Down Memory Lane to Charing Cross

Charing Cross Hospital, bathed in winter sun this week. Photo © N_Marie [redacted]

Like many other transgender people in England, I have deep and abiding memories of a certain London hospital. ‘I happened’ to walk past it this week — actually, I was in Hammersmith for work this week and I took a few minutes ‘down time’ on arriving at the Tube station specifically to go and take a photograph of it. It awoke a fair cascade of memories. My Other Half and I had been to Hammersmith once since my surgery, to see Robert Plant in concert on his 2002 ‘Dreamland’ tour. He was *good.* Apart from that one night, I’d not been there since January 1994, and we didn’t go down Fulham Palace Road at all in 2002.

I travelled my trans journey long before we all carried phones, let alone phones with cameras, and I don’t think we’d ever imagined that we would be taking photographs with a telephone! I wanted to take a couple of pictures of the hospital because I hadn’t got any to use as illustrations. It didn’t take me long to use one of them- it’s at he top of this piece.

I found that the only difference between when I was last there and this time was the picket line outside on the pavement, and passing cars tooting in support of the strikers.

The first time I saw Charing Cross was in the autumn on 1987, for my very first appointment at the Gender Identity Clinic. I had travelled down to London with a friend on a National Express coach and we’d got the tube from Victoria. I was more than a little bit nervous because I knew that that appointment would either change my life completely or return me to thinking that it would have been better to have been stillborn than to live my then-current life.

Trust me on this: The latter isn’t a mindset you want.

The appointment went well, and the Specialist agreed that I could socially reassign (i.e. change my name and start living full-time as a woman) from the New Year. We didn’t call it social reassignment then; the term hadn’t been invented — or if it had, I wasn’t aware of it. There was a lot of language that we take for granted now in living our lives; words like transgender (the term then was transsexual, sometimes spelled with only one ‘s’), gender reassignment surgery (GRS), because the term then was sex-change surgery, transition (then ‘change of role’)…

This appointment was also the first time that I (knowingly) saw someone else who was trans; she was called in not long after after my friend and I arrived.

The next appointment was a flying visit to have blood tests done. This included a compulsory AIDS test — this was the 1980s, after all. This was the first time I had ever seen anyone mask up and double-glove. I don’t remember whether the phlebotomist also wore a visor, but in my mind’s eye now, she did. The AIDS test, even though it was negative (I had not only not indulged in any risky behaviour, it was a fair while since I had been in *any* physical relationship), meant that I could not get any life insurance after that, and after a couple of refusals no-one at all will insure you. I asked some trans friends recently whether they still do that test — they don’t. Mind you, HIV infection is now a manageable illness rather than a death sentence.

I’ll spare you the details of the assessment questions and discussions over repeated appointments in the next years, save that to start with, the standard assessments included a lot of questions about patients’ sex lives (either solo or with a partner), their sexual orientation, whether wearing women’s clothes was a turn-on etc. It wasn’t, and isn’t, by the way — it just felt so right, so natural, and it was the first time I could remember that I felt at peace with myself and that I wasn’t wearing a costume or disguise.

Trans patients were back and forth to Charing Cross during the Life Test — the two-year period you spent living in your affirmed gender before you are referred for surgery. Standout memories for me are the prescription of Androcur some appointments in with the magic words “Your sex change starts here” and the start of oestrogen pills the following month.

The Clinic gathered information from your employer to confirm that you you were living continuously and successfully en femme and I remember taking in letters from the college where I was doing some vocational training, and later taking in one from my then-employer. They had a fairly narrow view of womanhood and femininity and used to note what you were wearing for your appointments — dresses or skirts were expected. One really nasty, raw, wintery day I rocked up in jeans tucked into boots and I was wearing a nice warm jumper under my coat. I was asked why I was wearing trousers, and I explained that it was for warmth — I’d had to wait in the open for a bus to the railway station, wait on an exposed platform for a train to London, and then walk from Hammersmith tube to the hospital. That was grudgingly(!) accepted, and my notes for that appointment said “en femme — trousers.”

Even after your life test was completed, and you’d had your surgical referral and assessment and been placed on the waiting list for GRS, the Gender Identity Clinic still had power over your life; you still saw them regularly and it wasn’t unknown for them to pull someone from the surgical list if they were concerned about someone’s progress.

I have one rather surreal memory. I used to see Dr Hohberger, a neuropsychiatrist with a strong Dutch, almost Germanic, accent. We used to sit there in the consultation room with a cup of vending machine coffee apiece and an ashtray between us, smoking(!!) and putting the world to rights as well as reviewing my progress. Charing Cross is on the Heathrow flight path and I commented one day that my mother would love to be watching the aircraft. Dr H looked at me with his head on one side, and asked in his inimitable way “Does she not know that the Blitz is over??!!”

I’ve written about the stay for my surgery (in November 1993) before, so I’ll not repeat that here save to say that when you’re flat on your back for a week with your nethers swaddled tightly, watching the aircraft fly over is the only thing you can really do. I didn’t have the concentration to read the paper and I turned down the opportunity to move to a room with a television because I was sure there’d be someone who’d appreciate it more than me. I never have been a big telly-watcher, and I was quite happy with the radio stations that were piped in.

Sadly, the last time I saw Dr Hohberger, a few weeks before my surgery, he was recovering from a heart attack and he was clearly still very unwell. More sadly still, on my final and post-operative GIC visit I saw a new doctor who told me that Dr Hohberger had passed away since I had last seen him. He was and is greatly missed, and I will never forget him.

Fast forward to 2023. I walked through the Broadway shopping centre and across Talgarth Road, and set off down Fulham Palace Road. There are a couple of huge new buildings on the way along, but I was soon outside the hospital saying a silent prayer of thanks for the gender specialists and the surgeon, the receptionists and the ward staff. Without them, I would literally not be who I am today. After several minutes and a few photos, I walked back past Hammersmith tube station to book into my hotel, dragging my mind back to the present day and to meeting my colleagues.