Tuesday, March 09, 2004
More media transphobia, but at least it's where you'd expect it to be, the Daily Mail, and from who you might expect, Melanie Phillips. I've developed quite a soft spot for her due to her being completely nuts, and if you haven't you should really check out her appearance on Radio 4's The Moral Maze, on cannabis, where she manages to turn even people who are against decriminalisation of the drug against her for her complete misuse of facts.
But anyway, yesterday she decided to take a stand against the Gender Recognition Bill.
Almost without notice by the public, an astonishing proposal to falsify sexual identity and make criminals out of people who tell the truth about it is on the way to being approved by Parliament.
The Daily Mail never likes giving people rights, unless it's the right to shoot someone you don't like. Or who is black (pretty much the same thing for Mail readers).
The predicament of transsexuals, who experience untold anguish from their conviction that they are trapped in the wrong sex, deserves much compassion. No-one disputes that they should be free to assume the lifestyle of the opposite sex, even to the extent of enduring surgical and hormonal alteration.
You can smell the 'but' coming can't you? 'These people have a terrible time of things, but I don't like them so I think this should continue'.
Nevertheless, the problem from which they suffer is not a physical but a psychological disorder. Yet this bill effectively denies the biological facts of sexual identity, replacing them as the basis of law by psychologically disordered feelings instead.
Actually, I'm not sure from what I've seen that the Bill does 'deny the biological facts of sexual identity', rather that it allows people to be registered as the gender they feel appropriate to them.
In other words, the birth certificate, the most basic guarantee that we are who we say we are, will be a lie. It means that someone who was born a man, married as a man and fathered children as a man will have a birth certificate which says he was born a female if he so chooses.
Ummm, no, it doesn't, as Melanie well knows. In this and the paragraph before she tries to make out that people can change their birth certificates on a whim (and to which a valid point might be "Yeah? So?") but the fact is that people have to be 'diagnosed' as gender dysphoric and then satisfy a panel of this, it's not something anyone can do on a boring Saturday afternoon.
Worse still, a wide variety of people will be prosecuted if they make known the truth. Suppose a fitness club advertises for a personal trainer and takes up a reference at another gym for an applicant named Barbara. If that gym's owner employed this person as Barry, it will be a criminal offence for him to say so. So he may be forced to tell misleading half-truths about 'Barbara's performance.
Well, at least Melanie hasn't tried to use Norman Tebbit's line that transsexuals are only in it so they can compete in women's athletic events, based on Tebbit's own belief that men will naturally be superior to women in any sport. But really, Mel is just inventing reasons here. If second gym owner is halfway professional, he will be writing about Barbara's aptitude for the job, not "well, there was this one time when me and Baz went down Stringfellows and you should have seen what he, sorry, she did with the stripper and the Peach Melba!"
This Orwellian situation is to come about because sexual identity will cease to be a biological given, and become instead a matter of whatever a panel of experts decides it to be.
Strangely, 'Saddam can launch nuclear weapons in 45 minutes', or whatever similar headline the paper she's writing for chose, was also a case of truth being whatever a panel of experts decided it to be.
Moreover, the criteria by which this panel will make such judgments are extraordinarily flaky. The person wanting 'gender reassignment' won't even need to have had sex-change surgery, only a statement by two doctors that the person has suffered from 'gender dysphoria' for two years, that he or she assumes the opposite sex and that the intention to do so is permanent.
I'm sure the psychiatric establishment in this country will be pleased to hear that Melanie thinks they're shit.
So biological facts are to be replaced by the fantasies of feelings. For feeling like a member of the opposite sex does not make it true. Even after surgical or hormonal treatment, people still remain chromosomally a man or a woman, a biologically unalterable fact.
Well, we agree on something. However, Melanie uses this as a jumping off point for prejudice (and is inconsistent, for after all marijuana is a natural herb so wanting to get it banned is illogical for this argument) whereas I believe that nature is hardly a good enough reason for anything, sitting at a desk of wood as I do, writing to people who aren't there, wearing clothes... etc.
Indeed, in a number of tragic cases the transsexual has sought to reverse the treatment and return to his original sex. Are we really to believe that such a man becomes a woman and then turns back into being a man? Isn't this rather a man with a distressing psychological problem? And will his birth certificate keep changing, along with his mind?
Again: "Yeah? So?"
As a result, priests may unwittingly marry people of the same sex. The bill allows them to refuse to do so ( an exemption not provided for registrars at civil weddings) - but how will they know whether half of the happy couple has had 'gender reassignment'?
Oh, won't someone think of the chil- Priests?! So Melanie wants to protect the right of the church to be bigotted and transphobic? I wonder why she isn't so thoughtful of the rights and feelings of anti-Semites? ( / low shot)
Even if they ask, they will have no way of checking since the birth certificate may be a lie. And when a priest asks if anyone knows of an impediment to the marriage, if an employer, public official or voluntary worker replies: 'Actually, the bride is a bloke' they may find themselves under arrest for a criminal offence.
Actually, if for some reason God is so concerned about what goes on under the brides dress, then if no-one points out to the Priest that she used to be a man the sin is theirs, not the Priests. If God isn't prepared to send three million volts through her in the form of a thunderbolt then I think Mel shouldn't be too worried about His views on the matter.
Conversely, married transsexuals who are judged to have changed sex will be forced to dissolve their marriages, maybe deepening the already huge anguish of such couples. The government says such marriages can't continue as they will then become same-sex marriages.
Again, we must preserve and cherish homophobia wherever it may lurk!
Although the bill has been amended so that sporting bodies can exclude transsexuals from competitions where they might have an unfair advantage, competitors may still have to share changing rooms with a transsexual person. And the same problem may emerge in public lavatories.
Oh I was wrong, she did bring up the sports thing. And the toilet thing. This is very important, as we all know of the rash of cases of rapists who went through full SRS just so they could rape women in women's only locker rooms and toilets. The only 'problem' here is in the minds of the phobics, and the answer should be to educate them rather than preserve someone else's misery.
Ludicrously, the bill says that if a woman becomes a man, 'he' remains the mother of her (his?) children. Similarly, a man remains the father of his children and therefore still liable for child support - even though his birth certificate might say he was born female.
I actually like the idea of a man being a mother, but I guess in Melanie's world men are real men, women are real women and small blue-green creatures from Alpha Centauri are columnists for The Sun. And has she seen the statistics for the poor income that most transsexuals have to put up with? Few get to keep their jobs and most have difficulty finding decent jobs once they've transitioned. If someone has to raise kids above and beyond that they need all the help they can get.
And I think Melanie means 'mother' rather than 'father' in the above. But there is another important point that Melanie has inadvertantly made. If a mother leaves her partner to bring up the kids, can he claim child support? If not, this is not a transsexual issue but a issue of basic rights.
The government presents this bill - which has been forced upon us by the European Court of Human Rights
Damn those filthy Europeans and their ungodly notions of fairness for everyone!
as an issue of rights and privacy. But no-one has the right to expect public servants to promulgate a lie. And it is hard to imagine a more public matter than redefining what it is to be a man or woman.
Melanie should check her history. The roles and duties of men and women have always changed, what it means to be a woman has always been redefined, ask the Suffragettes. And as for 'promulgating a lie', well, gender would be the least of their problems...
More profoundly, this bill continues the systematic attack being mounted upon all moral and social norms, to the extent of challenging what it is to be a human being.
Once again, "yeah? So?" Melanie is claiming that progress and change are bad things? Is the Daily Mail going to be advocating a 'back to the trees' movement?
The general silence and acquiescence in the face of this are simply astonishing. It's as if the nation is anaesthetised.
Or rather that the nation has outgrown you Ms. Phillips, although sales figures for the Mail and the Sun would suggest that's wishful thinking.
The outcome will be a sexual identity free-for-all, and a further descent into a moral vacuum.
We can hope.
But anyway, yesterday she decided to take a stand against the Gender Recognition Bill.
Almost without notice by the public, an astonishing proposal to falsify sexual identity and make criminals out of people who tell the truth about it is on the way to being approved by Parliament.
The Daily Mail never likes giving people rights, unless it's the right to shoot someone you don't like. Or who is black (pretty much the same thing for Mail readers).
The predicament of transsexuals, who experience untold anguish from their conviction that they are trapped in the wrong sex, deserves much compassion. No-one disputes that they should be free to assume the lifestyle of the opposite sex, even to the extent of enduring surgical and hormonal alteration.
You can smell the 'but' coming can't you? 'These people have a terrible time of things, but I don't like them so I think this should continue'.
Nevertheless, the problem from which they suffer is not a physical but a psychological disorder. Yet this bill effectively denies the biological facts of sexual identity, replacing them as the basis of law by psychologically disordered feelings instead.
Actually, I'm not sure from what I've seen that the Bill does 'deny the biological facts of sexual identity', rather that it allows people to be registered as the gender they feel appropriate to them.
In other words, the birth certificate, the most basic guarantee that we are who we say we are, will be a lie. It means that someone who was born a man, married as a man and fathered children as a man will have a birth certificate which says he was born a female if he so chooses.
Ummm, no, it doesn't, as Melanie well knows. In this and the paragraph before she tries to make out that people can change their birth certificates on a whim (and to which a valid point might be "Yeah? So?") but the fact is that people have to be 'diagnosed' as gender dysphoric and then satisfy a panel of this, it's not something anyone can do on a boring Saturday afternoon.
Worse still, a wide variety of people will be prosecuted if they make known the truth. Suppose a fitness club advertises for a personal trainer and takes up a reference at another gym for an applicant named Barbara. If that gym's owner employed this person as Barry, it will be a criminal offence for him to say so. So he may be forced to tell misleading half-truths about 'Barbara's performance.
Well, at least Melanie hasn't tried to use Norman Tebbit's line that transsexuals are only in it so they can compete in women's athletic events, based on Tebbit's own belief that men will naturally be superior to women in any sport. But really, Mel is just inventing reasons here. If second gym owner is halfway professional, he will be writing about Barbara's aptitude for the job, not "well, there was this one time when me and Baz went down Stringfellows and you should have seen what he, sorry, she did with the stripper and the Peach Melba!"
This Orwellian situation is to come about because sexual identity will cease to be a biological given, and become instead a matter of whatever a panel of experts decides it to be.
Strangely, 'Saddam can launch nuclear weapons in 45 minutes', or whatever similar headline the paper she's writing for chose, was also a case of truth being whatever a panel of experts decided it to be.
Moreover, the criteria by which this panel will make such judgments are extraordinarily flaky. The person wanting 'gender reassignment' won't even need to have had sex-change surgery, only a statement by two doctors that the person has suffered from 'gender dysphoria' for two years, that he or she assumes the opposite sex and that the intention to do so is permanent.
I'm sure the psychiatric establishment in this country will be pleased to hear that Melanie thinks they're shit.
So biological facts are to be replaced by the fantasies of feelings. For feeling like a member of the opposite sex does not make it true. Even after surgical or hormonal treatment, people still remain chromosomally a man or a woman, a biologically unalterable fact.
Well, we agree on something. However, Melanie uses this as a jumping off point for prejudice (and is inconsistent, for after all marijuana is a natural herb so wanting to get it banned is illogical for this argument) whereas I believe that nature is hardly a good enough reason for anything, sitting at a desk of wood as I do, writing to people who aren't there, wearing clothes... etc.
Indeed, in a number of tragic cases the transsexual has sought to reverse the treatment and return to his original sex. Are we really to believe that such a man becomes a woman and then turns back into being a man? Isn't this rather a man with a distressing psychological problem? And will his birth certificate keep changing, along with his mind?
Again: "Yeah? So?"
As a result, priests may unwittingly marry people of the same sex. The bill allows them to refuse to do so ( an exemption not provided for registrars at civil weddings) - but how will they know whether half of the happy couple has had 'gender reassignment'?
Oh, won't someone think of the chil- Priests?! So Melanie wants to protect the right of the church to be bigotted and transphobic? I wonder why she isn't so thoughtful of the rights and feelings of anti-Semites? ( / low shot)
Even if they ask, they will have no way of checking since the birth certificate may be a lie. And when a priest asks if anyone knows of an impediment to the marriage, if an employer, public official or voluntary worker replies: 'Actually, the bride is a bloke' they may find themselves under arrest for a criminal offence.
Actually, if for some reason God is so concerned about what goes on under the brides dress, then if no-one points out to the Priest that she used to be a man the sin is theirs, not the Priests. If God isn't prepared to send three million volts through her in the form of a thunderbolt then I think Mel shouldn't be too worried about His views on the matter.
Conversely, married transsexuals who are judged to have changed sex will be forced to dissolve their marriages, maybe deepening the already huge anguish of such couples. The government says such marriages can't continue as they will then become same-sex marriages.
Again, we must preserve and cherish homophobia wherever it may lurk!
Although the bill has been amended so that sporting bodies can exclude transsexuals from competitions where they might have an unfair advantage, competitors may still have to share changing rooms with a transsexual person. And the same problem may emerge in public lavatories.
Oh I was wrong, she did bring up the sports thing. And the toilet thing. This is very important, as we all know of the rash of cases of rapists who went through full SRS just so they could rape women in women's only locker rooms and toilets. The only 'problem' here is in the minds of the phobics, and the answer should be to educate them rather than preserve someone else's misery.
Ludicrously, the bill says that if a woman becomes a man, 'he' remains the mother of her (his?) children. Similarly, a man remains the father of his children and therefore still liable for child support - even though his birth certificate might say he was born female.
I actually like the idea of a man being a mother, but I guess in Melanie's world men are real men, women are real women and small blue-green creatures from Alpha Centauri are columnists for The Sun. And has she seen the statistics for the poor income that most transsexuals have to put up with? Few get to keep their jobs and most have difficulty finding decent jobs once they've transitioned. If someone has to raise kids above and beyond that they need all the help they can get.
And I think Melanie means 'mother' rather than 'father' in the above. But there is another important point that Melanie has inadvertantly made. If a mother leaves her partner to bring up the kids, can he claim child support? If not, this is not a transsexual issue but a issue of basic rights.
The government presents this bill - which has been forced upon us by the European Court of Human Rights
Damn those filthy Europeans and their ungodly notions of fairness for everyone!
as an issue of rights and privacy. But no-one has the right to expect public servants to promulgate a lie. And it is hard to imagine a more public matter than redefining what it is to be a man or woman.
Melanie should check her history. The roles and duties of men and women have always changed, what it means to be a woman has always been redefined, ask the Suffragettes. And as for 'promulgating a lie', well, gender would be the least of their problems...
More profoundly, this bill continues the systematic attack being mounted upon all moral and social norms, to the extent of challenging what it is to be a human being.
Once again, "yeah? So?" Melanie is claiming that progress and change are bad things? Is the Daily Mail going to be advocating a 'back to the trees' movement?
The general silence and acquiescence in the face of this are simply astonishing. It's as if the nation is anaesthetised.
Or rather that the nation has outgrown you Ms. Phillips, although sales figures for the Mail and the Sun would suggest that's wishful thinking.
The outcome will be a sexual identity free-for-all, and a further descent into a moral vacuum.
We can hope.
