Review of the year 1998
Foreword
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Roy and Hayley are intended to be the rock that the other mess of human life revolve around. An inseparable couple, together for life, but prevented from being truly together by the law. The affairs, sexual liaisons and violence may well go on out there, but Roy and Hayley remain largely untouched, and provide the audience with the most moral couple in the show!
Press for Change programme advisor reporting recently on the way that Granada Television view their transsexual creation, Hayley Patterson
Foreword
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by Christine Burns
December 2nd, 1998
IT HARDLY SEEMS a year since I last sat down to do a review of a year’s campaigning in Press for Change.
In fact it isn’t a year to be honest … in common with other Christmassy things, this year everything is a bit early around the Burns household. Christmas cards were done in the second week of November. Presents were bought, wrapped and stowed under the settee by the third. Even the Christmas hairdo got done in the last week of November. Not that I’m seeking awards or praise … it’s more a case of making a virtue of a necessity … because, by the time this is published, I’ll have gone off (like all good radicals) to spend Christmas far away from the British Isles in the sun, where I can ponder what the next year is going to hold and persuade myself to come back ! Mind you, of course, I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Each year I have to struggle to come up with a new set of expansive superlatives to describe what people not so long ago described as the impossible … but this year it’s perhaps simpler to let you find your own.
This year we’re having a little bit of festive fun as well … showing a lighter side to campaign life by launching a trans satire section on our web site. Maybe that’s significant in itself … for when any community advances to the point where it is confident enough to take the sharp knife of observant humour to the institutions and people it confronts, you know that a milestone in awareness and determination has been passed.
Claire McNab’s “Devil’s Dictionary” is a very funny piece with which to inaugurate the new section, for instance. I’m quite certain you’ll agree! But with every laugh, on every line, her brilliantly observed comments also push home point after point about discrimination, hypocrisy, ignorance and abuse.
Not content with defining the worst of our abusers into far-less intimidating absurdity, however, Claire’s also applied herself to crystal ball gazing … with a review of next year too. Again, very funny. Again, she makes a serious point on the end of each fanciful mix of true life and fancy. However, that’s when it gets awkward for me, struggling to do the serious account of the past year … because comparing satirical fiction with some of the real events that have happened in the past year, it’s sometimes difficult to decide which sounds the more fanciful. Certainly, if I’d predicted last year that we’d have our own soap star character with an adoring eighteen million audience following, you might have suggested I go and sit down.
It’s been a year full of opportunities which simply couldn’t have been predicted though.
More than that … it’s also been a wonderful year for grabbing the moment and turning events around in wonderfully opportune ways. Having the courage and belief in ourselves to seize opportunities, and to ask for what we want … in spite of the well rehearsed belief that it might be too ambitious.
But if there’s a message to carry into the next year, and as we cross of those last days towards the Millennium, it could be that nothing is really too ambitious if you believe in yourself sufficiently to just ask.
Certainly, to turn it around of course … If you don’t ask then you’ll never know.
Here then, with the usual apologies for persons or events missed out, is my review of the campaigning year, 1998 … the observing … the opportunity spotting … the asking … and the getting.
January 1998
The year got started as it meant to go on just two weeks after the new year when, on the 16th of January, we first heard the news that Granada Television were said to be planning a trans character in their thirty-eight year old, top-of-the-ratings soap, “Coronation Street”. The press, predictably, were “appalled” … but then switched to being rather perplexed when they went out to get some nice juicy quotes of the public being appalled too … and found very much the opposite. Interestingly, some TV critics agreed too … “Coronation Street is lacking a really strong female character at the moment”, said one, “and maybe they’ve just found her”.
Trans people, predictably, were more concerned with the accuracy of portrayal, of course … but rather than just talk about it, the campaign took this as a cue to act en-masse … writing letters that were certainly critical of the portrayal and the lack of initial research on the character, but repeatedly urging the programme’s producers to get in touch with Press for Change for advice. It was one of those examples of an occasion where PFC’s well oiled communications machine worked superbly … and within days I was rather pleasantly surprised to get a mobile phone call from a rather sheepish-sounding researcher, asking if we could talk. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Talking about history too, we also celebrated a small landmark of the 23rd, when PFC’s newer, bigger, faster, easier to find web site was officially launched … clocking what seemed like an astonishing 7,000 page accesses in its first month. With accesses at the end of November topping 25,000 pages per month, some successes soon pale into insignificance, mind you. There’s little doubt that the easily-remembered address, http://www.pfc.org.uk certainly contributed to the spectacular growth in our campaign from around the world in 1998.
And finally, January also saw Councillor Ros Mitchell in the news too, with news breaking of her exclusion from the Bristol Labour party’s women’s group … dramatically captured by a BBC film crew, as it took place during the making of a documentary.
By the end of the month it was certainly apparent that 1998 was not going to be a quiet year!
February 1998
Our biggest test, and perhaps one of our finest hours as a campaign organisation, came just three days into February, when the now-infamous Department for Education and Employment “consultation” paper dropped through PFC’s letterbox. Again, it was largely a success for PFC’s use of on-line technologies as a campaigning tool. Within 24 hours a complete activist “kit” was on-line, colleagues in other organisations were being mobilised and over eighty on-line activists were starting to think of their own individual responses to a document which threatened to take away from them the opportunity to work, or to continue working, in whole categories of employment. Within a fortnight, too, the “offline” world was catching up … and a marathon letter folding and envelope stuffing “party” at Stephen Whittle’s home sent an urgent call to action to a further 2,000 friends and allies on PFC’s mailing lists … complete with a copy of the offending document. The DfEE wanted to consult … and we were only too happy to oblige!
Ros Mitchell was still in the news too … with more drama as a Bristol City Councillor angrily pushed BBC cameras away and violently manhandled the documentary’s reporter when asked how he felt about his transitioning colleague.
And before the month was out, we were reporting upon Rachel Horsham and Kristina Sheffield preparing to make their way to Strasbourg for the European Court of Human Rights to hear their human rights cases … and making our first calls for people to pencil PFC’s International Congress into their diaries for September.
March 1998
March may have been dominated by letter writing for all those PFC activists keen to tell the DfEE what they thought of the ignorant things assumed about them, but we were all becoming avid soap watchers too (if we weren’t already!), as Hayley confided her secret to Alma … and eighteen million eavesdroppers. For a brief spell the media had Hayley mania again, but what really mattered was the news from Granada TV themselves who had discovered, to their surprise, that the public really liked Hayley and wanted her to stay.
In fact it was media month for PFC, with the first broadcast of BBC Bristol’s documentary about Councillor Ros Mitchell. This first time around the film was shown only in the Bristol region … but this did not dampen national newspaper interest. Meanwhile, too, Granada’s national mid-morning magazine programme, “This Morning”, also rewarded us with a satisfactorily lengthy opportunity to show the world what real trans people look like … and what they say when asked about their genitals in front of two and a half million viewers.
The month’s most significant event of all, however, came just a week after the closing date for responses to the DfEE’s “consultation”, with an invitation to talks … our point had been made!
April 1998
Even we didn’t realise how strongly that point had been made, however, until April 21st, when a parliamentary question by a supportive MP revealed that almost three hundred detailed responses had been received … an incredible achievement … and one which certainly did not go un-noticed in the corridors of power.
By comparison with the previous three months, April was actually quite a quiet month … although we ended it back in the news again, when a local registrar refused to grant a marriage license to trans woman campaigner Tracie O’Keefe, on the grounds that he could not accept that the woman before him was the person described as a legal male by the birth certificate she carried … the certificate which she proposed to use as the means to marry her lesbian companion of many years, journalist Katrina Fox.
May 1998
And May started with some sad news, when we learned that Press for Change co-founder and famous trans man Mark Rees had lost his Liberal Democrat seat in the local council elections in his home town of Tonbridge.
It was a sadness soon forgotten, however, when Israeli singing sensation Dana International captured the imagination … and the votes … of 350 million viewers across Europe, to win the Eurovision Song Contest by the most convincing margin in years. Suddenly the press was, once more, awash in talk about trans people … or more particularly this particular one, who proved to have a sharp political awareness as well as a good larynx when interviewed.
May was also a time for more investment in PFC’s communications resources too, when on the 18th we began a long-awaited move of our mailing list services to a new commercial home. It wasn’t a moment too soon, either, after several heart stopping occasions in the midst of the DfEE “consultation” campaign, when the original computer facilities in Australia, which had been generously provided free of charge, looked set to collapse under the strain at any moment.
Our international coverage of news was getting stronger too, with many people now scouring newspapers and the web looking for relevant news on our behalf and reporting, for instance, that approval had been given for Japan’s very first reassignment procedure, on May 21st. The procedure itself was actually carried out in October (see UKPFC-NEWS, Jan 1999). It’s easy to forget sometimes that whilst many countries may be well ahead of Britain in terms of legal provision, a small number are also behind in significant ways … Japan having been one of them.
Closer to home, too, one Exeter-based trans woman teacher was reporting problems with her colleagues at work, some of whom were unhappy at the prospect of her using ladies toilets, like any other woman, following her surgery.
And, behind the scenes, a little drama of another kind was being enacted as we tackled the issues created when a trans male athlete took a look at the conditions which the organisers of the Gay Games in Amsterdam wanted to impose upon him and called for our assistance … and we politely and gently talked our way to an unsung, but significant, resolution … free of confrontation … and leaving everyone wiser, and good friends.
On another front we proved that we’re as capable of getting it wrong as the next person, however, when we added a factually incorrect newspaper story about an intersexed Welsh Woman to our web site’s bursting news library … and got a sharp reminder from the Intersex Society of North America that you shouldn’t believe or repeat everything you read in newspapers. For people so concerned every day about poor reporting of trans issues, it was a salutary reminder that we all have things to learn about other groups too … and that bad reporting can be innocently done.
On May 25th, we heard the news that the government was, at last, prepared to alter the rules for changing birth certificates … but not for trans people. Faced with a case in the European Court of Human Rights taken by a man who wanted his name removed from a child’s birth certificate, the government reached an out-of-court settlement. If it was so easy to concede in this case, why not us, we wondered?
June 1998
Bridges were being built in another direction too, as June kicked off with the welcome news that trans women working patiently in Nottingham had succeeded, at last, in getting Women’s Space in local council-run facilities opened up to trans women.
And by now we were literally spoiled for choice by the volume of international news stories being sent to us about trans people too … making it seem as though there were trans people everywhere you turn, which (of course) they are!
Perhaps the happiest news in June was, however, the confirmation that Coronation Street actress Julie Hesmondhalgh’s contract was definitely being extended from the initial two month “experiment” to a full two years. Best of all, we started liaising in earnest about how to build a real life around the character … with a real past, real trans words to speak … and the end of those appalling scarves!
As we move into the second half of the year, however, Claire McNab takes up the tale …
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A YEAR AGO, when Christine wrote the review of the events of 1997, she concluded that “… in all probability it won’t be feasible to do such a detailed history ever again. For the campaign is now becoming simply too busy and diverse to track each twist and turn.”
In a way, she was right: 1998 was indeed a much busier year, and this review is a much longer text … too much, indeed, for one person to complete, and still far too short to include all the things we’d like to cover. But it’s the sheer volume of activity which makes it worthwhile to try recording it, both as a reminder to ourselves of how much we have achieved, and as an illustration to others of the extent of the difficulties still faced by trans people.
July 1998
The fourth of July may have other meanings elsewhere, but in London it was once again time for the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Pride march in London. The event was clouded somewhat by the cancellation of the festival after the march, due to commercial difficulties, but the march itself was a great success, with a large contingent of trans people … and, for the first time ever, an address from a Cabinet minister who read a letter of support from the Prime Minister.
The following day, July 5th, we got news that the Canadian Military would fund sex changes for serving personnel. In a policy shift confirmed in greater detail in September, the senior medical officer said that “I don’t see this issue as being any less legitimate than any other health-care issue.”
There was good news in the UK too, with confirmation later in the month that the threatened closure of the Gender Identity Clinic in Leeds had been averted. Effective lobbying by PFC activists and others in West Yorkshire had built support across several agencies (including the police and all local Health Authorities) for the continued provision of a much-needed service.
The public had a view, too, of how life works for a someone transitioning in the public eye, as the documentary about Bristol City Councillor Ros Mitchell was shown nationwide on BBC television on July 7th, creating fresh interest in the press.
Meanwhile, the nation’s favourite trans character hit the headlines again, as July 6th’s episode of Coronation Street had millions of viewers in tears, when it closed with a tender and beautifully shot moment of high drama: trans woman Hayley Patterson and her boyfriend Roy Cropper exchanged their first kiss. The flurry of glowing reviews mingled in the press with high-profile coverage of the announcement that a popular teacher in a Yorkshire school was to transition, returning next term as a man.
On that positive note, July 18th marked the first anniversary of the launch of Press For Change’s successful UKPFC-News mailing list. With hundreds of news items, announcements, briefings and calls to action, PFC could look back on a year at the frontline of using electronic communication as a campaigning tool.
High profile coverage of trans people wasn’t restricted to this side of the Atlantic: on July 19th, Time magazine’s cover story “Trans across America” brought to its huge international readership a positive and uplifting account of how trans people are no longer hiding in the shadows … but standing up positively for their rights.
Back in Europe, we began to prepare for the imminent announcement of the European Court of Human Rights’ judgment on the Sheffield and Horsham case … hoping against all the odds that it would be “fourth time lucky”, and that after three cases where the court had refused to intervene to secure our civil rights, 1998 would mark an end to our 28-year-long legal nightmare.
On July 30th, we got the bad news: by the narrowest possible margin, the court had once again refused to act. But in a finely-balanced judgment, it expressed tersely-worded exasperation at the UK government’s continued failure to do anything about its repeated promises to the Court (in previous cases going back to 1996) to review the issue … and a tantalising hint that the government had considered settling the case out-of-court. Extensive press coverage, co-ordinated by a team of more than a dozen PFC activists, was overwhelmingly favourable to our case.
August 1998
August is traditionally the “silly season” for news, but in 1998 it started with some good news: an army Sergeant-Major transitioning after 18 years’ service received support from senior officers. Sgt Joe Rushton will continue to serve in the army.
Later in the month, more trans politicians popped up around the world. In Australia, two trans women stood for election in the country’s general election; in Peru, trans woman Fulvia Celica stood for election as Mayor.
Closer to home, Greater Manchester Police adopted guidelines for officers dealing with trans people, reminding them that we must be “treated with the same level of respect and dignity as any other members of the public”.
The irony that it should be necessary to remind police officers of something so basic was underlined by a bizarre correspondence which opened up with journalist John Diamond, who objected to the inclusion on the PFC website of an article from the Times newspaper by his wife Nigella Lawson. Lawson’s article had neatly twisted trans people’s efforts to defend themselves against ill-informed attacks in the press, by complaining about the “intolerance” of those who objected to her crude characterisations of us … and we placed it on-line as an illustration for all of how NOT to write about us. With the boot on the other foot, John Diamond was highly indignant … as had been the lawyers for Germaine Greer, who earlier in the year extracted from the Guardian newspaper an apology for a critical article entitled “When Germaine wants a job”, written in response to her 1997 outing and criticism of a trans physicist. Both items have been removed from our website, but the space we made on the website for Ms Greer’s apology to her academic colleague remains unfilled … and our offer to pay Nigella Lawson to set the record straight on her views was never taken up.
Bad news too, on August 30th, for a Scottish trans woman convicted of embezzling: she faced uncertainty as to whether she would be accommodated in a female prison, or whether her male birth certificate would result in her being exposed to the risks facing any woman in a male prison. She was eventually imprisoned in the medical unit of a woman’s prison.
September 1998
September is back-to-school time … but with a rather higher profile than usual for a trans man returning to teach his classes in Yorkshire for the first time since his transition. Mike Garside had a warm welcome from his pupils, and survived an intense barrage of publicity with the help of supportive colleagues and management.
On September 13th, the Second International Transgender film festival opened in London, providing an important airing for the wide variety of cinematographic portrayals of trans people … and festival-goers were delighted by the presence of actress Julie Hesmondhalgh, who took part in a panel discussion of her role as the best-known trans character on screen: as Coronation Street’s Patterson, she is seen by more than 100 million viewers world-wide of the UK’s most widely-exported soap.September might have closed with one of the year’s highlights: the Third International Congress on Sex and Gender, hosted by PFC in an Oxford college, an attended by more than 170 delegates from around the world. The wealth of papers, the intensity of the dialogue between a wide range of perspectives, and the evidence of a global resurgence of articulate trans people defining their own agenda was exhilarating for all who attended, and laid the groundwork for several ongoing initiatives …
… but on September 24th, the Liberal Democrat Party hit the headlines when its annual conference adopted a policy resolution in favour of full civil rights for trans people — the first UK-wide political party to do so.
… and the next day, Coronation Street’s viewers watched a further twist in the blossoming relationship between Roy and Hayley, when the couple hesitantly decide to live together.
October 1998
With all the media interest in a fictional trans character, October opened with the dramatic outing of a real trans woman. Liz Bellinger courageously broke decades of silence to tell the story of how she had married in a registry office, and gone to court to adopt a daughter … and in both cases had openly alerted the authorities to her trans status. By telling her story, Liz risked prosecution for an “invalid” marriage … but instead prepared a legal challenge to have marriage officially recognised by the courts.
From the US, the start of the month brought the news that while Congress was sitting on a bill which would protect GLB people and trans folk, a young man was brutally murdered in Wyoming. Student Matthew Shepard’s death was followed by a large peaceful demonstration in New York which united GLB and trans campaigners … and provoked the wrath of New York police, who brutally broke up the demonstration with violence described by one veteran campaigner as “the worst since Stonewall”.
Meanwhile, on Coronation Street, Hayley Patterson faced a crisis familiar to countless trans people down the years: her boss, the Street’s favourite rogue Mike Baldwin, found out about her trans status, and faced with risk of being outed, she revealed her past to her co-workers. After a week of intense drama and some real hostility, Hayley eventually found — as so many other trans people have before — that the overwhelming majority of decent folk have no problem with trans people.
At the end of the month, two Early Day Motions were tabled in the House of Commons: one congratulating actress Julie Hesmondhalgh on her portrayal of Hayley, and the other supporting Liz Bellinger’s brave public stance. Both motions attracted cross-party support … and in a long series of media interviews, Liz found a lot of support for her own legal plight and for that of all the other trans people whose cause she has so effectively highlighted.
November 1998
On November 7th, another trans woman went public to tell her story: Susan Marshall and her daughter were interviewed by John Peel on BBC Radio 4’s “Home Truths” programme about families.
The number of trans people in politics grew again when a Labour Party selection meeting in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s constituency chose a trans woman to contest a safe seat in forthcoming Council elections.
After her successful radio appearance, barrister Susan Marshall was in the news again, when on November 18th the Crown Prosecution Service reached an out-of-court settlement with her arising from a job-offer which they had made to her, only to withdraw it when she revealed her trans status.
December 1998
At the end of the year, we were back to birth certificates again: December 1st saw the press giving widespread coverage to a case which wasn’t as straightforward as it appeared. A child who had been reassigned to female on medical advice had her birth certificate changed by the Office of National Statistics after a ten-year battle . Her doctors drew distinctions between her situation and that of trans people which were sufficient to convince the Registrar, but it was clear that a breakthrough had been achieved: a child born with a male chromosomal pattern and male genitalia, albeit deformed, had been reclassified … a major shift from previous insistence on chromosomes as a determinant of gender. PFC welcomed the shift in policy, and legal experts began to prepare the ground for a challenge to the registrar’s failure to make similar changes for trans people.
On December 9th came the news that Tasmania’s parliament had become the latest to enact laws protecting trans people from discrimination … and from Minnesota in the USA came news of another trans politician, when Susan Kimberly was appointed deputy mayor of the city of St. Paul.
Also from the US came the news that a New York court had awarded substantial damages to the mother of a trans woman who rescue after a car crash in 1995 had been impeded by the negligence of fire-fighters who mocked her trans status when it was discovered in the course of her rescue. Tyra Hunter died, but after a tough legal battle, her mother won US$2.8 million in damages.
As Christmas week opened we got news of the High Court’s decision in a case taken by three trans women against North-West Lancashire Health Authority, which had refused to fund their sex-reassignment surgery. In a decision which had major implications for the increasingly patchy NHS provision in several fields, the court ruled that that health authorities could not ignore the medical evidence when selecting which treatments to fund … and that the policy of North-West Lancs was “illegal and irrational”. For the many trans people facing obstruction in their quest for a treatment with a success rate of up to 97%, there is a very real prospect that their waiting may soon be over.
Postscript
As I sat down to finish this piece on December 31st, making difficult choices about which few events to select from the huge list in front of me, I checked the statistics and found that once again, accesses to our website had reached new highs — with the previous daily records being successively broken several times in the month. Looking back at my notes from 12 months ago, I see that I calculated that it would take two years to use up our 50Mb file limit — but we’ve reached it already. I thought that we would only be using one-third of our bandwidth limit — but we’ve already exceeded it.
Of course, the website is only a means to an end. It’s a very effective way of making our campaigning documentation available to all our activists, at a fraction of the cost of printing it … and of bringing our case directly to the journalists, academics and others who make intensive use of the site. And its success is an indication of how far the campaign is reaching … a spread also reflected in the increasingly well-briefed coverage of trans issues in the media.
In some ways the campaign looks much the same as it did at the end of 1997: with a core of dozens of hard-working activists joined by many others who do their bit when they can. We see the same familiar landmark of the awful 1970 judgment in the Corbett-v-Corbett case, still standing, and we see all too many trans people facing real obstacles in our lives.
But much has changed. That core of activists is growing all the time … and becoming increasingly skilled at putting our case across and at winning the arguments in court, in industrial tribunals, and in all the other fields where change is needed: the areas of discrimination are narrowing. The campaign has a much higher profile than ever before, with more coverage in the media, more action in Parliament and in government … and some real hopes for the future. The European Court of Human Rights will have new judges in the new year, who can be expected to be more favourable to our case, possibly enough to achieve the small shift from a vote of 11-9 against us to 11-9 in our favour; and in 366 days, when the Human Rights Act comes into force, British courts will also be able to take the Convention into account.
And two days ago, I finally got a chance to read that 1970 Ormrod judgment. As nasty and venomous a piece of writing as I’ve seen in a long time, I found it deeply upsetting … but I was also very struck by how out-dated it seems, how antiquated the prejudices, and how much the medical viewpoints have changed. It’s never a good idea to predict victory … but we are much better placed than ever before to finally remove that stain on the British legal system, and to turn this country from being the one of Europe’s worst on trans rights to one of the best.
I hope you’ve all had a wonderful Christmas … and that we can all look forward to an even better new year.
