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For more than a quarter of a century, GIRES (the Gender Identity Research & Education Society) has been putting trans rights ‘on the agenda’. GIRES was established in 1997 when Bernard Reed, OBE, and his wife Terry Reed, OBE, helped their transgender daughter Niki win a landmark sex discrimination case. The charity has been instrumental in several positive changes to trans and gender-diverse rights in the UK and beyond.
The ‘A Legacy of Kindness’ project documents and showcases the rich history of GIRES,
uncovering the memories through generations of past, present, and new members, trans activists and pioneers, who helped to establish and shape the charity.
This podcast series of oral histories is part of the exhibition: GIRES, a Legacy of Kindness, a project supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund. It is compiled from oral histories and produced as part of a digital exhibition exploring the rich history of the UK’s trans and gender-diverse GIRES, the Gender Identity Research & Education Society. It was produced by Lucia Scazzocchio with sound design and music by Samuel Robinson. The Community Curator sub-team was led by Georgia Marker.
For more information and other resources visit: https://lok.gires.org.uk
Episode 1: The Birth of GIRES
This first episode in the series explores the theme ‘The Birth of GIRES’.
Before the 1960s trans people self-identified, they accessed affirmative medical care of their choice. It was only in the mid to late 1960s, that opposition to that began. From 1970 to 1996 Trans people were unable to marry, unable to adopt, had no employment rights, the Institute of Personnel Management advised employers to dismiss all trans people in case they might offend a future hypothetical employee or employer or customer. Support groups started to be set up like Press for Change. It was during the early 90's that Bernard and Terry Reed had to navigate this harsh landscape when their daughter Niki began to be horrifically bullied at work for being Trans. This led this cis gender couple to become advocates to help protect other trans people from similar experiences, and the Gender Identity Research and Education Society (GIRES) was born.
Zoe Playdon
All the way through this terrible period that I typify as the trans genocide period from the seventies, through the eighties, into the early nineties, support groups started to be set up. You can imagine what it was like. You were just living your life and everything was fine. And, suddenly, you’re not and nothing’s fine and things have changed radically. So in the 1970s, and 80s, lots of trans support groups grew up, to try to make sense of the new environment, and to create community and give support.
Alice Purnell, is really noteworthy for having started out with the Beaumont Trust. And she developed that into the Gender Trust. Meanwhile, Stephen Whittle, who seems to have been an activist almost from the minute that he took breath, was busy organising. And in 1992, together with Mark Rees, after Mark had lost his case in the European Court of Human Rights, Mark initiated, and Stephen went on to lead an organisation called Press for Change. Press for Change was just a tiny little group, but terribly important organisation. And Stephen, of course, was hugely important because he was an academic lawyer, writing his doctorate on trans law. I’d started working with trans community groups after Section 28 in 1988. And I joined Press for Change just after it was started. And so we were constantly working together. On the one hand, doing lots and lots of consciousness raising and sort of education and so on and on the other hand, doing the political lobbying and the legal cases. That provided a body of knowledge and it also provided a focus and a locus for support.
Dee Stuart
I found out that Lynne Jones, who was the Labour MP for Selly Oak, in Birmingham, had a lot of interest in trans issues. So I contacted her office in Parliament, got to know her and her, I presume it was an assistant. We used to spend lots and lots of time talking on the phone, really got on well, and I was recommended to join Press for Change. So I did.
Zoe Playdon
We had organised a meeting of all of the solicitors and barristers currently involved in bringing cases on behalf of trans people to get together with Liberty and Press for Change. At that meeting, one of the people that had confirmed their presence there as an observer was Bernard Reed. I'd met Bernard prior to that, and said, “Look, this meeting’s going on. You should come and have a look and see what's what, given that you're going to court yourself, for your daughter.” And, initially, Bernard and Terry engaged very strongly indeed with the Press for Change and they were very important to its work.
Bernard Reed OBE
Having gone through the case, and had some help then from Press for Change, I thought, “Well, you know, that's been a horrible experience for Nikki, we must stop it happening to other people.” Press for Change, which is very much into campaigning and politicising. I thought, “Well, that's all right, but what about educating all the other people: employers, families, people in the street? What can we do there?”
Terry Reed OBE
Bernard said, “We must, must do something to stop this happening to other people.” And that's when he and others started to set up the Gender Identity Research and Education Society, GIRES.
Zoe Playdon
The logistical problem was that, if you were a charity, you couldn't be engaged in political activism. So at that point we had to set up a charity separate from Press for Change, because that's what the law required. And it was at that point that Terry and Bernard offered to do that.
Bernard Reed
The group of Press for Change vice presidents met in London on a day when we were delivering a petition to 10 Downing Street and we worked out what we're going to do about setting up this charity.
Zoe Playdon
And thus it was, on Wednesday 29th of October 1997, the inaugural general meeting of the Transsexualism Research and Education Society was held at the Abbey Community Centre in Great Smith Street in London. And that was the start of GIRES. It’s changed its name from TRES to GIRES, it shifted transsexualism to gender identity.
Dee Stuart
First thing was, we need to find a name, and I’d kind of like half prepared something. So I said, “Well, really, we need something that's going to have an acronym. And if we can come up with something like the Gender Identity Research and Education Society, that would give you an acronym of GIRES.” And they said, “Oh that's good.” So they kind of like adopted it there on the spot.
Bernard Reed
So we got charitable status in 1998. Then the question was raising money, how do you do that? And I said, “We mustn't raise it from the community, because typically trans people are not well off.” And we made therefore our membership fee at five pounds a year. And we set out trying to raise money, bit by bit by bit. Got money from here and everywhere. In due course, we found we could make money by doing training. So we did that. And as we got more known and more influential, we began to engage with the government talking about policy matters.
Terry Reed
We have always kind of functioned at more than one level. So there's been this kind of academic, scientific level. But, hugely important, the reaching out to people as individuals, to loving and caring about people, as individuals and trying to help their families absorb that and take that forward, so that people can go forward in peace, rather than surrounded by anger and hatred and all the awful things that society can do to people it doesn't like. Many of our early customers if you like, were adults who had transitioned and their families, their spouses and their partners and their children were finding it really hard. And we'd have open days when people would come. The biggest family group we had was about thirty. It just grew and grew and grew. They’d be phoning us and saying, “Can we bring so many more?” You know, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, of course.”
Shaan Knan
At that time, Bernard and Terry were more or less operating the charity from their family home. I just remember the feeling of being really inspired. More than anything also, their story of how GIRES came about. That it is actually a family story, the story of the Reed family and how a straight cisgender married couple came to become really fierce and important trans and gender diverse campaigners and researchers and founded a charity to do with their daughter, Nikki. I was extremely touched, moved, and inspired by it all. But I felt always very close in that sense, and very embraced within that environment. That was both a charity and a family environment.
Zoe Playdon
It's always important to note that before the 1960s trans people self-identified, they accessed affirmative medical care of their choice. They corrected their birth certificates in the UK, and they lived in complete equality. It was only in the mid to late 1960s, that opposition to that began. So that from 1970 to 1996 trans people were unable to marry, unable to adopt, had no employment rights, the Institute of Personnel Management advised employers to dismiss all trans people in case they might offend a future hypothetical employee or employer or customer. Being trans was itself a cause for dismissal, irrespective of how well you did the job or how long you'd been doing it. And this combination of legal exclusion, social ostracism, and a new NHS regime which demanded compulsory sterilisation or no treatment at all.
Terry Reed
I have watched and heard or listened to other people, their situations to trans people, to gay people, to people who are different in any way about the torture that they'd been put through because, because they're different. And it was one of the things that underpinned our whole approach to working in this field, is that people must be supported for who they are.
This podcast series of oral histories is part of the exhibition: GIRES, a Legacy of Kindness, a project made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund, thanks to National Lottery players.
It was produced by Lucia Scazzocchio from Social Broadcasts with sound design and original music by Samuel Robinson and narrated by Coran Foddering.The Community Curator sub-team was led by Georgia Marker. With special thanks to all the contributors who agreed to share their stories.
For more information about what you’ve just heard, do visit the project website, lok.gires.org.uk.