Gender Recognition Act Consultation Addendum (2009)
In 2009 I participated in a research study at Leeds University on how people who had been affected by the 2004 Gender Recognition Act felt about it.
After I had given my initial interview I felt that I should expand on what I had said as I felt that perhaps I had not been entirely clear about my views.
This is the full text [with minor redactions of personal data] of the Addendum which I sent to the Research Assistant for Dr Sally Hines’ study on the views of transsexuals who had received GRCs about the importance or not of reassignment surgeries in the legal recognition of ‘acquired’ gender. My views have evolved on some of the finer points, but overall they are still in line with what I present here.
The draft report initially did not factor my views into the statistical results but was afterwards amended to take account of the views I expressed below, when having seen the draft I resent it to Dr Hines. However no explanation was ever given to me about how this important data had been missed out, when I had made a special point of corresponding with the assistant about it and it was noticeable by its difference to the rest of the material included in the survey.
Also no comment was made in the revised report on my 3000 word Addendum, none of my issues were mentioned, the corrected version merely said ‘All but one of the participants felt that it was positive that the criteria for a GRC did not involve surgery.’
Here is the addendum I submitted for the research in 2009.
Gender Recognition Interview Additional Comments 4 Nov 2009
I should like to add some further comments to my interview for the Gender Recognition research.
When the GRA went through Parliament I recall that in the face of some questioning an assurance was given that for MtF transsexuals it would normally be required that genital corrective surgery had been carried out, or at least was about to be carried out and that a Recognition Certificate would only be granted in the case of exceptions to this in the event that the person had already qualified for surgery but had been turned down by the surgeon on the basis of strong medical reasons, such as haemophilia or other major medical contraindication.
Over the last couple of years I have come across references to more than a handful of cases, and indeed have been on internet groups where there have been MtF transsexuals who have not had or even qualified for, or even desire to have, surgery who have GRCs. There is quite a little backwater debate going on in some trans circles on the net as to whether having a GRA should qualify one to get surgery in the event of applying to a Gender Identity Clinic. (Thus reversing the situation.) Some argue that legal gender recognition in itself regardless of physical morphology should remove ‘gender dysphoria’! As if a piece of paper could remove a lifelong feeling about one’s body. I have even debated online with a person who said they were a woman and ‘completely happy’ with their ‘female penis’. What kind of sophistry is this?
I have mentioned the qualification referred to in paragraph 2 on some internet discussion groups and it has been replied that whether the original proviso was made or not it could not be enforced on the Gender Recognition Panel. This may be technically correct, however my own feeling is that there has been at the least, inconsistency.
I also understand that David Lammy, the MP responsible for steering the GRA through the House of Commons (I watched the Third Reading debate in its entirety) has since proudly stated that the GRA has detached (or some similar term) gender from physical conditions or qualifiers such as hormones or anatomy.
When I was first interviewed about my views on the GRA I was reticent concerning my opinions on this matter for various reasons, amongst which were that I was at the time reading some of Judith Butler’s works on gender and I wanted to digest what she said.
In my view it is a mistake to entirely detach gender recognition from all physical attributes. As the researcher is doubtless aware there is now a new debate going on about all this. There are many transsexual people who are very unhappy with the now all pervasive use of the term Transgender under which they are expected to be subsumed.
There is extreme unhappiness in some quarters with the idea that people who conform to a social identity of one gender but have no desire to change their morphology or hormonal status in order to be physically congruent with that should be categorised together with those of us for whom those changes were quintessential to our identities.
Not the least problem with this is whether someone who has male anatomy and hormonal status can be able to participate in sporting events as a woman simply because they wear women’s clothes and take on a female social role. Women who take male hormones are disqualified from participating in sporting events on the medical grounds that male hormones affect muscle development, yet the transgender lobbyists claim that to exclude transgender people of male hormonal status but female social role from such sports is discrimination.
It is far too large a debate to get into the full depth of argument here about what constitutes male and female, man and woman, however it is my view and that of many transsexual people that a complete divorce of gender recognition from all physical attributes is a serious mistake.
The GRA refers to ‘acquired gender’. In one sense of course transsexual people have always been of their personally identified gender, but in another it has to be accepted that we at least had the physical sexual characteristics of the sex we did not want to be.
If one ‘acquires’ a new gender (at least the term used in law) then there must be something that one does to ‘acquire’ it. To simply say that one always had it is a self contradiction in the terms as stated by the new law. Self definition is a part of the process of sex/gender reassignment, but if it were all that is involved, then the whole medical reassignment process would be irrelevant. We are moving from a time when radical feminists argued that transsexual people should not have genital reconstruction because they refused to accept the bodily identification involved, to a time now when some argue that genital reconstruction is not a necessary part of reassignment, indeed that people can be of a particular sex regardless of their morphology or hormonal status.
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Read the complete chapter in The War on Gender when it is published by Arktos Books later in 2021
https://arktos.com/
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I am well aware that my position goes against those held by some gender theorists such as Judith Butler, but in my view her argument verges on sophistry. The strong reliance on psychoanalysis shows the weakness of her position since that school has no basis in objective testing and their postulates are entirely subjective, being as they are completely unfalsifiable. This hypothesis construes gender identity as acquired through experience and identification, rather than as a bodily experience, morphological mapping which is hard wired, as postulated by Ramachandran, who has found supporting evidence, published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2008.
We should be working towards a theory of sex and gender which put sexually dimorphic neural structures at the centre, and congruence of bodily sexual characteristics with them should be the criteria for sex recognition. Social gender characteristics are relevant but must be seen as a thin layer which overlays and rides on top of much deeper and less mutable structures which are hard wired into our nervous systems. Congruence between all three levels should ideally be sought. To argue that social memes are of more importance than both hard wired neurology and sexual morphology is an attempt to discard the basis on which the whole platform rests.
I am aware that this view is not one which is held by most social gender theorists, however coming as I do from a background in physiological psychology I feel it is my duty to ensure that this perspective is included in the research.
The bottom line being that someone who not only has not acquired, but does not even aspire to have the morphology of the desired sex cannot possibly in my view really be considered to be of that sex.
[I have redacted the references to [******] since they are based on private conversations and were originally only intended for Dr Hines and her research assistant.]
© 2020 Claire Rae Randall
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