From the Guardian newspaper, 5 August, 1999 - reproduced without permission.
(Source: http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,71187,00.html, but I don't know how long they keep their archives up for).

Reaction at db.html

I feel like wearing the trousers. I want to be behind the steering wheel of the family car, hammer in a few nails, and generally swagger around like John Wayne. I might even watch some football at the weekend, slouched back on the sofa with my legs flopped wide apart, the remote control in one hand and a can of Carlsberg in the other.

No one bats an eyelid when I do any of these things. Women no longer need a special ticket to trespass into traditional male territory. They can dress like men, drink like men and adopt male body language. Women can become aromatherapists or astronauts, nursery nurses or prime minister. But a man pulling on a skirt, downing a Babycham or studying to become a beautician is still the stuff of locker-room ribaldry. They aren't allowed to stray into feminine territory at all. They have no choice but to wear the trousers, too.

Perhaps that's why so many more men want to be women than women want to be men. When the NHS waiting lists open for "gender reassignment surgery", following last week's Appeal Court ruling that North West Lancashire Health Authority was unlawful for refusing to operate on three transsexuals, the vast majority who apply will be not women who desire hysterectomies and double mastectomies, but men who want their willies removed.

Such radical surgery is becoming increasingly acceptable. Up to 200 of these operations are carried out in Britain each year. This week it was announced that sex-change soldiers will be allowed to stay in the army, following the case of Sergeant Major Joe Rushton, who has been given a desk job while taking hormone replacement therapy in the hope of becoming a woman. And next week we'll see Julia's white "wedding" to her boyfriend, Alan, in the BBC documentary Julia Gets Her Man. After her sex change op, Julia (once George) said: "For the first time I was the person I wanted to be."

I don't doubt that some people have convinced themselves that surgery is the only way out of their sexual nightmare. For someone born with male kit, the decision to ditch it is long, painful and often very expensive. Powerful female hormones will help you sprout pubescent breasts, have a waspish waist, and add a few inches to your hips, but they won't alter the pitch of your voice or dispense with the need to buy Bics. Only hours of electrolysis will remove your beard and years of speech therapy lessons teach you how to talk like a lady. Massive surgery is essential. The penis is cut off, a cavity is created and, with skin taken from the redundant dick and testicles, a vagina and "natural looking labia" are constructed. Surgeons claim that they can create a fully functioning clitoris, and orgasm is possible - although not at all probable.

It's important that these details are spelt out. Because gender reassignment is not simply about men in frocks; it's about removing bits of a fully functioning body to be replaced by parts which, however they may approximate to the real thing, simply do not work. In any other case, this would be considered as nothing other than genital mutilation.

I met a man who had had the op who was a stunner. A former page three girl, she'd had a glamour role in a Hollywood movie and dated rich and famous men. She told me how, as a child, she used to dress up in her sister's clothes, play with dolls and hated football. "I wanted to look feminine, grow my hair, put a little make-up on..." But how do you get from wanting to wear mascara to surgical mutilation? Her answer, and that given by almost all transsexuals, is chillingly simple. "I just didn't feel like a boy."

But should feelings lead to major surgery? Michael Jackson has said he feels as if he was born in the wrong body, that he feels like a white man. He has undergone massive surgery to realise this, reconstructing his face and bleaching his skin. What if hundreds of black people in Britain started saying: "I just don't feel black?" Would we start handing out skin whitener on the NHS and introduce "race reassignment surgery". Of course not. We'd want to put a stop to this self-hatred. We'd strive to create a society where it's fine to be successful, powerful, wealthy and non-white.

So if it's not okay to want to be white, why is it okay to want to be a woman? Transsexuals argue that they have no choice; you simply can't help wanting your willie chopped off. The Gender Identity Consultancy, drawing on Dutch research, believes transsexuality is a medical condition caused by an imbalance in the hormones in the uterus six to nine weeks after conception. Basically, you start off female in the womb but pop out, erroneously, as male. Your body may look like that of a Bob or Brian, but you have a "female brain".

Now, a female brain is an interesting idea. What is special about this brain? Does it like to play with Barbie dolls when it's little? Does it prefer pink to blue? As it grows up, is it particularly good at baking fairy cakes?

Such theories deliver a below-the-belt blow to the sexual revolution. It's the opposite of the healthy pursuit of gender-bending, which challenges permissible practices for men and women. Instead, it seeks to define what you can or can't do by your crotch.

Transsexuality also supports a conservative view on acceptable sexual practices. Bans on gays and lesbians joining the armed forces are not being lifted following the case of Sergeant Major Rushton, on the grounds that a sex change is a medical condition and therefore nothing like homosexuality, which is seen as a matter of choice. Ironically, having your beard painfully plucked out and your willie chopped off is far less threatening than kissing someone else of the same sex.

Gender reassignment surgery is declaring that you can't act like a man without having a willie, and can't act like a woman without having a hole. But, over the past two decades, women have increasingly realised that they can act as men without having male equipment. It's our attitude towards acceptable behaviour for a man that needs a few nips and tucks, not a couple of hundred penises on the NHS.

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