Interview With Trans Pioneer Mark Rees

Trans campaigner Christine Burns has been producing podcasts about trans people and events for the last eighteen months. Some of her recordings are designed to allow people to hear campaigning events and speeches which they couldn’t catch in person; on other occasions she features notable trans community figures with a story to tell.

One of her aims is to compensate for the fact that trans people are so infrequently featured in the media and that, when they are, the portrayals are so often constrained to the role of victim or curiosity. By sharp contrast, Christine’s recordings create a an important historical record of real trans people and events in the early part of the Twenty First Century.

For LGBT History Month Christine was determined to obtain an interview that was something special – and what better subject than the trans man who began the modern era of trans activism in the UK, by taking the first ever Human Rights case by a transsexual person to the European Court of Human Rights in the mid 1980’s.

Although Mark Rees failed in this first bid for trans people to be able to obtain new birth certificates, protect their privacy and be able to marry, his action established the precedent for others to follow – leading to a later successful case in 2002, and the passage of the Gender Recognition Act in 2004. Mark was also instrumental in the creation of the campaign group Press for Change.

You can listen to and download the interview here.

To subscribe to Christine’s other podcasts, simply add this ‘feed’ to iTunes or your desktop MP3 client: http://www.pfc.org.uk/node/1313/podcast