Changing Sex
By Elizabeth Grice
Just how much have attitudes really altered since the days when people who changed sex were regarded as freaks? Elizabeth Grice talks to four transsexuals about why they made the change and the effect it has had on their lives
 Christine Lions Secretary
Stephen Whittle Law Lecturer
Bernadette Rogers Retired director
Susan Marshall Bursar
On August 12, 1993, the staff of Exeter College, Oxford, were summoned to a meeting by Simon Stone, the college’s home bursar. They arrived, mildly curious, expecting to hear Stone announce the name of the college’s new rector. Instead the address took an unexpectedly personal turn. Stone, a former naval commander, began by referring to his recent, unconventionally floppy hairstyle. Moving nervously to the point, he said the hair was just an outward sign of a much bigger change that was about to take place in his life.
Stone, 46, explained he was ’one of those unfortunate people’ born with the brain of a woman in the body of a man. ’It is a cross I have had to bear since I was a child.’ Joining the Navy, he went on, was all part of an increasingly futile effort to make the best of life as a man. But after years of heart-searching, he had decided to change the way he looked to match the way he felt inside. ’When I return to work on Monday, September 13, it will be as Ms Susan Marshall.’
Sitting in the same office, doing the same job but looking every inch the efficient businesswoman - glossy, fashionably cropped hair, charcoal grey jacket and mid-calf skirt - she says, ’It was the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life. You could see a few chins drop when I told them. There was an awful pause. Then the hall prefect, Mrs Higgins, started clapping, and the others took up the applause. I had to flee, it was so moving. Afterwards, they all found a letter waiting for them in the Lodge, so that when they pinched themselves to see if it was true, they’d know it was.
’The next morning there were a few knocks on the door to say how brave I was. I even got flowers. It was absolutely wonderful. I intended to get up the next day dressed as a woman for the first time. But when I got home, my wife said, “Why don’t you get changed now? There’s no point in waiting until tomorrow.”’
It was a touchingly unselfish moment. Judi Stone was still trying to cope with the sadness and confusion of losing a husband but she demonstrated in one simple question that she was trying to move on. Simon and Judi had been married for nearly 25 years. He had become home bursar at Exeter after a distinguished naval career which had taken him to the rank of commander. She was secretary to the principal of St Hugh’s. They and their two daughters, one 19 and the other 21, were to all outward appearances a conventional, happy family.
But Simon’s growing conviction that he was female had been undermining normal family life for several years. There were arguments and confrontations, usually resulting in Simon’s denial that he was transsexual. ’I considered suicide many times, and at other times wished I had not been born.’ One weekend in 1992 he went on a religious retreat to Hampshire and returned to tell Judi that only a gender change could resolve his problems.
’That weekend was a turning point. Although it was not easy, Judi supported me almost straight away. I don’t think it was a great surprise to her.’ From the earliest days of his relationship with Judi, he had explained as best he could that there was something different about him - in particular that he sometimes dressed in women’s clothes. They met in 1966 at a party on a submarine when he was a 19-year-old midshipman and she was just back from studying history of art and picture restoration in Florence. ’I just knew she was someone with whom I had a bond. I usually felt terribly clumsy with girls but with her it was quite different. I instantly fell in love.’
Realising the relationship was getting serious, Judi’s parents sent her to New Zealand for a cooling-off period. Simon decided to tell her about his cross-dressing tendency in a letter. ’I hoped it was purely a phase that was behind me but I knew really that that part of me was going to go on. I thought she wouldn’t want to have anything more to do with me. But she wrote back saying she didn’t consider it a problem.’ They were married in December 1968, by which time Simon Stone was a sub-lieutenant.
In the mid-Seventies, two years after the birth of his second daughter, Stone began to realise that his gender confusion was not cured but merely in remission. Simultaneously, he came across Conundrum - the autobiography of Jan Morris, previously James Morris - with its disturbing message that something could be done. ’It may sound naive, but it was my first realisation that there were other people like me.’
His life outwardly maintained an aura of glamorous and successful masculinity. ’He was an incredibly good-looking man, always beautifully turned out,’ says his 22-year-old daughter Harriet. ’A lot of my mother’s friends fancied my father.’ But Simon was in turmoil. ’As you get older you cannot cope with these feelings about yourself. It became more and more intolerable. There were peaks and troughs but the troughs got longer and the peaks fewer. I asked: am I going to go on to the end of my life knowing I can’t be what I am?’
As senior legal adviser to the Commander-in-Chief, Fleet, at Northwood, it was Cmdr Stone’s job to deal with staff problems. ’If a case like mine had come up, I would have had to deal with it. How could I? I was feeling increasingly exposed and decided it was better to leave. It was presented as a crisis of ambition.’ On the day he left naval service, April 1, 1988, he took the job of home bursar at Exeter College.
Scaling the heights of an essentially male profession had been a cover, a way of distracting himself from the unpalatable conviction that he was in fact really female. ’I am not alone in this. Joining the armed forces is a sort of escape route. Some transsexuals have even joined the SAS. It is partly to show you are what you’re not. In service life you knew exactly where you stood. The Commander, that’s who I was. Nearly at the top of the tree. Upright father to his children; husband to his wife. I did my best to be the person others expected me to be but it got harder with every year. There came a time in my late 30s when I had to be honest with myself and others and stop living a lie.’
Harriet Stone remembers the strain of the three transitional years when they all still shared the same house and the same secret but no one else knew. ’I was 16 when I found out. My elder sister had her suspicions and we eventually confronted my mother and father about it. Once it was said, there was no going back. There was a lot of shouting and screaming but I began to see that when you are in my father’s situation you have no choice but to become the person you believe you are. It is literally do or die.
’My mother would disappear to meet friends when it got too much for her. I’d get up and she wouldn’t be there. Later she would ring to say she might be away all day.
’She is a wonderful woman - a tolerant, loving, bubbly person who believes in seizing the moment. She believes you should never regret what you have done, only the things you haven’t done. Mostly she is positive. She still loves my father but she has lost her spouse and that must be like a bereavement. There is an air of sadness about it. I still have a father, though he’s not the father he was. We had a close father-daughter relationship, but that has had to change. As a woman, Susan still has the same personality. The difficult thing for me is looking back at the past - photographs and things - and remembering how we were. Some of the memory seems tarnished. If things were not ever as they seemed in the pictures, what were they? A lie?’
Harriet’s immediate response to her father’s devastating news was to make an appointment to see a psychotherapist (’I wanted to accept Susan almost from the beginning’), and the counselling sessions appear to have helped her through all but the trifling practicalities of her father’s change. She would like, for instance, to display the old family photos as well as the new, but agonises that by showing her father as Simon she is not accepting Susan. And because of the confusion in most people’s minds between transsexualism and tranvestism, she finds it hard to explain everything that has happened to her friends.
Judi Stone and Susan Marshall have continued to live under the same roof, but they divorced last month and Judi is about to take up a new job in Cambridge. ’There are not many better grounds for divorce than this,’ Susan comments. ’It was not fair to Judi to go on. We had not slept together for four years. We are still each other’s best friend - the overriding emotion is still love - but it is an anomalous position. She accepts I am a woman and a woman is someone she can’t be married to.’
Harriet thinks it likely that her mother will find a new relationship. ’But I think it is somehow unlikely that my father will. Up to now, it has been harder for my mother, but it is probably harder for my father now that Judi is moving on. I do not want Susan to be lonely.’
Susan Marshall does not, for the moment, seem to have time to be lonely. She has been accepted unconditionally as a woman bursar by fellows and college staff. At the first meeting of Oxford’s (mostly male) domestic bursars after her change, she notes wryly, there was a 100 per cent turnout.
In the final week before returning to work as a woman, she and Judi arranged a series of small parties so colleagues could get used to the new image. ’I planned it with precision - my service background helped. One has to understand how deeply ingrained gender stereotypes are and not to expect too much of friends by springing change on them. The perception of Oxford is that it is full of stuffy people. It is not.’
Eighteen months after starting to live as a woman, she had gender reassignment surgery. ’The operation itself is a secondary matter compared with being accepted as a woman. Compared with some people’s experiences of surgery, I was terribly lucky. I felt very little pain and there were no complications. The overriding feeling was one of contentment.’
The one thing she cannot ameliorate is the effect on the family. ’I have great feelings of guilt towards my family. I let them down. In the end, I took the selfish option. But I really felt I had no choice.’
Next profile: Christine Lions, Secretary
| 
