What Colour Are Your Eyes?
What Colour Are Your Eyes?
(Copyright © 1993)
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.
It is intended as a cautionary reminder of the dangers of placing too much reliance on science to "legitimise" any sort of difference from contemporary concepts of normality.
It’s sad the way that the great public mind works isn’t it? In fact, it never ceases to amaze me that our civilisation has made it this far. A short while ago I reported on the Colloquy on Medicine and Law that took place in Amsterdam around Easter. In that article I referred to recent research which suggested a developmental explanation to gender dysphoric personality development and implied that this was good news because it stands to confirm the syndrome as a naturally occurring disposition. Not so it seems for the great British public however, if I’m to draw any conclusions from the curious and illogical reaction this week to the tentative announcement that another media bête noir, homosexuality, might have an identifiable cause.
Call it naïve, I suppose, but then I tend to class anything that nature does as, well, … er … natural! Don’t you? And if something occurs naturally then you can stop looking for the cause (ie. something to blame) and get on with dealing with the effect, if it gives the owner (rather than society) a problem. So I was astonished when the news of the scientists’ gene discovery seemed to hardly even scratch the widespread conviction that homosexuality is unnatural. Far from debating where this placed the world’s religions (whose objections have always been based on the belief that sexual orientation was a conscious choice), the world was suddenly and frighteningly debating whether this meant you could screen out and abort potentially gay foetuses. So, instead of being the good and enlightening news that it might have been, confirming that gayness is what the maker intended for part of humanity, the discovery is set to become another stick with which one section of society can beat another.
Now, before we go off at a tangent, my Amsterdam report didn’t imply that gender dysphoria has a genetic cause, it’s merely that there’s a plausible developmental explanation. That isn’t the issue. But the point is that it seems that finding a cause or explanation for something quite obviously doesn’t sway people’s views about whether it is natural or not. Instead of blaming the individual, the debate turns to whether that person had a right to be born in the first place. Make no mistake, genocide is always only just around the corner. But why?
There are lots of developmental characteristics for which we can now pinpoint a cause, and the massive worldwide project underway to map the human gene types is going to supply us with very many more before the end of the century. So, before we find ourselves involved in a whole new era of scientifically-sanctioned witch hunts over the next decade, it’s as well to try and understand the peculiar logic that’s at work and (ultimately) how it may affect the world’s transsexuals. Let’s start with something truly innocuous, for instance and from there we’ll work up to my argument…
The colour of your eyes is a natural genetically-determined feature which doesn’t of course raise a lot of eyebrows (if you’ll pardon the phrase). Nobody wants to blame you if you’re born with hazel eyes. Nobody’s going to discriminate against you in work, or seek to marginalise you. Nobody would describe this as unnatural, or the gene that causes it as defective in any way. And nobody would seek to treat or cure it, because it’s not an illness. It’s commonplace, the owner doesn’t perceive a problem, and neither does anyone else (unless you’re given to jealousy about such things).
Now let’s look at something that’s also genetically-determined, affects the colour of the self-same eyes but is a lot less commonplace … which means of course that medicine has claimed it by giving it a name. Albinism (according to my dictionary) is a genetic defect, which results in a total absense of pigment in the skin, hair and eyes. The eyes very often in this case are pale pink in colour. Again, nobody’s seriously going to blame you for being albino, though they mightn’t want you for a daughter in law and you might be subtly discriminated against in other ways too. When pressed, however, few people in the street would go as far as to call it unnatural, and the medical profession wouldn’t talk so much in terms of a cure, but would look for a remedy (or counselling) if society’s unease made the person (and I nearly said sufferer) unhappy. But it’s not an illness, so much as an outcome and the keyword in the dictionary’s definition (applied because it’s rare and unnusual) is defect.
So here we have an associative definition of defective. One string of amino acid molecules is regarded by common assent as OK, whilst another is classed as defective, simply on the basis of how common they are.
However, we’re about to fall into a thinking trap now, because the very choice of word being bandied around has a wider meaning than the genetic application we started with. Defect is used to describe things that develop unusually for other reasons as well, and takes us down the path where we begin to associate the word (and therefore everything that it’s applied to) as undesirable and in need of rectification. The catch is that we don’t simply apply this to unusual instances: we all for instance tend to develop sight defects as we get older. So, whilst unusual is defective, defective isn’t necessarily unusual!
Of course we tend to be agree in most cases over defects that are undesirable … at least when the owner of the condition agrees. Losing your eyesight with age is a natural developmental (rather than congenital) defect that’s not at all unusual and which is undesirable from your point of view, but it’s not something for society to get worked up about. Haemophilia, likewise, is perceived to be natural, it’s gene-based and uncommon enough to be called a defect, the patient is described as suffering (ie it’s undesirable from their point of view) and in this case society agrees it’s undesirable too because of the resources required for ongoing treatment. Yet the world is sympathetic too (another new and essential word to introduce into this argument). We shouldn’t forget as well that there are externally induced developmental defects which are truly unnatural because we’ve caused them. Consider, for instance, the terrible effects of the drug Thalidomide (pre-natally) or the effects in later life of metallic poisons in the environment (lead, aluminium and mercury for example). Neither should we omit to mention of course that some unusual syndromes are not necessarily undesirable enough to be seen as a defect by anyone (unusually high intelligence for example).
So, some defects are undesirable as well as unnusual, some are natural and others clearly not. Some need to be cured or counselled, and some have universal sympathy whereas others don’t. But what we’re starting to do is to separate the words and challenge the careless association of one with another. But why bother, you ask?
The reason, I believe, is that it exposes and undermines the progressive justification that we so often see in people’s reasoning. And we have to understand what’s happening (just as we know what the magician is doing when the playing card disappears) if we are to challenge it at the roots.
The conjuring trick goes like this…
First you start with a fact: we’ve found a gene that seems to influence development in some humans. At the moment we’re on safe ground; it’s scientific, it’s not yet described as usual or unusual so it’s not a defect necessarily. It’s indisputably natural and, because it’s not seemingly a defect, we’re not sure whether we should be sympathetic or possibly even jealous.
Now we’ll qualify the fact with a word that’s represented by ignorance and which tells us to think of the effect as affecting a small part of the species. You don’t need to use the word homosexual of course, any adjectival noun with the same associations will do. (Try transsexual, for instance). What do our word associations now give us? Well it’s uncommon, therefore it’s a defect (poor dears).
Now go on with all those unfortunate associations working to feed the willing prejudice of ignorance… Defects are unnatural, which confirms that this one is undesirable. Defects also need a cure… Now apply the "cure" that applied before you knew there was a cause. A self-imposed one… "They’re not cooperating. They’re not interested in a cure. Forget that sympathy, maybe we should cure them ourselves. For their own good. Help us you scientists, you understand what causes it."
Scary? Yes. Far fetched? It’s happening.
The greatest discovery in coming to terms with being different from the crowd lies in the self awareness it creates. Whether you’re articulate or not, and whether philosophically inclined or downright pragmatic, nature’s gift to anyone who is unusual is the ability to stand apart and see the world from another perspective. To challenge generalisations that have slipped into being axioms. Without people to do that, very little of what we now take for granted about life and civilisation would exist today. Unusualness is the essence of life, standing above and looking down upon the flat plain of normality to see the holes the others can’t see in their reasoning.
The self awareness of a few, however, can so easily be perceived as a threat by everyone else. And, without the same perspective, how can you blame them for not intuitively seeing where their assumptions need subtle revision?
The moral is that no-one can afford to be smug. Transsexuals should not sit and confidently expect that when science finds an explanation for why they’re different, understanding and acceptance will simply follow suit. The lesson is that it won’t. The world’s gay community will suddenly have to adjust to having a new corner to fight, now that science is offerring an explantion for why they’re different to heterosexual people. Suddenly, they don’t have to justify why they’re gay (if science takes that from them) so much as why they should have been carried to term by their mother. And a similar fight for existence lies in the path of transsexuals too, should science progress from agreeing upon an explanation to pinpointing a cause for a particular variation in human identity development.
Gays are organised and have won enough points in the last thirty years to know and be able to confront the holes in the arguments ranged against them. Given time, science’s discovery can still be, for that part of humanity, a triumph rather than a disaster. Maybe the name gay will really mean what the letters originally stood for: Good As You.
But could the same be said for the world’s transsexuals? Do the few hundred GEMS members sheltering in unorganised anonymity, and their brethren worldwide, want to gamble that the same traps mightn’t lie in wait for them? In those same thirty years what have transsexuals gained? A more poignant question might be "What more have they lost since the mid sixties, when the April Ashley case defined the British establishment’s view on the matter?"
Science has created a window of opportunity. The research to date is contributing an explanation for gender dysphoria, but hasn’t offerred a cause. This means it’s possible to capitalise upon the explanation when it’s confirmed and to develop a growing public sympathy into a much better public understanding of the difference between sex, gender role and gender identity. And identity issues are closer to the public’s heart and (in the broader sense) far more common…. one might even say natural. If the scientists then want to find a cause, they can add it to the reasons why some people have hazel-coloured eyes.
It’s about as important.
