Dear All,
I have just read through this thread and it has me feel very emotional. I am a woman with a transsexual past and I am very distressed by this unnecessary conflict which has been created by Maria Miller and her laughable Women and Equality Committee.
Justine Greening was interviewed some time ago saying that it should be easier to change your gender and the current system is intrusive and involves going to see your GP and a whole medical process gets kicked off. They want to streamline the process and demedicalise it and to stop treating people changing their gender as if it was some medical problem that needs fixing. This is a choice that people are making....
Everything she said in this interview is absolute nonsense. it is easy to find by googling "Justine Greening Gender Recognition"
And that will also bring up Theresa May's ludicrous speech in which she claims that "being trans is not an illness and should not be treated as such".
Similarly, Jeremy Corbyn's pronouncements about how people have to undergo "invasive medical tests" to get a GRC is simply not true and utterly clueless.
There is a long and ignoble legal history as far as the legal status of people in this country who have had "sex changes" is concerned.
This goes back to April Ashley's divorce case in Corbett V Corbett in in 1970. April being declared to be legally male meant that everyone in this position lost their rights. Before this, people used to quietly change their birth certificate and get on with their life.
One of those responsible for April losing her case was John Randall, the former clinical lead at Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic. If I remember correctly, Randall gave evidence that April was properly classified as a "male to female homosexual transsexualist" .
As Liz Hodgkinson points out in her book "Bodyshock: the truth about changing sex" (1987), it is interesting to speculate about the way the case might have gone if April had been an old Etonian and her husband from a Liverpool slum.
The Charing Cross "Gender Identity Clinic" started in 1966 and so Randall's evidence caused direct harm to his patients.
In 1979, the BBC broadcast "A Change of Sex" and there is an infamous scene with John Randall interrogating Julia Grant which can be found by looking for "Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic".
In that clip, Julia Grant had gone off and had breast surgery without doing a year of the so-called "Real Life Test".
When she tells him, Randall says, "I must say, I take extreme exception to you doing that. This is a medical matter and not a personal choice".
That is the reality of the situation and the reason why, after people like Mark Rees and Caroline "Tula" Cossey had taken the Government to the European Court of Human Rights, the ECHR eventually judged that the Government had to act in "Goodwin V United Kingdom" (2002).
Essentially, the NHS were providing treatment, including surgery, and the Government were failing to recognise the results of that treatment leading to feelings of anxiety, vulnerability and humiliation.
The Government had taken no steps to address the suffering and distress experienced by the applicant and other post -operative transsexuals and it was no longer a matter of controversy requiring the elapse of further time to cast light on the issues involved.
This judgement only applied to people who had been through the whole medical process and I can assure all of those reading this that going through a hellish and traumatic social and medical process only to be officially undermined by being a "non-person in the eyes of the law" is not an experience that I would wish on my worst enemy.
As I explained to my GP in 2004, all I have ever wanted to do was sort out my medical problem and make a positive contribution to society.
On October 14th 2004, I wrote a letter to Ian Beales, the head of the Press Complaints Commission, which Christine Burns subsequently published in a dossier entitled "Transsexual People and the Press".
This criminal offence under Article 8 is typical of the "trans" activists and you can read the letter in that dossier which remains online in spite of the fact that I wrote to "Squeaker" explaining how upset I was about it. pp38-39
Ian Beales responded by writing me a kind and humane and personal email saying that he found my account of my experiences particularly sad and harrowing and asked me if I was prepared to advise the PCC committee on a series of questions relating to press coverage.
I was delighted to do so and, from what I remember, the most positive examples I could provide were the serialisation of Conundrum by Jan Morris in The Sunday Times in 1974 and a 2002 Independent article by Deborah Orr.
When I wrote to Ian Beales in 2004, I really hoped that our ordeal might be coming to an end but this has not happened because of the influence of un-elected narcissistic "trans" activists on the Government.
There is an Equality and Human Rights commission film on utube
in which Stephen Whittle defines "trans" as "transvestite, transsexual, transgender" and talks about his surgically constructed prick.
By that definition, Dr Michael Haslam, Beaumont Society transvestite, Gender "psychiatrist" and convicted sexual criminal is "trans".
As a survivor/victim of sexual assault, I take extreme exception to being put in a category with someone like him and I am not alone in feeling great anger about this
As far as I am aware, the "trans" supports and so-called "trans community" in general have been silent about the experiences of the vulnerable women assaulted by "Dr" Michael Haslam and if anyone has any evidence to the contrary I would love to see it.