The Sunday Sermon: Walking the eggshell road
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The Sunday Sermon: Walking the eggshell road
Sunday 5th November 2000
Dear Readers
Last week, as most of you will know, I published a piece here entitled “Measuring Sex in Centimetres” in which I set out to parody and criticise the line of judicial reasoning which takes the law to ever more extreme lengths to define sex without reference to people.
As a “hook” for that piece I took the recent case of W v W, in which a decision of the High Court Family decision happily managed to find that someone born with a so-called “Micro Penis” was a woman for the purposes of marriage. My point was that the law is getting further and further from what the proverbial “Man on the Clapham Omnibus” would perceive as a material difference because of a thirty year refusal to consider the most relevant evidence of all: the expressed identity of the woman or man at the centre of it all. And my scepticism was unhappily borne out just FOUR DAYS LATER when a different judge, in the same court, managed to come up with an opposite ruling on what, to most ordinary people, would appear to be very very similar circumstances.
The difference between the cases seems, to me, to turn on the matter of that medically defined “Micro Penis” which, as I set out to satirically dissect by comparison to the seemingly arbitrary dictates of “fashion” last week, is a concept subject to change. I wasn’t so much interested in dissecting the medical differentiation as in pointing to the fact that courts have to deal with such increasingly esoteric hair splitting though. My point, rammed home at the end, was that going down that path takes us further and further from any consideration of the human element. Without that human element, where is the justice ?
I think most people got that point, judged by the feedback in the week.
Even as I wrote, however, I was aware that I was treading on difficult territory and acknowledged as much in pointing out that we had not yet been able to study the full judgement itself. Unfortunately, the parties concerned had not kept us briefed as most do. So, whilst suspecting that the press coverage didn’t tell all the story, and being very conversant with the whole business of how medicine has historically described a whole spectrum of atypical genitalia in penis/clitoris terms without reference to the owner’s views, I decided that perhaps the best way of dealing with this element of the backdrop was to put that specialist knowledge aside and approach the discussion from the standpoint of all those ordinary mortals on that Clapham bus. The same sort of mortals who peek between the legs of their newborn and interpret anything sticking out there as permission to call their child a boy, regardless of how functional or anatomically “correct” it is. The point of doing that was to position that piece of the jigsaw in the same space in which ordinary people need to try and understand the difference between two apparently contradicting cases.
During the week my article was added to the Press for Change website and following that I got a message, on Friday, from Mrs W’s solicitor to tell me that her client was distressed by the way in which she read last week’s article, with the references to fashion.
The solicitor explains a bit more about the medical evidence, which I repeat here since (as we’ve established) it is important for people to understand the facts on which the difference in judgements turns.
Quote:
“The “micropenis” with which she was born was, in fact a flap of skin of less than 25mm with the urethral opening underneath near the body. Evidence from the surgeon who performed her corrective surgery in 1987 was that it was “wholly abnormal” in its form”
Mrs W’s solicitor adds:
“The epithet “transsexual” does not apply to Mrs W and it is for this reason that Mr Justice Charles was able to differentiate the rules in Corbett from the circumstances of this case. She suffers from partial androgen insenstivity”
In other words, as we’ve reported here extensively in the past, “W” appears to fall into that category of people who have been arbitrarily popped into a particular box in a premature hurry at birth. Had Mrs “W” been born a few years later then medical “fashion”, having changed to follow John Money’s now-discredited views, would have decreed that there was no way she could survive psychologically as a boy and they would have performed what (in other cultures) we decry as “female circumcision”, to make her a “happier” woman. Nowadays, following long and hard lobbying from the victims of such unnecessary God-playing, we are assured that the medical fashion is belatedly changing again … and a child like “W” today might be permitted to grow up a little and decide for themselves who and what they are.
That’s another discussion, however … for the point I’m getting to is this:
My immediate reaction to Friday’s letter was to write to Mrs W, through her solicitor, to apologise for any unintended offence she has taken from my article last week. I didn’t set out to offend her, but that’s not the point either. Neither is the intellectual and political maelstrom which cases like this raise.
The point is that when we are busy using all our sharpest political tools to savage judges and doctors who put intellectual argument before humanity, we ALL have to tread very carefully lest we are unwittingly drawn into doing the same. It is so easy to look at a case as an inert thing … a set of words … and forget that the canvas for those words is a life. A person who hurts, and has probably been through as great a trauma in court as a rape. As terrible a childhood as a victim of child abuse.
So much as I have a job to do here, I’m doubly reminded this weekend of the fact that we walk on egg shells and I would urge EVERYONE who feels moved to comment on cases like this … “W”’s and Liz Bellinger’s … to always remember that.
To “Mrs W” I say sorry. I hope you will realise that hurting your own feelings was the furthest thing from my heart. I’m glad for you personally that a way has been found to differentiate your case and let you out of the hole in which ALL gender and sex-variant people find themselves. Good luck.
To the rest … ?
Well, those reading this outside of the UK may perhaps not be aware that a lot of our countryfolk have lost their homes this week. Most of them through an act of God, but one through an act of Man.
To the thousands whose homes have been washed away by floods what can one say? Pondering the scenes on television this week and worrying about my own brand new home from hundreds of miles away, I think I can completely imagine the trauma of having your place of safety, the centre of your family life, taken away in minutes. The only comfort which those people can have is perhaps their insurance. They can rebuild. The bricks can be dried out, the furnishings replaced.
Another family has lost its centre too this week though … unmarried by a judge following the type of reasoning which I criticised last week and will need to go on criticising. I’ve tried very hard not to bring that other human tragedy into this essay for the same reasons I’ve explained above; for this is a road strewn with egg shells which it is almost impossible to avoid breaking on our passage. To debate the case is to risk hurting the humans still more.
What can we say to Liz and Mike this weekend?
Christine Burns
(Vice-President, Press for Change)