David Burgess was born in
Castleford, West Yorkshire.
His mother was a secondary-school headmistress, but he never knew his father. He
went to boarding school in
Skipton, and then to Cambridge
University where he met Robert Winstanley and gained an upper second in law in
1969. He was already openly bisexual.
In 1975 Winstanley Burgess Solicitors opened in offices above a pizza
restaurant opposite
Islington Town Hall. Burgess
had already been doing voluntary work for the Joint Council for the Welfare of
Immigrants, and rapidly began to build his reputation in immigration law,
working especially with Tamil and Kurd refugees, and the firm moved to larger
offices.
Stephen Whittle describes a visit:
“I had expected a London lawyer to work in a fancy building, with polished
furniture, and rich carpets. Instead I entered a dark, dingy, decaying building
on the East London Road, where dirty magnolia woodchip papered stud wall
partitions, with holes where they had been torn and kicked in frustration by the
firm’s clients, and which looked as if they would collapse at any moment. Inside
that den of iniquity, there seemed to be hundreds of grey people hanging out,
hoping for a bob or two, or a cup of tea whilst they waited for the British
Government to decide on their lives. Rarely did money change hands. Sonia,
supported by her legal partner Robert Winstanley and backed by an army of
pro-bono law students, mostly gave away her services.”
By this time Burgess was experimenting in going out as Sonia. For a while he
had a relationship with a Chinese man, whom he took home to Castleford.
In 1979 Burgess acted on behalf of
Mark
Rees so that he could change his legal gender. This was taken as far as the
European Court of Human Right (ECHR) in 1986, but his petition was finally
denied.
In 1985 David married a Tibetan refugee who worked as a nurse. They had two
children, and adopted the wife's 7-year-old niece. The wife knew of and accepted
that David was also Sonia.
In 1987 a group of 52 Sri Lankan Tamil asylum seekers were refused entry on
arrival at the UK border. Burgess intervened to stop their deportation, using
the only in-country legal remedy then available, a judicial review of the
decision to reject the asylum claim. Burgess won the case in the court of
appeal, but lost in the House of Lords, and the men were returned to Sri Lanka.
The next year Burgess and a colleague travelled to Sri Lanka, traced the 52 men
and documented the ill-treatment they had suffered since their return. This
permitted an out-of-country appeal and the men were subsequently accepted as
refugees and allowed into the UK. Burgess did lose this case when it reached the
ECHR in 1991, but the case highlighted the inadequacy of judicial review being
the only in-country challenge to a refusal of entry, and the law was later
changed.
Burgess represented the Sri Lankan
Viraj Mendis who sought
sanctuary in the
Church of the
Ascension in Hulme, Manchester, before being deported in 1989.
In 1991 a Tibetan official who was visiting London as part of a Chinese
delegation decided to defect and Burgess provided accommodation for several
weeks until asylum was granted.
The same year, Burgess was brought in at the last moment in the case of M, a
teacher from Zaire, who was actually on a plane at Heathrow and about to be
deported. Burgess filed a new asylum application and understood that he had
received an undertaking from the government solicitor that deportation would be
stayed. Officials phoned Heathrow, but were put through to the wrong terminal,
and M was flown to Zaire. On discovering this, Burgess phoned the judge at home
at midnight, who ordered that arrangements be made to fly M back to the UK.
However the Conservative Home Secretary
Kenneth
Baker interfered to cancel the arrangements. At this point M disappeared,
probably fleeing to another African country. Burgess began contempt of court
proceedings against the Home Secretary and pursued the case to the House of
Lords, which ruled against the government. Baker was spared a fine, but was
ordered to pay costs.
“It would be a black day for the rule of law and the liberty of the subject
if ministers were not accountable to the courts for their personal actions”.
This has been described as the most significant constitutional case for 200
years in that no previous serving minister had been so chastised. In the House
of Commons, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour MP for Islington North, and future leader of
the Labour Party, criticized the Home Secretary for putting M's life at risk.
After the transsexual action group,
Press For
Change, was founded in 1992, Burgess acted as their solicitor.
However Burgess was first and foremost a human rights lawyer, and if she had
transitioned at that time would have lost credibility and career.
In 1992 Burgess acted on behalf of Stephen Whittle's eldest child, referred
to as 'Z' and argued that Stephen should be on her birth certificate as
'parent'. This took four years to get to the ECHR, and although they technically
lost, the ECHR did recognise Stephen, his wife and children as a family.
In 1996 Burgess' partner,
Robert Winstanley, who had specialised in criminal
defence work, was made a judge. They parted on good terms, but Winstanley had
been the more business oriented, and his departure coincided with government
changes to legal aid that required more documentation that Burgess found
irksome.
In that year Burgess acted for
Karamjit
Singh Chahal, an alleged Sikh militant facing deportation to India, where he
claimed he would be at risk of torture. Burgess travelled to India and collected
four volumes of cogent evidence, while the Attorney General had only a thin file
of press cuttings. The ECHR ruled against deportation, that the risk of torture
is absolute, even for those who may pose a security risk to the UK. This
precedent prevented the deportation of accused terrorists rounded up after 9/11.
While David and wife had kept the existence of Sonia from the children, one
night in a restaurant with another trans woman, Sonia realised that she had been
recognised by another parent from her son's school. She forced herself to tell
the son, and got the reaction:
“I thought you were really the most boring person I had ever known, thank god
there is something interesting at last”.
After that the family was open and both as Sonia and David she was accepted.
Sonia semi-transitioned in the early 2000s. By that time she was able to work
part time, and was recognised by the courts as an expert in immigration law. Her
appearance had become androgynous, and many lawyers and judges knew of her as
Sonia.
However the firm was in financial problems and her back was giving her a bad
time. The firm folded in 2003. Burgess was burned out from years of representing
clients traumatised by rape and torture, and by the political and media abuse
heaped on asylum seekers. He spent time in Tibet learning the language. After
returning to the UK Mr and Mrs Burgess agreed to separate, and in 2008 they were
divorced. A flat was found in
Cambridge
Circus, on the edge of
Soho, where Sonia could be
herself, and was considering facial surgery and breast implants.
 |
| Sonia |
Burgess did not stay away from refugee work, and began working for the
Medical Foundation for
the Care of Victims of Torture, and also for a law firm in north London,
where her Sonia identity was an open secret.
Sonia met 34-year-old Nina (Senthooran) Kanagasingham, probably in a
nightclub.. Nina was a trans asylum seeker from Sri Lanka who had been in the UK
since 2000. On 25 October 2010 they were at Kings Cross tube station, after
visiting Nina's doctor, when Tina, probably in despair at the inhumane
immigration system, lashed out and Sonia was under the train.
Sonia's funeral was held at
St Martin-in-the
Fields, Trafalgar Square on 17 November, attended by around 600 persons, a
mixture of lawyers, former asylum seekers and trans persons. The three children
delivered a eulogy about the father they had known, slipping easily between
female and male pronouns.
Kanagasingham was charged with murder, and remanded in
Wandsworth men's
prison.
Kanagasingham pleaded guilty to manslaughter on grounds of diminished
responsibility because of schizophrenia, and chose to be referred to as a man
and by his male name during the trial. He was sentenced to life, and to serve a
minimum of seven years.
He was sent to
Belmarsh men's
prison – one of the first trans prisoners to be housed in defiance of the New
prison Guidelines of 2011, which said that those living as female should be sent
to a woman's prison. In February 2015, he was found dead in his cell with a
plastic bag around his head, and hands tied to the bed. At the inquest, nearby
prisoners reported hearing cries for help.
* David Burgess is apparently a common name for lawyers. Google brings up
such in various English-speaking cities. There is a book,
Fighting for Social
Justice: The Life Story of David Burgess, but it is about the US labour
activist.
-
Mark Rees. Dear Sir or Madam. Cassell, 1996: Chp 26.
-
Katharine Knox & Tony Kushner. Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global,
National and Local Perspectives During the Twentieth Century. Routledge,
1999: 385.
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Stephen Whittle. "Sonia ('David') Burgess (1947 – 2010): An Obituary".
whittl(e)ings, 1 Nov 2010. http://whittlings.blogspot.com/2010/11/sonia-david-burgess-1947-2010-obituary.html.
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Alexandra Topping. “Woman accused of tube murder was undergoing sex change”.
The Guardian, 1 November 2010. www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/nov/01/tube-death-woman-sex-change.
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Fiona Bawdon. “David Burgess obituary: Influential lawyer and tenacious
defender of asylum seekers' rights”. The Guardian, 2 November 2010. www.theguardian.com/law/2010/nov/02/david-burgess-obituary.
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Elizabeth Day. "The extraordinary life and death of David Burgess". The
Observer, 9 Jan 2011. www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jan/09/david-burgess-sonia-lawyer-death.
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Kate Saunders. “Celebrating a Compassionate Friend: David/Sonia Burgess”.
Huffington Post, 01/31/2011. www.huffingtonpost.com/kate-saunders/celebrating-a-compassiona_b_809229.html.
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Pater Walker. “Man who pushed solicitor under tube train jailed for life”. The
Guardian, 22 December 2011. www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/22/man-pushed-solicitor-under-tube-train-jailed.
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Kiran Randhawa. “Transsexual killer of top lawyer found dead in prison cell”.
London Evening Standard, 17 February 2015. www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/transsexual-killer-of-top-lawyer-found-dead-in-prison-cell-10051098.html.
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Kiran Randhawa. “ 'Inmates heard shouts of 'help me' before transsexual
prisoner was found dead' “. London Evening Standard, 20 February 2015. www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/inmates-heard-shouts-of-help-me-before-transexual-prisoner-was-found-dead-10053295.html.
EN.Wikipedia
______________________________________
Sheila Jeffreys, in her 2014 book,
Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of
the Politics of Transgenderism, p160-1, uses this case of all cases to raise
alarm that Kanagasingham might be placed in a woman's prison.
The Evening Standard has two articles from February 2015 re the then ongoing
inquest into Senthooran Kanagasingham's death, but I could not find any articles
in the Standard or elsewhere re the conclusion of the inquest.