Friday 5th May 2000

A change in the gender agenda

The battle of the sexes took on a very different meaning when a pub landlord banned a woman who had been a man because his other customers were unsettled.  Stephen Biscoe examines the questions it raises.

THE JACOB’S WELL between Huddersfield and Holmfirth is not redneck territory: this is a pub which has a Malt of the Month (this month’s is Bowmore Legend from Islay) and a respectable, middle-class clientele who go at midday for its excellent food, good wines and interesting selection of real ales.  It was filled at lunchtime yesterday and the regulars weren’t raising the ticklish subject of transsexuals.

The Landlord, David Woodhead, used to be at the nearby Coach and Horses.  He might have pointed out with some satisfaction that yesterday while had had 40.  Mr Woodhead knows how to run a successful establishment, no question.

Yesterday, serving meals between working in the kitchen, he did not have time to do much socialising.  Last October, Mr Woodhead banned Lisa Jones because customers told him they felt uncomfortable having to share the bar with her, and women had complained that she was using their toilet.  The Equal Opportunities Commission then took up her case, and in an out-of-court settlement she received £1,000 compensation and a welcome back from the landlord.  But she says that to save everyone embarrassment, she will not be taking advantage of it.

The impression given by Claire McNab, a vice-president of Press for Change, which represents the interests of people like Lisa, is that being confrontational and aggressive is not characteristic of their behaviour.  Until quite recently, being found out to have changes sex could lead to the loss of your job, bricks through your windows, taunts in the street, and perhaps sneering tabloid headlines.  Transsexuals have learned to keep quiet: they don’t go in for placard-waving demonstrations and the issuing of strident demands.

Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the Jacob’s Well incident, public attitudes towards them are changing — and it is partly thanks to their quiet but determined insistence that discrimination is not warranted by an individual’s sexuality.

That was Lisa’s argument, and it is being won.

A transsexual (someone who has had medical treatment to alter their sexual characteristics — or is contemplating it) should not be confused with transvestites.  These are people, usually men, who get sexual pressure out dressing in clothes of the opposite sex.  Treatment for transsexuals, including surgery, is available in some areas on the NHS.  Press for Change is campaigning to make it more widely available.

Claire McNab, who lives in Thornton, West Bradford, estimates there are between 300 and 500 “transpeople” across West Yorkshire.  The “transpeople” term is one she prefers because she says “transsexual” carries an implication of sexual behaviour which is not necessarily applicable: many transpeople are, in fact, celibate.  Not that anyone surfing the internet for transsexual websites would know that.  The vast majority of these sites seem to cater for crude voyeurism and have nothing to do with the real concern of men who “transition” to women and vice versa.

These people simply ask to be accorded the same rights as everyone else.  Claire thinks that the problems they encounter are mostly to do with the uncertainty they create in the people they meet.  “There are not very many of us, perhaps only 5,000 in the UK, so we are a very small minority”, she says.  Their very rarity makes people uncertain how to deal with them.

“Society is much more at ease with larger minorities.  Blacks, Asians, gays are better understood because they are more frequently encountered, but because we are more unusual we tend to provoke shock, uncertainty and confusion.

“People don’t know how they should react to us.  They don’t know what pronouns to use — whether he or she — and that by itself can be very unsettling.”

Claire believes that what happened at Jacob’s Well was not a reversion to bad old days but evidence of a lingering problem caused by fear of the unknown.  But she thinks it will continue to diminish as society at large becomes more accustomed to, and comfortable with, the transsexuals in its midst.

Her chief regret about the whole incident is that a lack of clarity in the law allowed it to happen in the first place because last year’s amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act outlawed discrimination against transsexuals by employers, but said nothing about it in relation to the supply of goods and services.  “It is a real pity,” she says, “that the law still provides incomplete protection”.

As far as employment is concerned, protection begins the moment an employer finds out that a member of staff is even contemplating “gender reassignment”; discrimination from that point on is illegal and has no bearing on drug therapies or surgery.  But outside the workplace, no such protection exists.

One way of extending it is through the courts.  If the case brought by the Equal Opportunities Commission on behalf of Lisa Jones, for instance, had ended in a victory for her, a legal precedent would have been set, eliminating the need for an amendment to the Act.

Claire McNab, however, thinks this is a long-winded, clumsy, expensive and needlessly stressful way of achieving justice for transsexuals: much better, she says, that Parliament should clarify the law with a simple amendment.

Press for Change, which was set up in 1992 and has about 2,000 members, also wants the government to give full legal recognition to people who have undergone a sex change.  The UK is one of four member countries of the Council of Europe which does not allow their change of sexual status to be put on their birth certificates.  This, argues the pressure group, can have long-term implications when it comes to pension rights and even motor insurance — women tend to have lower premiums than men but if a woman’s birth certificate states she was born a male, this fact has to be disclosed to the insurance company or it might have grounds to refuse to pay a claim.

Press for Change sees it as an unnecessary handicap, but last year the government at least gave the appearance of being willing to reconsider the issue when it set up a working party to look at it.

The working party’s report was due out last month, and although nothing has yet been published, the pressure group understands that it is now before Ministers.

Transsexuals, for so long the butt of smutty jokes, the subject of prurient tabloid headlines and the victims of prejudice and discrimination, are gradually being accepted as transpeople, and legal wrangles such as that over Lisa Jones are likely to become increasingly rare.

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