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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 3: Education for Action
As suggested in the charity’s name, education has remained a key component of GIRES’ work, from employer training to health advocacy to research funding. This episode, ‘Education for Action’, explores this educational work done by GIRES.
Catering for an increasingly online world, the charity created numerous e-learning resources. In 2010 TranzWiki was set up, creating a directory of trans and gender diverse groups throughout the UK. GIRES also worked with the Tavistock and Portman clinics, and in 2004 was asked to organise an international symposium on hormone treatments for young people, funded by the Nuffield Foundation. Whether in the children’s books produced on trans identity, or the Legacy of Kindness project itself, education remained a central principle of the charity’s work, as it does today.
Bernard Reed OBE
We've done some quite distinctive things; eLearning, TranzWiki, education, a lot of training with employers, and traveling around the country a lot to do that.
Persia West
What I really respected about GIRES was the fact that they're always there. I couldn't believe it, they were always there. Whatever it was, they were there.
Susie Green
They would talk through their general training that they did, they’d talk about pronouns, they talked about sexual characteristics, and it was always a really popular talk for people.
Persia West
I also had a feeling that it was good that there were non-trans people doing training. Because if you're trans giving the training to a non-trans person, you don't know exactly where they're coming from, and what they want to hear, what they need to hear. But if you are not trans, and you have, as in their case, a trans daughter, I think they could then communicate to people sort of like themselves. But also, I just thought they were very professional, and put a lot of intelligent work into it, and I think it made a real difference.
Bernard Reed
GIRES then gradually got more influential, more money, did more training, got grants, began to do bigger pieces of work, set up a website, which was very important. And one year I went to a conference in London, where somebody from the Department for Communities and Local government says, “We're handing out grants.” So I applied for a grant to design an e-learning course. And they gave us the money. That was our first e-learning course - 2002, 2003.
Simona Giordano
The educational aspect of GIRES struck me early on, how they created their online courses. They were probably about the first to do that, and again, they showed how visionary they were.
Jenny-Anne Bishop OBE
Bernard in particular and us were involved with NHS Wales Equality and Human Rights Center. Everybody does Equality and Diversity course and one of the modules is the e-learning on trans. We got contacted by Manchester City Council and other councils to get involved in their diversity work with some of the hospitals in Manchester, with the CPS in Manchester. And eventually, with Greater Manchester Police we did much more work. And we were often using GIRES material.
Bernard Reed
Another thing that I thought was helpful would be to have a resource where groups could actually list themselves. We set up a thing called TranzWiki.
Sharon Smith
It's a network of groups and support networks. It's not just the trans and gender people themselves, it's like their families, their allies because some people are lost, and need a bit of help and support.
Amelia Lee
TranzWiki was to provide a really useful space where people could get non-biased information, they could get balanced information, they could get helpful information. It will have supported hundreds of trans people who just would find their reliable source of information there.
Mary Deans
GIRES isn't a campaigning organization. Our real focus is on research and turning that into training, which we can then put out to people. We're not going to be at the forefront of campaigns, although we do support other organisations who may be driving those. We're happy to put our name to letters to the Government, the Equalities and Human Rights people and other campaigns about the way that people are treated.
Susie Green
So in terms of Mermaids’ involvement with GIRES,we worked quite closely together. I attended quite a few conferences over the years for Mermaids. I also relied upon GIRES so when we were dealing with queries coming in from families and young people with regards to access to bathrooms and to sports and changing rooms, I found Bernard and Terry to be incredibly helpful and they supported Mermaids many, many times with advice around what obligations schools had towards young people, especially after the 2010 Equality Act.
Amelia Lee
It was useful for us as youth workers and also for the youth workers in the network, to get really a policy update from Bernard and Terry, so they were very often saying, “We've been at this thing with the Royal College of GPS, we've been at this thing with the Royal College of Psychiatrists, there's this article that's come out in the Lancet.” They were able to provide a bit of insight into what was going on, a little bit behind closed doors, but when there was policy work in the making,
Jayne Ozanne
I front a major campaign to try and ban what we call conversion therapy. I'd overseen some research in 2018 where we'd looked at the impact on sexuality and sexual orientation of religious teaching. But our research advisors have told us to try and separate sexual orientation from gender identity, it was very difficult to actually put a questionnaire together that could unpack the differences. And in 2020, I brought together GIRES and Mermaids and the LGBT Foundation and Stonewall to work with me on a piece of research that we could do amongst the trans community to understand whether people have been through conversion therapy, what form that had taken, what impact that had had on them. At that time very closely with Bernard and Terry and I must admit, just thank God for Terry's patience with me, I learned so, so much in terms of us having to word the questionnaire correctly, but perhaps most importantly, when we started getting the results and trying to be able to interpret them and speak about them in a way that correctly reflected the trans community's concerns and needs.
Amelia Lee
I was part of working with Terry to lobby places like the Royal College of GPs to try and resolve this issue around access to blockers, around the role of the Tavistock and that it wasn't really fit for purpose anymore given the exponential growth in young people seeking trans healthcare and support, and trying to push for greater access to hormone blockers, free at source on the NHS. And then a few years ago, we all sort of came together GIRES, Gendered Intelligence, the Proud Trust and other groups to look at the Gender Recognition Act and give feedback on how it could be improved.
Bernard Reed
We stayed very close to Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, which had a child service, I think it was set up in 1999. And we could see that if you get things right for people when they were young, it would improve their life chances forever. So we tried very hard to work with the Tavistock and Portman and got so close and they did ask us to set up an international symposium where they actually bring people from around the world to talk about hormone treatments for young people. We took on the job of arranging it, so we got funding from the Nuffield Foundation and had to bring people from all over the world, put them up in London for a four day conference. And they came and they worked together, developed a position paper at the end of it. But, through it all, the British physicians just weren't cooperating.
Simona Giordano
I was working as a bioethicist, which is a mix between medical ethics and medical law. My supervisor was asked to participate in a conference organised by GIRES to discuss the ethical and legal issues around the provision of puberty blockers. This was back in 2005. My boss could not go and asked me if I wanted to go instead. Even working as a medical ethicist, I was completely unaware of this issue. This was a small issue that apparently affected 40 or 50 children a year, nobody was really interested in that. And I think Terry and Bernard were keen that someone who specialized in medical ethics and law would take an interest. And I was very interested. So it was like a marriage nearly at first sight with them.
Emma Cusdin
GIRES were funding the translations for the WPATH standards of care. And I thought that was just great, because that's about getting medical help to people in local languages. And Terry wrote the article for The Lancet, which again, was just a landmark article in terms of their view. I know that they were on the user group for the gender identity clinics and were clashing often with some of the clinicians around the care they should give. In addition to all the workplace training, doing some e-learnings, doing the e-learning for the GPS, because there was nothing for the GPs, through to the daily cause of helping people whenever they needed help.
Professor Stephen Whittle OBE
I went to endless meetings in which people were from GIRES were: with politicians with doctors, you know. So Terry and I sat on NHS England's Strategic Commissioning Committee, and spent three years of our lives bashing out a way of commissioning services for trans people for them to have the whole thing turned over by because the doctors walked in and said, “We're not going to do any of that.” That was the sort of experience you have. I mean, I would say we lost much more than we ever won. But we won enough.
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.