To be fair, I think the refusal to admit homosexual cross dressers was motivated by the law, rather than explicit homophobia.
AGPs were historically envious of HSTS types anyway, who tended to pass better/be full time younger, so the rule probably helped club cohesion.
Now that trans has exploded and rigorous psychiatric assessment pre diagnosis no longer exists, not everyone fits as neatly into the old AGP/HSTS categories.
I posted this link on another thread yesterday - it’s a dissertation written by a student who spent time attending Northern Concorde, which was the Manchester equivalent of the Beaumont society. It clearly illustrates how club members divided themselves into two categories, something that continues today, only now it’s tucute/truscum instead of TV/TS.
I can’t see a date on the dissertation but it looks like the other uploads on the site are from 2003-2005, so it must be from around then.
Manchester has had a TV/TS club since the late 60s and Stephen Whittle was a founding member. At some point the club became formalised as Northern Concord and then there was a split with the town centre weekly meeting becoming Manchester Concord and Northern Concord continuing to do weekly weekends a couple of time a year. The weekend event ‘Sparkle’ came out of Concord (kind of like a trans pride party - no parade - that predates the T officially being added to the LGB - Whittle is a patron of the Sparkle charity: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkle_(charity)
I suspect that in the early days, Whittle was the go between who linked Beaumont and the Manchester group. As we know, Whittle went on to found Press for Change and Gires and was instrumental in getting the original 2004 Gender Recognition Act.
News article on Whittle’s marriage (2005): www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/sex-swap-stephen-is-married-at-last-1073932
I don’t think the MCR group ever had rules about gay members, but then they did move the meetings from the university to Canal Street, so I presume they relied on the safety-in-numbers protection of the gay community. They provided changing rooms so members could arrive in ‘drab’ (the opposite of drag). I would imagine that the vast majority were always heterosexual cross dressers (because HSTS types are rarer anyway, and because fully transitioned people who actually passed usually ‘graduated’ from these kinds of clubs, no longer needing them).
Manchester Concord was wound up recently after the ‘Hostess’, known as Mary passed away. They still have a Facebook group and there are posts about how the internet seems to have negated the need for traditional style support groups and that new people attending towards the end seem to be ‘genderqueer’ rather than old style TV/TS types. I rather assumed that to mean that they disapprove of the bearded Alex Drummond types 😂
Mary kept a weekly blog about who attended MCR Concord for over ten years. It’s recently been archived here:
manchesterconcord.wordpress.com/category/mblog/
(Source: At two points in my life I have been part of artsy/underground social groups that mixed with/shared venues with lots of TV/TS people. The first time was Brighton 1998ish and the second Manchester 2009ish. It was only in Manchester that I first met a transman.
When I first heard about the current trans encroach on women’s rights debates I refused to engage with it due to knowing far more trans people than is likely average. It was only when my teenage son came home with tons of misinformation from school about sex being a social construct that I asked Uncle Google and went through the Mumsnet radicalisation portal)
Battery dying, no time to proofread!