregation at the end of morning service, the 46-year-old vicar’s desire to be a woman was a secret between himself and God, one he had kept since the age of four.
While the Bishop was telling them about Peter’s plight, Peter was in the vicarage, fretting. This was the last stage in a journey that he feared would end in disaster. “In January, I wrote to the Bishop, telling him my life story, my agonies. I was terrified. I thought I would lose my home, my livelihood, my job. But I had an overwhelming feeling that I’d come to the end of the road.
“It was a letter that has been in my heart for the 22 years of my ministry. I’ve never known anything else but the call to serve God in Holy Orders and I’ve never known any deeper desire than to be a woman. I risked losing the whole meaning of my existence.”
He had hoped it would never come to this. There was a chance that the operation last August, the details of which he is reluctant to divulge, would be sufficient to allow him to carry on outwardly Peter, but inwardly Carol. “It was marvellous, as Carol I felt closer to my true self. But I couldn’t go on being two people. The operation I face is horrendous, and there are often complications. No one would go through it unless they were desperate.”
Seeing him make our tea with skimmed milk, I ask if he is dieting so he will be able to fit into a size 12 dress. “The hormones have made me put on weight and I need as little body fat as possible for the operation,” he says, smiling. “In the past few months, I have lost a stone and a half. Lent has its uses.”
The days since Monday, when he sat next to the Bishop at a press conference, have been “surreal”, he says. There have been dozens of calls and messages of goodwill - no hate mail - and his phone has not stopped ringing. In between, he has been carrying on with his daily work.
“I won’t stop feeling guilty for some time,” he says. “I’m embarrassed even to say the words ’female hormone’.” But the sense of release is evident. After years of being “tortured”, he enjoys discussing practicalities with a member of the sex he is soon to join.
Peter is a sizeable man and he sits in masculine fashion, sticking his large feet out in front of him. “They’re a size 10. I just want one more miracle - I want them to go down to size 8,” he jokes. “But I’m sure He’s got better things to do.”
Carol, however, will be able to get shoes to fit from Marks & Spencer and through mail order; he knows, because he has been cross-dressing for years. “The first time I put on my wife’s clothes it was explosive. I stood in front of the mirror and said: ’Where have you been all my life?’ ”
That was more than 20 years ago, before he was even ordained - and the realisation sent him into a spiral of guilt. But recently, he has been told to attend appointments with his private doctors (he didn’t dare seek treatment on the NHS for fear of exposure) as a woman. How on earth did he sneak out of the vicarage dressed like that? “Let me just say that I have avoided scandal. Nobody has turned round in the street and gasped in horror.”
Peter Stone takes his work very seriously. Two days after the August operation, he had a wedding booked and officiated without revealing his acute discomfort. For the sake of his parishioners, too, he has begged a waiver of the normal requirement that any man seeking a sex change, spends two years in women’s clothes before the operation. “I couldn’t go to see the bereaved dressed as a woman,” he says.
He has always been “meticulous” about taking off make-up, and he has kept his hair short, with just a soft curl over his forehead to indicate femininity. “I can’t grow it long as a Territorial Army chaplain,” he says. He has not yet heard whether he will be allowed to continue in that role, but he would like to, despite the likelihood of ribbing: “As padre you are teased anyway.”
When he becomes Carol, he will take three months off to recover and get used to his new self. “It sounds silly, but I have nothing to wear,” he says. However, as far as possible, he will look like his old self. Dog collars are a boon because they hide the Adam’s apple, and he will wear the dark suits favoured by most women ministers.
But he will still have to get used to the public’s reaction to a woman with a deep voice and huge hands and feet. How will he react if a man makes a pass at him? “I don’t know. It will be very strange. I haven’t felt gay, and I have never moved in those circles. But who can say how things will change? I certainly am not doing this because I want to marry a man, as some have suggested. All I want is to be the person I have always felt myself to be.
“My earliest memories are of dreaming that I was a girl. I never told my parents because it seemed so natural. At school, I felt I was one of the girls and at Christmas, I wanted to be Cinderella in the pantomime.”
Whether his parents suspected his leanings, he doesn’t know. But he does remember, with pain, the day when all his cuddly toys disappeared; his mother denies having thrown them away. “As an adult, I found I could go out and buy teddy bears and no one would take them away,” he says, indicating the fluffy toys dotted around.
As a child, he read the Bible from cover to cover and found an injunction against men dressing as women. That stopped him borrowing his mother’s clothes, but he prayed nightly to be turned into a girl. “Until I reached puberty. Then, with all those hormones surging, I asked God to take a rain check.”
During the years when he was reading history at Leicester University and theology at Queens College, Cambridge, he continued to be interested in women and, at 21, he married for the first time, “for friendship and companionship”.
Then the problems started. From the moment he saw himself in the mirror wearing his wife’s clothes, he knew he had to do something. Remembering the words he had read in the Bible, he was agonised by guilt, terrified that he would never be ordained. He tried to repress his desire and “as part of a Christian marriage”, he and his wife had a daughter.
Joy at fatherhood did not alter his feelings of being in the wrong body and, a year later, he applied for a sex change. “When I told my father he begged me in tears not to. Then my wife left me, and I knew that my daughter did not need two mummies: she needed a dad.”
So he carried on as Peter and, a few years later, married again: “Of course I was explicit to my wife”, he says, and despite the strain of his double life, the marriage lasted for 13 years. Then, in 1996, a few months after he arrived at the parish of Upper Stratton, near Swindon, his wife went home to America and never returned.
The following year, his father died. It was time to take action but, before he did so last year, he made sure his now 18-year-old daughter understood his position. “She has been great,” he says. “She has seen me through each decision.”
His ex-wives have supported him too. There remained only the letter to the bishop which he finally persuaded himself to write in January, knowing that the second, more major operation had to be done within two years of the first.
Sleepless nights followed as he waited for a response. Within a week, it arrived. “Before I opened it, I hugged it to my chest and prayed,” he says, laughing at himself for imagining that God would alter the contents. Inside, he learnt that the bishop hoped to “stand by” him.
A month later, the Rt Rev Barry Rogerson entered Peter’s study, sat in a low chair facing him and announced the verdict of the Archbishop of Canterbury. “There is no canonical bar to your ministry,” he said. Peter’s relief was overwhelming.
“I had assumed the worst. I knew nothing of the bishop except that he had supported the ordination of women.”
There was one more hurdle. He needed a two-thirds majority of support in the Parochial Church Council to keep his job. Last Friday, they voted 17 to 1 in his favour; all that remained was to make their decision public.
“We do not always feel that our bodies fit us,” the bishop told the St Philip’s congregation last Sunday. “Some of us feel too fat or too thin. How would you feel if your body felt totally wrong?” He then explained Peter Stone’s predicament. When he had finished, a member of the congregation stood up and said: “We loved him as Peter, and as Carol we will give him our full support.” A round of applause followed.
Repeating those words now brings tears to Peter Stone’s eyes. The future will be an extraordinary adventure, which he hopes to share with his parishioners. He has already begged them to tell him if he is “wearing an inappropriate shade of nail varnish”.
Since then, alone in his study, he has been writing his editorial for the parish newsletter. “I don’t want to make the mistake of thinking they are terribly interested in me,” he says. So he has chosen a Breton sailor’s prayer which reads: “Protect me Lord, my ship is tiny and your sea so vast.” Writing about God’s all-embracing mercy, he notes that, “in a marvellous way, you are suddenly no longer adrift.” And leaves it at that.
20 June 2000: [UK News] Vicar can carry on preaching after sex change
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