Archive for the ‘Transgendered Issues’ Category
IOC Approves Transsexual Olympic Athletes
The International Olympic Committee executive board this month approved a measure that will allow athletes who have undergone sex change surgery to compete in Olympic events under their reassigned gender.
The new policy goes into effect in time for this summer’s Olympics in Athens, Greece.
Athletes who want to compete as transsexuals will have to prove that they have undergone at least a minimum two-year regimen of hormones following sexual reassignment surgery.
The IOC and transsexual activists argue that the fear of men who have sex change operations having an unfair advantage competing in women’s sports will never materialize because the hormone therapy causes testosterone levels and muscle mass to decline. But they conveniently forget that men have other advantages, including increased average heart and lung capacity.
Besides, this is just the foot in the door. At the Gay Games V in Amsterdam, for example, the organizers of that event were accused of bigotry for requiring the sort of proof of completion of the sex change operation that the IOC is requiring. Look for that sort of accusation to be directed at the IOC down the road.
Source:
Committee clears transsexuals for Olympics. Associated Press, May 17, 2004.
Australia Turns Down Bid by Serial Killer to Have Sex Change Information
Australian serial killer Paul Denyer recently filed a request for information about Australia’s policy on sex changes for inmates, and the misogynist killer may be looking to have a sex change in order to be reassigned to a woman’s prison. But the government the government denied his request and is looking to block future Freedom of Information requests by Denyer.
Denyer was convicted of killing three women in the early 1990s, and told police that he committed the crimes because he hated women.
He has previously asked to wear women’s makeup, but has been blocked from doing so by prison officials. In that case, taxpayer-funded Legal Aid organization helped Denyer file a gender identity discrimination complaint against the government, but that claim was ultimately rejected.
Source:
Misogynist killer seeking to hate himself. United Press International, January 7, 2004.
State turns down triple murderer’s bid for sex change. Andrea Petrie and Chee Chee Leung, The Age (Australia), January 9, 2004.
Transsexuals and Sports
The British Parliament of late has been considering the Gender Recognition Bill whose primary purpose is to allow transsexual individuals to formally re-register their gender to their newly reassigned gender, replacing for most legal purpose the gender of their birth. And, of course, this immediately created a debate about the most important related topic — the issue of transsexuals competing in sports competitions.
As originally drafted, the Gender Recognition Bill appeared to require both domestic and international sporting events to allow transsexuals to compete in their re-assigned genders. So a person born male who later decided to register his gender as female would have been allowed to compete in sporting events as a woman.
This caused great furor, in large part because reactions to this possibility cut to the very core of whether or not gender can genuinely be reassigned. As Kevin Myers wrote in an op-ed for The Telegraph,
We can pretend that we are able to turn men into women and vice versa, but that is not true. We merely give the appearance of doing so to help those unfortunates who feel that they have been born into the wrong sex; and maybe they genuinely have been. Or maybe they have got other psychological problems which become manifest in a gender-identity crisis. Either way, rightly or wrongly, medical science has taken the surgical and endocrinal route of rough-hewing a reasonable facsimile of the desired sex out of the raw material of the undesired sex. The result is usually unconvincing, but it nonetheless brings some peace to troubled people’s minds.
Neither law nor science can transform the physical substance of a woman into a man, or vice versa. And we are doing no justice to ourselves or trans-sexuals by pretending that an authentic bodily consecration can [sic] occurred, and that one sex can be transubstantiated into the other. This cannot happen.
Following the debate, the sponsors of the bill largely acquiesced to Myers’ view, announcing that there would, of course, be special exemptions to the bill where sports are concerned. According to The Guardian,
Under the government’s new gender recognition bill, which comes into force next year, transsexuals will legally be recognized as members of their new gender. However, sport is to be a given special exemption from certain elements of the bill because it is felt that some transsexual athletes might have an unfair advantage in some sports, particularly physical ones.
The medical panels will examine areas such as testosterone levels, physique and an athlete’s mental state before making their decision. If it is felt that a transsexual athlete has an unfair advantage then the panel will be allowed to prevent them from competing.
So which is it, then? Is a male-born female really a woman, or simply a man with slight cosmetic changes to the outward physical appearance? And if the answer is no when it comes to sports, why should it be yes for other areas?
Sources:
What next? Martin Johnson to be Martina? Kevin Meyers, Telegraph (UK), December 21, 2003.
Sport panel to rule on transsexuals. Vivek Chaudhary, The Guardian, December 20, 2003.
Judge Allows Lawsuit Over Transgendered Bathroom Controversy to Proceed
A judge in New York paved the way for a lawsuit brought by the Hispanic AIDS Forum to proceed against the HAF’s former landlord. The Hispanic AIDS Forum is suing based on a claim of discrimination against transgendered persons.
The landlord received complaints that transgendered clients who were born male but later became female were using the women’s restroom. When the HAF’s lease was up, the landlord refused to renew the lease and the organization was forced to relocate.
Transgendered advocates argue that there is essentially no criteria — other than personal preference — to dictate which restroom an individual should use. HAF executive director Heriberto Sanchez Soto told Columbia Radio News,
You cannot go to the subway and say I feel uncomfortable with all of you being here, while I am here, I am god, y’all get out so I can have the space to myself.
Jennifer Levi, an attorney at Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, told Columbia Radio News,
It is a privacy claim which basically says that it’s inappropriate for an employer or a landlord to ask questions about somebody’s genital makeup in order to determine what appropriate restroom facility they should use and it’s very significant that a judge agreed that info relating to a person’s anatomy is not relevant in determining what restroom they should use.
And, for good measure, an ACLU spokesman compared complaints over transvestites born male using the women’s restroom to Jim Crow-era segregation. James Esseks, Litigation Director of the ACLU’s AIDS Project, told 365gay.com,
It is unfortunate that the bathroom has once again become a battleground in the fight for equal rights. The landlord’s decision to exclude transgendered people from the bathrooms and common areas was just as wrong today as it was 50 years ago when business owners in the South tried to force African Americans to use separate bathrooms.
We’ll see who comes out on top in this pissing contest.
Sources:
Suit against transphobic landlord moves forward. Doug Windsor, 365Gay.Com, October 16, 2003.
Transgender Bathrooms (Transcript). Emily Grossman, Columbia Radio News, March 28, 2003.
Debate Over “Female Born” Lesbians in Australia
You just can’t make this stuff up. A controversy broke out in Australia earlier this month over the desire by organizers of the upcoming LesFest 2004 to exclude transsexuals from attending or working at the national lesbian festival.
LesFest 2004 organizers had applied for and received an exemption from sex discrimination laws from the Victorian Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
But the exemption was challenged by the transsexual lobby group the Australian WOMAN Network. The transsexual group argued that the LesFest’s advertisement for “female-born” lesbians was offensive and urged the exemption revoked. The tribunal agreed and overturned the exemption on the grounds that LesFest organizers failed to inform the tribunal about a complaint filed against them.
In a press release WOMAN noted that under Australian common law,
- sex is not immutable;
- a transsexual person?s sex, following hormones and surgery, is their affirmed sex;
- the law should be consistent in this regard; and
- the meaning of ?woman? is its ordinary, contemporary meaning
According to WOMAN,
Such a term [female born] is offensive to the law that protects us all from discrimination on the basis of ?sex?. Inclusion of ?female born? in the text of a legal decision purports to create a legal distinction between people who are all legally women; those who were born women and those who were not. Such a distinction is not countenanced under either the common law or the Equal Opportunity Act 1995.
?Female born?, and its more common presentation, ?born womyn? are remnants of a gender political culture spawned more than three decades ago by radical separatist feminists like Germaine Greer and Janice Raymond. They did much that was good for the advancement of women, but their vitriolic pronouncements on people born with a variation in their sexual formation are abhorrent to anyone who support the rights of all individuals to dignity, privacy and self-expression.
I.e., people even nuttier than the radical feminists.
Sources:
Claws out over lesbian festival. Australian Age, October 1, 2003.
LesFest - On Again, Off Again. October 28, 2003.
VCAT joins attack on LesFest’s ‘Lesbians Born Female’ Policy. September 30, 2003.
UK Court Rejects Transsexuals Lawsuit Over Bathroom Privileges
A British judge this month rejected a lawsuit by a group of transsexuals who argued they suffered sexual discrimination at a pub. The five transsexuals were asked to leave a pub after they used the women’s restroom.
The men sued and were backed up by the UK’s Equal Opportunities Commission. The transsexuals each sought 2,000 pounds from the pub owner.
But a judge ruled that the UK’s Sex Discrimination Act does not provide protection specifically for transsexuals. The judge ruled that since the transsexuals were biologically men, that the pub owner was well within his rights to ask them to leave if they could not refrain from using the women’s restroom.
Source:
Landlord right to treat transsexual customers as men. Nick Britten, Daily Telegraph (London), August 15, 2003.
Transsexuals Lose Case. Sky news, August 14, 2003.
Transsexual Wins $4,600 Award from Rape Counseling Group for Sex Discrimination
CNSNews.Com reports that this week a Canadian human rights court awarded Kimberly Nixon $4,664 after it agreed that her rights had been violated by The Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter. Nixon is a transsexual who was born male and had sexual reassignment surgery in 1990. The shelter argued that since Nixon grew up male, he did not have the life experiences necessary to counsel women about rape. The court disagreed, finding the shelter engaged in sexual discrimination.
According to Nixon’s lawyer, Barbara Findlay — who has specialized in lawsuits that seek legal recognition of transsexuals — this is the first case of this kind in North America in which the transsexual has one. In a similar case brought against a Canadian prison which refused to hire a transsexual for a counseling position in a women’s prison, the prison prevailed in its claim that a transsexual raised as a man did not share the life experiences necessary to counsel female prisoners.
Nixon told CNSNews.Com that the refusal of The Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter to hire her had caused a great deal of harm to her self-esteem and dignity,
The fact that they view me as a man was amazingly hurtful, because my whole life I’ve had to deal with feelings around being male, because that’s not who I am. It was very, I guess, damaging to my sense of self, and my identity of being a female was undermined.
Nixon says the shelter remains in denial about its discriminatory attitude toward her and would like the court to order the shelter to institute training to “un-learn trans-phobia.”
Findlay says that the court’s decision, “sent a message to Americans pressuring for the same kind of change. It is, in my opinion, at long last the beginning of the end of discrimination against trans-gender people.” For its part, the shelter is considering an appeal.
Lets hope Findlay is wrong and that this sort of insanity does not spread south to the United States. The shelter here has an open and shut case, as far as I’m concerned, that their right to free association and desire to have an all-woman staff trumps any sort of claim Nixon might have.
Source:
Transgender Advocates vs. Feminists in Legal Battle. Alison Appelbe, CNSNews.Com, January 25, 2002.