Saturday July 3rd, 1999

Gender Mix-up

The Readers’ Editor on … confusion over reporting sexuality

Ian Mayes,
Open door

About a month ago we published a report of an employment tribunal in which Eleanor Lynall, a marine surveyor, was seeking compensation from her former employer for unfair dismissal and sex discrimination.  Ms Lynall, who had been known to her employer as Andrew Lynall, had for nearly 10 years been undergoing counselling, diagnosis and treatment for gender dysphoria and gender reassignment.  She is a transsexual person in the process, under medical supervision, of shedding an uncomfortable male identity for the female one to which she feels she has a natural claim and for the liberation into which she is prepared to suffer the accompanying trauma.  She told her employer formally of her intention to adopt a female gender role and was dismissed shortly afterwards.  Her employer resists the claim of unfair dismissal and the tribunal has yet to announce its conclusion.

The rights and wrongs of the case are not the question here.  The question is the Guardian’s blunder in its report of the tribunal hearing in referring to Ms Lynall as Mr Lynall throughout, despite the fact that she was presented to the tribunal, and in all the documents involved, in her new role.  Her gender was, you could say, the point of the proceedings.  Ms Lynall, a Guardian reader for years, felt our treatment of the case, in particular the apparent denial of her gender, was a slap in the face from a paper of which she had considerably higher expectations.  Indeed, anyone following the paper’s generally sympathetic and helpful coverage of transgender issues, especially by our legal affairs correspondent, in the past few years might have held a similar view.  Ms Lynall complained to the Press Complaints Commission and in a covering letter which accompanied a copy of the complaint sent to the Guardian, she said: “It would be an extreme understatement to say that I am offended by the article.”

I read Ms Lynall’s complaint and asked the PCC to give me the opportunity to look into it, on the understanding that Ms Lynall would be free to return to the PCC later if she wished.  Ms Lynall, by the way, was not the only person to complain.  Another reader, who, I have since learned, is also a male-to-female transsexual, wrote that for the report “continually to refer to Ms Lynall in the male gender is not only insulting and distressing in the extreme, it betrays a profound ignorance of both transsexualism and the meaning of discrimination within European Law and the Sex Discrimination Act, which now [from May 1 this year] explicitly protects TS people”.

How did it happen? The Guardian’s report was supplied, substantially in the form in which it appeared in early editions of the paper on June 2, by a news agency.  I spoke to the agency’s reporter who read from his original copy.  He had referred to Ms Lynall once, placing her in her former employment with the company from which she is seeking redress, as Mr Lynall, and in all other references as Ms Lynall.  This seemed to me to be an accurate and acceptable thing to do.

Unfortunately, the copy was then changed by the agency before transmission to its clients.  It says it did this in an honest attempt to achieve clarity and consistency, and that the last thing it wished to do was to cause offence.  It now recognises that it was wrong and says it will bear in mind the lessons of the story.

We should have noticed and corrected it.  We didn’t and we apologise to Ms Lynall for not doing so.

Ms Lynall says her main purpose in complaining to the PCC was to try to prevent such things happening to others and to foster a greater understanding of gender reassignment.  She feels many people still regard it as though those involved are exercising a lifestyle choice.  “As far as choice is concerned,” she says, “there are transgendered people who, for religious, family or other reasons, decide not to submit to treatment, and consequently live out their lives in often extreme distress.  For myself, and doubtless for others in a similar position, gender reassignment was started only after exhaustive diagnosis and assessment of alternative remedies, none of which was considered likely to be effective.”

Ms Lynall embarked on this long, difficult journey of transition nearly a decade ago.  We clumsily stuck out a foot to trip her.

Readers may contact the office of the Readers’ Editor by telephoning 0171 239 9589 between 11am and 5pm Monday to Friday.  Surface mail to Readers’ Editor, The Guardian, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER.  Fax 0171 239 9897.  email: reader@guardian.co.uk

Useful links:
Gender Trust
FTM Network
Beaumont Society
Mermaids
Gires
Press for Change

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