Background to the Annual Diversity Lectures
At Imperial we are dedicated to promoting and embedding all aspects of equality throughout the College’s communities.
To help with this mission we hold an annual Diversity Lecture to highlight the importance of equality and diversity. In previous years we have had a wide range of speakers from Ram Gidoomal CBE to Trevor Philips (former Chair of the EHRC).
This year we are pleased to have members from GIRES (Gender Identity Research and Education Society), who will be sharing some of their research into trans awareness and how it can impact the workplace, including some of their own stories and experiences.
This will be followed by a Q&A session and a small reception.
Please use the button below to register for the Lecture:
If you are interested to find out more about GIRES and the work they do, please click here for their website.
Abstract
Celia Macleod‘s personal story of transition will reveal the challenges of having endured 10 years at single sex boarding schools for boys whilst at the same time knowing she was not content with her assigned gender. She will also share her experiences of embarking on a change of role to live as a woman whilst serving in the NHS as a Medical Director, thus attracting a flurry of media attention.
Terry Reed will speak about her family’s personal journey, and how this provided her, as a trustee of GIRES, with an entrée into the scientific world which was starting to erode the myth that ‘transsexualism’ – as it was then described – was a psychiatric illness. The condition still appears in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD10), as a Mental and Behavioural Disorder. Terry will look at the disempowering impact of the psychiatric diagnosis.
However, in anticipation of the upcoming ICD11, the World Health Organisation is preparing to re-classify the condition, under a different title, description and classification, that will de-psychopathologise it, and take account of ‘current scientific evidence’.
Terry will give a brief synopsis of some of this scientific evidence, and the impact, not only on adults, but also on gender variant children and adolescents, as gender medicine travels from the dark-ages towards enlightenment.
Biographies
Celia Macleod qualified as a doctor in 1969 after studying at Cambridge University and The London Hospital Medical College. She underwent specialist training in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at St Mary’s Hospital Paddington and St George’s Hospital London. She practised as Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist in Norfolk for nearly 30 years. During this time she took an active role in post-graduate medical education and played a leading part in post-graduate specialist examinations for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. She contributed to hospital management including serving 4 years as Medical Director of an acute hospital Trust. In the clinical field her principal specialism was the care of women with gynaecological cancers. She also saw small numbers of trans men for keyhole surgery for hysterectomy and removal of ovaries. She retired from clinical practice in 2010 and now lives in London. Celia is currently Chair of GIRES and has been a member since 2006. She is also a member of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.
Terry Reed OBE, JP, BA (Hons), MCSP, SRP, Grad. Dip. Phys. is a trustee of the Charity, Gender Identity Research and Education Society (GIRES). In 1997, the Charity was set up by her husband Bernard Reed, OBE MA, MBA, working with trans activists. Bernard and Terry met in 1957 when Bernard was at Oxford. This was an era of gender-binary segregation, which obliged Terry to scale walls and climb drainpipes in pursuit of romance.
Terry has degrees in History and Physiotherapy. She trained at St Mary’s Paddington, as well as a number of other London hospitals, including the Brompton, and Great Ormond Street. She was awarded the Memorial prize for being the “student of outstanding merit”.
Terry is currently joint authoring a short article on etiology for The Lancet. She is on the NHS England Clinical Reference Group preparing Service Specifications and Policy for the treatment of adult trans people, and has, for many years, been a member of the team writing UK Intercollegiate Good Practice Guidelines (2013) for the assessment and treatment of adults with gender dysphoria.
Terry and Bernard helped their trans daughter to win a landmark sex discrimination case in 1997 which triggered the establishment of GIRES. The charity’s trustees are trans people, or their relatives or friends, as are most of the charity’s 350 individual members; it also has 59 Corporate Members, including Imperial College London, which are engaged in central and local government, healthcare regulation and provision, education, financial services, policing, legal services, housing, sport, media, aviation, aerospace, food processing and information technology.