Changing Sex: Christine Lions, Secretary (Daily Telegraph)

Saturday
22 March 1997
Issue 666

Changing sex

PETER and HIS WIFE had been married for 14 years and lived in a large house in Reading with their two young daughters.  They knew their marriage was an unusual one, but for a long time it suited them perfectly well.  ’I don’t think we made love more than 20 times in 14 years,’ says Peter.  ’Unusually for a transsexual, I had no problem with the physical side of marriage, but she had a low sex-drive and was probably predisposed to a relationship with someone undemanding like me.  That didn’t worry me.  It was more important to us to be close than to have an active sex life.’

But they both knew that things were not right and by the time they sought marriage-guidance counselling they had not made love for a year.  Perhaps because Peter held back his feelings of gender confusion, the counselling was not a success.  A year later, they started visiting a psychiatrist together.  After three months he pronounced there was no discernible male side to Peter’s nature.  ’It was the first time a suggestion of transsexuality had passed between us.  In fact, the penny dropped with my wife first.’ But instead of embracing the news as a welcome explanation of everything that had been going wrong with the relationship, he tried to fight it.  ’I wanted to be a normal man.  I wanted to hang on to what was left of my male identity and thought we should try to restore our sexual relations.’ It took several distressing months before Peter finally admitted his problem.

After an inept attempt to wash down 50 paracetamol tablets with half a bottle of Scotch, he decided to start hormone treatment.  When the feminising effect of the treatment became obvious, Peter, a computer salesman, took to wearing a three-piece suit to work, even in summer, to hide his growing breasts.

But his wife was becoming understandably anxious about how she was going to confront friends, neighbours and family.  Unable to face the likely prejudice, she returned from a holiday with her sister and asked her husband to leave.  Soon after, Peter collapsed at work with a suspected heart attack and was in hospital for two days.  When he returned home he was banished to the granny annexe of their five-bedroom house, and his wife, announcing her intention to file for a divorce, took steps to have him evicted.  ’She wouldn’t let me see the children.  She said it was bad for them and bad for the neighbourhood to have me around.’ He was also made redundant.  ’In the space of two weeks since I returned from hospital, I had lost my job, my marriage, my house and my children.  Someone who’d given me so much support suddenly was not there.’

Though professing sympathy, his parents did not want to put him up either.  ’By the time I came to have the surgery, I felt I had already paid the price.’ The operation was performed last year at a private hospital in Birmingham and when it was all over, he rang his parents.  They could not bear to speak to their son, but simply played his message.

The person relating these events today is an attractive woman in her late 30s with an unfurrowed brow, straight black hair and a fringe.  Christine Lions, as she is now known, wears quite a lot of make-up, as if it is her job to look groomed.  She has wide lips and when she smiles, her eyes slant into almonds.  She is wearing a pale-blue jacket with a lace blouse and a short skirt.  A silver necklace and little stud earrings complete the picture of ultra-conventional femininity.  She says that from the moment she dressed as a woman she felt right.  ’I never had to learn the ways of women.  It came naturally.’

Surgery, however, seems to have been the only straightforward part of the experience.  ’I felt peaceful, so calm.  This great torment had gone.  The feeling that I had been carrying a male cardboard cut-out in front of me vanished.’ In other respects, the transition has been profoundly dislocating and when she talks about her two girls, now aged 11 and eight, she looks close to tears.  At first after the separation she saw them for half an hour every fortnight and they sat self-consciously on a park bench.  Now, with the one ludicrous condition that she dress as a man, they meet for half a day.

’The children know perfectly well I am a woman and they have accepted it but they have to play the game as well.  If my younger daughter sees nail varnish in the house, or if I am wearing the ’wrong’ watch, she taps my wrist and shakes her head, grinning.’

At her former wife’s insistence, the children have not seen their paternal grandparents or any of their father’s relatives for two years.  He gives them birthday cards but they do not take them home.  ’They are terrified when they are with me that they will let something slip and there will be no more visits.’ Although she says no one can take away the joy of fatherhood (’and I will always be their father’), it looks as though fatherhood is an attenuated thing.  She admits, ’It hurts that I cannot go to any of their school functions or social events that would mean meeting their friends.  I have to see them in isolation.’

Transsexuals cannot predict with any certainty what kind of relationship, if any, they will fall into once they have ’transitioned’.  According to Fran Springfield, who runs the Gender Identity Consultancy Services in London, it is like arriving at adolescence again, with all its confusions, and not knowing whether the emerging self will be heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual.  After two years in her new identity, Christine Lions had a brief sexual relationship with a younger woman in Norwich but it is now over because ’I am still plagued by memories of 14 years of marriage.  I am still fond of my wife.  It does spoil the potential for new relationships.’

Until she finds another job, she is working as secretary to Dr Russell Reid at the London Institute for Human Sexuality.  She is conscious of being examined as some sort of role model by every pre-operative transsexual who comes through the door.  ’Putting on a good face can be a strain,’ she admits, ’especially as my own life is far from resolved.  But unlike some people in my position, I am proud of my past.’

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