Lifting the Veil
Lifting the Veil
(Copyright © 1996)
Just ten years ago, anyone brave enough to stand up and say that sexual abuse of children was endemic in the western world could expect to be howled at. The whole idea was counter-intuitive. "Surely", we all thought, "if something so despicable is so commonplace then we’d all know about it. There are no big secrets like that in reality at the end of the twentieth century … are there?"
What a perfect cover for a miserable injustice to continue, unheeded.
Just a few weeks ago, a BBC documentary series tackled some other big secrets for the very first time. And what did we see behind the veil when it was lifted? Isolation … ignorance … shame … denial … a vicious self-perpetuating circle of behaviour whose only outcome is to create victims.
Will we never learn?
The BBC series Dark Secrets was aptly named. In a culture deeply afraid of sex, the series dealt head on with an entire catalogue of myths and misconceptions about a subject in which the best informed of us can seldom lay claim to knowledge bettering what we learned behind the bicycle sheds.
By and large we get by of course. One of the wonders of nature is that sex has a very simple and intuitive user interface. Designers of domestic apparatus could learn a lot from it. The dimmest simpleton can manage to get pregnant or father a child without tuition. You don’t even need the lights on. If reproduction required a fraction of the skills needed to program a video recorder then we simply wouldn’t be here.
Yet superficial simplicity doesn’t mean the design is simple too. Why is it so frightening to acknowledge the truths about the whole thing, to the extent that we blight lives in the frantic struggle to maintain a set of myths?
Myth number one, which began the series, is at least being broken down…
So long as we all clung to the notion that there is only one right form of sexuality, then it seemed entirely reasonable to subject homosexual people to nothing short of torture in the quest to "cure" them. Nowadays of course that sounds repugnant to all but the most hardened of bigots. Yet as long as homosexuality was denied an existence by intelligent minds who had not thought to question the basis for their reasoning, then it’s quite possible that those inflicting the torture were literally blind to the simple observation that their methods weren’t working.
Well … either blind or too afraid to challenge the fearsome power of that leviathan called consensus.
The image that sticks in mind from the film was of an aversion "therapist" looking into the camera and telling the world the only thing that would be accepted at that time … in the 1950’s … which was the unchallenged lie that patients were cured and went on to live happy, normal, heterosexual lives after shock treatment. The image stuck because I wasn’t really listening to his words, but reading his body language. I was watching his hands and involuntary facial expressions. I wonder how well he sleeps today? Nothing short of death was allowed to challenge the myth that the torture worked. Sadly the programme became a long-overdue epitaph to those who died or were broken to protect the sexuality myth.
But if our simple idea that there is only one natural sexuality is now seen to have been so flawed, what else don’t we know?
As a transsexual rights campaigner I’m so used to quoting the statistics of childbirth that they roll off the tongue now without a thought. One in 200 births has some form of physical anomaly. That’s a fact. We don’t all have perfect male or female genitalia. Nature just isn’t that precise. We’re not just black or white, tall or short, nice or nasty.
Present statistics also suggest that about one in 50,000 children are born with XY (male) chromosomes and superficially female genitalia. They’re particularly interesting to transsexual rights campaigners, because the only difference between such women and a post operative transsexual woman in the UK is a legal distinction, based on one anomaly being visible at birth when the other wasn’t.
Yet whenever I’ve repeated these statistics I’ve always had the acute sensation that my audience didn’t entirely believe me. Like those poor millions of sexually abused children, invisibility denies reality an existence.
The programme about the so-called XY Women (whose condition is called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, or AIS) began to authoritatively lift the veil though. These are children who are chromosomally and internally male (they have no uterus or ovaries, but do have undescended testes). They emerge into the world and are classified as girls because they have no penis. The condition is usually spotted early on because the testes can be felt as lumps protruding into the child’s labia. What happens then is instructive however.
As a society we cannot cope with sex ambiguity. The simple model that we have asserts that there is no such thing. So these children are operated upon to "correct" the situation. Mercifully, in the case of AIS, it’s a logical course since the testosterone insensitivity that prevented development of male genitals also usually extends to the child having a female brain pattern too … a feminine gender identity. Besides, there is an argument (which we have to take on trust) that the testicles in such cases could be cancerous in later years. The good intent seems to go sour from that point, though …
The parents are told not to tell anybody about what has happened … least of all the child. Later, at around the age of eight to nine years the child is treated again with oestrogens, covertly, to simulate a normal puberty. In fact, the young woman at the centre of this treatment is only actually likely to learn the truth of her situation by figuring it out herself and then dragging the facts from those around her … either when she seeks a proper explanation for her failure to menstruate, or because self examination reveals that she has no proper vagina.
What a message to receive! … That the thing you’ve got is so unspeakable that nobody, but nobody, must know about it! What an unethical way to behave? … Operating without informed consent on a patient and lying blatantly to everyone in sight? Telling parents to lie to their children. Evading the truth until it becomes unavoidable. Expecting a teenage woman to then just accept that she’s genetically a male in the eyes of medicine … and to be offered surgery to create a vagina only when the surgeon deems appropriate. ("Go and find a lover first".)
We’re told that the syndrome is rare. Yet if nobody is enabled to talk about it and the operation is often concealed in the child’s notes as "labial hernia" how are we to know how many other young people suffer in isolation, believing that they’re alone in the world as unlovable, unworthy freaks. How many are denied the knowledge which is a prerequisite of demanding better treatment too?
Another programme in the series continued the theme by examining the stories of two families in which the new born child’s genitalia were simply too ambiguous for sex to be classified. The confusion of the parents … certainly not helped by their respective hospitals … again showed how badly the "perfect sex" myth serves us all, and how lost they were as a result. They didn’t know how to dress the baby or what to call it. Worse, they didn’t know which set of stereotypes to play out on the child. They were lost … unable to decide whether to begin the process of quality nurturing that a little girl can expect, or whether to start the subtly different treatment geared to ensuring that a little boy grows up to be the emotionally abused creature which we call a man.
In the panic to arrive at a resolution to this man-made problem, doctors regularly encourage the parents to connive in another abuse. The race is on to decide, in the face of nature’s own indecision, to surgically assign the child one way or another … and then again to maintain a tight-lipped silence to maintain the myth of perfection. It’s a decision which ignores the possibility that the child might grow to display a very different gender identity of course. It risks the child’s emergent identity being physically denied by the very myth which surgery has conspired to sustain. What’s a little boy to believe if everything around him says that he can’t possibly be a little boy if he doesn’t have a willy … and when everyone maintains that there are absolutely NO exceptions to this rule? Is it entirely reasonable to insist that he’s a little girl because that had been decided for him?
It’s surely not a big leap from that vision to a better understanding of the plight of those little girls who grew up with a penis, or those other little boys who grew up without one. The ones for which the diagnosis has been, for too long, a derogatory word … transsexual. Would their feelings have been easier for them to understand if they had grown up in a better informed world … a world educated enough to understand the mere possibility of their existence?
And that’s why the last programme in the Dark Secret series was rather curious. At first sight the billings might have implied that the producers were taking the thread of their argument to its logical conclusion. Why not round off the series by examining the phenomenon of transsexuality in a new and more informed light? Why not examine the common developmental thread between those whose incongruent development shows in a physical way, and those whose mental imprisonment is compounded by society’s unwillingness to believe anything that it can’t see or touch?
There are many thousands of transsexual people of both genders in the United Kingdom. The three thousand post operative transsexual women and one or two thousand transsexual men are just the ones who’ve made it through. Behind them it is impossible to estimate the numbers grappling with denial, guilt and shame, because they’re invisible. So too, of course, is their agony.
The transsexual men are a particularly interesting group to examine. Society has fewer pet stereotypes with which to confuse the issues surrounding their lives. It’s easier to see the innateness of the men’s masculine gender identities, uncluttered by associations with transvestism, fetishism, and the subjective minefield which defines a woman in terms of her attractiveness rather than her personality. It’s much harder to examine transsexual women without tripping over the wires laid by feminist theory, and without being cognitively confused by the sad fact that some transsexual women will never fit society’s narrow aesthetic definition of acceptable womanhood.
But why then ignore the thousands of cases on home territory and travel 8,000 miles to (of all places) San Francisco to do little more than gawp, with little or no intelligent commentary, at a pair described as no more than "women dressed as men"? Why even ignore the very ordinary-looking transsexual men who did appear at the edges of some scenes and focus, instead, on two people as untypical of the breed as it’s possible to find?
What was the sub plot? Why make a freak show film, depicting the subjects as shallow and apparently motiveless pretty-boys, playing with gender, whilst all around seemed (tellingly) to have no doubt in their minds that they were women all along? And, if this was a film about the wider field of transgendered society (which is everything except homogenous) why not explain that? Why lift the veil on a whole universe of gender variant behaviours and fail to provide a guide? Why suggest, by means of the setting and presentational style, that the whole issue of gender role changing is nothing more than a trivial amusement … quite separate from the "real" problems explored in the previous films of the series?
You can speculate all you like about the motives, naïve or dark, of the team which made the last film, yet we’re left with the sad fact that in a series that could have been seminal, the producers shied at the last fence.
The veil was lifted … momentarily … and then quickly lowered back into place as though those involved were not yet ready themselves to confront the logic of what they’d revealed through the series. Like the aversion therapist, trying not to have seen what he’d seen, it seems that in some quarters society is still not quite ready to digest the evidence that robs us of those convenient simplifications we’ve all been taught about gender and sex, but which would liberate so many.
And is that the crux perhaps? Is the knowledge that sex has the potential to be what you make of it too terrifying for those who aren’t compelled to challenge the limitations? Is it safer to let sex remain what it makes of you?
It leaves me wondering what we’ll see in another quarter century, looking back on the 27 years of our struggle to get people seeing and thinking about medical knowledge that wasn’t even new in 1970. For nothing in this discussion is news to modern medicine. This same knowledge was available in 1970 and could have informed a very different judgement to the one deliberately reached by Justice Ormrod that year, when he defined April Ashley to be a legal absurdity.
Will we live in a world which acknowledges that people’s gender, sexual physique and proclivities are all as variable as our height and build? Will that generation find it hard to understand how children could be abused on such a scale as they are because we still refuse to acknowledge them as evidence of an unpalatable truth about life? Will we then know that there are 5,000 and not just 500 XY women … as the current estimates suggest?
That’s where we have to get to. If we don’t, then we deny recognition to the pain of another generation of children rendered guilty and ashamed by ignorance. We condemn thousands more to finding the way, without a guide, from denial and shame into enlightenment and happiness. It’s not as wanton as sexual abuse perhaps, but the scars of the victims go just as deep.
It is time therefore to raise and pin back the veil. Or, better still, rip it down!