1997: the review of next year
31 December 1997
On the last day of the year, a time I normally use to review what’s happened, I thought it might be nice to write down all the year’s news on trans issues.
Unfortunately, it turned out that I got my clock wrong and wrote up ’98 instead of ’97, but I hope you’ll all forgive me for not correcting it :)
January 3, 1998: The Society of Clean-Shaven Trans Men cancelled its planned merger with the Association of Trans Women Without Bears after both organisations were revealed to have no members.
January 14, 1998: The National Council of Midwives voted overwhelmingly to refuse to complete the “Sex” part of the birth registration form, to protect themselves from lawsuits by trans people and other intersexed persons.
January 29, 1998: A doctor at the Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic, who had been fired for prescribing hormones to a trans person, was reinstated after he promised not to do so again.
February 2, 1998: The cost to Charing Cross of vaginoplasty (which has always greatly exceeded private sector prices) was revealed to have increased to 32 million pounds.
February 17, 1998: Government spokespeople denied newspaper reports that the growing mountain of uncompleted birth registration forms was causing a nationwide shortage of warehouse space.
February 27, 1998: The European Union’s Agriculture Commissioner announced that the UK was to be fined a million pounds a day for allowing the birth registration form mountain to grow beyond agreed limits.
March 3, 1998: Following up his 15-year-old pronouncement that we retain our sexual identities in heaven, the Pope appointed a commission to establish a GIC in the afterlife.
March 19, 1998: The manufacturer of Ethinyl Estradiol resumed production of 100-pill jars. Trans women immediately reorganised their shelves to reclaim the space used by stocks of 21-pill jars.
April 1, 1998: Germaine Greer said sorry.
May 7, 1998: The Ministry of Defence signed an agrement with Germany to pay for 242 vaginoplasties, and cancelled its order for the EuroFighter.
May 10, 1998: The Papal Commission on Transition in Heaven concluded in its interim report that the new Heaven GIC should use existing expertise, and recommended waiting until enough practitioners had died.
May 17, 1998: The manufacturer of Ethinyl Estradiol announced that it would supply Estradiol only in 5mcg strengths. Warehouse rentals soared as trans women scrambled for a place to store their prescriptions.
May 26, 1998: Pizza Delight announced a new home-delivery hormone service to reduce the demand for warehouse space.
June 18, 1998: The Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths persuaded the Home Office to requisition all the former Estradiol warehouses to store the growing mountain of incomplete birth registration forms.
June 21, 1998: The Dept of Agriculture announced that in a barter deal with Japan, the Birth Cert Application Mountain was to be exchanged for 8,627,000 expired Tamgochis.
June 25, 1998: A radical breakaway group of TS Menace, calling themselves the TS Hit Squad, shot four members of the HBIGDA board to provide staff for the new Heaven GIC.
July 14, 1998: Fourty-seven thousand babies whose births had not been registered were arrested in a demonstation in Whitehall, but released after the High Court ruled that non-existent people could not be charged with any offence.
July 29, 1998: After intense lobbying from the Society of Bear Makers, the govt agreed to fund vaginoplasty on demand. 200,000 jobs were announced in factories making surgery bears.
August 2, 1998: Five hundred cargo ships carrying dead tamgochis from Japan were turned away at Felixstowe because their birth certifictates did not record their sex.
August 19, 1998: Resisting pressure to cancel its order for 32 milion pound vaginoplasties in view of the operation’s free availability elsewhere, the RAF pronounced that this was an essential defence against the growing sophistication of Third World States armed with the Karma Sutra.
August 20, 1998: The Daily Mirror apologised for invading the privacy of trans people. In front page article headlined “TITS FOR TAT”, the editor admitted that the paper had in the past been unfairly sensationalist, but assured readers that this would happen no more. Further heavily-illustrated articles on page 2,3,4,7,11 and 16 revealed exclusively that trans women have breasts.
August 27, 1998: Japanese manufacturers announced a plan to re-use the bartered birth cert application forms as instructions for electrical goods. The Campaign for Plain English welcomed the improvement.
September 6, 1998: Labour MP John Lewis (formerly Sarah Lewis) was denounced for breaching the court ban on all-woman shortlists for selection of parliamentary candidates; all her rivals for the nomination had been women.
September 25, 1998: Psychiatrists denounced the conclusions of a major research programme which showed that trans people really were corrrect in their assertion that they knew who they were. The psychs attempted to discredit the research team by drawing attention to the team’s earlier report offering conclusive evidence of a link betwen bereavement and grief, saying “that’s the sort of rubbish these people always come up with”.
October 2, 1998: The Papal Commmision on Transition in Heaven reported that the Heaven GIC was still unstaffed: the four assassinated HBIGDA members had apparently been accommodated in a different part of the afterlife.
October 13, 1998: After being given a pocket calculator for his birthday, the Minister for Health announced a series of spending cuts, in which the Charing Cross GIC was shut down and all trans people were given hormones and surgery on demand. 700 job losses were announced at paper mills as orders were cancelled for copies of CX’s secret manual “How To Frustate Transition Whilst Wasting Taxpayers Money”.
October 23, 1998: A group of trans people took control of Downing Street by using garlic and daylight to drive out Peter Mandelson. They immediately formed a provisional government and issued a decree requiring all medical practitioners to either renounce the SOC or be forcibly given HRT.
October 24, 1998: The provisional government resigned after an emergency session of the BMA agreed to ban use of the SOC.
November 7, 1998: Large-footed women all over the country sent messages of support to a group of trans women who occupied the head offices of a major shoe retailer, demanding that sizes 8-11 be held in stock. The chain gained an extra million customers in its first week after agreeing to stock only larger sizes, but many trans women reported that they had been unable to break their way through the long queues.
November 12, 1998: Sales of the testosterone-suppressant drug Androcur were revealed to have grown a hundred-fold since it was made available without prescription. The National Society for Large Families urged women to find other ways of controlling their husbands, and denounced the practice of putting Androcur in beer.
November 16, 1998: After the House of Lords forced through a bill legalising same-sex marriages, trans people held a mock-demonstration against the loss of of one the few legal advantages they had over non-trans persons.
November 22, 1998: After an early millenium bug in the Birth Registration Computer system wiped out the “Sex” field in 57 million records, the Home Office agreed that it had no choice but to abandon the use of a sex classification for birth registrations.
November 27, 1998: Surgeons who had developed a 100%-successful phalloplasty technique were sued by a trans man with 17 penises after an operating theatre were inflitrated by a scientist from the Dolly-The-Sheep cloning experiment.
December 25, 1998: In her Christmas Day address, delivered on behalf of “my spouse-person and I”, the Queen revealed that her husband’s erratic behaviour had been due to repressed transsexuality, which had now been remedied by transition.
December 27, 1998: The Queen’s consort, Princess Philippa, was arrested in a toy shop for trying to shoot teddy bears. She claimed that she was on safari, and still supported the aims of the WWF.