Cuntysnark Its seems it should be ok to be a 'bolshie bastard' & 'feisty', even to 'fight back against injustice'. After all wouldn't it be rather sexist of Whittle if women were not allowed to do as Whittle has done?
2007 Guardian, Higher Education Profile.
'Stephen Whittle: Body of work
The law lecturer tells Chris Arnot how being a transsexual has put him at the forefront of a political movement'
(extract)
"Stephen Whittle knew from an early age that he wanted to teach. He also knew that he wanted to be a man. There was one rather fundamental problem, however. He had been born female. "I imagined myself becoming one of those spinsterish teachers I'd read about in Bunty, in tweed skirts and twin sets," he grins, discreetly dabbing cappuccino froth from his slightly greying beard.
We are in a bar in his home city, just over the road from Manchester Metropolitan University where he is now Stephen Whittle OBE, professor of equalities law. The woman he once was has gone forever. "When I look in the mirror," he says, "I can't conceive of my old self. In fact, I can't bring myself to mention her name - even to my kids, and they're dying to know." (continues)
"At one time, we transsexuals were what other people wiped off the bottom of their shoes," he says. This is a man who knows what it's like to lose jobs on the basis of what he is rather than what he could do, a former self-employed builder who took a part-time law degree to further his business interests and then discovered that he could use the law to "fight back", as he puts it, against the injustices he feels have dogged him for most of his life. This is a husband and father who went as far as the European Court of Human Rights so that his long-term partner could be impregnated through artificial insemination and his name could be on their children's birth certificate.
"I'm just a bolshie bastard with an overwhelming desire for equality" and justice," he says" (continues)
It seems unlikely that his father would have been as generous, had he still been alive. He was a representative of the old Britain, the old Manchester. "He was very much of the view that girls were girls and women were women," says Whittle. "I remember being on a holiday when I was about 13 and he hit my mother because she came out of the caravan wearing slacks and refused to change back into a dress."
By that time, the family were beginning to prosper, moving to middle-class Withington from the council estate of Wythenshawe. Whittle Sr, having fallen into a vat of dye at a chemical depot, was offered the choice of compensation or a desk job. He took the desk job and, despite being barely literate, discovered a hidden talent for technical drawing. Eventually he became manager of the plant, while his wife became a medical secretary at the Christie hospital. The middle of five children, Whittle envied his brothers but inherited his parents' drive to get on. In later life, that drive was fed by the generous doses of testosterone he persuaded his GP to prescribe. "I became quite feisty," he admits." (continues)
As an aside its interesting to note his connections with Wythenshawe and The Christie. These are notable with regards where fellow law graduate Tara Hewitt has had influence. UHCM being in Wythenshawe Manchester
There are quite a few links between the two trans-activists
I wonder if Professor Whittle has been a mentor to Tara Hewitt?
www.theguardian.com/society/2007/apr/17/socialcare.highereducationprofile