Transsexual people don’t generally just “feel like the opposite gender fits them better”. Think of it more as something that’s screamed at you in your head for as long as you can remember. You’ve always known that you’re physically wrong but you’re trapped and you can’t do much about it.

You know what, just try being transsexual and then come back and make that comment again. If only you could.

And why is it revolting? We’re all human, and it’s not like public toilets don’t have walls around each stall?

Well I said that i didn’t want to go down the route of biological ‘facts’, but if you insist.

There are whole reams of studies which are looking at the possible connection between biology and sexuality. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_sexual_orientation

[Daphne – Sexuality and gender are different things. I’m talking about gender, which is determined by chromosones and is unambiguously male or unambiguously female.]

I did not want to go down this route because it is all still somewhat nebulous (and possibly utter bunkum).

However I don’t think it is safe to reason that “when the remains of a body are tested the result will be the biological fact of what you were born as” because we still may not know what we should be looking for. The science in this area is still relatively crude. And that too, I suppose, is a ‘fact’.

[Daphne – Of course testing of remains reveals whether the body was male or female. And this regardless of what’s specified on that person’s passport.]

As to being biologically identified as ‘male ‘or ‘female’ can it not be surmised that what we have here is the crude biological equivalent of red and blue. That we have compartmentalised the findings to provide only one of two solutions.

And that is the crux of the problem: the tension created by, on the one hand the needs of the State to pigeon hole everyone and everything in satisfactory compartimentilised fashion and the desire of today’s society to allow the individual to express themselves fully .

Unfortunately, as to often happens, the discussion is reduced to a few cheap laughs and we talk of men who are cikkulata and women who are mara-ragel. Oh well. Ho-hum

You are born physically male or female and your paperwork records this historical fact.

This is why I also find changing gender on birth certificates, even after the person has undergone reassignment surgery, as being ridiculous. By all means, if desired, changing what it is recorded as “at present” is acceptable – i.e. on identity cards, etc – but amending a birth certificate is nothing but rewriting history – impossible.

Now to suggest that someone who is physically male or female should be allowed to identify themselves as belonging to the opposite sex is just as ludicrous as myself insisting on being identified as a black rapper, with a photo to match on my identity card, just because I feel that that reflects my persona better than the palefaced reality that I am. Chaos ensues.

Ah well, in for a penny, in for a pound, I shall go ahead and dig deeper into being ridiculous.

I agree that the state records facts. So age is a fact. However what I tried to point out is that gender attribution is more closely connected to identity then crude biology.

[Daphne – It is not. The state does not record feelings. It records facts. When all is said and done, and notwithstanding sex change operations, life as a transgender person, etc, when the remains of a body are tested the result will be the biological fact of what you were born as.]

I’d rather leave the whole chromosome/gene argument aside as it is very shifty ground either way.

[Daphne – It isn’t. It is cast-iron fact that some people would like to ignore: that transgender operations are really just window-dressing. The person remains biologically a man or biologically a woman.]

In my defence I will say that there is a long tradition of the Third Sex in many of our oldest civilisations, whether in the far east (India, Thailand) or the west (The American Indians often attributed magical powers to the ‘Two Spirits’).

So no, I don’t agree that this is a question of facts but a state of being which the state can recognise as much as it can recognise a state of marriage. And with that I will bumble of to be ridiculous in another corner of this island.

@Ms Calleja

I suppose that if it was up to you , you would abolish the Ladies and Gents toilets and insist on a unisex one – in the name of ‘serious human rights ‘.

The very idea is revolting.