Nicholas Cheffings is a real estate lawyer with more than 40 years’ experience. Geoffrey Warren Wright was a senior surveyor with more than 18 years at CBRE before launching a consultancy in 2020.
Leaders in their field, the pair toured the UK giving talks on the industry. They were friends. Until one day Cheffings called Wright and was told he’d never talk to Geoff again. Geoff was gone. Gaynor was here. This is their story.
Nicholas Cheffings, interim head of legal at the Crown Estate and senior counsel at Hogan Lovells
Some 20 years ago, Geoffrey Warren Wright and I went on speaking tours of England, giving talks in a dozen towns and cities. He was a surveyor and I was a real estate lawyer. We were so-called leaders in our respective fields. We enjoyed ourselves, taking the subject seriously but not taking ourselves too seriously.
We stayed in touch, working together for a number of different clients over subsequent years. We enjoyed each other’s company, learning more about each other over time. Geoff, from Leeds, was an ardent follower of Leeds Rhinos rugby league team. A big man and not in the best of health, Geoff seemed happy enough. That said, he never quite gave me the impression that he was entirely content. He always seemed to be holding back a little. He didn’t completely relax without the support of a nice glass (or several) of red. We were friends, but something prevented us from becoming close friends.
In 2019, we were both coming towards the end of our time with our respective firms when Geoff suffered a near-death episode, which he was extraordinarily fortunate to survive. Having come within three minutes of dying in hospital during what should have been a routine heart operation, a fortnight later, after being discharged, his left lung collapsed and the right was about to follow. Over the ensuing five days, he suffered progressive multiple organ failure. This was diagnosed as Dressler’s Syndrome.
In January that year, he had six theatre visits and 29 procedures, received 24 units of blood, suffered heart failure in theatre, was in a coma for three days and had another heart failure coming out of it. He teetered on the very edge of survival for two weeks.
I asked how long she had been struggling with these feelings, and her answer was truly remarkable to hear: “Since I was five.” Yes, five. That’s 60 years
Nicholas Cheffings
During the coronavirus pandemic we exchanged occasional messages. At one point, to my surprise, he told me that he had separated amicably from Jane, his wife of 37 years. At the start of this year, there was a period of silence before we reconnected. I got back in touch, initially by message, because I wanted to tell him that I was taking on a new temporary role and to ask if he was available to act for a former colleague who I thought would benefit from his expertise.
I received a message back telling me that there was some “mega-news” to share. I called. I said: “How are you, Sir?” Something struck me as different about the voice I heard coming back at me. The voice told me that I had got it wrong saying “sir”. For a nanosecond I thought I was about to be told that Geoff had not actually been knighted for services to real estate but instead had received an MBE.
I was wrong. Totally wrong.
The “mega-news” was that Geoffrey Warren Wright was no more. I would never speak to him again.
I was now talking to Gaynor Mary Warren-Wright – and how happy she sounded. She was blissfully happy. She told me that she was well under way in the process to correct her biological gender from male to female. Having a discrepancy between her brain’s gender and body’s gender had, over time, become more difficult to handle, and it had reached a point where treatment had become the only answer to that dysphoria.
I asked how long she had been struggling with these feelings, and her answer was truly remarkable to hear: “Since I was five.” Yes, five. That’s 60 years.
I subsequently learned that, by late 2019, deteriorating health through trying to return to normal workloads far too soon was simply too much. Continued struggles and the gender dysphoria meant that evening, after a particularly hard and depressing day in London, she sat alone in semi-darkness, staring at a litre of gin, a glass and sedatives, knowing that this would be the easy way out. Thankfully, Geoff just fell asleep.
The next day, Geoff reached out to Mary Burke at the London Transgender Clinic. From that moment, life changed. The focus now was upon finding Gaynor.
Gaynor Mary Warren-Wright, arbitrator and sole principal at Warren Wright Associates
I had known about this issue from a very early age. To say something blindingly obvious to older readers but maybe not to Generation X, Y or Z, research was nearly impossible for a youngster in the 1960s. My parents were very traditional and unforgiving of anything that might impugn their traditional approach to life.
What I did know was that I was out of place in my skin, and most comfortable in female company. This, I now understand, was in part fear of being confronted or cornered and my awful truth emerging. I never became close to males in a friendship sense, and this perhaps was the reason.
When I was about 14, I visited the school library and found a copy of the Daily Mail blasting out a full-cover front page on fashion model April Ashley, after being “outed” as transsexual in 1961. This focused upon the controversial annulment of her marriage to Hon. Arthur Corbett (later the third Baron Rowallan) in 1970. For the first time, I realised that it was possible to change sex. But, knowing that my GP was wholly traditional, there was still very little that I could do.
It is now with the benefit of hindsight that I can see why my dreaded psoriasis appeared for the first time. I now understand that the stress of gender dysphoria was intervening in my life. What was clear was that society was not ready to comprehend this “illness”, for that is what they thought it was.
My best expectation was to try conforming to traditional values and seemingly live a normal life. For the most part, I achieved that very successfully, but my career, aviation and later golf were the barriers behind which I hid.
In December 2017, with the help of a supportive friend, I arranged to see Dr Vickie Pasterski, a specialist in gender identity and gender non-conforming behaviour. I recognised that I needed to understand myself, why this was happening to me and what my options were. Vickie diagnosed me as having gender dysphoria and referred me to the London Transgender Clinic. On my first visit, I stood terrified on the steps, a shining black gloss painted door facing me. I rang the bell and the door opened.
I entered, shaking with nerves, but for the first time in my life I felt safe.
In time I concluded that if I didn’t embrace change, with all the challenges that it necessarily involves, then I wouldn’t live much longer. It is fair to say that the team at LTC, in particular registered nurse Mary Burke, saved my life. They persuaded me to confront myself and to accept that Gaynor was who I really was and had been all my life.
The personal emotional cost of my journey has been immense, but from the moment that I accepted who I really was it has been fabulous
Gaynor Mary Warren-Wright
I should rightly commend the love and support given to me by my wife and grown-up children, Christopher and Penny. They now understand the trauma that has inhabited me for most of my life.
I hope that you can see that my decision to change my gender is an informed decision that I have taken with full clinical support.
My former PA, Kat, who I took on many years ago as a raw but enthusiastic 24-year-old graduate summed it up perfectly, saying:
“I appreciate the time you have taken to tell your story. It’s so hard to appreciate what a burden this must have been to carry around all these years, and what a relief it must be now. I’m so happy that you finally feel you can be your true self and are on this journey.
“I am also very pleased that you chose to share this with me. I can’t imagine what it takes to come out to friends and people you care about, not knowing how they will react. All I can say is that if they are not accepting or treat you with anything less than love and care, then they are not worth your energy.
“Some people may take time. Give them that time if needed, but otherwise save your energy for yourself and the people who deserve it. Life is too short.”
My transition has been so happy, if at times mentally challenging. However, everybody that I know has been unbelievably kind and supportive – my male and female friends, those somewhere in-between (non-binary/gender fluid), past and present work colleagues, the kids and my wonderful new neighbours. The property industry, in generic terms, has been simply wonderful.
The personal emotional cost of my journey has been immense, but from the moment that I accepted who I really was it has been fabulous. To publicly gain Nicholas as a friend and ally of the trans community is somewhat overwhelming but so welcome.
I am now mentally in a far better place than I have ever been. Above all, I am in an incredibly happy place. The reaction of two of my former colleagues on hearing the news: “OMG, you were bad enough to negotiate against before, but with this burden shifted you will be impossible!”
Once I had accepted who I was and that I had been Gaynor Mary Warren-Wright for my whole life, the stress dissipated, and my energy and verve for life flowed through in abundance, like never before. All of this despite a crazy 2021, moving house, transitioning fully, working, making new friends, refreshing old friends, my first surgery in April and more surgery at the end of August.
I am now adding one more massive task to my CV, having been asked by plastic and cosmetic surgeon Christopher Inglefield to head up new national charity, the London Transgender Clinic Foundation Trust, aimed at supporting transgender people in need of financial help where the NHS is unable to realistically assist them.
Deep and personal insight
You may ask why we have published this piece. We know that criticism, contempt and perhaps abuse will follow from some. Those who are not interested in Gaynor’s journey or who reject the whole concept of gender dysphoria will probably not have made it this far. To those of you who have, thank you.
We wanted to give some insight at a deep and personal level of what it means to be trans; to show how hard it is to live a life which belongs to somebody else; to give some idea that some of our mental challenges can be so deeply hidden from view but can be such a heavy weight to carry; to emphasise the importance of true supportive and proactive allyship for those who are too often marginalised and discriminated against; and to tell a story that has such a happy ending – no, not an ending… a new beginning.
We also wanted to say a sincere thank you to the property industry, whose warm welcome of Gaynor belies the reputation it has for too often failing to embrace diversity and foster inclusion. Those thanks extend to the RICS, a much-maligned institution of late, but John Fletcher, Gemma Beasley and all of the team at the Dispute Resolution Service could not have done more to welcome their first-ever transgender arbitrator.
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