Changing Sex: Stephen Whittle, law lecturer

Saturday
22 March 1997
Issue 666

Changing sex

STEPHEN Whittle is a compact, muscular man with a greying beard and moustache. His voice is deep, his hair close-cropped and he wears prominent braces over a checked lumberjack’s shirt. Only if you are looking for clues to his past identity would you notice that he has small, smooth hands. Not feminine hands necessarily, but simply the hands of someone who is not used to manual work. Whittle, aged 41, is senior lecturer in law at Manchester Metropolitan University. Twenty-two years ago he was a woman.

For the past 18 years Whittle has lived with Sarah Rutherford. After a long struggle to be allowed to start their family through artificial insemination, they now have four children - the youngest are three-month-old twins. Despite their long and devoted commitment to one another, the couple cannot marry because Whittle is still legally a woman. Britain does not allow transsexuals to alter the gender on their birth certificates and the injustice they feel about this has encouraged him to campaign for a change in the law.

Initially, he was not enthusiastic to stand up and be counted. Colleagues had only ever known him as a man, and it would have been far easier for him to remain silent about his past. But he chose as the subject for his PhD thesis, Transsexuals and the Law. Colleagues were impressed by his sample group. How, they wanted to know, had he achieved such a comprehensive range of interviewees? His reply was completely unpremeditated. ’Because I am one,’ he said.

There was no big announcement. The news gradually filtered through his department and then through the university with no troublesome reactions. Whittle says he has always successfully passed as a man, as most female-to-male transsexuals do, even though he had been a pretty young woman. ’After male hormone treatment, the woman quickly develops a deep voice and facial hair. It cannot possibly be a secret. Once you start treatment you don’t have to work out when you are going to tell everyone because the changes are so obvious.’

But Whittle points out wryly, ’The question of whether we "pass" or not presumes that the whole of our lives are spent fully clothed. As soon as one’s not fully clothed, one doesn’t pass.’ In the nude state, most male-to-female transsexuals are so perfectly equipped with breasts, a vagina and hairless arms and legs that some GPs have no suspicion that they were ever male. When the male-to-female transsexual Kate Bornstein (author of Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us) was asked on an American chat show whether she could experience a female orgasm, she replied, ’Yeah, the plumbing works and so does the electricity.’ But not all female-to-male transsexuals choose to have phalloplasty - a penis constructed from tissue taken from the forearm - and there is an element of compromise for those who do.

Stephen Whittle (he has never revealed his female name) had felt he was a boy from the age of about three. He attended an all-girls grammar school and did well academically, but socially he was always a misfit. As a teenager, he tried to talk to his parents about his confused sexual feelings and even suggested that he was really a man. His mother was sympathetic but his father refused to listen. He went to his GP for help and was referred to a psychiatrist. ’In the Seventies, you had to work for three months in your chosen role before you were allowed hormones. The whole thing hurt horribly, the breast-bindings. But I made it. Then when I had jumped all the hoops, I was refused hormones. It was devastating. I arrived home fully prepared to overdose myself.’

He believes the chance arrival of a new GP, who saw the state he was in and prescribed hormones, saved his life. The following year, when he was 19, he had a hysterectomy and total mastectomy (he did not choose to have phalloplasty). But sexual relationships foundered. He was attracted by women but the only women interested in him were lesbians - until he met Sarah Rutherford.

She was 18 and studying for A-levels. When her parents heard she had fallen in love with a transsexual, they begged her to think hard before ruining her life. ’Although I was totally committed to Stephen by this stage, I knew in a sense they were right. I was making my life complicated by choosing Stephen. But we couldn’t change our minds about one another.’

They moved in together. Sarah trained to be a nurse and Stephen, now with a degree in geography, took on a number of short-term posts - but none of them survived the eventual disclosure than he was a transsexual until he went on to qualify in law and then to teach.

’I never stopped loving Stephen but I hated the complication he brought to my life,’ she says. ’I disliked the feeling that society did not recognise our relationship. No one took photos of us at family parties because we could not officially be described as a couple. We were regarded as an oddity.’

Stephen’s father still does not accept the change and refers to him by his female name. He has cut the grandchildren out of his will.

Their fight for Sarah’s right to be artificially inseminated by donor brought their case into the open. They were turned down by the NHS and then rejected for treatment by the ethics committee of a private hospital. During an interview with a counsellor, they were deeply offended to be asked how they made love. A year later, a doctor agreed to treat them and they now have a daughter aged four, a son aged two and twin girls born just before Christmas. They say that having the children has helped mend the rift between their respective families.

The children have Stephen’s surname, but only Sarah could register the births. The space for ’father’ on their birth certificates is blank. ’What is a father?’ asks Stephen. ’In law we do not have a definition of a man, only a series of ascribed roles. Every other male parent of a child by donor insemination is allowed to register himself as the father of the child.’ In his eldest daughter’s name, he is fighting through the European Court for the right to be cited on her birth certificate as her father.

Sarah says that having the children was ’such a watershed for us all. Before that I used to be frightened and ashamed of telling people, now I want to show my children that I am proud of Stephen.’ But in many ways it is more difficult for her to live with the reactions of others than it is for him. ’When he tells people, he becomes interesting; I tell people and I become weird.’

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