The PFC Library - Gender Politics and Awareness
A selection of articles and essays which examine the place of transsexual people in relation to society, themselves and contemporary thinking.
Gemeinschaftsfremden
- Or how to be shafted by your friends: Sterilisation requirements and
legal status recognition for the Transsexual
To many it seems so "obvious" that it’s said with hardly a thought for what it means. In practice it’s almost an academic point too. Yet why is it that transgendered people are the only people for whom it’s assumed reasonable to formally demand sterilisation in return for recognition? What does it say about the mindset of those who aren’t content just to know that the treatment renders transsexuals sterile anyway? What dangerous precedents does it set in countries that would be scandalised by applying the same logic to other citizens? Dr Stephen Whittle proves again in this politico-legal treatise that even your friends sometimes need to be watched. (55Kb).
Christine Burns asks whether some women’s groups are so busy using biological criteria to define us and them that they fail to see the irony of the objectification this involves.
And do the benefits outweigh the possible confusion caused when transsexuals, whose sexual orientation is as variable as anybody else’s, campaign alongside other groups like lesbians, gays and bisexuals?
The Empire Strikes Back
(external link)
A spirited rebuttal of the work of Dr Janice Raymond, author of the book, "The Transsexual Empire".
An Association For As Noble A Purpose As Any
This thought-provoking article was published by Press for Change’s Dr Stephen Whittle in the New Law Journal in March, 1996.
If you rely on science alone to bring transsexuality in from the cold, then think again. This article, first published by GEMS News in the autumn of 1993, was prompted by a brief and disturbing illustration by the world’s press that genocide is never far from the surface in our society.
The International Bill of Gender Rights
The International Bill of Gender Rights (IBGR) was first drafted in committee and adopted by the International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy (ICTLEP) at that organization’s second annual meeting, held in Houston, Texas, August 26-29, 1993. This is the text as finally agreed and published in June 1995.
In September 1995, Press for Change campaigner Christine Burns facilitated a week long online debate about the issue of transsexual rights on CompuServe’s UK Politics forum (GO UKPOLITICS). This is the edited summary of the entire discussion, as a series of three Web pages.
An edited email exchange between Christine Burns and Dr Angus Campbell, Lecturer in law at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, exploring some of the philosphical issues bound up with the status of transsexual people in the UK. It was meant to be a question of legal interpretation, but then that begs the observation that much as it would be nice in theory to approach legal problems in a detached and clinical fashion, lawyers are as prone as anyone else to be as subjective in their objectivity!
This is the original and complete text of an article written by the "P" in "P vs S ..". It was published in a shortened form by The Independent in early May 1996.
Or how to forget the label and concentrate on the quality of the cloth.
Some revolutionary ideas about birth certificates: just what purpose does that fourth column really serve?
Rich man, poor man, transsexual woman …
When a child is born, it is neither a man nor a woman. But just as any child develops a sense of their own gender, a transsexual child will start to develop at an early age the self-understanding which will, after many painful years of denial, lead to transition. What is British society so grudging in legally recognising this?
Just ten years ago, anyone brave enough to stand up and say that sexual abuse of children was endemic in the western world could expect to be howled at. The whole idea was counter-intuitive. "Surely", we all thought, "if something so despicable is so commonplace then we’d all know about it. There are no big secrets like that in reality at the end of the twentieth century … are there?"
Book review: "S/he", by Minnie Bruce Pratt.
"S/he" is a memoir of an American lesbian feminist,
recounting her own journey through the shifting concepts of
gender, sexuality and feminism.
