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Showing posts with label Russell Reid patient. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russell Reid patient. Show all posts

10 September 2018

Stuart Lorimer on the Charing Cross GIC

Articles on the Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic (GIC)

Part I: 1818-1982
Part II: 1983-now
Part III. Addendum
Part IV. Stuart Lorimer


Stuart Lorimer (born late 1960s) qualified as a doctor at Aberdeen Medical School, with a distinction in psychiatry. He has been involved with the Charing Cross GIC since 2002.

Lorimer has provided a history of the Charing Cross GIC, with emphasis on his own involvement.
  • Dr Stuart Lorimer. “1966 and All That: The History of Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic”. In Christine Burns’ Trans Britain: Our Journey from the Shadows, Unbound, 2018: 51-67.
I have also written a history of the Charing Cross GIC – see the links above. My emphasis is different, discusses more of the patients, and starting much earlier in time. I have adjusted my account slightly, especially in the most recent years with input from Lorimer’s account.

There are two points in his account, however, that I would like to examine closely.


1966 and all that.


British persons over a certain age will immediately recognise the title as a riff on the 1930 classic satire by WC Sellar & RY Yeatman: 1066 and all that, which was published in 1930 and is a satire on how English history was taught at that time. How many readers under 40 would get the allusion is an open question as the content of history courses has changed so much. Peter Hitchins in his The Abolition of Britain says “A modern child, shown Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 and All That, simply wouldn’t get the joke. You cannot laugh at this satire on forgetfulness and confusion unless you, too, share the experience of misunderstanding and mixing up the Wars of the Roses, Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck and the rest. You cannot even be enjoyably confused or forgetful about something which you never even knew in the first place.”

However the important question is what did happen at the CX-GIC in 1966 such that Lorimer and others assume that 1966 was the founding of the clinic, despite it being in operation since the 1930s under a different name.

In Part I of my account, I commented at the end: “The WLMHT GIC web site says: “The West London Gender Identity Clinic at Charing Cross Hospital (CX GIC) is the largest and oldest clinic of its type, dating back to 1966.” But what happened in 1966? Lennox Broster’s work with intersex persons dates back to the 1930s, and John Randell’s with transvestites and transsexuals dates to the 1950s. On the other hand the 1969 symposium reported ‘there is as yet no permanent gender identity unit’.” Lorimer’s account does not answer this.

Lorimer twice mentions 1966. On p53 he writes: “Randell was nonetheless a trailblazer, the originator, in 1966, of one of the largest and oldest trans treatment centres in the world”. On p56 he writes of Harry Benjamin: “Distinguishing his patients from transvestites (a term not coined until Benjamin was twenty-five), he opened the doors of his first proper clinic in 1966, the same year as Randell’s GIC at Charing Cross”. Neither of these assertions answers my questions. What did Randell do in 1966 that is taken as founding the clinic that he had been running since 1950, and was such that three years later in 1969 it was said that reported “there is as yet no permanent gender identity unit”.

(Note also that Lorimer is of the school that insists on ignoring the facts and claiming that Hirschfeld coined ‘transvestism’ despite it being in use from the 16th century and that the Paris Police had been issuing permissions de transvestissement since 1800.)


Russell Reid


Complaints were made against Russell Reid in 2004, and in 2007 there was an investigation by the General Medical Council that led to his resignation. Lorimer mentions this on p62, but does not list the doctors who made the complaint. Here is the list from David Batty’s article "GMC inquiry into gender change expert" in The Guardian, 20 January 2004: “Donald Montgomery, James Barratt, and Richard Green …. Together with Stuart Lorimer, a senior registrar at the clinic, they allege Dr Reid has repeatedly breached guidelines”.


Now of course in 2004, Lorimer had been at Charing Cross only two years, and was the most junior of the four doctors mentioned. However it is naughty (to use a mild term) of him not to mention that he was one of the four doctors.
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04 September 2015

Donna Gee (1949–) sports writer, journalist

Gerry Greenberg was raised by a Jewish family in Caerphilly, Wales. His mother died of polio when he was six, and he was then sent to boarding school until father remarried.

His first job at age 16 was with the Pontypridd Observer weekly newspaper, where he gave singer Tom Jones his first write-up. He married and they had two daughters.
"I was in denial in public, but privately became a woman at any opportunity. I kept a bag of [women's] clothes in the garden shed that I took with me on assignment, and would dress up in the privacy of hotel rooms. Even though I knew there were many others like me out there, I was paranoid about being caught."
One time in the 1970s, Gerry's wife dressed him up as a woman for fun, but realized that it turned him on. She went to the doctor, and said that he was gay. They did not talk about it again for many years.

Gerry worked for the Express newspapers until 1976 when he moved to Manchester to work for the Jewish Chronicle and the Manchester Jewish Gazette. He then became part of the team that launched the new tabloid paper, The Daily Star in 1978 (again an Express newspaper), which was designed to use spare capacity on the Manchester presses. Gerry became the Star's rugby correspondent.

In 1992 Gerry wrote England Rugby star Wade Dooley's autobiography.

In 1997 Gerry searched 'transgender' and 'Manchester' on the Internet and found a local group. Regular e-mail exchanges followed until Gerry's wife noticed, and when she realized what was going on, she gave him a spare lipstick. Together they attended meetings and socials for trans people.
"It was stressful being two people. In time, I realized that my ultimate dream was to become a woman".
Greenberg's boss found out from an anonymous e-mail in 1999. A rumour went around that a sub-editor was changing. A betting book was opened on the identity.
"If only I’d known I was listed as a 40-1 outsider, my winnings could have paid for my surgery!"
After an initial consultations with Russell Reid,    Gerry wrote to workmates while on holiday in Israel, and became Donna Gee. The daughters, now in their thirties were accepting as were the five grandchildren.

Donna worked as a sub-editor for Metro, and the northern sports desk of The Sunday People. She had full sex affirmation in 2003. She also had electrolysis, breast augmentation, a facelift, her adam’s apple reduced and an eye lift in her quest to be a proper female. In all she paid £25,000.

In 2006 Donna and wife retired to Spain, although still doing work for papers in Manchester and Israel. They initially told the neighbours in Spain that they were cousins, but the kids visited and the neighbours asked which one was the mother to which and it became easier to tell the truth which was accepted.

She is working on her own autobiography.
GrumpyOldGran   LinkedIn    ScribblingInTheSun
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22 March 2014

Jessica Diana Bussert (1965 - ) network specialist, photographer.

Joshua Bussert grew up in the US Mid-west. He married his girlfriend at 18 when she became pregnant. In 1985 he studied data processing at Vincennes University, Indiana. He was also seeing a counselor to overcome his desire to be a woman. He had three children with his first wife before they divorced.

Bussert converted to Catholicism, and then met Sharon, a born Catholic, who became his second wife in 1990, after being told of his cross-dressing. They raised the three children from his first marriage and adopted two sisters from Haiti. Bussert worked in business consulting and systems analysis for networks, went to the Kinsey Institute for counseling, and they found Gender Identity Dysphoria.
In 2001 Bussert started working for Hitachi Data Systems, and in 2003 started laser hair removal, and looked for a transsexual community, but being in the middle of Indiana found none. In addition a 19-year old transsexual was murdered locally with her body set on fire.

Bussert applied for a transfer to the UK branch of Hitachi. He was to be an IT techie and business manager at £88,000 a year. The supervisor was open-minded, but moved on soon after. In London Bussert met Russell Reid at a conference, became a patient of his and started taking female hormones, and going out as female more often. She socially transitioned 2005 with Facial Feminization Surgery and breast augmentation with Dr Douglas Ousterhout in San Francisco. Her new supervisor had responded to the mention of a sex change: “Don’t do that to me, Josh. I had to work in an office with someone who did that once and it was weird”.  By this time Russell Reid had been forced into retirement and Charing Cross Gender Clinic gave her a run-around.

Hitachi effectively demoted her and she was given a negative appraisal. She took sick leave for stress, returned and again went on sick leave. Hitachi stopped paying her salary and she resigned. Jessica sued for £500,000 in the UK and $3.6m in the US, but without success.

Since the Sex Discrimination (Gender Reassignment) Regulations 1999 it is clear that not only is it illegal to discriminate against transsexuals, but that this covers employees intending to undergo gender reassignment. However the Employment Tribunal in Reading dismissed Bussert's claims ruling that she had left the company of her own free will. Furthermore it found no fault with the way that Hitachi had handled the situation, and even commended Hitachi managers for displaying good management practice and embracing diversity.

As Bussert was no longer employed, the Home Office ruled that her permit to live in the UK was no longer valid, and Jessica and Sharon returned to Indiana.

They have since become award-winning photographers.
http://bussertimages.smugmug.com
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06 October 2011

Charles Kane (1960 - ) executive.

Sam Hashimi was born and raised in Zofaranaya, a suburb to the south of Baghdad. When the family was out, he would dress in his sister’s clothes, until caught by his brother. His one masculine interest at school was football. However he was perceived as feminine by the other boys, and started having sex with them in the passive role.

At age 16, he moved to England, took an National Diploma in engineering, in Swindon. He financed it by selling hot food at night from a van. He met a woman in a disco, and eventually married her in 1984 in a Anglican church in a village outside Swindon. They soon had two children. He launched two companies: one importing fruit and vegetables, and the other making computers.

He later met an Arabian sheikh and they created a property and investment company. This company thrived. Hashimi became known for negotiating on behalf of wealthy Arabs. He also ran a club and a restaurant in Mayfair. In 1990 he had the opportunity of investing in Manchester United Football Club, but was unable to raise the required ₤10 million in the specified 24 hours. Later the same year he launched an unsuccessful takeover bid for Sheffield United FC, at a time when foreign ownership of British football clubs was not done. The bid resulted in much publicity. It was discussed in the House of Commons, and the Saudi King expressed his disapproval. Coincidentally it came out that a Sheffield company was supplying materials for Iraq to build a ‘supergun’, and then Iraq invaded Kuwait. The deal was off; his major investor pulled out; Hashimi was bankrupt.

For the first time he told his wife that he was a woman trapped in a man’s body. She was at first sympathetic and helped him to cross-dress, but quickly segued to divorce, and, once she found another rich man to keep her, ousted Sam from the family home, and obtained injunctions to keep him from seeing the children. In violation of those injunctions he was arrested and served a few months in HMP Wormwood Scrubs.

During a subsequent period of depression and living at the Ealing YMCA, he started going to gay and trans clubs and was told how great it was to be a woman. He applied through his doctor to be evaluated by the Gender Identity Clinic at the Charing Cross Hospital. However the wait would be over a year, and if he were to become a woman he needed money.

Through his old contacts he was able to get restarted as a property refurbisher. In the course of that work he met an Israeli divorcee, and they became both business partners and spouses. However that was short lived, and a second divorce ensued.

He then contacted Dr Russell Reid and was accepted as a private transsexual patient.
"First of all, I thought I would I would do my nose to make it look more feminine. I had eye correction surgery to get rid of my glasses. Then I did my teeth to give me a better smile and I had electrolysis all round my face to remove the masculine beard. I had my Adam's apple removed and my vocal chords tightened. I had breast implants, all before the sex change surgery to remodel my genitalia".
Six months after first seeing Dr Reid, in December 1997 Samantha Kane had genital surgery with Michael Royle. She spent over £100,000 in total.

She had not seen her family for 10 years. She contacted them and, because of the situation in Iraq, they arranged to meet in Amman, Jordan. They did not know about her change until they actually met at Amman airport, but they did accept her.

Samantha wrote an autobiography in her first year, when she was trying to launch a football magazine to take advantage of the 1998 World Cup. She was even considered as chief executive at Sheffield United FC because of the possibility that she could attract supporters in Asia and the Middle East who would watch on subscription television. She built a new career in interior design, and lived an expensive life in London and Spain.

Within four years he regretted the mistake, as he missed being one of the boys talking football, business and girls.
"In fact, I found being a woman rather shallow and limiting. So much depends on your appearance, at the expense of everything else. I wasn't interested in shopping. My female friends would spend hours shopping for clothes, trying on different outfits. But having been a man I knew exactly what would suit me and appeal to men. I could walk into a shop and be out again in five minutes with the right dress. Nor have I ever been interested in celebrity magazines or the things that interest other women, but when I tried to talk to men about blokey things they didn't take me seriously.”
In 2004, after the collapse of her engagement to a wealthy landowner when it became apparent that he did not regard her as a ‘real’ woman, Kane decided that it had been a mistake, and as Charles Kane reverted to male. He complained, at the time that the Gender Recognition Bill was going through Parliament, to the General Medical Council that Russell Reid had been too easy in accepting him. Charles was referred to the Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic, and as a private patient spent a further £25,000 on breast removal and phalloplasty.
"After what I've been through, I now think that sex-change operations shouldn't be allowed. They should be banned. We live today in a consumerist society where we all believe we can have everything we want, but too much choice can be a dangerous thing."
Charles has prospered again in the property market, and is now living in a £2.6 million property in west London, and had recently announced his engagement to a 28-year-old woman. His son, now 25, has reconciled with his father. Charles has completed a novel, and is seeking funding for a
documentary on the “the Sex Change Delusion”.
“In many ways I see myself a victim of the medical profession. Even with the glamour of Samantha Kane and the £100,000 I spent on myself, I had people shouting abuse at me and builders throwing stones at me from rooftops.”
As Charles he was featured in a BBC documentary, 2004, and an ABC "Primetime Nightline" documentary in 2011.

++ In March 2017, in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail, Kane announced a return to being a woman, and a change of name to Sam Kane,
"The reversal operation did not return me to the man I once was, just an approximation.  With the exception of Victoria, I was rejected by both men and women. The original surgery was effectively irreversible. You can’t turn back into a man because whatever defines the male has been completely removed, so how can you bring it back?
‘I discovered to my detriment that there is only so far medical science can go.  As Charles, I still sometimes wanted to wear a blouse or a pretty ring, and wear my hair long.  Having become Samantha, I should have stayed Samantha. When I told Victoria how I was feeling, it effectively ended the relationship.  She said she preferred men and did not want to live with a woman, but we are still friends."

*Not the romance novelist, Samantha Kane, nor Charles Kane the protagonist in Citizen Kane, 1941, nor the character in Tomb Raider, nor the boxer, nor the President of One Laptop Per Child.

____________________________________________________________

I also had the surgery only six months after first meeting Russell Reid, but unlike
Hashimi/Kane I had by that point been on female hormones for some years, was living full-time as female and working as female.

Why is it that these who change back, then feel that they want to ban the operation for everyone?

What a pity that Samantha did not discover ways of being female, ways that are less shallow and consumer oriented. Nor did she figure out that being glamourous and passing are not the same thing.
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22 July 2010

Lynne Janine Braithwaite (1934 - 2008) Flight Sergeant, aircraft engineer.

Lawrence James Braithwaite was born in one of the Beatrix Potter Houses, and raised on the shore of Lake Windermere in the Lake District.

At age 15 he joined the Royal Air Force as a ‘Boy Entrant”. He was trained as an airframe mechanic. He married and he and his wife had two daughters and a son. He served 40 years in the RAF rising to Flight Sergeant. He served a year at RCAF Goose Bay in Labrador and three years with the USAF near Omaha, Nebraska.

His speciality was the maintenance of Vulcan bombers. In 1976 he was awarded the British Empire Medal. He left the Air Force in 1989, and was divorced three days later.

He remarried the same year and started a business making silver model aircraft which survived until the recession of 1992.

His second marriage ended in 1993, and in 1994, after consultaion with Russell Reid, Lawrence Became Lynne. She worked with Press for Change, and became the lay advisor on transgender issues to the Lancashire Constabulary. She was a consultant on rebuilding a Vulcan XH558 aircraft.

She died peacefully at age 74 at her home in Morecambe.

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25 June 2010

Stephanie Anne Booth (1946 - 2016) marketing executive, sex worker, business woman.

Keith Hull’s father spent ten years, including the Second World War hospitalized with what was finally diagnosed as ankylosing spondylitis, and was told that he would never work or even walk again. However when his wife became pregnant with Keith, he did find work, and eventually rose to being a production manager.

They lived in Harpenden, Hertfordshire. When Keith was seven, his parents became Jehovah’s Witnesses. Keith had frequent dreams of being a girl.  He was in a group of friends that dressed up which let him do some cross-dressing, and for two years had an arrangement with an adult woman who had him wash her naked body and dressed him as a girl. In teenage he was popular with girls, but preferred a platonic friendship with them. He left school with four O-Levels: his parents felt that further education was pointless as the end of the world was nigh.

At 21 he became a sales representative at Hoover, and fell in love and married Marylin. They had twin boys and then a girl. He was promoted to area manager and then to marketing. He became head of Saga DIY Retail and then sales and marketing director of Hestair Group (now part of Findel PLC) which specialized in educational supplies.

He was a workaholic and his home life deteriorated. Marylin persuaded him to see a doctor who hypnotized him with Marylin present, and she and the doctor decided that he was transsexual. Marylin dressed him in female clothes for the first time since childhood. He encouraged Marylin to take lovers, and became very depressed. He almost committed suicide.

He signed on with a new doctor (actually in the same practice as serial killer Dr Shipman), started on hormones and was referred to Dr Russell Reid at Charing Cross Hospital GIC. He hired a woman to coach him in femininity and deportment. His wife left taking the three children. He chose the name Stephanie Anne as his twin boys were named Stephen and Andrew, and chose Lloyd from his chequebook. At the end of 1983 at the age of 37, Keith left his job and returned early 1984 as Stephanie Anne Lloyd, having had surgery with Peter Philip.

One of the employees sold the story to The Daily Mirror, and Hestair was besieged by reporters. Stephanie was persuaded to resign. She signed over all her assets to Marylin and had left just her clothes and 78p. She quickly found that no company wanted to employ her despite her experience in marketing.

However she soon had two rich men after her, even after she told them of her past. The Elders of the Jehovah’s Witness summoned Keith and disfellowshipped him, which required that Stephanie’s parents regard her as dead.

She decided to open a retail business for transvestites, and advertised in the Manchester Evening News for business partners who would provide capital. The first partner was her femininity coach’s brother, and a second partner was David Booth who owned a chain of supermarkets with his wife.

They found a suitable property on Bury Old Road, Prestwich, Manchester. The business Transformation, opened in October 1984, catering as a beauty salon to women and also to male transvestites. Because the business was not doing so well, Stephanie, with the advice of a solicitor, sold herself as a prostitute in the upstairs flat, until subjected to a full-scale police raid. At the trial in December 1985, Stephanie was given a suspended sentence.

David’s wife divorced him, and David and Stephanie became lovers. They were married in Sri Lanka in 1986 as it was not then legal to do so in the UK. They expanded the business, opening a London Branch just around the corner from Euston Station, and another in Birmingham. They created the Albany Gender identity Clinic which is located across the street from the Prestwich shop. In December 1989, when there was a controversy in that Lancashire County Cricket Club did not permit women members, Stephanie took advantage of the fact that she was technically still male and took out a membership in her male name. Thus she was able to get into the AGM and contributed to women members being accepted.

When Stephanie was ill in hospital, David contacted her parents, and was able to bring them to visit and reconcile them to her. Stephanie published her autobiography in 1991.

Another police raid with an extensive search found that their own-made videos did not have certificates from the British Board of Film Classification. They were fined ₤6,000 and sentenced to a year in prison, which Stephanie served in a women’s open prison near York. She was released on appeal three months later.


They have an adopted child, and raised David’s two children. Two of Stephanie’s children from her first marriage have accepted her.

Together, Stephanie and David have built a chain of six hotels in North Wales, where they also run transvestite getaways.

Following the change of UK law, they re-married in 2006. She has been voted the leader of the Llangollen Chamber of Trade and Tourism. In 2009, she was featured in a four-part documentary on BBC Wales.

++Stephanie was killed in a tractor accident at age 70.  
____________________________________________________________

Stephanie is not listed but should be as one of the notable local persons in the Wikipedia articles on   Prestwich and Llangollen.

It is certainly unusual for a gender identity clinic to be owned by a retailer.

Apparently Stephanie never did a real-life test before surgery.  It is not clear from her account whether Russell Reid was aware of that.

It is also not clear whether she was a private patient, or did she transition on the NHS.

By her own account, Stephanie never was a transvestite herself.

While her shops are obviously needed, both Andrea James and Julia Grant have criticized them for being overpriced and for selling products that do not work.

“A girl in a million” is a bit of an exaggeration.  Transsexuals are a lot more common than that.
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18 May 2010

Russell Reid (1943 - ) psychiatrist.

Russell Warwick Stedman Reid was born in New Zealand. He trained as a doctor at Otago University in Dunedin (where John Money had taught psychology). He served as a captain with the NZ army in Vietnam. He then completed his training as a psychiatrist at Maudsley and Bethlehem Royal Hospitals in London. He was also an exchange resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore with John Money.

From 1982 he was a consultant at the Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic, and also ran a private practice as an alternate route to the NHS path for transsexuals. He worked with surgeons Peter Philip, James Dalrymple & Michael Royle. He was a member of the parliamentary forum on transsexuality, and the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ expert committee on transsexuality.   He helped and guided hundreds of transsexuals.

Like John Money and Ray Blanchard, Dr Reid became interested in apotemnophilia, and referred two such patients to Robert Smith, surgeon at Falkirk and District Royal Infirmary who amputated their legs at their request. Then the hospital Trust stopped the procedure. Dr Reid was featured in the BBC2 program Complete Obsession about apotemnophilia.

In 2004 as the Gender Recognition Bill was proceeding through parliament, Reid faced an complaint to the General Medical Council that he too easily accepted patients for hormone therapy and surgery. The complaint was brought by four of his colleagues at the Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic, psychiatrists James Barrett, Richard Green, Donald Montgomery and senior registrar Stuart Lorimer on behalf of four of his former patients. A fifth patient filed a separate complaint. (For more on the five patients see Batty, 2007). The patients included a convicted paedophile who thought that being female would get him closer to her boyfriend’s children, but lost interest in a sex change when that did not work out, and a woman with manic depression who thought that she was turning into Jesus and becoming male would help. In addition Charles Kane, Claudia and four other former patients started legal claims for damages against Dr Reid.

Reid retired from his NHS post in 2005, and in 2006, trans man and doctor, Richard Curtis, took over Reid’s private practice.

The complaints were formally addressed in 2007. The charge was that he did not adhere to the HBIGDA (now WPATH) Standards of Care in that he prescribed cross-gender hormones and recommended gender surgery without adequate assessment. Many of his professional peers spoke in his defence, as did more than 250 of his former patients who posted to a blog. He was found guilty of Serious Professional Misconduct, mostly for failing to communicate fully with patients’ family doctor (a rule that many doctors are unaware of) and not documenting his reasons for departing from the HBIGDA Standards of Care guidelines sufficiently. However, the panel "determined that it would be ... in the public interest as well as your own interests if you were to return to practice..." and allowed him to return to practice, subject to some normal, by GMC Fitness To Practice panel standards, restrictions on his practice and hormone prescriptions for the next 12 months.

* Not the Chicago plastic surgeon, nor the editor of The Sunday Post, nor the Liverpool graphic designer, nor Russell Reed, the impersonator, nor Russell Reid Ortiz the baseball player.
EN.Wikipedia
http://russellreid.blogspot.com/
__________________________________________________________________________________

Russell Reid has kept his private life very so.  There is no mention of a wife or civil partner or anything.

I am one of hundreds who passed through Dr Reid's gatekeeping and have never complained to the GMC or taken him to court.
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    03 November 2008

    Claudia (1958 - ) opera singer, drag performer.

    As a boy in Glasgow, he was bullied because of his androgynous looks. At 18 she started dressing as female, and was accepted and complimented on her appearance.

    Whilst at hairdressing college she found her boyfriend. He was from a family of musicians and got her started as an opera singer. She had some success, for example playing support to Marc Almond. She was also a drag performer.

    After being beaten by a Dutch border guard who took exception to the discrepancy between her appearance and the ‘male’ in her passport, they decided it was time to complete the change. She was prescribed female hormones by a psychiatrist in Glasgow in 1985. She had surgery in 1986, rushing it so that she could have a specific surgeon before he retired. She was referred by Russell Reid.

    Her boyfriend left her in 1987 when she developed a hair-ball in her vagina. Other prospective boyfriends left when she told them of her past. She lost her confidence to face an audience. She suffered a breakdown, that was made worse by transphobic response from the Glasgow police after she was raped.

    She now regrets that she had the change. While reading The Silence of the Lambs, she decided that she should have been rejected when she applied for a sex change. She is pursuing a civil claim against Russell Reid.
    _____________________________________________________________________________________________________

    Julie Bind is of course the cause of an outcry from transsexuals etc because she has been short-listed by Stonewall UK for an Award as Journalist of the Year. She has issued a statement in reaction to this outcry in which she cites the case of Claudia again. I, and I think most transsexuals, feel that Bindel is incapable of understanding us, and wish that she would stop writing about us. Her current statement contains reactions from transsexual and intersex persons, some of whom are well known activists. The statement is worth reading, but do continue on through the comments, and notice that initially Bindel responds, but then doesn't. Many of the most salient points elicit only silence from her.

    My second declaration of interest is that I went through Russell Reid only two years later, and he passed me onto James Dalrymple, FRCS. In those days UK surgeons were Mr, not Dr. I understood quite well that Reid was acting as a gatekeeper. That he was deciding whether I was suitable, and that there was no question of the session being therapy. At the price that he was charging, I did not want to stay for therapy.

    I am intrigued by Claudia's rush to get a specific surgeon before retirement. Neither Batty nor Bindel name this surgeon. My guess is that it was Peter Philip, who mentored James Dalrymple. Why Claudia thought that Dalrymple would not do is not explored.

    Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs, whilst a fairly good thriller, is however badly researched on the issue of applying for a sex change. Some readers, with reason, regard the book as transphobic. Notice the sentence in the Wiki summary: Lector "explains that Bill isn't actually a transsexual, but only thinks he is".

    Both Batty and Bindel hold back Claudia's surname. This is odd in Batty's case as the print edition in the Observer Magazine included a full page photograph of Claudia. Is her privacy being respected or not? Ironically I learned Claudia's surname in an article about Bindel. However I see no reason to print it. Indeed I suspect that 'Claudia' is also a pseudonym. If you have had an international career as a drag performer and have sung opera as an opening act to Marc Almond, we should be able to google something.

    There is an apparent discrepancy in Bindel's account. She says that Claudia started living full-time only after starting hormones in 1985. But she was crossing a border as female when she was assaulted, and Batty implies that she had started at age 18. The discrepancy may be only an artifact of journalistic style.

    Bindel opens her new statement by being 'angry' at Vancouverite Kimberly Nixon for suing a rape crisis centre after it rejected her for being trans. The treatment that Claudia got after being raped in Glasgow shows just how essential it is that all rape crisis centres should have transgender counsellors for those who need them.

    It is of course ironic that Bindel, who condemns transsexual surgery as something imposed upon us by heterosexual men, then condemns Reid for not adhering precisely to the Standards of Care Guidelines.

    Claudia's case is of course a sad one. However Batty interviewed her 17 years after her boyfriend left and Bindel three more years after that. She does not seem to be attempting to de-transition, nor rebuilding her life after the common female experience of being abandoned by a boyfriend. She also waited 20 years before suing Reid.
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