Barrister Heather Stokes in a studio shot. Source: News Limited
LAST August, Adelaide barrister David Stokes brought his double life to an end and arrived at work as Heather. She tells the story of her transition below.
She used to run for Australia, back when she was David Stokes. In 1973, not long out of St Peter's College, she won the men's national 100m track title, and competed in the Pacific Conference Games in Canada.
"I had a fractured foot during the trials for the Christchurch Commonwealth Games and I nearly made the team which wasn't bad considering I had to take several months off for the fracture to heal," Heather Stokes says, flicking back a stray piece of fringe.
Respected criminal lawyer returns to work as a woman
It is almost a year since criminal barrister David Stokes left work on Friday and returned on Monday as Heather.
Acting Chief Judge of the District Court, Geoff Muecke, sent around a memo to judges the week before to advise them that from next week, Mr Stokes would be Ms.
"He rang me personally to say 'how do you want to be addressed?'," she says. "He said 'I think they all know but it's nice they will know it's happening as of this day'."
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It caused something of a sensation in legal circles - how could it not? A middle-aged barrister with steel grey hair and a receding hairline becomes a woman in tailored skirts and pantyhose, draped cardigans, high heels, dangly earrings and lipstick.
The transition, done with psychiatric and medical support, is a major step but Heather's evolution is not over. There is potential in the future for sexual reassignment surgery but that remains a long way off.
In the lead-up to becoming Heather, David took aside court staff, senior police and prosecutors, even members of the press, to let them know what was about to happen.
"I'd catch up with them over coffee, that sort of thing," Heather says. "I ran into the Chief Justice (John Doyle), he was buying coffee, and I told John that I was going to do this and that I would let his office know as a matter of professional courtesy."
She would break the ice saying, "I don't know what stories you would have heard about me but this is what I'm embarking on", and answer whatever questions they had. "I was saying this is me, and if you want to talk about it, I'm happy to talk," she says.
Most of the court staff took it in their stride although when she first went to the cells in the Samuel Way Building to see her client, convicted murderer Kelly Lee Pearman, she was challenged by one of the guards.
"She said 'Are you all right? I don't think I've seen you down here'," says Heather. "And I said 'for God's sake, it's Heather'."
She was not asking permission, nor was she seeking approval. She wanted to let colleagues know she was on a course that was not going to change.
"I didn't need approval; approval is nice if you can get it," she says. "A couple of close friends and a couple of judges said 'what you're doing is fine but we're worried about what it's going to do your practice'. It was only an expression of concern."
David emerged as Heather in mid-August but the transition had been going on for much longer. A lifetime in fact. No one wakes up one day and decides to change their sex. But unlike some transgender people, Heather did not grow up feeling like a girl who was trapped in a boy's body. It was trickier than that, less clear-cut.
Defence lawyer Heather Stokes the Supreme Court in Adelaide.
"Way, way back from as little as I can remember I had an interest in dressing up as a girl," Heather says. "I was aware that I had this desire to dress as a woman, which would make me like any other transvestite. Sometimes, that is a cover for something deeper, and in my case it was."
David had talked to his father in the early 1970s and late 1980s about whether he would be happier living as a woman but it came to nothing and he got on with his life.
He married not once but twice and was in love with both women, at least for a time. The first marriage broke down after a decade, and David left for another woman. He later married his second wife with whom he has two adult daughters who fully support him and who he adores. The second marriage lasted for 28 years but crumbled as 'Heather' started to emerge.
David wasn't particularly effeminate and cut quite a dashing figure at the Bar where his clients included Zialloh Abrahimzadeh who stabbed his wife to death in public, the former head of the APY Lands Bernard Singer, and AFL footballer Fabian Francis. He was a heterosexual man who liked to dress as a woman, but only in private.
"I wasn't bad looking as a male and I was reasonably successful - that was one reason why I sublimated that need and that need had to be suppressed," she says.
The record shows that David Stokes would be in his mid-60s. Heather likes to think of herself as a born-again woman who is "somewhere in her fifties". Either way it is late in life to be making such a drastic change.
She reached the point last year where, for her sanity, it had to be done.
"I nearly did this the year before but I decided 'I just can't do this' and I put it on hold again," she says. "But I had got to the stage where I don't know what I would have done to myself."
Not that she would have harmed herself; she is far too sensible for that. But she could see herself becoming progressively more depressed and miserable. The thought of never becoming who she was supposed to be frightens her even now.
The legal community, perhaps because they are wiser in the ways of the world than most, has taken the change entirely in its stride and it helped that David, and Heather, are well-liked.
Judges have been unfailingly courteous - although one of them kept calling her Mr Stokes during a recent courtroom argument - and she says she has lost just two briefs out of hundreds. One judge finds it difficult but manages to nod cursorily, another looks away when they pass in the street. At the recent funeral of Paul Rofe QC, a judge walked past without recognising her but then realised and doubled back to apologise.
Heather's first public appearance was in relation to Kelly Lee Pearman who killed housewife Karen Hodgson with a sawn-off shotgun after a bungled home invasion in 2010. In her third day as Heather, Pearman was sentenced to 15 years and she was approached by journalists as she left court and asked to comment. She appeared on television that night as Heather.
"I don't have a reputation for stopping and talking unless there's a social justice issue and I just kept on walking and fielded a couple of questions," she says.
Heather says clients like Pearman were unfazed by the change. Most of them are focused on court at the expense of anything else; some said "it's 2012 so what was the problem?"; and one asked permission to come around the table and give soon-to-be-Heather a kiss on the cheek.
"Of the hundreds of matters I've been involved in since August last year, I've only lost two briefs because people were a bit unsure about how a jury might react," she says. "But I've won a lot more trials than I've lost in that time."
Heather plainly enjoys being a woman. She began hormone therapy early last year - "I'm on the Pill!" she says - and presents as a woman, not as a man in drag.
Like other transgender women, she relishes the trappings of womanhood that define her new status. She represented Pearman in a form-fitting elasticised black dress. She likes jewellery, her nails are polished and the lipstick is in place. Despite her career as a runner, she does not have the giveaway bulging calf muscles and her legs are slender and shapely.
"Genetically, I'm lucky," she says. "I don't look like a boy in drag and that's been a huge advantage."
Mostly, she believes in herself. She is lively and amusing company and has enormous confidence in herself as a woman. She is happy being Heather and wants everyone to know it.
She had been living as Heather except for work as part of her transition so by the time it happened there was no awkwardness, no having to steel herself to walk through the door of Christopher Legoe Chambers and face colleagues for the first time.
"I'd got way past the stage of being outdoors as Heather and being nervous, way past it," she says. "That was months and months and months before. I just felt really comfortable, and I was curious to know what the reactions would be."
Her only residual concern - and it's one that she worries could be exacerbated by this article - is that juries will recognise her and make judgments.
"I said to one judge last year that it still worried me a bit that some jurors will have seen publicity or figure from the voice that there is something going on," she says. "He said, 'well actually, we've just finished a trial Heather and I'm not sure that all of the jurors do pick it up."
Early this year, something very unexpected happened to Heather Stokes. She began falling in love with a colleague, lawyer and barrister Kristie Molloy.
After leaving a long marriage in 2011 and transitioning to Heather she anticipated a future of friendships, but not love. "I was quite prepared to spend the next x years going out with friends and meeting people and having a good time," she says. "I hadn't envisaged being in a couple until this happened. I am an extremely happy girl and it is as much a surprise to her as it is to me."
Kristie wasn't gay, yet she had fallen in love with a woman who used to be a man.
"I wasn't a lesbian - all my past relationships were with men but I fell in love with Heather," Kristie says.
So surprised was Heather that she sought out her psychiatrist whose assessments of her are part of the legal process for reassigning gender. She basically had to ask him what she was doing falling for a woman.
"It took him five to eight minutes to scientifically say 'd'uh'," she says. "Gender orientation is not the same thing as gender preference. So if you're born with an orientation towards women, the mere fact that you change your gender because that's the way you see yourself does not automatically mean that you will change your gender preference."
So Heather is a gay woman who never had an interest in men, and hasn't now. Kristie, who is in the same chambers, knew David vaguely but fell in love with Heather. They know they are the subject of gossip but are getting through it and Heather wants the world to know they are together.
"I am proud of the fact that she loves me, I am proud of the relationship," she says. "I want to tell everyone I'm in a relationship with someone I adore."
Heather Frances Stokes is still a work in progress. She changed her name by deed poll, has a new lawyer's practising certificate, driver's licence, health and credit cards.
She is about to apply for a new passport, which will require her amended birth certificate and a letter from her psychiatrist confirming she identifies as female.
From one week to the next, she changed to female bathrooms and only one person has ever complained. She chose the name Heather last year because it was a soft name with suitable Scottish ancestry and it was non-generational and relatively uncommon. There aren't a lot of Heathers around, she says, but there will always be Heathers.
Sexual reassignment surgery is a way off in the future. It is a long and deliberate process and she is not sure how far down that road she will go.
"It's a reality that not everyone feels the need to do so," she says. "I have made no decision about that. I probably will do, but that's a while away."
Becoming Heather has not just been about adopting the trappings of womanhood. She says there is a genuine internal transformation going on that has altered her view of things.
Her professional life and passion for social justice haven't changed but her emotional reactions have subtly shifted. She is not the same person that she was.
"It's like there's some circuitry in my head that's been lit up by the fact I'm on hormones and now living as a female - that has been quite interesting," she says.
It is hard to believe but she says that she cries more. "I do, it's not pathetic, that's the point, I've had a couple of meltdowns," she says. "I used to see a sad movie and I would have shed a tear anyway but the reaction is much stronger and much more lasting. And I've had some hormonal reactions to things which have not been much fun, they've been quite distressing."
Barrister Heather Stokes putting make up on at home.
Without wanting to overplay it, she feels more vulnerable as a woman. If there is a group of men in the street, she pays more attention to their body language and what they are doing.
"I hadn't expected that but I do feel more vulnerable," she says. "I don't want to overplay that or be silly or over-intellectualise it but I have noticed it without intending it to happen."
The decision to speak to saweekend has been motivated by the decision to become patron of the support group for women in prison, Seeds of Affinity.
Heather says she has always felt strongly about the plight of women in the prison system who suffer in general more than men. Many are mothers, and too many of them come out of prison and return to inappropriate relationships.
"Women prisoners are very underprivileged and probably one of the most downtrodden groups in the community," she says. "I appreciate there is no sympathy for criminals and some of the women have done some terrible things but mostly speaking not."
Heather insists she isn't brave; that she has only done what she felt she needed to do. And she is proud that she did it in Adelaide, resisting the temptation to start afresh by moving interstate. Instead, she stood her ground:
"I have stayed in Adelaide, I've stayed in my own profession, and I have a fairly high profile as a criminal barrister. I'm a bit stubborn. It was the right thing to do. I've never seen myself as brave, it was a necessity."
She is also sending a message to others that they can do it, and survive. It is another reason she has agreed to speak, so transgender people who may be tempted to self-harm can see that another life is possible. Suicide rates in the transgender population are extraordinarily high; a 2011 study in the US put it at 41 per cent.
"You don't wake up one morning and think, 'screw it, I'm going to thumb my nose at the world and decide I'm going to be a transgender.' It's not something you ask to do," she says.
"You can squash it within you, you can hide it, you can avoid it, and maybe never give in to it but it's really important for people of all ages to know you don't have to do that. And it ought not to be bad."
She has never been so happy because she has never felt so "right" in herself. "You feel as though you are finally where you ought to be, in a body where the presentation feels natural," she says. "When you get there and you realise just how appropriate this is, it's an amazing feeling."
seedsofaffinity.org.au
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