Rich Man, Poor Man, Transsexual Woman

by Christine Burns, Press For Change, U.K.

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In years to come she will learn that people who seek the treatment to release them from this silent hell are labeled freaks.

Achild giggles whilst drinking the bath water from an egg cup. It is 1955 and not long since the national press have re­ported the story of a Spitfire pilot and racing driver who has "become" a woman through what we now call Gender Reas­signment Treatment.

The child's parents have registered and christened her as a boy. How is anyone to know any different? Within three years "he" will know otherwise though, and the little girl inside will have learned enough about life already not to mention her pro­found self knowledge to anyone.

In years to come she will learn that people who seek the treatment to release them from this silent hell are labeled freaks and get hounded by the press. They are shunned by their families and friends. They are treated with less respect than murderers and rapists. Anything they receive from medical specialists or authority is to be regarded as a grudging and contemptuous concession which they don't really deserve. Not surprisingly, she will seek to bury her terrifying self knowledge deep within herself

As enlightenment gradually dawns on society, sometime in her thirties, she will wince when she sees women like her de­scribed as having been "born a man".

A man? Look again at the photograph. You could no more call the child "a man", than you could label them a "Computer Consultant", "Conservative" or "Rights Campaigner". Yet all of these labels are a part of her development potential, just as her innate femininity means she will not rest until she find her true self-expression within society.

So, eventually, she will come to the agonising choice which confronts all transsexual people in the end ... made worse for having deferred it until mid life. She will have to decide how to deal with the partner and family she acquired whilst trying to be what everyone expected of her. She will have to put her career on the line. She will lose her home and tens of thousands of pounds through divorce. She will lose some of her friends. For a while she will wonder if she deserves to keep her self respect. Yet the choice is between that and suicide. For a life which is a perpetual lie ... a life which gets more painful with every passing day of the soul's denial ... is no life at all.

Make believe? No.

Increasing evidence indicates that everything which transsexual people have ever reported about their mys­terious juxtaposition of psychological gender and physi­cal sex is true. The more science is inclined to look, the more it finds to substantiate the discovery that children like the little "boy" in the picture above really did already have the brain of a little girl.

Nobody can be blamed for assuming this little girl was a boy. If we have to have a basis for distinguishing how we're going to differentiate the type of upbringing we're to give our children then the appearance of their genitals is no more and no less arbitrary then the colour of their skin or the country they were born in. What matters, however, is how we respond when the child is old enough to turn round and say that we got it wrong in their case.

It helps, of course, to be sophisticated enough to be able to accept such an assertion with the respect it deserves. If society attaches such importance to gen­der then it's hardly a trivial thing when you know you've been dragooned into the wrong one. Trans­sexuals need help, not hindrance, if they are to manage a transition which affects every single way in which they relate to the world around them.

More than that, however, a compassionate and sensi­ble society will recognise that once such a change has occurred then there is absolutely no benefit to anyone in making it anything less than a 100% change. Society only has two social gen­ders to choose from. Man and Woman. To cripple a man with a legal status which regards him as a woman, or to say that a woman cannot marry a man because of her long since removed birth deformity is to erect a deliberate barrier to the otherwise successful functioning of that individual. It is, in short, like breaking a man's leg because you don't want to accept that he can walk.

And that is all that we in Press for Change seek from British society. The right to walk. To stand on our own two feet after being forced to crawl for almost thirty years. It's not a lot, is it?

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