Stephen Whittle

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Stephen Thomas Whittle, OBE born Stephanie Whittle, female 29 May 1955, is a United Kingdom activist with the transactivist organization Press for Change.[1] Since 2007, she has been professor of Equalities Law in the School of Law at Manchester Metropolitan University.[2][3] Between 2007 and 2009, she was president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).[4] A British FTM transsexual, she was described as "a radical lesbian before her sex change and now a leading commentator on gender issues",[5] who after the Gender Recognition Act 2004 came into force in April 2005, achieved legal recognition as a man and so was able to marry her female partner.[6] [7]

Traumatic Childhood

Stephanie Whittle as a child.png A photograph of Stephanie (centre) between her two elder sisters.

Whittle was born female on 29 May 1955 at Altrincham Cottage Hospital, Greater Manchester. Her original name is believed to have been Stephanie but she sometimes used Jackie. Her grandmother was a senior nurse.[6] Stephanie was a sickly child, suffering from rickets. She was the middle child of five children in her family. In 1955 they lived in Wythenshawe. At that time, Wythenshawe was said to be the biggest council estate in Europe, providing workers for the Trafford Park estate. After several years of sun lamp treatment for rickets, at St Mary's Hospital, she was considered well enough to attend Havely Hay Primary school at the age of five. In 1963, the family moved to Withington village, an inner suburb of Manchester. From the age of eight she attended Old Moat Junior school.

Whittle recalls her father being violent to her mother Barbara Elizabeth Whittle (née Stead) which may have contributed to her trauma and reluctance to identify as a girl. "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." [8]

In 1966 Stephanie won a scholarship to Withington Girls' School. It was during her time at Withington Girls' School that she started reading medical books.[9] In her teens she was romantically attracted to both sexes. On top of that was a strong desire to be a man, to grow a beard and to have a hairy chest. She read articles about people like Della Aleksander and April Ashley who had had a so-called sex change. In 1972, at the age of 16, whilst visiting the doctor about a sore throat she read about a female to male (FTM) transsexual person and was indelibly indoctrinated with the idea.[citation needed]

Transgender campaigning

In 1974 Whittle came out as a FTM transman, after returning from a women's Liberation Conference in Edinburgh, which she attended as a member of the Manchester Lesbian Collective. She began hormone replacement therapy in 1975.[10] She has been active in transsexual and transgender communities since 1975 when the age of twenty she joined the Manchester TV/TS group which had been started in 1972/3 by two trans women[11] the very first support group for transsexual people in the United Kingdom.[citation needed] In 1979 she joined a former army officer and then royal sculptor, Judy Couzins, a transwoman in the Self Help Association for Transsexuals (SHAFT).

In 1989, she founded the UK's FTM Network which she coordinated until November 2007.[12] In 1992, along with Mark Rees, the actress Myka Scott and an airline pilot Krystyna Sheffield, she founded and became vice-president of Press for Change that works to change the laws and social attitudes surrounding transgender and transsexual lives. Whittle remains as one of the vice-presidents (there is no president, as it is a consensus group), and Press for Change was called "one of the most successful lobby groups seen in the last 25 years" by Lord Alex Carlile, Baron Carlile of Berriew as early as 1994 at the reading of his Gender Reassignment Bill. The bill failed but "for 40 minutes members of parliament discussed trans people which without it, would have never happened."[citation needed].

Whittle under went phalloplasty surgeries from 2001 to 2003.[13] The Channel 4 documentary Make me a Man followed her life during the surgeries.[14]

In Disembodied Law: Trans People's Legal(Outer) Space, Whittle said that people like her were "oppressed", blaming nature for having only two sexes. "I face an inadequate legal framework in which to exist. We are simply ‘not’ within a world that only permits two sexes, only allows two forms of gender role, gender identity or expression. Always falling outside of the ‘norm’ our lives become less, our humanity is questioned, and our oppression is legitimized."[15] The Whittles demanded that Stephen be recognized as their children's legal father although she is a woman and incapable of fathering a children. They brought court case,"X, Y and Z v. The United Kingdom" before the European Court of Human Rights in 1996.[10][16] When the Gender Recognition Act 2004 came into force in April 2005, Whittle obtained a false, male birth certificate. She then married Sarah (née Rutherford) later that year.[16] They had been cohabiting since 1979.[10] They have four children by artificial insemination, the first of whom was born on 13 October 1992.[10][16] In April 2006, they jointly adopted the children, making Whittle their legal father.

She has written and spoken extensively about her "personal journey" which is transgender jargon for sex re-assignment, most notably in her autobiographical statement in Will Self's essay for David Gamble's photography collection 'Perfidious Man.'[17] Her writings have included, among other things, an article on the ground-breaking transsexual employment discrimination case decided on by the European Court of Justice.

Awards

Whittle has got lots of the sort of awards that LGBT activists set up for each other, in order to bestow importance, publicity and applause on their own agenda. In 2005 she was awarded The Sylvia Rivera Award for Transgender Studies by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies for the monograph ‘Respect and Equality.’ In 2007, along with his co-editor, Susan Stryker, she was awarded a Lambda Literary Award for their annotated collection of 50 key historical and contemporary transgender science, political and theory texts; 'The Transgender Studies Reader'.

In 2002, Whittle was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Having experienced a variety of health problems since his early 20's, she had had suspicions and was neither surprised, or terrified by the diagnosis.[citation needed] Her multiple sclerosis has been an increasing problem since late 2005, yet she continues in her full-time university post.[18] In recent years, she has collaborated with other members; Paisley Currah, Shannon Minter and Alyson Meiselmann, of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health WPATH on amicus briefs to courts in many jurisdictions. In 2007, she was the first non-medical professional and first trans person to become President of WPATH.[19] Whittle continues to write extensively on the law and policy surrounding transsexual and transgender people, along with several recent academic articles returning to the question of the law and trans people. She also continues to work on what she hopes will be the defining history of transgender, and the sources of the many theories surrounding gender variant people. Throughout her life she has maintained an interest in the avant-garde of the arts, and has started to collaborate with Sara Davidmann, a photographer and Lecturer in Fine Art at Wimbledon College of Art.

In early 2007, the research report Engendered Penalties: Transsexual and Transgender People’s Experience of Inequality and Discrimination,[20] was instrumental in ensuring the inclusion of trans people in the remit of the new Commission for Equalities and Human Rights.[21]

Honours

In 2002, Whittle was given the Human Rights Award by the Civil Rights group Liberty, for her advancement of the transsexual agenda in the UK, Europe, and around the world.[16]

In the 2005 New Year Honours, she was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) "for services to Gender Issues".[22]

In 2006, she was awarded the Virginia Prince Lifetime Achievement Award by the USA's International Federation for Gender Education.[not in citation given]

Roles

Writings

Books

  • (with Turner, L.) (2007) Engendered Penalties: Transsexual and Transgender Experience of Inequality and Discrimination by Trans People, London: Cabinet Office
  • (with Stryker, S., eds) (2006) A Transgender Studies Reader, New York & London: Taylor & Francis: Routledge
  • (2002) Respect and Equality: Transsexual and Transgender Rights, London: Cavendish Publishing
  • (2000) The Transgender Debate: The Crisis Surrounding Gender Identities, Reading: South Street Press
  • (with More K, eds) (1999), Reclaiming Genders: Transsexual Grammars at the fin de siecle, London: Cassell Publishing
  • (with McMullen. M.) 1998, The Transvestite, the Transsexual and the Law (4th edition); 1996 London: Beaumont Trust (3rd Edition); 1995 London: Beaumont Trust, (2nd Edition); 1994 London: The Gender Trust ( 1st Edition.)
  • ed. (1994), The Margins of the City: Gay Men's Urban Lives, Hampshire: Arena Press, Hampshire

Chapters in books

  • (2007) Transsexual people in the Military, In J. Barrett ed. The Practical Management of Adult Disorders of Gender Identity, Oxford: Radcliffe Publishing
  • (2007) The Gender Recognition Act 2004, In J. Barrett ed. The Practical Management of Adult Disorders of Gender Identity, Oxford: Radcliffe Publishing
  • (2006) Impossible People: Viewing the Self-portraits of Transsexual People in A. Rogers ed. Parody, Pastiche and the Politics of Art: Materiality in a Post-material Paradigm, University of Central England in Birmingham in association with Ikon Gallery
  • (with Watson, K.) (2004) Slicing Through Healthy Bodies: The media of body modification In M. King and K.Watson, Representing Health: Discourses of health and illness in the media London: Palgrave pp. 104–136. pages: 35
  • (2005) Sustaining Values: Feminist Investments in the Transgender Body, In Y.W. Haschemi and B. Michaelis, eds.. Quer durch die Geisteswissenschaften. Perspektiven der Queer Theory. Berlin: Querverlag, pp. 157–168, pages: 10

Journal articles

  • (2007) “Respectively a Man and a Woman”: The Failures of the Gender Recognition Act 2005 and the Civil Partnership Act 2005, Lesbian and Gay Psychology Review [2][dead link], Vol.8, no.1, Spring
  • (with Turner, L.) (2007)‘Sex changes’? Paradigm shifts in ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ following the Gender Recognition Act?’[3], Sociological Research Online, Volume 12, Issue 1, January
  • (2006) 'The opposite of sex is politics – the UK Gender Recognition Act and why it is not perfect, just like you and me' Journal of Gender Studies [4], Volume 15, Number 3, November.
  • (with Witten, T.M.) (2004) 'TransPanthers: The Greying of Transgender and the Law' [5], Deakin Law Review [6], 4(2) pp. 503–522
  • (with Hartley, C.F.) (2003) 'Different Sexed and Gendered Bodies Demand Different ways of Thinking About Policy and Practice, Practice', A Journal of the British Association of Social Workers, 15(3) pp. 61–73
  • (with Poole, L., Stephens, P.) (2002) 'Working with Transgendered and Transsexual People as Offenders in the Probation Service' Probation Journal [7], 49(3) pp 227–232
  • (with Little, C., Stephens, P.) (2002)'The Praxis and Politics of Policing: Problems Facing Transgender People' QUT Law & Justice Journal [8], 2(2)
  • (1999) 'New’isms: Transsexual People and Institutionalised Discrimination in Employment Law' Contemporary Issues in Law [9], 4(3), pp 31–53.
  • (1998) 'The Trans-Cyberian Mail Way' Journal of Social and Legal Studies [10], 7(3), pp 389–408
  • (1998) 'Editorial' in The Journal of Gender Studies [11]: Special Edition – Transgender, 7(3), pp 269–272

References

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  2. 2.0 2.1 Professor of Equalities Law
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  7. https://herriotts.wordpress.com/2020/05/16/the-usual-suspects-steven-whittle/
  8. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2007/apr/17/socialcare.highereducationprofile
  9. Withington Girls School's deputy head girl, Miss Whittle is now Stephen Whittle OBE, PhD Archived 17 December 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  10. 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. adapted with permission from Stephen Whittle,'Perfidious Man' in Self W, Gamble D(2000) 'Perfidious Man', Penguin: Viking
  12. http://www.ftm.org.uk[dead link][dead link]
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  15. Stephen Whittle in 'Disembodied Law: Trans People's Legal(Outer) Space' in Whttle, S. 'Respect and Equality, (2002) London: Cavendish Press, p 1
  16. 16.0 16.1 16.2 16.3 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  17. "Perfidious Man – Amazon.co.uk Reader Reviews"
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  19. WPATH
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  21. Engendered Penalties: Transsexual and Transgender People’s Experience of Inequality and Discrimination(2007) London: Cabinet Office)
  22. The London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 57509. p. 13. 31 December 2004. Retrieved 2012-07-30.

External links