I just couldn't go on living as a man (Good Housekeeping)
May 1999
I just couldn’t go on living as a manPEOPLE embark on the drastic and usually irreversible step of a sex change to make the inside of their lives correspond with the outside. So which story do you tell - the inside or the outside? According to Susan Marshall, 52-year-old bursar at Exeter College, Oxford, who started life as Simon Stone, you tell the whole story, for not to do so would be to negate the past. ’Changing over’, in 1993, was a readjustment for Susan, but not a reinvention of herself. There was no enormous transition from one role to another. ’Some people like me prefer to start with a clean slate,’ she explains, ’but I didn’t want to create a new past for myself, because that makes life even more complicated by replacing one falsehood with another.’ It requires fine judgement to know who to tell. Often it isn’t necessary at all, but when there’s a new friendship in the making, Susan feels it’s important to acknowledge her past. Over the years, she has drawn strength and comfort from the experiences of Jan Morris. Morris’s autobiography, Conundrum, first alerted her to the fact that someone else had experienced the same powerful, instinctive urge to become the gender her brain had always told her to be. In 1988, Simon Stone became bursar at Exeter College after a prestigious career as a naval barrister. His wife Judi knew about his need to cross-dress for many years, and she accepted it. Anonymous forays outside Oxford had shown Simon that he could function as a woman without difficulty. It was when he retired from the navy that the question of changing sex came to a head. ’The navy had effectively kept a brake on me,’ says Susan. ’But once I’d left, that restriction didn’t apply.’ Judi was behind him all the way. She says there was no sense of betrayal because she’d known of the problem for as long as she’d known Simon. Nor was there anger, as she knew ’he’ had tried enormously hard to be upfront and honest, hoping against hope that he could cope with being Simon for ever. But it was an intolerable situation. ’If you love someone who’s desperately unhappy, it gets to a stage when you realise they can’t go on and something has to be done,’ she says. From the day in April 1993 when Susan made her plans known to a few of the Fellows at Exeter, she’s received nothing but support from both college and university, though for a while she felt her job was on the line. Since the role of bursar requires trust and respect, had people not accepted her as a woman she wouldn’t have tried to stay. On returning from holiday, Susan and Judi arranged a few drinks parties to present Susan’s new identity and allow people to ease themselves into the changed situation, culminating in a party at the college shortly before she returned to work. ’People like me often show a lack of understanding,’ she says. ’We imagine it’s a big thing only for us, but we should never underestimate the impact it can have on others. I felt that if I showed people consideration, the chances were they’d show me consideration in return.’ And they did. If Susan showed some diffidence then, it has all gone now. Strikingly dressed in a dark grey trouser suit, she is clearly an energetic and efficient bursar. She’s also resolute that the issue of gender only comes up when people like me remind her of it. If there are raised eyebrows or sniggering behind hands, Susan is unaware of them. A few of her friends, though, however supportive, have found it more difficult than she anticipated. ’I think they’ve felt slightly betrayed, believing I wasn’t the person they’d thought I was and imagining I’d not been entirely frank with them for years,’ Susan explains. But only one old friend has fallen by the wayside.
At times she finds it tiresome that people think of her as ’someone who’s changed sex’, rather than the woman she’s become. But anything she can do to change attitudes will have been worthwhile. Most of all, she wants to dispel the notion that changes of gender merely mean ’men in frocks’, ’Emphasising that transsexualism is a medically recognised condition and that people also change from female to male helps,’ she says, ’because then the syndrome can’t be dismissed as just a male perversion.’ She emphasised this to her parents when she told them of her decision in November 1992. ’Initially, explaining seemed easy,’ says Susan, ’because they couldn’t really grasp what I was saying. It was beyond their experience and they had no point of reference. It has taken time for Susan’s relationship with her parents to resume it’s former familiarity but, even so, she doubts it will ever be quite the same. They’d had a son of whom they were quite proud, and suddenly found themselves with a second daughter instead. ’I think they’ve found they can still have some pride in me, though,’ she says. The first time she saw her parents after the change, Susan was deeply touched when her father gave her a kiss (as father and son they’d only ever shaken hands), and her mother was very complimentary about her appearance. At least, Susan felt, they weren’t embarrassed to be seen with her. Since then, their meetings have become easier each time. Direct experience of prejudice and discrimination has turned Susan into one of life’s activists. After being offered a job in the Crown Prosecution Service, Simon (as Susan then was) had written to the Director of Public Prosecutions explaining that he wished to take up the post as a woman. The reply withdrew the job offer, as her circumstances were ’inimical’ to the aims of the CPS. In 1996, Susan lodged a complaint for discrimination in recruitment and the case was settled out of court. She’s currently involved in the campaign to change the legal status of transsexual Britons (in line with most of Europe) by allowing them to amend the sex on their birth certificates. Susan would like another relationship since becoming single again, but admits: ’People get hung up on sexual orientation. The mere fact that I’ve been in a heterosexual relationship with a woman doesn’t mean to say that, now I’ve resolved my gender identity, I won’t want to be in a heterosexual relationship with a man.’ People have questioned how she could have jeopardised the close and loving marriage that Simon and Judi had. ’I ask myself that too,’ Susan admits, ’but even if you’re happy in a relationship, if you can’t live as the person you believe yourself to be, there’s something fundamentally lacking.’ She had hoped that, with Judi’s loyal support, they could continue to live together platonically; but it didn’t work, as Judi grieved for her husband. ’In some ways it was comparable to a death,’ says Judi. ’On one level, you feel blessed to have the person still with you, but that also makes it more difficult as, on another level, your whole life has changed.’ But for Judi, as much as for Susan, it was also a huge relief that they were no longer living a lie. Both of them had been familiar with the persona of Susan for many years - they’d chosen the name and planned the change together - ’so it was easier for us than for those friends and family who had no idea,’ she says. Judi didn’t know whether their life together as two women would work. ’I coped with each day as it came, but I never had a problem thinking of her as Susan because I’d been eased into the situation gradually,’ In the end, however, Judi began to feel her relationship with Susan wasn’t enough. ’When I was offered a job elsewhere, it seemed a good time to try life on my own. At first I went back to Oxford every weekend, but that gradually changed and when I started a new relationship, the break became final.’ She still loves Susan and thinks she always will. ’But the way I love her isn’t the same,’ she says, ’I feel enormously protective towards her. I think she’s a remarkable woman who has forged a remarkable life for herself.’ As to whether Susan is happier than she was as a man, Judi is convinced that, on a fundamental level, she’s more content, but concedes that happiness is ’a difficult word’. Susan has never regretted her gender reassignment (the alternative being too bleak to contemplate), but there’s been a heavy price to pay. Where once she had all the warmth, security and companionship of ’an enormously happy and successful’ marriage, she’s now divorced and lives alone. While she has an active social life, nothing could have prepared her for the vacuum left by the divorce. ’I’m very happy for Judi, who began her grieving process when I first made my change and has since come through it and found a new relationship,’ she affirms. ’For me, it’s still very raw and I’m still grieving.’ She feels guilty for the pain she caused to her children, although she’d rather live with that sense of guilt than the pain and desperation of feeling trapped in the wrong body. In the years spent as a naval officer, suicide was a recurrent consideration.
It’s this unhappiness that her children have found hardest to come to terms with. ’My daughter Harriet put it so well,’ recalls Susan. ’She asked me if it meant I hadn’t been happy doing things with them when they were children. My answer was that just because I wasn’t happy being the person I was, it didn’t mean I wasn’t happy being their father.’ One of the knottiest questions to answer is where the girls’ father has gone. Harriet was 19 and Charlotte 21 when Simon made the change. ’They must grieve the loss of the father they once had’, Susan concedes. Using the past tense concedes a finality that’s not entirely true, for Susan demonstrates the same love and support for her children, shares the same memories and has the same temperament as Simon. ’I still have a father,’ says Harriet, ’though he’s not the father he was. We had a close relationship but that’s had to change. As a woman, Susan has the same personality.’ Time has helped the girls come to terms with the change, and both now fully accept Susan. If either of the girls had begged her not to go ahead, Susan isn’t at all sure what she would have done. She is convinced, though, that she would never have gone ahead while they were still young. Nevertheless the guilt remains, as does a little voice in her head which admonishes: ’Couldn’t you somehow have carried on as you were?’ ’I feel I’ve been supremely selfish,’ she admits. ’I’ve done what I wanted, though always regardful of other people, but I knew that if I couldn’t be me for myself then I could never be me for them.’ Talking to Susan Marshall makes you realise that the support of her family has been crucial in the healing process. Without it, a fundamentally happy outcome could have been a tragic one. ’To Judi’s eternal credit,’ says Susan, ’I was never asked not to do it. Perhaps she’d hoped I’d reason myself out of it, but it was precisely because she was so positive and loving that I convinced myself this was something we could all cope with. I believe that, as time has passed, this has proved to be the case.’
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