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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 4: Policy Over Politics
This episode explores the political work done by GIRES throughout its history.
Niki Reed’s employment tribunal case against Chessington World of Adventures in 1997 was a significant court case for trans rights, but it was not the first. In 1996, the landmark case of P vs S and Cornwall County Council was tried in the European Court of Justice.These employment discrimination cases laid the groundwork for future trans justice. The nineties also saw the movement towards trans-inclusive policy. Lynne Jones MP and Dr Jane Playdon established the Parliamentary Forum on Transsexualism in 1994, which Terry Reed became involved in soon after meeting Jones. The name later changed to the Parliamentary Forum on Gender Identity, reflecting the changing language of trans at the time. These end-of-century developments created space for the work of charities like GIRES, and paved the way for the 2004 Gender Recognition Act. However, this episode makes clear the extent of progress in trans rights ebbs and flows.
Dinah Rose KC, President of Magdalen College, Oxford
What I remember about the case at the beginning was that Niki was a young transgender woman who was working for Chessington World of Adventures as a rides technician and she had been working there before she transitioned. And she transitioned while she was working at Chessington. She was quite a vulnerable person in many ways, and after she transitioned, she was subjected to appalling abuse and harassment. And I was asked to bring an employment tribunal case to hold her employers liable for the harassment that she had suffered because she was transgender. At that time, there was very little case law on the employment rights of trans people.
Zoe Playdon
In 1996, there was a major judgment by the European Court of Justice, in a case called P versus S and Cornwall County Council, which restored employment rights to trans people in public sector bodies for the first time. I was P, the applicant for the case. It was a struggle and we were going from absolutely nowhere and then suddenly, we had these great springboards, suddenly we won P - that was astonishing. The Advocate General Giosepe Tesoro, he was astonishing. It was his opinion that was just life changing. You know, he talked about the fundamental and inalienable value that is equality. He shifted from being simply a legal decision to an ethical and moral decision. And then it was wonderful that having just leapt up with P, we had Bernard and Terry to take that forward almost immediately into the private sector. And, of course, we had the Parliamentary Forum with all of the civil servants there from the department and were able to work with them to write new regulations for employment and so on and so forth.
Terry Reed OBE
I was invited to go to Parliamentary Forum and Parliamentary Forum was chaired by Dr. Lynn Jones.
Lynne Jones
I think was about ‘94, I'd been an MP for a couple of years, I held regular surgeries. One Friday night, somebody came to see me. He wanted to assure himself that everything was confidential, which I said it was and then he said he would come back next week with his partner to discuss her issues. And the following week, he did indeed return with another woman called Jane. And she was actively involved in trans issues. They told me about the man's partner's experiences. She was very successful at work. But she was under constant fear that if, for some reason, she had to show her birth certificate, which would identify her as having been born male, then she could lose her job, and it was a constant fear for her. So I wrote to the relevant government minister in the Department of Employment, who told me that of course, it was perfectly reasonable for somebody to be sacked, were it to be identified that they were trans. That's how it started. And then with Jane, we set up the Parliamentary Forum. We had, you know, very, very experienced and knowledgeable people involved. And we set about with the work trying to change the law, and to get respect and equal treatment for trans people.
Alice Ramsay
My involvement with an organisation called the Parliamentary Forum on Gender Identity came about through GIRES. Terry thought that it might be helpful to have someone involved in the discussions that were had in that group that had an understanding of equality law and employment law, and some of the practicalities involved if the person wished to bring a legal challenge, whether that's in a discrimination setting, workplace, or in a school environment, or in the context of accessing healthcare services, or the criminal justice system. A forum for discussions allows people who might not have previously met a trans person or who might not have understood what might it feel like to be married to someone and to have to dissolve that marriage in order for you to live in your affirmed gender identity.
Christl Hughes
If you were married, your spouse was able to say, “No, you can't have a Gender Recognition Certificate.” What happens in Scotland is that you are allowed to apply for Gender Recognition Certificate and get it and then your spouse receives a letter saying you have transitioned. And if you don't like it, please complain, and no one ever has.
Alice Ramsay
One of the examples where the Equality Act was actually more helpful for trans people was that it ended the requirement to be under medical supervision, to be protected by the anti-discrimination provisions. So transition was seen as a more social process, and a more individual personal process than under the previous law, where to be protected against discrimination, for example in the workplace, or in accessing services, you would have had to have been under some form of medical supervision.
George Barrow
My first real contact, proper contact in the trans world was when I was asked to do a piece of work for the Ministry of Justice, which was to rewrite the transgender policy around the care and management of offenders in 2016. And it was the most rewarding and interesting piece of policy work that I was given in my whole career. So one of the first things that happened was that a member of MOJ staff contacted me and said, you know, “Do you want to have a chat about trans?” And I said, “Yeah,” you know, because I hadn't really thought about it. And so I met this colleague, went for a coffee. It was a young trans woman who hadn't transitioned at work, who was coming into work as a man. And then at the weekend, was running a kind of trans support program for young trans people close to where they lived as a woman. We had about two hours together where she went through her story, her transition, but also went through just some of the basic things that people might not immediately understand about being trans from the practical stuff, you know, driving licenses and bank accounts into how to change your gender identity at work. That was probably one of the kind of most profoundly instructive sessions I've had a policy maker.
Natasha
The Justice Department was putting out new guidelines for the welfare of trans people in prison, and I did consult on the 2016 guidelines while I was with Trans Leeds. And prisons are a really, really difficult place for making trans inclusive for two main reasons. One is that it is one of the most heavily gender segregated places you can have. And also they're high security areas. So it makes it really difficult to try and make it trans inclusive, especially when you take into account the needs of non-binary people. Then around 2015, there was a string of suicides in prison, and that made the Justice Department think, okay, we really need to look at this. At the time, the only way that a trans person would be able to go to a prison that matches their gender would be if they've had a Gender Recognition Certificate. And the Justice Department realized that this is inadequate, and we need to be doing more to look after trans people while they are within prison. So they put out the 2016 guidelines, which I think were probably the best that they could really do at the time, and then, sadly, there was an incident at a prison where a trans woman had assaulted another woman in prison while they were in a woman's prison. And the Justice Department decided that: okay, we're getting a lot of backlash for this now, we're going to have to revise our policies. And they didn't do any consultation on this, they just decided in 2019 okay, these are the new policies, and they're going to come into effect as of December 2019. It was a massive step backwards. The policy made it out that trans people were an inherent risk to other prisoners on account of them being trans. It's a real shame that this policy came out without any consultation.
Lynne Jones
Eventually, regulations did come in to stop discrimination in the workplace, not because the Labour government was willing to do it, but because people took their cases to court at the European Court of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights. I felt really angry with the Government for the attitudes that were displayed, and the way that was a real fight to actually get any change.
Amelia Lee
In terms of policy and change, in terms of government, there's been real peaks of activity, there's been really strong connections to certain individuals, be that ministers or civil servants, but it's a very fickle space, and you know, we've lost a lot of more moderate voices. We will have to see how it plays out in the long run. But right now, it doesn't feel like a lot of that policy is progressive, it actually feels like it's quite regressive. So there's also been this very big backlash against trans rights, which has been like a tsunami.
Cat Burton
On the evidence of research, we foster education, and we will engage in attitude changing, but at a very, very high level. So we're not trying to campaign in the public eye to change the minds of the general public. We're not an organisation which seeks to campaign to change the minds of local GPs. But we are an organisation which sets out to speak to the NHS and to change the policies of the NHS, to speak to government and change the policies of government. I gave more than a dozen briefings to English MPs last year, all to do with the Gender Recognition Act reform. That's the sort of campaigning that we do. We talk to people in power and we make a difference, but we don't wave placards.
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.