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I have posted this in the UK law forum https://gendersociety.com/forums/32/uk-transgender-law in documents etc, because it has reference to birth certs. but think it would be interesting to everyone so have posted it here for general interest.
Well I threatened to come up with some interesting facts.
Legislation and Legal Judgements Impacting Trans People
Sexual Offences Act 1967
This Act decriminalised homosexuality – though actually resulted in an increase in convictions for homosexuality. This was because it allowed sex between consenting adult men over the age of 21 only provided nobody else was in the same building – therefore two men taking a room in a hotel. living in shared accomodation, flat share or tower blocks were often reported, and subsequently raided and arrested. Since transsexual women were treated as male until after surgery – even if they were living and presenting as female -- many were arrested under this law, as homosexual men.
Corbett v Corbett 1970
In 1970, April Ashley’s divorce made matters worse. Until then, post-surgery trans women had been able to change their birth certificates unofficially, to reflect their acquired gender. However, in the court case annulling her marriage to Arthur Corbett (Corbett v Corbett ), Justice Ormrod determined that trans people could not ever change sex, and therefore even after full gender reassignment, trans people remained legally in their birth gender. This made them unable to marry, and inhumanely treated in all legal matters, including imprisonment.
Goodwin v. UK and I v UK (2002)
The European Court of Human Rights held that the UK government’s failure to alter the birth certificates of transsexual people or to allow them to marry in their new gender role was a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. This led directly to new legislation to once again clarify and restrict the extent of the judgement.
Eventually this lead to the creation of the UK Gender Recognition Act.
Lynn Barber
Published: 12
1AM BST 02 Jul 2006
Almost half a century after changing sex, April Ashley is now, officially, a woman, thanks to the 2004 Gender Recognition Act. She claims that John Prescott helped her with the paperwork - she knew him from when they both worked at a hotel in Wales and shared a bedroom, but back then she was a boy.
She also claims to have had an affair with Grayson Perry, the Turner-prizewinning potter, and a one-night stand with Michael Hutchence, the INXS singer who gave her much pleasure with his "enormous whanger". These are the new cherries on the April Ashley cake - she must have sold her story at least a dozen times - but it is still an amazing cake.
Born George Jamieson, the fourth of six children, in 1935, she was brought up in a Liverpool slum. Her father was lovable but drunk and mainly absent. Her mother was a "twisted" woman who liked to hold George by his feet and bang his head on the floor. From the age of three, George used to pray that he'd wake up a girl. At 15, he ran away to join the merchant navy.
His break came in Paris where he was hired by the transvestite club Le Carrousel as "Toni April". By now, she was dressing as a woman full-time and taking hormones. "I was exquisite," she writes, "with slim shoulders and wonderful legs and incredible skin," as the photographs in the book attest.
If only she could have coped with sex, she says, she could have been a great courtesan. But there was what she called "une petite inconvenance" and she longed to have it removed. Transvestites, she writes, are happy if they can "pass" as women, but for transsexuals like her "a vagina wasn't just a fancy, it was a need ".
By 25, she'd saved enough to go to Dr Burou's clinic in Casablanca. He told her he'd done the operation only nine times: it was still experimental. But it worked (though I strongly advise skipping the chapter that describes it). She moved to London with a new identity, April Ashley, and a new career, fashion model, though the bookings dried up the minute she was outed by the Sunday People in 1961.
Since then, she has had to live by being brazen - she was always "a sex-change first, and anything else second". She sought respectability by marrying a minor aristocrat, the Hon Arthur Corbett, son of Lord Rowallan the Chief Scout, but lost it in 1970 when he sought an annulment on the grounds that he was "a deviate" and she was a man. The judge agreed, and his ruling set back the cause of transsexual legal recognition for a generation.
After the annulment, she worked for a while greeting customers at a fashionable Chelsea restaurant but had to give up when she had a heart attack: she was drinking more than 30 dry martinis a night. (She never had any interest in drugs, except when she was very young and ate the wicks from Benzedrine inhalers to stay awake, but says she has been "drinking for England" for most of her adult life.)
She washed up in Hay-on-Wye where Richard Booth, "the king of Hay", appointed her Duchess, but she was so broke she lived on cabbage and baked beans. She was forced to apply for benefits and was sent on retraining courses to learn employable skills but, luckily, a Hay widower left her his house. She sold it and moved to New York then California, where she ended up working as a charity mugger for Greenpeace. Today, she lives in the south of France - though this book suggests that money must be tight again.
The First Lady is full of good anecdotes and incidental delights. I am glad to know that Lionel Bart had a loo that played Food, Glorious Food when flushed, and I cherish her beautician's remark that, "Miss Ashley, if you think you've got hairy legs you should see Elizabeth Taylor's shoulders."
But most of all I admire Ashley's courage. Her life has gone through appalling vicissitudes but she shows no self-pity. On the contrary, she learned to cope with loneliness as a child and "In the end, it rescues you. It prepared me for my life, enabled me to fight my corner on my own." If the British public has a better understanding of transsexualism now, it is thanks to April Ashley and her oft-told life story.
Lili Elbe
1886 - 1931
Lili Elbe, born Einar Wegener in 1886, began part time transition while living with her life long companion Gerda Wegener in the 'teens, and had surgery and full time transition in early 1930. Her marriage to Gerda was invalidated by the King of Denmark in October of 1930.
Outed in the press, she may have faked her death in 1931, or may have really died months after her fifth operation, an operation that she hoped would allow her to have intercourse with the man to whom she was engaged to be married... Her story is told in frank and loving terms in her book, Man Into Woman, edited by Niels Hoyer, 1933.
Both Lili and her partner, and legal wife before her surgery, Gerda Wegener, were well known painters and illustrators. But Gerda had far better commercial success and is still recognized today as one of the leading Art Deco artists of the early twentieth century.
Lili was one of Gerda's favorite models, wearing women's high fashion or nude. As a fashion designer in Paris, Gerda was influential in setting fashion trends. It is amusing to consider that the 1920's small breasted feminine ideal may have been influenced by Lili's figure.
Mary Frith alias Moll Cutpurse 1584-1659
MARY FRITH, otherwise called Moll Cutpurse, a 17th century term for pickpocket was a notorious underworld figure who robbed travellers on Hounslow Heath, including Oliver Cromwell's associate, General Fairfax, for which she was sent to England's most notorious prison, Newgate Gaol.
In the attire of a man, she plied her trade as Britain's first 'highwayman', as well as a fence and petty thief. Moll became the subject of a play written within her lifetime, The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker.
"She was a very tomrig or hoyden, and delighted only in boys' play and pastime, not minding or companying with the girls. Many a bang and blow this hoyting procured her, but she was not so to be tamed, or taken off from her rude inclinations. She could not endure that sedentary life of sewing or stitching; a sampler was as grievous to her as a winding sheet; and on her needle, bodkin and thimble she could not think quietly, wishing them changed into sword and dagger for a bout at cudgels. Her headgear and handkerchief (or what the fashion of those times was for girls to be dressed in) were alike tedious to her, she wearing them as handsomely as a dog would a doublet, She would fight with boys, and courageously beat them; run, jump, leap or hop with any of her contrary sex, or recreate herself with any other play whatsoever."
Moll lived to be 75, and her last request was to be buried face down, in order to be rebellious even after death.
Magnus Hirschfeld 1868-1935
A German sexologist in the early 20th Century, and himself a transvestite, Hirschfeld was the first man to systematically describe and work with transvestites and transsexuals both terms that he coined in his books in 1910 and 1923 respectively.
Until Hirschfeld trans people had largely been considered homosexual and often treated that way. However in Berlin at the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a strong political campaign to decriminalise homosexuality and it was felt that "men dressed as women" was damaging their campaign. Labeling transvestites as different from Homosexual was considered an essential political move. That same argument still often finds favour amongst some gay activists.
There had been an attempt by Havelock Ellis another sexologist to introduce term 'Eonism' after the Chevalier d'Eon de Beaumont, following the lead of renowned sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebbing who had used the names of the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, well-known models of sexual behaviour, to describe 'sadism' and 'masochism'. However the term transvestism was preferred though is tending to give way to a generic term of transgenderism today.
Hirschfeld considered transvestite and transsexual persons to be a form of intersex. Working with surgeons in Berlin through his "Institute for Sexual Science" (Institut füer Sexualwissenschaft) he established and operated the world's first, modern medical, gender clinic. One of Hirschfeld's clients was Lili Elbe. The Institute was founded in 1919 and targeted and closed down by the Nazis in 1933 who burned all the contents of it's famous library. Thousands of homosexual men and transsexual women were subsequently sent to concentration camps and the few who survived were re-imprisoned by the allies after the liberation.
Hirschfeld was an openly gay man who visited the gay and transgender bars and nightclubs of Berlin. His nickname in the gay community was "Aunt Magnesia." The rise of the Nazis forced him, as an openly gay jew, to leave Germany in 1930, never to return. He died in Paris in 1935.
Hirschfeld and Harry Benjamin met in 1907, when Benjamin was still a medical student and later when Benjamin arranged for him to visit America on a speaking tour. Thus, Magnus Hirschfeld really deserves the appellation of "The Father of modern Transsexualism."
The 3rd Earl of Southampton 1573 - 1627 - Henry Wriothesley
Henry Wriothesley was a great friend and patron of William Shakespeare. How great the friendship is debatable, but almost half of Shakespeare's sonnets were dedicated to "WH" - strongly believed to be Henry Wriothesley.
Just a few years ago a painting (shown bottom right), in the possession of the decendents of 3rd Earl of Southampton and believed to be an unknown female member of the family, was revealed to be more likely a painting of the Earl him self, as a woman. Judge for youself from pictures here.
Is it possible that the Earl was a Transvestite or Transsexual and there may have been a relationship of some kind. There is no doubt that Shakespeare spent a great deal of time staying with Henry Wriothesley when in London for the Globe Theatre productions, and then there are the sonnets. One hundred and twenty-six are addressed to a young man known as the Fair Lord and believed to convey far more than friendship.
This is Shakespeare's Sonnet Number 20 - dedicated to WH - which leaves no doubt.
A woman's face with natures own hand painted
Hast though the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not aquainted
With shifting change, as is false woman's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth
A man in hue all hues in his controlling
Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert though first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee,fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
While adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she pick'd thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.
Harry Benjamin 1885-1986
Originally a German national, Harry Benjamin emigrated to the U.S. just before the first world war in 1913. The medical standards and ethics body that governs treatment of transsexuals today is named after Dr. Benjamin: The "Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association".
Harry Benjamin did much to develop medical treatment of transsexuality and related TG issues in the United States & Canada, bringing the German knowledge to North America in the early to mid 20th Century.
Benjamin was on good terms with Magnus Hirschfeld the famous German sexologist who coined the terms "Transvestite" and "Transsexual," and Alfred Kinsey, the famous American sexologist, and agreed with Hirschfeld that transsexuals were a form of neurological intersex.
In 1966, Benjamin published the seminal book, The Transsexual Phenomena. It is unfortunate that he followed the lamentable practice of the first half of the century of using gender pronouns consistent with sex assignment at birth even after transition.
Benjamin was a gerontologist, considered an expert on life extension, as well as an endocrinologist and sexologist. Considering that he lived to be 100 years old, the claim may be valid.
Chevalier d'Eon de Beaumont 1728 - 1810
Lawyer, diplomat, confidential envoy to Louis XI, and one of the finest swordsman in Europe, Charles Genevieve Louise Auguste Andre Timothee de Beaumont is best remembered for concurring with a 1777 court verdict that he had been masquerading and he was actually a women. After his death this was found to be untrue.
In 1966, the UK's largest Transgender support organisation the Beaumont Society was set up naming itself after him.
London gossip of the 1770s would have it that the Chevalier had assumed the disguise of a women as a member of the French Embassy and Secret Service in Russia from 1757 to 1760. This was unfounded. Later exiled during a period of French court intrigue, heavy betting in London regarding the question of his sex prompted a court case for which, in July 1777, the Court of King's Bench recorded its verdict that the Chevalier was a women.
He was permitted to return to France and receive a pension with the condition that "she resumed the garments of her sex" and never appear in any part of the kingdom except in garments befitting a female. The Chevalier, who was also a Freemason (the illustration was produced as a jest on Freemasonry), after accepting this condition, never again attempted to enter a Masonic lodge.
Billy Tipton 1914 1989
A minor, but well respected, jazz musician and travelling entertainer before settling down as an entertainment agent, Billy Tipton was born female but from the age of 19 lived as a man, marrying five women, adopting and fathering three boys. His first wife knew of his transgender status... the rest did not, after his death people still refused to accept it.
Tipton died in 1989 and was 'outed' by the coroner. Soon after, non-transgender people speculated as to why a "woman" would live fifty-six years as a man, not telling even his wife and kids! The notion that he was transgender did not often enter their thoughts.
Diane Wood Middlebrook has written a well researched book, Suits Me, on Mr. Tipton's life and times... unfortunately, she is unable to acknowledge Tipton as a transgender man, taking great pains to 'prove' that this was a woman who needed to present as a man in order to survive... and failing miserably.
Middlebrook argues that Tipton was trapped by his success at passing as a man, but Tipton had many opportunities to step back from his life as a man, and refused to his dying day. Many of Tipton's friends, his ex-wives, and his children, now knowing full well that he was female bodied, insist that he was a man in the psychological and spiritual sense. His friends speak for him... now that he can not speak for himself.
Sylvia Rivera 1952 - 2002
Silvia Rivera literally led the charge at the Stonewall Inn, New York City, on the night of 27th of June, 1969, the night that a riot at the bar, touched off the open radicalization of the Gay Liberation Movement fighting back against police harassment directed at the most visible members of the community.
Rivera spent most of her life at the forefront of both transgender and gay activism, tirelessly advocating and demonstrating for LGBT rights, inclusive social policies and struggling against transphobia.
In 1970 Rivera formed a group called S.T.A.R. - Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries - to fight for the civil rights of transgender people, and provide them with social services support. The S.T.A.R. House lasted for two years until her crack habit caused her to lose the house. It was the first institution of its kind in New York City, and inspired the creation of future shelters for homeless street queens.
In 2000, she reformed S.T.A.R. pressuring the Human Rights Campaign to be more inclusive of transgender people. Even when hospitalized with liver cancer, Rivera never stopped working for the civil rights of transgender people and several hours before she passed away on February 19, 2002 she was meeting with LGBT community leaders.
1927-1989 Christine Jorgesen
Christine Jorgensen is undoubtedly the most famous transsexual figure in the 20th Century. Her very public life after her 1952 transition and surgery was a model for other transsexuals for decades.
She was a tireless lecturer on the subject of transsexuality, pleading for understanding from a public that all too often wanted to see transsexuals as freaks or perverts. Although she considered herself primarily a photographer, she toured as a stage actress and singer. Ms. Jorgensen's poise, charm, and wit won the hearts of millions.
Christine Jorgensen once appeared on the Dick Cavett talk show. He insulted her by asking about the status of her romantic life with her "wife" and she walked off the show! Since she was the only guest scheduled, Cavett spent the rest of that show talking about how he had not meant to offend her.
Christine Jorgensen died in 1989, tragically of cancer, at the age of only 62
Stephen Whittle 1955 - Present day
Stephen Whittle is probably the most famous of Britain's Trans Men and certainly the most influencial. Professor of Equalities Law in the School of Law at Manchester Metropolitan University and co-ordinator of the United Kingdom's FTM Network, he is best known as founder and vice-president of TransActivist organisation Press for Change and his work and a activist on behalf of the trans community since the age of twenty, in 1975.
Stephen and his wife Sarah Rutherford have four children by artificial insemination but were unable to marry legally in the UK due to the infamous Corbet V Corbet Judgement in 1970. This led to significant legal efforts by him to become the children's legal father and considerable legal and political work leading to the successful passage of the Gender Recognition Act in 2004.
Following the passing of the Act in October 2004, Stephen and Sarah legally married on June 18, 2005 the first legal marriage in the UK of a transsexual person and their opposite gender partner.
In 2002 Stephen was awarded the Human Rights Award by the Civil Rights group Liberty and in the Queen's New Year's honours list in 2005 was made an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) for his services to gender issues.
Cristine Jennifer Shye B.acc. BL (GS Admin) 
Don't get angry
when others are talking behind your back... because they're just proving
that your life is obviously more interesting than theirs.
Cristine Shye. 1983 - present day.
A woman I respect not only for just being herself but also for all of the time and effort she puts into teaching some of us things that we would otherwise no nothing about. A woman who devotes herself to this website when she has absolutely no real need to but does so because she cares and still finds the time to study for her future. Over the years I have learned things from her I did not know and I thank her for that with all of my heart.
Cristine you deserve the recognition Julia Ford xxXxx