Hello supporters!
As always, thank you for your pledge if this is the first exclusive shed post you're receiving. Your support really matters. And if you received my previous message on Wednesday (with the MacBook balanced on my lap on the loo), I promise that I won't be inundating you with these things. I don't want to have you looking for the unsubscribe link! I'll probably settle down to a much more sedate pace now. However, I wanted to make good on my promise to reward supporters with exclusive content from mission control. I'll be writing about the contributors; about the process I use to write books; and about the history too. I'm definitely hoping to try out draft ideas with you and to share snippets of the contributed chapters and the interviews. But I'm going to start this share-a-thon with a bit of background on how we got to here.
As many of you will know, I've already written a two part historical memoir. Pressing Matters was the inside story of the major trans activist campaign which began 25 years ago this year (27th Feb 1992). It was the campaign that brought about employment protection, the right to NHS funded treatment, a series of legal precedents, and ultimately the Gender Recognition Act.
I was a central player in that campaign, so it was a history told from a first person perspective, coupled with contemporary material fished out of the archives. I never thought I was ever going to read another diskette or Zip Disc until I embarked on that project! After Pressing Matters I genuinely thought I'd done my bit for trans history, but enter Katy Guest...
I've known Katy now for about six years. She was the Literary Editor for the Independent on Sunday, until the Indy went out of print last spring and made most of the daily and Sunday staff redundant. Aside from reviewing books and writing about publishing and selling, Katy also organised the Indy's annual Pink List (latterly renamed "Rainbow List"). Back in 2011 I wrote a haughty comment "below the line" when that year's list was revealed online. I was dissatisfied by the fairly tokenistic attention to trans people in every Pink List to date. Katy wrote to ask for help. I put her in touch with some people to help judge the list better in 2012. And then I eventually became a judge myself, cementing our friendship in the process.
After leaving the Independent on Sunday Katy went to search for work that would fulfil her love of books. She found the ideal work-life marriage in Unbound -- a publisher with a unique way of supporting the books that authors want to write and readers want to read. Even before she was in the door, Katy was in touch with people she knew, to ask if they had exciting book proposals they wanted to discuss.
As I say, I didn't really plan to write another book anytime soon, but one doesn't turn down the possibility of being commissioned to do something interesting! So, I sat and I thought and I scribbled on the back of an envelope, and I soon realised that there was a much bigger story that I'd left untold. To test the idea, I sketched what this more ambitious book would look like. My first key decision was that I could not again be central to the story. I've done that. And I certainly didn't want to write any more about the years before I became an activist. Then it hit me: Everything about trans support and activism has always involved teamwork. Our advances were guided by collaboration. We grew up to always pay respect to the part that others play. So, an anthology perhaps? Give up the role of sole author and become an editor instead?
The next question concerned the scope of the book. You can't pin a date on the beginning of trans history per sé. We can talk about figures before the common era whose behaviour definitely involved gender crossing. There's the tale of the Chevalier d'Eon. Some cite Joan of Arc as a sort of proto trans man. Then there are all the individual stories from Lili Elbe (in 1930) through the war and the arrival of Christine Jorgensen in the headlines.
However, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that something really crucial took place in the 1960s. This was the point where the history of trans people stopped being about those kinds of individuals, who just sorted their own problems and tried to disappear. The 1960s were the time when trans people started forming groups with the specific intention of supporting one-another. And they soon needed that support when the controversial divorce case of April Ashley came along and ripped away some of the 'grace and favour' support which trans people enjoyed. Until then, transsexual people (with the support of their doctors) were able to get their birth certificates altered. Some of them (like April) married. They had the chance of a private life and to obtain jobs without their documents instantly outing them to strangers.
Justice Ormrod delivered his judgement on April Ashley's official status in February 1970. He said that April and transsexual people like her were to be treated as their birth gender for the purposes of marriage. In practice that also meant denying the right to correct or annotate birth certificates and it just got worse as the decade went on.
So, that era struck me as the ideal place to start a modern history -- back in the sixties.
After that, it struck me that progress back from that legal mess was really marked by long periods of everyday struggle, punctuated by the odd event which would become a milestone or turning point. And I knew exactlty the right people to tell the story of those big moments -- first hand.
So that's what brought us to here: A book to span 50 years of social and legal progress, from the shadows to Acts of Parliament and trans people on Eastenders.
In a future installment I'll tell you about some of the handpicked contributors that are going to write this book. All I'll say for now is that they are all experts, and they are not all trans -- there are some great cisgender allies on the project too.
For now I'll just end with the routine plea: This book needs more supporters like you. It can only go forwards when we hit 100% of the target. So please try and recruit your families, friends, colleagues or whoever. And you can tell them that, only by pledging support will they be privy to these insider briefings from the shed.
Till the next time
Christine x