At Oxford
Professor Changes SexBy Elizabeth GriceDaily Telegraph Magazine On August 12, 1993, the staff of Exeter College, Oxford were summoned to a meeting by Simon Stone, the college's home bursar. They arrived mildly curious, expecting to hear Stone announce the name of the college's new Rector. Instead the address took an unexpectedly personal turn. Stone, a former naval commander, began by referring to his recent, unconventional, floppy hairstyle. Moving nervously to the point, he said the hair was just an outward sign of a much bigger change that was about to take place in his life. Stone, 46, explained he was 'one of those unfortunate people' born with the brain of a woman in the body of a man. 'It is a cross I have had to bear since I was a child.' Joining the Navy, he went on, was all part of an increasingly futile effort to make the best of his life as a man. But after years of heart searching, he had decided to change the way he looked to match the way he felt inside. 'When I return to work on Monday, September 13, it will be as Ms Susan Marshall.' Sitting in the same office, doing the same job but looking every inch the efficient businesswoman, glossy, fashionably, cropped hair, charcoal grey jacket and mid-calf skirt - she says, 'It was the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life. You could see a few chins drop when I told them. There was an awful pause. Then the hall prefect, Mrs Higgins, started clapping, and the others took up the applause, I had to flee, it was so moving. Afterwards, they all found a letter waiting for them in the Lodge, so that when they pinched themselves to see if it was true, they'd know it was.' 'The next morning there were a few knocks on the door to say how brave I was. I even got flowers. It was absolutely wonderful. I intended to get up the next day dressed as a woman for the first time. But when I got home, my wife said, "Why don't you get changed now? There's no point in waiting until tomorrow. "' It was a touchingly unselfish moment. Judi Stone was still trying to cope with the sadness and confusion of losing a husband but she demonstrated in one simple question that she was trying to move on. Simon and Judi had been married for nearly 25 years. He had become home bursar at Exeter after a distinguished naval career which had taken him to the rank of commander. She was secretary to the principal of St Hugh's. They and their two daughters, one 19 and the other 21, were to all outward appearances a conventional happy family. But Simon's growing conviction that he was female had been undermining normal family life for several years. There were arguments and confrontations, usually resulting in Simon's denial that he was transsexual. 'I considered suicide many times, and at other times I wished I had not been born.' One weekend in 1992 he went on a religious retreat to Hampshire and returned to tell Judi that only a gender change would resolve his problems. 'That weekend was a turning point. Although it was not easy, Judi supported me almost straight away. I don't think it was a great surprise to her.' From the earliest days of his relationship with Judi, he had explained as best he could that there was something different about him - in particular that he sometimes dressed in women's clothes. They met in 1966 at a party on a submarine when he was a 19-year-old midshipman and she was just back from studying history of art and picture restoration in Florence. 'I just knew that she was someone with whom I had a bond. I usually felt terribly clumsy with girls but with her it was quite different. I instantly fell in love.' Realizing that the relationship was getting serious, Judi's parents sent her to New Zealand for a cooling-off period. Simon decided to tell her about his cross-dressing tendency in a letter. 'I hoped it was purely a phase that was behind me but I knew really that part of me was going to go on. I thought she wouldn't want to have anything more to do with me. But she wrote back saying that she didn't consider it a problem.' They were married in Decemeber 1968, by which time Simon was a sub-lieutenant.
In the mid-Seventies, two years after the birth of his second daughter, Stone
began to realize that his gender confusion was not cured but merely in
remission. Simultaneously, he came across
As a senior legal advisor to the Commander-in-Chief, Fleet, at Northwood, it
was Cmdr Stone's job to deal with staff problems. 'If a case like mine had
come up. I would have to deal with it. How could I? I was feeling
increasingly exposed and decided it was better to leave. It was presented as
a crisis of ambition.' On the day he left naval service, April 1, 1988 he
took the job of home bursar at Exeter College.
Scaling the heights of an essentially male profession had been a cover, a way
of distracting himself from the unpalatable conviction that he was in fact
really female. 'I am not alone in this. Joining the armed forces is a sort
of escape route. Some transsexuals have even joined the SAS. It is partly to
show you are not what you're not. In service life you knew exactly where you
stood. The Commander, that's who I was. Nearly at the top of the tree.
Upright father to his children; husband to his wife. I did my best to be the
person others expected me to be but it got harder every year. There came a
time in my late 30s when I had to be honest with myself and others and stop
living a lie.'
Harriet's immediate response to her father's devastating news was to make an
appointment to see a psychotherapist ('I wanted to accept Susan from almost
the beginning'), and the counseling sessions appear to have helped her
through all but the trifling practicalities of her father's change. She
would like, for instance, to display the old family photos as well as the
new, but agonizes that by showing her father as Simon she is not accepting
Susan. And because of the confusion in most peoples' minds between
transsexualism and transvestism, she finds it hard to explain everything that
has happened to her friends.
Judi Stone and Susan Marshall have continued to live under the same roof, but
they divorced last month and Judi is about to take up a new job in Cambridge.
'There are not many better grounds for divorce than this,' Susan comments.
'It was not fair for Judi to go on. We had not slept together for four
years. We are still each other's best friend - the overriding emotion is
still love - but it is an anomalous position. She accepts I am a woman and a
woman is someone she can't be married to.'
Harriet thinks that it is likely that her mother will find a new
relationship. 'But I think it is somehow unlikely that my father will. Up
to now, it has been harder for my mother, but it is probably harder for my
father now that Judi is moving on. I do not want Susan to be lonely.'
Susan Marshall does not, for the moment, seem to have time to be lonely. She
has been accepted unconditionally as a woman bursar by fellows and college
staff. At the first meeting of Oxford's (mostly male) domestic bursars after
her change, she notes wryly, there was a 100 per cent turn out.
In the final week before returning to work as a woman, she and Judi arranged
a series of small parties so colleagues could get used to the new image. 'I
planned it with precision - my service background helped. One has to
understand how deeply ingrained gender stereotypes are and not to expect too
much of friends by springing change on them. The perception of Oxford it
that it is full of stuffy people. It is not.'
Eighteen months after starting to live as a woman, she had gender
reassignment surgery. 'The operation itself was a secondary matter compared
with being accepted as a woman. Compared with some people's experiences of
surgery, I was terribly lucky. I felt very little pain and there were no
complications. The overriding feeling was one of contentment.'
The one thing she cannot ameliorate is the effect on the family. 'I have
great feelings of guilt towards my family. I let them down. In the end I
took the selfish option. But I really felt I had no choice.' |