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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 2: Trans at Work
This episode, ‘Trans at Work’, looks at trans people in employment, and how the charity’s efforts have sought to change patterns of discrimination.
Being trans at work has historically been difficult, sometimes even impossible. The extent of discrimination brought up in the interviews might be surprising, but this stemmed from a lack of employment rights. Over time, employment rights for trans people were gradually acquired and confirmed through a number of court cases. GIRES itself was in large part born out of Bernard and Terry Reed’s involvement with their own daughter’s employment discrimination case against Chessington World of Adventures in 1997. Within this difficult environment of job insecurity, GIRES worked to combat workplace ignorance, producing training resources for employers. Trans employment research was funded by the charity including Professor Stephen Whittle’s report on a 2000 survey on trans employment discrimination.
Yet, in spite of the work done, continued efforts to combat workplace discrimination remain vital.
Jenny-Anne Bishop OBE
In the seventies, eighties, and the early nineties, being trans was really dangerous, you'd lose your job, you'd find it very hard to get work again. And I'd a family to support.
Sandra Jane Donaldson
In 1980s, when I first started considering, I spoke to a specialist, who claimed to be a specialist, paid some money for her opinion. Which was, “That's fine. Physically there will be no problem in your gender transition. But you will render yourself unemployable. Unemployable.”
Professor Stephen Whittle OBE
“You did a wonderful job, you were marvelous, you are absolutely fantastic. We couldn't have asked for anybody better to do this job. But we can't possibly employ somebody like you.” And you know, it's like, just take my heart out and throw it away in the bin, you know. ‘Cause that's what you're doing, every time you do that. I ended up doing jobbing work on everything from building sites to little bits of bookkeeping.
Natasha
Unfortunately, a job that I had for nearly a decade I had to leave again. Then I had to discover all the funs of trying to find new work as a freshly hatched trans woman who was experiencing massive amounts of social anxiety.
Jenny-Anne Bishop
Over the years, I lost my job five times for being trans in my private life, which was crazy. My private life had got nothing to do with my job performance. In fact, most of the time, if I had time to be myself, I was less stressed and did a better job. And that was my life up until around the early 90s, when I lost my job yet again for being trans. And I was very sad, because I got paid well, I got big bonuses, I had a nice expenses account, a very nice car. And all that went and my salary in the next job was less than a third of what I'd been earning.
Stephen Whittle
One of the things that had happened to me was I worked at the university. My boss had pulled me up one day and said What the fuck is wrong with you? You're a really good worker., but you are all over the show. Then I burst into tears and said, “I really want to have a sex change. I'm seeing this doctor. He says he won't give me anything until I have been working for three months as a man. You know, I've got this name, Stephen, I've done all that. But he won't let me do it.” Ray just looked at me and said, “Is that it?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Okay, we'll get that sorted.” He said, “Right, now, let me see. If you take the next fortnight off, just go on holiday, I'll give me some compassionate leave or something and I will sort this out.” And he did. He told the technicians I worked with that it was going to happen, they were going to have to get used to it and they were going to have to practice saying “Good morning, Stephen,” before I went back in because he was not going to tolerate any shite basically.
Zoe Playdon
My line manager said, “Well, no one has done this kind of work so well for me ever before, would you consider working for us at the same salary, but just doing three days a week? I'll pay all of your travel, all of your accommodation, all of your expenses if you'll just do us another year, for three days a week.” And I said to him, “Well, you know yes, by all means, but you do need to know.” And I explained that, you know, I would be medically transitioning at the end of that year. And, although at the time he said, “Oh, that's nothing to me, I employ you for your brains, not your body,” later in court, he said that it was like a bombshell. I was terribly well known, and so you know, it was actually very difficult to get another job. And of course, you try all of the strategies, you try telling the truth, people just look appalled, you try saying nothing and halfway through the interview, someone starts to read the CV finally. It's hopeless, so I had to move to a sector where I was completely unknown, did another doctorate to support that shift, was at the time of the case, managing, just about getting by.
Terry Reed OBE
Our daughter, when it came to her work situation, was in such a vulnerable position, in a very macho environment. But the policies at the time, and still to a certain extent, are that you go public at work, and everywhere else. And she was obliged to do that, she was obliged to go public. I tried to work with the company in the initial stages, we then went into this saga of things that happened to her that went on over several years. She was in a team of seventeen young men, and over a period of time, they tampered with the brakes on her motorbike, they put a razor blade under the handle of her car door, they spray painted her clothes with obscenities, and they stole her tools, they put used tampax on her work station, and they refused to work with her which in the end turned out to be the worst possible thing because she was working doing this heavy lifting of stuff and she had injuries which prevented her working. Eventually she became a permanent wheelchair user. Before the case was taken, we knew that the case going through Europe was very important, and that just immediately preceded ours. It was a groundbreaking finding. What it actually demonstrated was that following the then recent finding in Europe, that our own law, the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act, actually applied not only to sexual orientation, but also to gender identity. And this is applied not only in public organizations, but in private organizations.
Stephen Whittle
Employment came out as the number one issue for people, because you have to pay for so much of your services that you accessed and your treatment. If you didn't have a job, you became completely socially isolated, you'd often lost your family and your home. You moved into a strange place and nobody wanted to make friends with you because you looked weird, so you became totally socially isolated. You couldn't pay for your treatment, and you basically sank into poverty and destitution pretty quickly.
Christl Hughes
Through the website, we got all sorts of queries, usually about employment. “Can they refuse to employ me because I'm trans?” The answer to that is no. But, equally, there is a very high proportion of trans people who would like to work, not finding work.
Sharon Smith
I've come to learn how tough it is for trans people to come out at work. And for them to go about their working daily business and just be themselves. And, you know, there’s so much ignorance out there.
Mary Deans
I'd spoken to people at work about transitioning. And we decided it will be easier if there was some training at work to explain about trans people, and about what I was going to be doing. I'd heard of this organization, GIRES charity. So I got into contact with them, went down to see Bernard and Terry and they agreed that they'll be able to do some training where I was working, and they came and did a session for management and a session for employees, and they helped me through my transition at work.
Emma Cusdin
Inside of work, I was still male expressing. I got to March 2010, thinking I need to do this, because I'm actually becoming a bit schizophrenic. You know, I'm two people. So I carefully planned what I was going to do, which was went back onto the GIRES website, printed off the transitioning at work guide, I'd equally found a lawyer just to get them on standby, just in case the conversation didn't go very well. Took my line manager out to lunch, I had a glass of wine for Dutch courage, and I told him the news. His response will stay with me forever, which was, “Just tell us what we can do to help and support.” I said, “That's brilliant. That's exactly what I want to hear.” I gave him the GIRES guide. I said, “Look, this might help.” Next morning, he came in and he said, “I've read the guide, that was super helpful. So let's talk about when are you thinking of expressing Emma? When do you want to come into work? How are we going to make this work?” And so together we worked on a plan. So the guide really helped.
Stephen Whittle
I revisited the employment issues through surveys and interviews. And it was very interesting really because we have seen a change, people were more likely to be employed, found it easier to have employment, but you'd see the significant shift of people who have been in the private sector move to the public sector. Why? Well, because trade unions, who took a welfarist approach, particularly in local authorities, were really up on, you know, inclusion. You saw people who were really big in industry move out into much lower paid local authority jobs because they were safe there.
Pips Bunce
I'm working in the financial services market, the trading floor, you know, typically a very aggressive environment that's not typically viewed as the most inclusive. It took me a long, long time before I felt safe and ready to sort of come out in the corporate workspace. I always kept the corporate part of myself a facade and not totally authentic and not totally out. I'd reached a point in my life where I thought that wasn't acceptable, I didn't feel the need to do that. And, you know, more so I felt that society had progressed to a point where there was better understanding of a wider set of trans identities. It took a while in my head before I started to see society at least beginning to comprehend and consider some of the different identities.
Emma Cusdin
In 2014, I had been in conversation with a couple of trans and non-binary people in London. We knew there was a networking group in London for those working in different professions. But typically, if you went to one of those networking events, you were the only trans person there. And I remember speaking to Bernard and Terry saying, “What should I do?” And they said “Put something on.” We put on a first event for trans and non-binary professionals in London, to come together as a networking group. We formed an organisation called Transformation, we started to get companies coming to us saying, “We want to put training on for trans and non-binary inclusion in the workplace. Would you be interested in providing it?” Without any hesitation, Bernard’s saying, “How can we help in GIRES? We can put you under the GIRES umbrella, we can have you as part of our family, we can refer work to each other.” And I just thought that was just amazing and awesome. I still do to this day.
Pips Bunce
We do so much now, whether it's education, podcasts, courageous conversations, celebrating the different days, really elevating role models within the firm that have come out as trans and gender non-conforming, and using as much of that to really make visible across the entire company and also outside the firm.
Ash Hayhurst
Working with GIRES has been this giant surprise where I've enjoyed doing things I never thought I would enjoy doing. And I've felt like just so validated. And it took me a long time to realise that a lot of this is because being trans isn't an issue, because it's GIRES. So when you remove all of that stress, always feeling like you're going to be questioned or people are going to be curious about you, you remove all of that and then you find out that actually you can do a lot more than what you think you can do. It just feels very affirming. Very exciting.
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.