Priest Resumes Job After Sex Change

For the past four years the parishioners of St. Philip’s Church in Upper Stratton, a suburb of Swindon, a railway town 80 miles west of London, have been ministered to by the Rev. Philip Stone.

On Sunday, their services will be conducted by the Rev. Carol Stone.

At the age of 46, their vicar has had a sex-change operation--or “gender re-assignment,” as described in the church’s news release--and is at last the woman she always wanted to be.

“I only have two vocations in my whole life,” Stone told a news conference in Swindon earlier this week. “They are to be a priest and to be a woman. My last prayer at night was that I’d wake up a girl.”

Stone, twice divorced and with an 18-year-old daughter, has had the support of her family, her congregation and her bishop, the Rt. Rev. Barry Rogerson of Bristol, who said last June he could see no reason in church law why Stone should not continue as a priest in the Church of England after the sex-change operation.

“I don’t believe there’s a moral issue here,” he said. “This is a medical condition and can be dealt with medically, now.”

Stone acknowledged some people might find her change of sex unacceptable.

“As a priest you always have to be prepared for people to come and go,” she said. “There will obviously be those people who won’t come with me, and they will be sorely missed, but there will always be a place for them at St. Philip’s.”