Guardian 2013 article about formation of Press For Change includes interviews with Stephen Whittle, Christine Burns, Paris Lees, Sarah Brown, James Barrett
(extract
"Whittle, who "transitioned" nearly 40 years ago, was one of three trans men and three trans women who did an unusual thing in 1992: they went to meet Liberal Democrat MP Alex Carlile in Westminster. The unusual element was not the meeting but the fact that they travelled together – at the time, trans people never dared to because it increased the likelihood that they would be spotted and abused. These six wanted to start a campaign group; Carlile advised them to avoid the word "transsexual". So, in Grandma Lee's teashop opposite Big Ben, an anodyne name, Press for Change, was chosen."
The 80s, remembers Whittle, had been "dreadful years". As soon as his trans status was discovered he would be sacked; it was the same for every trans person. At the job centre, the adviser would call out, "Miss Stephen Whittle". At his teacher-training medical, the doctor told him they couldn't have "his sort" in teaching. "It was very, very hard, not just on us but on the people we fell in love with and lived with. We felt like we could never, ever win this battle. All these years on, we have sort of won the battle."
For decades, Ashley's life itself was a source of some of these battles, as one of the few widely known transsexuals in Britain alongside Jan Morris, who completed her transition in 1974. The annulment of Ashley's marriage to the Hon Arthur Corbett (in court he was judged "deviant"; she "a man") in 1970 was a humiliation for Ashley and a great setback for trans people because it was established that a person must remain their birth gender in law. Before that, trans people were furtively altering their birth certificates, or passports, and accessing medical treatment.
Christine Burns is one of a generation who vividly remembers reading about Ashley in the papers when she was a young child. (Ashley appeared in a six-week special in the News of the World: "They were one of the very few who paid me and they behaved impeccably. I was very sad when the News of the World closed," says Ashley.) The existence of someone like her in the public eye was a great comfort for Burns. In the 90s, when she was chair of the Women's Supper Club of the local Conservative party association in Cheshire, she quietly joined Press for Change. Even then, the new activists dared not be openly trans. "The thing that held us back in the 1990s campaigning was that fear of being out," admits Burns. Eventually, she came out in 1995; she jokes that she realised she was more embarrassed to be a member of the Conservative party than openly transsexual.
Much of their campaigning remained on the quiet. The passage of the 2004 law to give trans people legal status was "remarkable," says Burns, because "the government was able to pass an entire act in parliament without anyone throwing a fit in the press". In popular culture, the activists became more forthcoming in their attempts to increase popular understanding of trans issues." (continues)
www.theguardian.com/society/2013/jan/22/voices-from-trans-community-prejudice