Friday 9th August 1999

Sex-change sailor wins pension battle

A TRANSSEXUAL Falklands veteran who was thrown out of the Royal Navy is in line for a six-figure sum in compensation after a 13-year battle.

Lynda Cash, 49 - who was previously married father-of-one Leading Medical Assistant Brian Waling - was discharged in 1986 after the Navy claimed her emotional state was a danger to the ship and its crew.

Officials blamed her transsexualism - she was undergoing sex-change treatment at the time and has since had the full operation.  But they have now accepted she was suffering post traumatic stress as a result of Argentine air attacks on British ships during the 1982 conflict and the horrific injuries she treated.

Now she is to receive a backdated pension with interest, together with a lump sum payment as compensation for the disorder and the Navy’s failure to recognise it sooner.

More worryingly for the Navy, however, is that its admissions about Miss Cash’s case mean she is free to sue over its action. She could pick up hundreds of thousands of pounds more.

Defence chiefs are also braced for claims from other transsexuals dismissed after serving in combat.

Lynda Cash, who recieved the South Atlantic Medal after the war, served on Invincible, alongside Prince Andrew.

Last November she became the first transsexual to march in the annual Remembrance Day parade at the Cenotaph when she accompanied fellow Falklands veterans.

She said she had wanted to continue in the Navy after her sex change. ’I wanted to transfer to what was then the Wrens,’ she added. ’But I’m too old to go back now.’

Ironically, Miss Cash, from Bolton, lost her case for unfair dismissal, sex discrimination and alleged medical negligence at an employment tribunal and again at appeal.

But the Navy has now sent her a letter admitting it was wrong.  ’I am to get a service invalidity pension plus my service pension backdated to November 1986 and a cash lump sum,’ she explained yesterday.

’There will also be interest on top. I assume it’s going to be a substantial amount. The Navy have told me they are still working out the figures. The whole thing is to be retrospective.

’I am still undergoing treatment for my post-traumatic stress disorder. My gender identity problems are over. I am a perfectly normal woman and all I ask is to be treated as such.’

The MoD insisted last night that it had maintained throughout that her discharge was ’due to a temperamental unsuitability for service life’.

A spokesman said: ’It had nothing do to with gender realignment, but concerned simply the sailor’s mental fitness for duty.’

In its letter to her, however, the Navy says it ’emerged that she had been attending a gender identity clinic’ days after she ’broke down with anxiety and depression’.

It goes on: ’A consultant psychiatrist assessed Miss Cash as displaying a severe degree of temperamental unsuitability for service life and, upon his recommendation, she was administratively discharged.’