European Court of Human Rights ruling acquiesces to misleading transsexual claims

The British Government is being compelled to introduce legislation to facilitate transsexual marriage as a consequence of the decision by the European Court of Human Rights meeting in Strasbourg on Thursday July 11.

It is notable and notorious legal issue: should the marriage of a (biological) male-to-female transsexual to another biological male be considered legally valid.

It is notable because it threatens yet another assault on the stability of the heterosexual marriage and family structure, considered by sociologists and social research groups to provide the ideal foundation for a positive and healthy society.

It is notorious because it exemplifies the way in which small but vociferous lobby groups are able to successfully manipulate the political and legal system through the subterfuge of disinformation.

Pro transsexual lobby groups claim that “new” scientific evidence demonstrates that the traditional view that, of sexuality being determined by the chromosomes, is obsolete. The evidence cited is based on limited research and difficult to replicate - it resulted from a small number of post mortems on transsexuals - but is said to indicate that the brain microstructure of a transsexual is more feminine.

While it is difficult to determine whether brain structure affects or influences behaviour, there is unequivocal evidence that its structure is affected by long-produced behaviour. In other words, it is know that the brain changes physically in response to our behaviour. London taxi drivers, for example, have enlarged parts of the brain dealing with navigation. Transsexual brain differences therefore are more likely to be the result of transsexual behaviour, rather than its cause.

Transsexual lobby groups further attempt to resolve the cause of transsexualism by insisting that it is biologically determined, but, again, there is a significant paucity of evidence. Studies of identical twins, which share the same gene pool, show that homosexual behaviour in co-twins is 50 per cent or less. If genes directly determine sexual orientation, then both twins would show the same orientation. There have been few similar studies of transsexualism, but one small study on four monozygotic male twin pairs, one of whom was transsexual, revealed only one pair to be concordant in transsexual behaviour. These findings confirm that genes do not therefore exclusively determine homosexual or transsexual behaviour.

However, behaviour genetics, for all its faults, have established that all behaviour patterns are a mixture of genes, family environment, unique circumstances, and individual choice. A crucial factor in the gender identity development is frequently a dysfunctional family influence. A fragmented relationship with a parent in the childhood years of two to four is common in the early childhood experience of individuals experiencing Gender identity Disorder. A crucial time for children are forming a self-image of their gender identity

The opinions of many politicians, lawyers and social commentators, who have been persuaded to support the transsexual lobby’s political aims, have doubtless been shaped and formulated by unsubstantiated and misleading information, not least espoused by the liberal media whose deliberately simplistic coverage eschews a balanced and informed presentation. In an article in The Independent (23 April 2002), it was stated that “medical opinion now holds that (transsexualism)…is the result of being exposed to a massive dose of hormones while in the womb. Most commonly, a foetus will be exposed to a massive dose of female hormones, perhaps explaining why male-to-female transsexuals are much more prevalent than female-to-male.”

Medical opinion makes no such claim. How does one measure hormone levels in the womb retrospectively, when a person finally turns out to be transsexual? Further, studies have clearly concluded that exposure to very high levels of prenatal hormones - abnormally higher than the usual female hormone levels in pregnancy - can almost never make a person transsexual. They showed, in fact, that those exposed to such extraordinarily high levels in the womb were more influenced by their subsequent self-image than the actual physiological effects of the hormones.

Such unhelpful media coverage - The Independent declined to publish letters correcting its misleading article - also invariably occurs whenever a new scientific study suggests a link or correlation between transsexual or homosexual behaviour and brain structure or hormones. Without reference to the actual strength of the correlation, the media invariably reports that the behaviours have “a biological basis”, or are “genetic”, or “due to hormones.” With each study and misreportage, the gap between actual scientific thought and popular belief widens.

The claim that transsexualism, like homosexuality, is innate, biology-derived and unchangeable is a standpoint known as “behavioural determinism”, a theory discarded by biologists decades ago, but to which activists and sympathetic liberal politicians still cling. They disregard at a sweep multi-factorial causation and any suggestion that the disorder can be reversed, as agreed by specialist psychiatrists from Canada, America, Holland, Germany and the UK in a report issued by the Royal College of Psychiatrists on gender identity disorders in children and adolescents in 1998.

It stated: “Identity issues and beliefs in adolescents are complex. They become firmly held and strongly expressed. This may give a false impression of irreversibility; more fluidity may return again at a later stage.” The report also took issue with “current classification systems” that seem to suggest that “gender identity disorders in childhood are equivalent to those in adulthood and that one inevitably leads to the other. This is not the case.”

It is also worth noting that the incidence of relatively successful non-surgical treatment of transsexuals is quite high. A psychotherapeutic study of gender dysphoric patients by L M Lothstein and S B Levine showed that out of 50 patients treated, 35 - 70 per cent - made marked recoveries.

Disingenuously, a leading transsexual lobby group, Press for Change, protests that even if a definite physiological causation cannot be established, it really doesn’t matter. Simply because a person demonstrates transsexual tendencies, he or she has a right to be legally acknowledged as a member of the opposite sex. Arguing that it is not necessary to prove why transsexuals exist in order to accept that they do, Press for Change vice-president Christine Burns adds on the group’s website: “That being the case, we leave medical argument to the doctors, with whom we have sufficient argument as it is, without wanting to become in any way dependent upon them for authentication of our existence.”

Politicians and ministers who once stood firmly and rightly opposed to the illegitimacy of the transsexual lobbies’ demands have gradually wilted under legal, civil and political pressure. An example of this pressure can be observed in the increasing frequency of parliamentary questions intended to vitiate the resistant stance of the likes of Rosie Winterton, Government minister for the Lord Chancellor’s Department, which has to make key decisions in the near future.

A further example could be found in the recommendations of a Home Office co-ordinated report issued in April 2000, which was strongly influenced by unsubstantiated medical evidence and reinforced by biased anecdotal statements provided exclusively by transsexual lobby groups. It led to the Government, in the form of the Lord Chancellor’s Department, apparently agreeing to prepare legislation to give transsexuals full legal recognition, including the issuing of new birth certificates.

In politically correct times, when it is considered repressive to comment negatively on a person’s chosen sexuality regardless of the consequences to society at large, the judiciary, too, has seen fit to express sympathetic support for the transsexual’s predicament in a way that does not help informed and balanced debate.

When transsexual Caroline Cossey, who became better known as the model, Tula, failed in her efforts to persuade the European Court of Human Rights to recognise her “right” to marry a man, one of the dissenting judges said the transsexual was simply seeking to “shape himself and his fate in the way the he deems best fits his personality.” Judge Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, head of the Family Division of the High Court, said the Government had “failed to recognise the increasing concerns and changing attitudes across Western Europe.”

Both statements are highly disturbing. Butler-Sloss’s comment blithely presupposes that such concerns and revised attitudes, because they are prevalent elsewhere, must be unquestionably right and therefore be readily embraced. The public comment of the European Court of Human Rights judge is no less dangerously presumptuous in that it indicates an alarming ignorance of the aetiology of transsexualism, yet confirms the uniqueness of a disorder that is diagnosed by the patient rather than the doctor. One might well argue that a transsexual - or any other sexually dysfunctional person - has every right to assume whatever sexual identity he or she so chooses. Indeed so. But should they also have the right - oh, what liberties are wrought in thy name - to benefits and privileges that would otherwise be denied?

Transsexual people represent less than 0.1% of the population - an estimated 5,000 have had gender reassignment surgery on the NHS. The consequences of the proposed birth certificate legislation on the rest of society is considerably more far-reaching, vitiating not only the integrity of marriage, but also impacting on family law, the criminal justice system, employment, social security, insurance and even sport. And it will, of course, confer on homosexuals and lesbians, whose sexual orientations are no less self-determined, the same full recognition, rights and benefits.

Whatever the intensive political lobbying of transsexual groups, whatever the back-pedaling of timorous politicians who have abandoned a moral standpoint, whatever the misguided understanding of the liberal pundits and media commentators, the unequivocal fact remains that there is absolutely no evidence that transsexualism is an unalterable condition and there can be therefore no basis for granting its exponents special civil and legal rights.

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