Thursday November 19th, 1998

CPS payout to sex-change lawyer

BY CLARE DYER, Legal correspondent

The Crown Prosecution Service and Dame Barbara Mills, former director of public prosecutions, agreed yesterday to pay compensation to a barrister who had a job offer withdrawn when she revealed she was about to undergo a sex-change from male to female.

The terms of the settlement to Susan Marshall, bursar of Exeter college, Oxford, are confidential at the insistence of the CPS, but they include a compensation payment. The CPS accepted that sex-change should not be a bar to her employment.

Ms Marshall, aged 51, was formerly Simon Stone, a naval lawyer who rose to the rank of commander, served on the Royal Yacht Britannia, married and fathered two children.

He was working at Exeter college and had been receiving treatment for transsexualism for four years when he decided in 1992 to change careers to coincide with the adoptipn of a female identity.

He applied for a job as a crown prosecutor and was offered a post. But when he wrote a confidential letter to Mrs Mills explaining the position, the offer was withdrawn.

Mrs Mills’s letter indicated that she had misunderstood and had assumed Mr Stone wanted to continue as a man at work and a woman in private. She replied that he has “underestimated the extent to which lawyers in the CPS can be exposed to media and public attention”. Despite a letter from him correcting the error, she refused to reinstate the offer.

Ms Marshall took no action until 1996 when the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, which interprets the law retrospectively, ruled that European equal treatment laws protect transsexuals from discrimination at work. An industrial tribunal ruled that she could bring her case outside the normal three month time limit.

The CPS appealed to the employment appeal tribunal but lost.

A further appeal, due to start in the Court of Appeal today, was discontinued when a settlement was reached.

The CPS said in a statement it recognised “the distress caused to Ms Marshall by the withdrawal of emplyment at the time she had expressed her intention to undergo gender reassignment” and accepted “that gender reassignment should not have been a bar to Ms Marshall’s employment”.

It added: “For the avoidance of doubt, the CPS now has in place the appropriate equal opportunities policies to prevent the recurrence of such discrimination.”

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