The Guardian: "Mutilation won't make a man a woman"

[Claire McNab <claire@siberia.demon.co.uk>]

Mutilation won't make a man a woman

On: Why we shouldn't endorse sex changes  (SNIP)
Dea Birkett

Thursday August 5, 1999
The Guardian

I feel like wearing the trousers. I want to be behind the steering
wheel of the family car, hammer in a few nails, and generally
swagger around like John Wayne. I might even watch some football at
the weekend, slouched back on the sofa with my legs flopped wide
apart, the remote control in one hand and a can of Carlsberg in the
other.

No one bats an eyelid when I do any of these things. Women no longer
need a special ticket to trespass into traditional male territory.
They can dress like men, drink like men and adopt male body
language. Women can become aromatherapists or astronauts, nursery
nurses or prime minister. But a man pulling on a skirt, downing a
Babycham or studying to become a beautician is still the stuff of
locker-room ribaldry. They aren't allowed to stray into feminine
territory at all. They have no choice but to wear the trousers, too.

Perhaps that's why so many more men want to be women than women want
to be men. When the NHS waiting lists open for "gender reassignment
surgery", following last week's Appeal Court ruling that North West
Lancashire Health Authority was unlawful for refusing to operate on
three transsexuals, the vast majority who apply will be not women
who desire hysterectomies and double mastectomies, but men who want
their willies removed.

Such radical surgery is becoming increasingly acceptable. Up to 200
of these operations are carried out in Britain each year. This week
it was announced that sex-change soldiers will be allowed to stay in
the army, following the case of Sergeant Major Joe Rushton, who has
been given a desk job while taking hormone replacement therapy in
the hope of becoming a woman. And next week we'll see Julia's white
"wedding" to her boyfriend, Alan, in the BBC documentary Julia Gets
Her Man. After her sex change op, Julia (once George) said: "For the
first time I was the person I wanted to be."

I don't doubt that some people have convinced themselves that surgery
is the only way out of their sexual nightmare. For someone born with
male kit, the decision to ditch it is long, painful and often very
expensive. Powerful female hormones will help you sprout pubescent
breasts, have a waspish waist, and add a few inches to your hips, but
they won't alter the pitch of your voice or dispense with the need to
buy Bics. Only hours of electrolysis will remove your beard and years
of speech therapy lessons teach you how to talk like a lady.

Massive surgery is essential. The penis is cut off, a cavity is
created and, with skin taken from the redundant dick and testicles, a
vagina and "natural looking labia" are constructed. Surgeons claim
that they can create a fully functioning clitoris, and orgasm is
possible - although not at all probable.

It's important that these details are spelt out. Because gender
reassignment is not simply about men in frocks; it's about removing
bits of a fully functioning body to be replaced by parts which,
however they may approximate to the real thing, simply do not work.
In any other case, this would be considered as nothing other than
genital mutilation.

I met a man who had had the op who was a stunner. A former page three
girl, she'd had a glamour role in a Hollywood movie and dated rich
and famous men. She told me how, as a child, she used to dress up in
her sister's clothes, play with dolls and hated football. "I wanted
to look feminine, grow my hair, put a little make-up on..." But how
do you get from wanting to wear mascara to surgical mutilation? Her
answer, and that given by almost all transsexuals, is chillingly
simple. "I just didn't feel like a boy."

But should feelings lead to major surgery? Michael Jackson has said
he feels as if he was born in the wrong body, that he feels like a
white man. He has undergone massive surgery to realise this,
reconstructing his face and bleaching his skin. What if hundreds of
black people in Britain started saying: "I just don't feel black?"
Would we start handing out skin whitener on the NHS and introduce
"race reassignment surgery". Of course not. We'd want to put a stop
to this self-hatred. We'd strive to create a society where it's fine
to be successful, powerful, wealthy and non-white.

So if it's not okay to want to be white, why is it okay to want to
be a woman? Transsexuals argue that they have no choice; you simply
can't help wanting your willie chopped off. The Gender Identity
Consultancy, drawing on Dutch research, believes transsexuality is a
medical condition caused by an imbalance in the hormones in the
uterus six to nine weeks after conception. Basically, you start off
female in the womb but pop out, erroneously, as male. Your body may
look like that of a Bob or Brian, but you have a "female brain".

Now, a female brain is an interesting idea. What is special about
this brain? Does it like to play with Barbie dolls when it's little?
Does it prefer pink to blue? As it grows up, is it particularly good
at baking fairy cakes?

Such theories deliver a below-the-belt blow to the sexual
revolution. It's the opposite of the healthy pursuit of
gender-bending, which challenges permissible practices for men and
women. Instead, it seeks to define what you can or can't do by your
crotch.

Transsexuality also supports a conservative view on acceptable sexual
practices. Bans on gays and lesbians joining the armed forces are not
being lifted following the case of Sergeant Major Rushton, on the
grounds that a sex change is a medical condition and therefore nothing
like homosexuality, which is seen as a matter of choice. Ironically,
having your beard painfully plucked out and your willie chopped off is
far less threatening than kissing someone else of the same sex.

Gender reassignment surgery is declaring that you can't act like a
man without having a willie, and can't act like a woman without
having a hole. But, over the past two decades, women have
increasingly realised that they can act as men without having male
equipment. It's our attitude towards acceptable behaviour for a man
that needs a few nips and tucks, not a couple of hundred penises on
the NHS.

(SNIP)

+ Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 1999

ENDS