David Burgess - Obituary

The David Burgess story seemed to some of us to come from nowhere and it refused to fit the narratives about dressing and transitioning available at the time. It confirmed that dressing was not the province only of underworld opportunists and that senior professionals did not have to live closeted lives, attend secret balls or mimic "safe" relationships. Their lives of real adventure could be heroic and highly-principled. The hints of a difficult personal relationship in some of the media coverage of the story only added to our conviction that the world of trans was as deep and complex as any human world.