Measuring Sex in Centimetres
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Measuring Sex in Centimetres
(or where shall we draw the line this year?)
29th October 2000
<<LONDON (Reuters) 17th October - A Briton born as a man with a “micro penis” 53 years ago before having a sex change won a court ruling confirming her legal status as a woman, a written judgment released on Tuesday said.>>
I see hemlines are down again. Right down. You can’t miss them. Ankle length skirts are seemingly “it” after a bit of an absence this Autumn, and suddenly half my wardrobe doesn’t look quite as appropriate as it did the week before. Bother! I don’t know what determines it … some say it’s the economy, maybe it’s global warming? Whatever the case though, some mysterious consensus seems to have decreed that a length that qualified as a skirt not so long ago may now, I guess, have to be reclassified as a belt! All change!
It seems to be happening with cars too. I’m told that the “new” mini is apparently a lot bigger than the motor car which epitomised that term for over forty years. But if the new maxi mini’s now a “mini”, what’s the old one all of a sudden? A “micro”?
Come to think of it “micros” aren’t what they used to be either. The PC I use these days would once have qualified as a mainframe but, by next year, may not even qualify for the jumble.
That’s the problem with measurements though, and especially relative ones like “big”, “medium” or … um “micro”. When you get down to brass tacks you find they’re not “real” measurements at all, but just another form of fashion term … open to redefinition with each new season or, if we are talking about genitals, the sartorial taste of the beholder.
What is a so-called Micro Penis this year, and how does it compare to the rival brand, “Clitoris XL”? Doctors, it seems, appear to have a rule of thumb. Literally! As our physically Intersexed associates will tell you, a millimetre either side of the fashionable view of what’s an acceptable Penis this year can determine, quite literally, the rest of your life. A bit longer and you can get to be a boy, a bit shorter and they’ll nip it down to size even further for you, and you get the Domestic Science classes in place of the Woodwork.
All of which makes a UK court decision last week rather intriguing.
The High Court was told by doctors giving evidence that a person whom we can only call “W”, registered as a “boy” on their birth certificate on the (literally) rather slender evidence of what medicine now calls a “Micro Penis”, would nowadays have been registered from the outset as a girl, and ought to be regarded that way now when considering the matter of their marriage. The court appears to have gone along with that reasoning and decided that she is a “she”, even though “she” had ironically in the past used the legal definition of her as a “he” to annul a previous unsuccessful marriage.
Now, until we’ve been able to study the full transcript of the case and understand what other factors may have played on a decision which appears to negate the 30 year standing of “Corbett v Corbett” it is very difficult to know what that does for the standing of a nation of trans people defined for almost two generations by the pseudo scientific legal dogma of Justice Ormrod. In Justice Ormrod’s book, ruling on the marriage of April Ashley and Arthur Corbett in 1970, if you were born with a penis, any sort of penis … average, extra large or “fun size” … then arithmetically you could only be a “man” for the purposes of marriage. For there to be any doubt over that assessment … for you to be a debatable sort of “Intersex” in law … one of three factors needed to be out of step with the other two : chromosomes, internal genitalia, and external ones.
We know of course that in the intervening thirty years this reasoning has been ripped to shreds on just about every conceivable basis. There are registered women, quite happy to be women, whose XY chromosomes would make them legally men in Ormrod’s quack version of medical reality. There are people with bits of both sets of internal genitalia who need some sort of legal tie-breaker to allow them to determine what they are in world which isn’t set up to deal with ambiguity. And then there are thousands … literally thousands … of people whose sex is determined for them at birth purely according to what is a fashionably “acceptable” length of penis that Autumn.
The thing we don’t yet know about this particular woman, whose identity cannot be revealed, is whether the court considered what her chromosomes were, or whether she had bits of ovarian or uterine tissue which might might perhaps further differentiate her from boys born that week with nothing more different than a slightly longer “todger”.
Certainly there is nothing in the press reporting of this interesting case to suggest that there is anything more to differentiate W from other transsexual cases apart from a piece of tissue which has long since been excised and exists only as a matter of medical record.
So that potentially leaves us with an interesting matter of definition. What is a “Micro Penis”? If a couple of hundred millimetres qualifies as one this year, what’s the medical fashion to be next Spring? Three hundred? One hundred? Is this any way to decide which pigeonhole to push people into for the rest of their life?
The law will continue making an ass of itself so long as it chooses to decide issues like this on anything and everything other than the one piece of evidence which would actually acknowledge that it is human beings we are dealing with here, not microscopes and tape measures.
April Ashley is and always was a woman … because she told us that. She used something that laboratory rats don’t have. Her voice. W is a woman, not because her willy wasn’t long enough to “qualify” as a full blooded fella but because, it seems, every bit of her behaviour was screaming that out since her childhood.
It’s rather simple that way, isn’t it? The only remarkable thing is that it is the last thing that the judiciary and political establishment of the United Kingdom seems to have been willing to countenance over all those years.
Maybe picking people’s sexes is the ultimate power trip for some; a controlling political act which makes absolutely clear who owns your body, your life. And in its’ attempts to cling on to some sort of physical evidence to deny the voice of the individual concerned in the matter, the judiciary ultimately corrupts itself, putting easily discredited pseudo measures of masculinity and femininity before the one piece of evidence which ultimately counts.
The one most remarkable piece of evidence is that trans people have always been, and remain, so clear about who they are in the face of such daunting opposition. “I think, therefore I am” has an added poignancy for anyone who has trodden this road to make that most fundamental of statements of identity.
Only I know who I am, and the only way that YOU are going to know is by what I tell you. That’s the long and … er … the short of it all.
Christine Burns
(Vice-President, Press for Change)