A man’s sex change has been affirmed in a Church of England service, said to be the first of its kind.
The transsexual man, who is known as Susan Musgrove, 60, underwent surgery last year and has now been publicly blessed as a woman at St. Andrew’s Church in Northumberland.
The curate of Musgrove’s church designed an affirmation liturgy for the service after it received the go-ahead from the bishop of Newcastle.
Susan Musgrove has been married three times and has two children and two grandchildren, who all attended the service.
He saw a “gender specialist” at a gender clinic in Sunderland in 2009 and lived as a woman before having a sex change.
Musgrove says, “I’d needed the stone and wood and ceremony of an Anglican church, particularly my local church, to make my transition feel real. … As far as I could see, no transgender person had ever formally affirmed their faith before in the Church of England.”
In November last year, it was revealed that Britain’s youngest sex-swap patient decided to reverse the procedure after living as a woman for less than a year.
The 18-year-old, who was formerly known as Brad Cooper, had been having hormone injections to make him look like a woman but decided to revert back to living as a man.
