Transcript of A Journey of Transition: Carolyne's Story - Part Two

With the previous episodes, a small portion of the time spent preparing them was devoted to plotting the key points I wanted to include, but as this trilogy is about my life I thought I didn’t need to bother with plotting.

The thing is I have never kept a diary and it turns out that my memory is a bit rubbish, so for this episode I will be following a somewhat non-linear narrative, picking up some events missed in Part One, along the way.

One major event being in 1979 the election of Margret Thatcher, oops, and another major one was just beginning to be reported as I was leaving school.

Welcome to “Trans Wise Trans Strong”, I am Carolyne O’Reilly.

Episode eleven, “A Journey of Transition: Carolyne’s Story - Part Two”

So after two years of the Margret Thatcher led Conservative government I left school in 1981, when unemployment was two and half million, however within two years it would exceed three million, and stayed above three for a further three years.

Ironically during the 1979 election campaign, the Conservative party reused a modified version of an election campaign poster targeting the main Labour opposition party, its text read, “Labour Still Isn’t Working”, sorry who isn’t working!

I was clueless about what to do, so I “signed on”, at the laughably named, “Job Centre”, and signing on meant you had had no work and you would receive a small amount of money from the state.

I spent the time with my friends, and speaking of friends you would perhaps have noticed in Part One, a lack of any mention of relationships I had, well that was for the very simple reason there where none.

Why was this, well I was attracted to girls, but I only wanted to be in a relationship with a girl as a girl, so even though my gender expression was not female, my sexual orientation was lesbian, so I think you can see the problem, so avoidance was I felt the only option.

There is a belief held by some called, “Cisheteronormativity”, which is the belief that everyone’s gender identity is the same as the sex assigned at birth and that everyone is straight, well back in the real world, sexuality and gender is more complex than this simplistic belief.

There is an article I would like to recommend by my therapist Dr Kenneth Demsky, which you can find on The Beaumont Trust website, “The Klein-Demsky Matrix of Sex and Gender”.

And speaking of sex and gender, a couple of weeks ago I was watching a profile on John Hurt, which mentioned their role in the BBC groundbreaking drama, “The Naked Civil Servant”, which was a film biography of “Quentin Chrisp”.

It reminded me that I had watched it when first broadcast in December 1975, and although Quentin Chrisp was a gay man, John’s portrayal, henna haired, make-up and varnished finger nails, left quite an impression on me at the time.

I wonder though if viewers perception of gay men were coloured, and we are not talking rainbow positivity here, by this drama.

After about 6 months unemployment, my father who was a site agent, suggested I come to work with them as a labourer which I did, and my decision perhaps needs a bit of explaining.

Well, it is not totally unusual that some trans women initially fight against their gender identity by working in what might be perceive as a somewhat masculine occupation, and at eighteen I was similarly railing against my true gender identity.

I have a theory I call, “The Five Stages before Transition”, inspired by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief, as I believe trans people go through five emotional stages before they decide to transition.

Stage 1 Confusion, Stage 2 Doubt, Stage 3 Denial, Stage 4 Questioning and finally Stage 5, Acceptance.

However I do not perceive these stages as linear, rather that stage 1 leads into a recursive period of stages 2 to 4, until acceptance is reached and the decision to begin the process of transition.

I wasn’t sure if I’d would mention this, but as I decided this autobiography would only have real value if it was totally honest, so shortly after starting work, and remember my gender denial, I grew, yeh facial hair but only lasted 6 months, a definite stage 3 action.

I would sometimes think it would be great to work for the BBC, but like asserting my true gender, also seemed like another impossibility, but.

I continued working, gradual acquiring building skills, and because I find change difficult, I stayed for eight years, but at the start of a new decade, I decided to quit, and was unemployed again.

In the introduction, I mentioned two major events, the second started with initial reports in 1981, that would see the emergence of a disease that would become, like another disease from early in the twentieth century, a pandemic, that early one was the 1918 to 1920 “Spanish” flu.

The initial reports where from the United States, and would see a rise in prejudice towards gay people, perhaps in part from the acronym first applied to it, GRID, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, prejudicial much.

But with a better understanding of the disease it was renamed AIDS, Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome.

But the damage was done and anyone with AIDS was treated like a modern day leper, but as mentioned with a better understanding of the disease, attitudes gradually began to change, helped in Britain perhaps, by a simple gesture, when Princess Diana visited AIDS patients in hospital, and she held the hand of one of the patient.

In 1943, IBM president Thomas Watson predicted that the world would only need five computers, then they filled a cavernous room, by the eighties they were small enough to fit on a desk, and now five computers may be found in a single home, some of which could fit in a hand, a smart phone.

I also joined the ranks of computer owners buying one that had a tie-in to a BBC series aimed at educating Britain about computing, and I also was becoming interested in technology in general, particularly television technology, buying many books on the subject, that would later prove a wise decision.

The eighties saw the rise of alternative comedians, whose mantra was to reject; sexism, racism and homophobia, unfortunately transphobia was not included, had it been maybe attitudes to trans and non-binary people would be a bit better today?

In the past, sometimes had the thought, what if I could go back to before puberty or maybe tell my younger self that yes you are female and you can assert this, although if my younger self did, would I or rather this version of me cease to exist?

But if it meant a version of me would grow up as a girl then a woman, and the price would be my non existence, well in the eighties I think I would have paid the price, as I then I experienced, many periods of severe depression, which I now know were due to my gender incongruity.

However, now I would not want to loose the memory of the wonderful people I’ve have met since I began transitioning.

Three years later we come to a year that was also a title of a book, long associated with dystopia, 1984, so how dystopian was 1984?

In 1945, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was created by scientists in the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and two years later they created the Doomsday Clock, with midnight as the end of, well everything, and it was initially set at 7 minutes to midnight.

Each subsequent January an assessment is made whether or not to adjust the time, well in 1984, it was 3 minutes to midnight, due to U.S. and Soviet relations reaching their iciest point in decades, scary, but seven years later in 1991, with the Cold War officially over, it was moved back to 17 minutes to midnight.

And what of today, 2025, as of January it was set at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been, scary doesn’t even come close.

But back to the eighties and the 17th of October 1986, which saw the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), rule on the Case of Rees v. the United Kingdom.

The case was brought by Mark Rees, a trans man, in regards of ECHR Article 8, which is essentially a right to a private life and Article 12 the right to marry.

The court found that there had been no breach of Article 12, however in respect of Article 8, although no violation was found, it was not unanimous but by a majority of twelve votes to three.

The three dissenting judges felt that Mark, not being able to obtain a birth certificate with their sex recorded as male was a violation, and quoting from the ruling.

“This has resulted - and may again result - in the applicant having to face distressing situations which amount to an interference with his private life and thus to a breach of Article 8”

However it wasn’t only trans people who where impacted by the stance of the UK Government, as couple of years later, the Margret Thatcher government oversaw a piece of legislation that would add further prejudice to lesbian and gay people, this was the, Local Government Act 1988, specifically its section 28.

In summary, Section 28 prohibited local government from intentionally promoting homosexuality, publishing material promoting homosexuality, and state schools must not teach that homosexuality was acceptable as a pretended family relationship.

Cross burning bigotry level perhaps, and as for “promoting” and “pretended family relationship”, it now seems almost laughable, but for those teenage school children beginning realise that they were lesbian or gay, it was anything but, and was not repealed until November 2003.

But what is the percentage of the population that are either; lesbian, gay or bisexual, well that would not be known officially until the 2021 UK census, and the answer is, 3.2% of the population, that’s a lot of pretended relationships.

Three years later on the 27th of September 1990, another case was ruled on by the European Court of Human Rights, the Case of Cossey v. the United Kingdom.

The case was brought by Caroline Cossey, who we met in Part One, and again concerned her justifiable belief that her rights had been breached under Articles 8 and 12, and although she also lost, under Article 8 the margin was much closer, ten votes to eight against, and under Article 12, it was no longer unanimous but fourteen votes to four.

So the tide was turning, albeit a somewhat neap one, as it would be another fourteen years before an Act of Parliament would resolved the injustice that Mark, Caroline and other trans people where experiencing.

So now unemployed I made practical use of the skills I had learnt whilst working, I helped my father install a central heating system in the family home, and I also studied video production and screenwriting at evening classes.

I was still classed as unskilled, however the Job Centre offered various, “Training for Work” schemes, and although some training was very good, some was not, and cynics felt it was just a means of reducing the topline unemployment number, as people on a training scheme were removed from the list of the unemployed.

However to get on the training scheme you had to be unemployed for 6 months.

At school their attitude towards me was that I was just averagely intelligent, and not being very confident I believed this.

However it was at this time I completed one of those tests that Mensa placed in some news papers, and when I got the result back, it said I had an IQ of 133 and would I like to take an invigilated test, which I did, and then learnt my official IQ was 131, in the top 2% of the population, and would I like to join Mensa, which I did.

If time travel were possible, I think one journey I might like to take would be to go back in time, so I could shove my Mensa membership right under the nose of my former headmaster, and ask “so whose average now?”, although perhaps being confronted by a confident mature women, might just have blown his mind.

I was lucky, that I had an interview with a woman at the Job Centre who perhaps saw something that my school didn’t, and managed to get me on a training scheme without having to wait the full 6 months.

That training scheme, which was very good, led to a HNC, and then in 1995 as a mature student aged 32, I began studying for a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London.

And remember in Part One I mentioned there was no internet in the sixties,

well when it became available to the public, finding information via the internet was not easy, but two years before I started my degree on April the 30th of 1993, three letters would revolutionise how we interacted with the internet, and those three letters, www, the world wide web.

After graduating I initially looked for roles with IT companies, but they were all obsessed with nothing but profit, it seemed to me, and then remember I said, I thought working for the BBC seemed an impossible dream, well I saw a brilliant BBC Advert for graduate trainee broadcast engineers, “Archaeology to Zoology, you bring the degree we provide the training”.

I fortunately gained a place, thanks to my interest in television technology, remembers those books, and over the next two years studied various courses Monday to Friday at the BBC’s residential training facility, at Evesham in the Midlands, and in between worked at different BBC sites.

There is a phrase, "you know where you were when", that possibly has its origin with the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior, well in 1977,

psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik coined the phrase " flashbulb memories", to describe those collective autobiographical memories.

For me my first flashbulb memory was the death of Princess Diana, and then there was the Challenger disaster and the third that had the greatest impact on me was whilst still a trainee and was on Tuesday 11th September 2001.

After training, to stay working for the BBC I had to pass an interview for a permanent engineering role, and was again successful in 2003, and a year later, I decided on a hiking holiday and spent three and half wonderful weeks on a guide hiking holiday around New Zealand, I would highly recommended it.

And 2004 was also notable for an Act of Parliament that would have a profound and very positive impact on trans and non-binary people, it was the Gender Recognition Act 2004, by which a Gender Recognition Certificate could be obtained.

One immediate effect was to be able to apply for a passport, with one’s sex in alignment with one’s gender identity, which tragically now is no longer available to US citizen’s, however to be granted a Gender Recognition Certificate required a degree of gymnastics, given the loops required to jump through.

You need to be aged 18 or over, been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, lived in your affirmed gender for at least 2 years and intend to live in this gender for the rest of your life.

And with a certificate you could; update your birth or adoption certificate, get married or form a civil partnership in your affirmed gender, and this is a bit grim, have your affirmed gender on your death certificate when you die.

Here’s the thing, at 16 you can legally have sex, and conceive a child, and yet not be able to be legally recognised in you affirmed gender until 18.

I perhaps differ from some, as I, at the moment, agree with a requirement of a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, although I feel the terminology should be updated to be in alignment with the W.H.O. and should be gender incongruence, but the requirement for two doctors reports, really!

And surely, one year living in your affirmed gender is sufficient, what exactly is going to change after another year.

The following year would see two events within the space of twenty-four hours, the first united the country in joy, the second was Britain’s 9/11, equally uniting all in grieve for the 52 lives taken by acts of terrorism on three tube trains and a bus.

After the New Zealand trip, and over the following years I went on hiking holidays to; the High Tatras of Slovakia, the High Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, and I climbed Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro, as well as long weekends to The Peat District and Lake District.

Then in 2010 there was the Equality Act 2010, which replaced nine previous Acts of Parliament, and for the first time afforded protection to transgender people from all forms of discrimination, victimisation and harassment.

So, all was right with the world, well, there would be an awful coda to the Equality Act 2010, which I will discuss in Part Three, although if you do not want to wait, you could check the “Trans Lives Matter” episode.

I mentioned at the beginning that my memory was a bit rubbish, so one event I cannot recall the date for was when after my parents came home from a holiday my father began to feel very unwell with chest pains and aches in his arms, and we phoned our GP, who said to come to the surgery.

After examining my father, the doctor ordered a cab to take him to hospital, where they found that although he had not experienced a heart attack, he needed surgery for a triple heart bypass, which he successfully had, but that meant instant retirement.

My mother had always been very active but around 2010, she developed a Parkinson’s like disease where Levodopa was not effective and eventually became wheelchair bound and needed the help of carers, and I with my father took on house care duties as well as caring for my mother.

Then in 2012 there was an event which doom sayers had predicted would be a disaster, but in the end it would unite again the nation, it was of course the 2012 London Olympics and Paralympics which were a fantastic success, if only we were now more united and not prone to prejudice.

With the passing of the Gender Recognition Act 2004, trans people could marry, but if you were lesbian or gay and cisgender you still couldn’t get married, however this injustice was rectified on the 17th July 2013, when The Married (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 passed into law.

In 2014 I moved with my parents to Southend-on-Sea, Essex, and again my memory is unclear but maybe 18 months later my mother died, and I had to try and park my grief to support my father.

It wasn’t long before my father also needed a carer and also became wheelchair bound, and then in mid December 2016 he also died, and to paraphrase Alan Rickman from, “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”, I called off Christmas.

I am not sure if I have the words to describe the feelings of grief, saying it feels physical seems so inadequate, I feel that it is only by experiencing it that one can truly understand what grief is.

So now I was alone and I never felt able to tell my parents that I was trans, not because I feared rejection, but because I know my mother would have worried for my safety and my father would have found it very difficult to understand, and now I never can tell them, and they will never meet Carolyne.

It was about 6 months before the pain of grieve finally eased, and it was at this point that I finally realised I had reached the fifth stage of The Five Stages before Transition, “Acceptance”, that I was transgender.

But it would be another 18 months, before I decided to begin transitioning.

It was Christmas Day 2018, a day I could dressed in the daytime in my female clothing, no chance of any callers, and whilst cooking my Christmas dinner, brussel sprouts and all, I decided I would make my dream a reality.

When I returned to work in the New Year, I would tell my colleagues I am trans, and begin to transition to my true gender, quite a New Year’s resolution don’t you think?

This episode was written and presented by me, Carolyne O’Reilly, thank you for listening.

Next time, “A Journey of Transition: Carolyne’s Story: Part Three”