Campaign Issues

What’s it all about? | What (or more politely Who?) is a “Trans Person”? | So where does the discrimination come into this? | The consequences of the Corbett case

What’s it all about?

Press for Change is a political lobbying and educational organisation, which campaigns to achieve equal civil rights and liberties for all transsexual and transgendered people in the United Kingdom, through legislation and social change.

That’s what it says on our web index page, and on all of Press for Change’s literature.  But what, first of all is a transgendered (or “trans”) person?  And what are the tangible examples in their lives which lead to a claim for an inequality to be righted?

In this section we aim to answer the first question, and then lead you to our compendious A to Z “Encyclopaedia” of discrimination to answer the second.  If you are one of the many people who think that trans people’s interests start and stop with wanting to get married and correct their birth certificates for a little bit of privacy, then be prepared for a shock … and for a long and upsetting read.

What (or more politely Who?) is a “Trans Person”?

(If you’re absolutely sure what all the terms mean you can jump straight to the next section and read about the legal mess created by a medically qualified judge who should have known better.  If you read on, however, you’ll perhaps appreciate more acutely the absurdity of what he did in 1970).

Labels are always hopelessly inadequate to describe the sheer diversity of human existence, and no more so in the area of sex and gender, where the most fundamental mistake of all is to assume that life is “normally” simple and clear cut.

We’re all taught that there are only two sexes, right?  And people are born one sex or the other, right?

Wrong.  Think about other human characterics for a moment…

Are you a tall or a short?  Are you a fat or a thin?  A clever or a dim?  A white or a black?  A nice or a nasty?

Sometimes we use these simple distinctions, of course, but few would deny that they mask many shades and subtleties in every case.  It is nature’s design to encourage diversity, in order to maximise the chances of a species’ survival … and so, on every plane of measurement you care to examine, people are seldom actually at one extreme or the other.

Most of us think of ourselves as “average”, which is a way of expressing the simple fact that we may be generally like the next person, but that doesn’t mean we are identical.  In fact, the combination of where we are on all the scales of measurement taken together … height, build, intelligence, skin colour, personality and all the rest … are what make each of us absolutely unique.

So why should we be so naÏve as to build a society on the peculiar assumption that sex … and the perception of which sex we are (our “gender identity”) should be simply one thing or another?  We even know that people have different sized and shaped genitals, yet we’re taught from our earliest recollections to assume that there is an exact cut-off point somewhere … or perhaps, more comfortably, a yawning un-bridgable chasm … on one side of which there are males, and on the other side of which there are females.

Ponder a statistic : One in every two hundred children born anywhere in the world has something which is a bit ambiguous about the most obvious physical manifestation of their sex … their external genitals.  In about one in five of those cases (i.e.  one in 1,000 babies) the ambiguity is sufficient that doctors may decide to take some sort of action to “correct” the ambiguity.  The quotes are significant, because a thousands upon thousands of people grow up to vehemently resent that “correction”, carried out without their consent, depriving them of options which nature gave them, and very often destroying their capacity for sexual enjoyment.

We digress, perhaps … but the point is to illustrate that on a physical plane, there is no such thing as “one sex or the other” … only a society constructed on the assumption that there is, and prepared to use surgery upon an otherwise healthy and comfortable child to maintain the myth by cutting away the evidence.

So it is with human personalities too, and the self-identificational part of ourselves which leads us to feel that we “belong” with one sex or the other.

The important point is that there is no reason why the intangible bit (your identity) and the whole gamut of physical bits (your genitals, your internal reproductive organs and the chromosomes which first nudge a foetus in one direction or the other) need to develop in sync.  The two are formed at very different times for one thing, and all have so much capacity for variation that they can easily vary in opposite directions and overlap.

For all sorts of reasons, therefore, people can find that what they look like, how they feel, who they feel like, and how they’d like to be seen and treated by others brings them into conflict with the over-simplified contemporary norms of the society they live in.

When people live that conflict openly, by challenging the limitations upon their expression, we call them “trans”.  And, if you really must have further labels to try and break that down, transgendered people are those whose sense of self places them so far into the opposite camp to the one suggested by their physical sex characteristics, that they take varying steps to solve the conflict by altering or disguising those features.  Again, simplistically, those who are happy enough to merely disguise their features using the powerful signals sent out by gendered clothing are dubbed “transgendered” and those who go to the lengths of wishing to alter their physique to completely resemble the sex they feel themselves to belong to are labelled by medicine as “transsexual”.  Medicine “owns” the transsexual label because, of course, transsexual people require the assistance of surgery to achieve a physical expression of who they are inside.

Usage of the terms differs, however, and has evolved over the years in line with a growing sophistication in trans people’s own awareness.  The above distinctions invite the assumption that “transgendered” is in some way inferior or short of “transsexual” for instance.  More recently, therefore, the term “transgender” has come to embrace both … and Press for Change and other organisations worldwide have gone a further step and now advocate the use of the adjective “trans” to describe people who, in expressing their sense of identity, come into conflict with the contemporary gender behaviour norms of their society.

We stress however that whether you use the word “trans” or older, more prescriptive, terms like “transsexual” these are adjectives not nouns.  It is no more polite to say that somebody is “a transsexual” than “he is a blind” or “she is a deaf”.  Please remember that trans people, transsexual people, transgender people … or whatever description you use … are people first, and the “T” adjective describes only one of the many interesting and individual characteristics which make up that person.

Now aren’t you glad you asked?

So where does the discrimination come into this?

The legal status of trans people in the UK is not actually defined by legislation, but generally determined by reference to the case law (jurisprudence) resulting from a now-infamous divorce case in 1970 (Corbett vs Corbett/Ashley - all England Law reports 1970 Vol 2 pp 32-51).

April Ashley, a model and transsexual woman had married Arthur Corbett (the heir of Lord Rowallen) some two years previously.  The marriage had not worked out and the Rowallen family was seeking a basis on which to end the marriage and yet avoid the inheritance issues which would normally be raised.  Divorce law in Britain at that time required proof of adultery or cruelty; mutual consent was not admissible and, in any case, April did not wish to be divorced.  Instead therefore, a case was constructed on the premise that the marriage had never been legal in the first place (since she had been registered as a boy at birth) and should always therefore (and in perpetuity) be treated as male.

The case was contested quite strongly but medical opinion at the time was divided (the three experts on both sides disagreed about the etiology of transsexuality, and the manner in which the phenomenon should therefore be construed).  Consequently the judge (Lord Justice Ormrod) who was himself a medical man, felt obliged to construct a medical test and definition, by which the sex in such cases was to be determined.  It is worth commenting at this point that the basis of his test would no longer be supported by any informed medical opinion, in the light of new knowledge in the intervening 30 years.

A significant precedent was thereby established, since up till that point no case law or legislative provisions for transsexual people was thought to have existed (although this belief is now questioned).  Operated transsexual people simply applied and were allowed to have their birth certificate altered, and they then simply enjoyed the normal status accorded to citizens of their new sex.  Desperate attempts were made at the time to try and limit the effect of the judgement to the issue of marriage but, in practice, as it remains the only judicial reference point in this matter, the outcome has been used as the basis on which to comprehensively deny this group of UK citizens the most basic of civil rights from the moment their treatment commences.

The consequences of the Corbett case

The practical consequences of the Corbett case over the last 30 years have extended to virtually every area of life for British trans people, to the extent that even Press for Change campaigners are not surprised to come across new implications or subtleties stemming from society’s fundamental refusal to recognise the simple social reality of their existence in law.  To try and do justice to the scope of what we campaign against, therefore, we have assembled, quite literally, an A to Z Encyclopaedic guide to the problems and indignities faced by … for all you know … the person sitting next to you now.

Read on … to the Encyclopaedia of Trans People’s discrimination