Intimate Spaces and Sex Chromosomes

by Les May

THE article by Debbie Hilton reprinted on the Northern Voices blog generates more heat than light over an issue where a bit of clear and unemotional thinking might be more appropriate.  It conflates and confuses what we know about someone’s biology with how we choose to treat them in a social context.

I have no problem with referring to someone who has had their primary and secondary sexual characteristics (testes and penis) surgically removed, and undergone surgical and/or hormone treatment to encourage the development of the secondary sexual characteristics we associate with a woman (breasts), as ‘she’.   It seems to me to be a reasonable courtesy to extend to them.  The fact that as a biologist I know that every cell of their bodies carries an X and a Y sex chromosome in its nucleus, indicating that they were born male, does not dictate to me how I should treat them in a social context.  My preferred term for such people is ‘trans-sexual’.

Debbie refers to herself as ‘trans-gender’ which I consider to be an unhelpful term in this context.  I associate the term with the ‘cocks-in-frocks’ brigade; men who put on a frock, some lipstick and then try to insist that the rest of the world calls them ‘she’.  Ditto the ‘non-binary’; don’t tell me, I’m not sufficiently interested in you to want to know. To me these are just posers who want to be noticed; a lifestyle not a life.

Proclaiming that trans-sexual people are not ‘real’ women no doubt gives ‘activists’ a warm glow of satisfaction.  But would it not be a better use of everyone’s time to think about the circumstances in which that actually matters. I can see the logic and good sense of keeping the ‘cocks-in-frocks’ and the ‘non-binary’ brigades out of the intimate spaces reserved for women, e.g. changing rooms, dormitories, toilets etc, but I fail to see why that should apply to trans-sexuals, who, by the definition I use above, have lost their wedding tackle.  If you think I am wrong about this please explain the circumstances in which you think not being a ‘real’ woman matters.

The words of Judge Tayler quoted by Debbie Hilton seem to me a chilling attack on freedom of expression which will not doubt be exploited by the ‘cocks-in-frocks’ to try to bully the rest of us into buying into their fantasies. 

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