Bernadette Rogers, retired director
By Elizabeth Grice
![[back]](/graphic/icon/wa.gif) Changing sex
THE tall, greying, straight-backed figure sitting at the organ console of St Mary the Virgin, Woodford Halse, does not remotely look like a woman with a past. Bernadette Rogers fits comfortably into the Northamptonshire village scene like a capable character in a Joanna Trollope novel: organist, choirmistress, musical director of the local dramatic society, member of the parochial church council. A woman of energy and intellect living with her quiet, elderly companion, Joyce, in an old farmhouse on the main street.
Nothing pleases them more than to be taken for sisters. Bernadette, aged 67, is the more robust of the two, travelling about tuning and restoring church organs or immersed at her computer translating an obscure 18th-century German manuscript. Joyce, 72, is a cardiganed, motherly type, attentive but less talkative. A newcomer to the district would assume they are retired schoolteachers, brought together by the companionship of widowhood and the urge to carry on being of use.
Bernadette and Joyce Rogers do indeed share a surname; not because they are sisters but because they are married. After more than 20 years as a husband, in 1993 Bernard Rogers, a director of the Rank Organisation, scientific adviser to the Government on broadcasting and a pioneer of colour television, became a woman and started to lead the sort of life which she believed an accident of birth had denied her.
Outwardly, it was a startling enough transformation: Bernard had always had a beard and worn a regulation business suit. In what must have seemed to neighbours like a matter of weeks, his place was taken by a handsome, well-rounded woman with a light perm and a touching pride in her wardrobe and make-up. She was called Bernadette. Over the ensuing months of feminisation, even her bone structure changed. To her astonishment, she lost both height and muscle and eventually needed shoes two sizes smaller. She used to be able to span an octave and four on the piano keyboard; now she can only manage a tenth.
A mechanic who arrived at Folly Farm one day to do some office maintenance remarked that he had visited their house before. ’I know your husband,’ he said. ’He was a Rank Organisation director, wasn’t he?’ Bright with mischief, Bernadette replied, ’Yes, and so was I.’ The visitor barely looked up as he commented, ’Now there’s a coincidence.’
Three weeks after coming home from hospital after her operation, Bernadette braved the community, gingerly lowering herself into her seat at the church organ and later taking the reins at music rehearsals for the Eydon Players’ annual pantomime. ’No one turned a hair. They seemed to know instinctively the right things to say.’ She still sounds disbelieving. ’Some men had problems about how to deal with me at first and some women felt they had lost someone important to them and didn’t know what had arrived instead. But there was not a single adverse reaction.’ A triumph of good manners over prejudice? Or an unexpected outbreak of understanding? ’I was grateful, anyway.’
In a state of even greater trepidation at her next hurdle, she travelled to London to chair an industry meeting. Personal letters had already gone out to every committee member warning them of her altered persona and asking for their support but she could not be sure how they would take the news. There on the blotter in front of her chair was an envelope: it contained the key to the ladies’ lavatory. In minutes of the meeting, the Bernard Rogers they had known for years was faultlessly recorded as ’she’.
Like most transsexuals, Bernard Rogers had felt a misfit all his life. Several times in his life, from adolescence onwards, he had tried to kill himself. In his 50s, when his sense of dislocation was at its worst, he became severely epileptic - but the fits ceased with the psychological calm that prevailed after he ’came out’ as a woman. Even as a toddler, he says he knew, without being able to articulate it properly, that he was really a girl. His bookish, gentle interests - including knitting and embroidery - alarmed his parents who had desperately wanted their only child to be a boy.
’My father went to ludicrous lengths to impress the need for manliness. I was banned from using anything but red carbolic soap, in dead square cakes. I was given every conceivable kind of masculine accoutrement - boxing gloves, football boots - but none of them meant anything to me. I wanted music. I wanted literature.’ By the age of nine, he had learned every note of Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues and was teaching himself German.
When he was 11, he was sent from London to a tough boarding school in Lancashire in the hope that it would make a man of him. Most of the boys seemed to accept him as an agreeable oddity but some of the masters in whom he tried to confide were aghast. ’Their mouths fell open. There was a discussion about whether I should be made to sleep separately. I was virtually accused of inventing a problem to evade certain activities. The concept of a boy who was in no way homosexual but seemed to think he was a girl had never occurred to them. It was at this time that I first began to feel suicidal.’
He panicked at the threat of puberty. ’I watched other boys reaching puberty. Their voices broke, hair grew in all sorts of strange places, masturbation was a form of collective pastime. I was terrified of these developments.’ He was 17 and the subject of enormous curiosity by the time the awful characteristics developed. ’I began to hate my body and came close to mutilating myself. When I started to grow hair on my face, I didn’t know which was the most upsetting, having to shave or having a beard. I decided on a beard.’ But the general turmoil became so severe that he was sent home suffering from a nervous breakdown.
Partly to prove he could succeed in a man’s profession, Rogers chose a career in electronics rather than music and became fascinated by television. ’Activity and commitment seemed to be my only means of survival. Involvement in work enabled me to keep my gender problems at bay for weeks at a time. But when they surfaced, they were worse than ever.’ By the end of the Sixties, he had played a leading part in the development of colour television, teletext and satellite broadcasting.
In 1966, he went to visit an old friend, Joyce, who had recently been widowed and was living only six miles away in outer London. Joyce’s husband had been Bernard’s best friend and they had known one another for more than 20 years. ’Bernie came back to see how I was coping with my two children,’ says Joyce. ’We were both a bit vulnerable and just seemed to be drawn to one another. We were married about three months later.’
Joyce’s family had always realised there was something ’a little odd’ about Bernard and felt protective towards him. Bernard admits he saw in Joyce a way out of his gender confusion. ’She was the person nearest to me. I felt if I had a chance of being helped by anybody it was her. In total desperation I proposed to her.’
Both claim they had a successful marriage - although Bernadette remembers how, as a man, she would feel detached from their sexual relations ’like an observer rather than a participant’. The main problem seems to have been Bernard’s increasingly frequent depressions. ’I got to the stage seven or eight years ago where I couldn’t face a mirror. I could only take a shower if I closed my eyes. I seemed to live in a picture by Hieronymous Bosch. Life was indescribable.’
Joyce remembers how they would set an alarm clock to break the dreams. ’I just used to think: he’ll get over it. I had no idea what the real problem was.’
An old family friend, Dr Andrew Mellhuish, 61, describes the man he thought he knew. ’He was always slightly effeminate, a lovely, interesting, fascinating person. I suppose there were clues - there was this impression of femininity - but I was unaware of the turmoil inside. Then he started to develop severe headaches, which may have been related to his unhappiness.’
Bernard first admitted his transsexualism when being treated for epilepsy. After several consultations, his psychiatrist announced, ’You are going to tell me what your problem has always been and then we shall know why you became epileptic.’ Rogers replied simply, ’I have been convinced all my life I’m a woman.’
Joyce remembers the day he told her. ’We had met in Sainsbury’s to do a shop and Bernie told me in the coffee shop. He knew I couldn’t throw a wobbly there. I went home not really knowing what it was all about. Gobsmacked, I think, is the word. I never had any idea.’ As so often in the three-way conversation, Joyce broke off to address Bernadette directly. ’You weren’t even difficult,’ she said, puzzled. ’You were just terribly emotional over the most stupid things.’
Although they say there were huge difficulties in adjusting, the diagnosis was in a way a relief because ’an awful lot of things suddenly fell into place’. Separately, Joyce had psychiatric counselling.
Bernard was put on a large dose of the female hormone oestrogen for a year, developed breasts and started facial epilation. ’It took 18 months and a total of 400 hours to clean my face up. The discomfort was unbelievable.’ But by the time Bernard had been recommended by three psychiatrists for full ’gender reassignment surgery’ his mental and physical state had greatly deteriorated and the operation was brought forward.
Surgery to remove his male genitalia and create a vagina took seven and a half hours. The list of procedures read: ’genital ablation, orchidectomy, penile amputation, construction of female external genitalia and vaginoplasty.’ Reading and agreeing to such a list, she reflected, would certainly sort out the true transsexual from the patient who was in it for kicks.’
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