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transex
Germaine Greer mocked male to female "transexuals" as "men" masquerading as women by the use of chemicals and surgery. She rejected a person who did not look like an acceptable woman as a "gross parody of my sex". (The Independent. "On why sex change is a lie." 22nd July, 1989) Germaine's rejection of this person begs the question of how is a person's gender defined? It surely is not by having good looks?
Medical evidence in fact suggests that such people are not masquerading but akin to Germaine in having physically female brains. (Medical evidence to UK Parliament 1996) We now know that on the purely physical level, there are at least 3 criteria for gender, our chromosomes, brains and genitalia. They usually concur. But what happens when these do not concur? What is the gender of the hundreds of thousands of humans in which these factors are gloriously mixed?
Judges have pondered this in the UK courts - in the infamous case of Corbett v. Corbett, the judge ruled that although the defendent was clearly a woman, she was not a woman for the purposes of marriage despite them engaging in seemingly normal heterosexual love. That Judge in a decision of impenetrable wisdom declared their love-making to be homosexual. It was for him a matter of "what you see and experience is not what you get." He declared their heterosexual love to be fraudulent.
However he did not take note of a precedent involving a member of one of Scotland's most distinguished families. Sir Ewen Forbes of Craigievar, holder of a 15th century Barony and the 1630 Baronetcy of Novia Scotia, who was born Elizabeth Forbes-Sempill. In 1952 Sir Ewen was issued with a male birth certificate and shortly after this married his housekeeper, Isabela Mitchell. The new birth certificate was issued on the basis that his transsexuality meant his gender should have been seen as indeterminate at birth - which medically is the situation for all born with the condition of transsexualism.
But just last week (early June 1996) in South Korea, the highest court in the land decided that a woman raped was not raped as she did not have the appropriate chromosomes. It did not matter that her vagina was abused. The judges solomnly declared that the anti-rape law existed solely to protect women and she could not be such as she had XY chromosomes. The men who raped her - and had as much fun with her as with any other woman - thus escapted rape charges. These judges were deciding on medically primitive criteria. We now know the determing factor in gender identity is not the chromosomes, not the genitalia but the markedly gender differentiated brain.
It is true that many in our society find gender re-assignment hard to accept or understand. But generally this is because they imagine that the "male' to female "transexual" was once fully a male - and likewise the female to male was previously fully a female. This is simply not so. The concept that the transgendered were once full members of the opposite gender leads to many prejudices. Men cannot understand how any males would want to be castrated.They are completely right. It would be an unthinkable choice for any male. But the "transexual" undergoing this does so with the relaxed ease of a woman having a needed correction. She is simply not a male and has never mentally been one.
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