Mutilation

[bcholmes]

So, some time ago, I kvetched about a trans documentary that I saw.

One of the aspects of the documentary that I still find myself thinking about is a segment involving a guy from Oz named Alan Finch. Alan Finch is a post-op former M2F transsexual who now regrets having had surgery. So he's now suing "Australia's top gender clinic" because they misdiagnosed him. This part bugs me enormously:

"At the end of the day the choice is with the man holding the scalpel. Nobody's got a gun to his head and is forcing him to do this. He's the one who makes the ultimate choice. Now he better be sure he's got it right."

Nope. No agency, there.

But that's not the part that I keep pondering. What I keep pondering is that when the interviewer, Hana Gartner, pressed him about his critical remarks about trans surgery, he finally blurted out: "Look, it's mutilation."

A number of years ago, I worked on a trans magazine, and we discussed an article that had appeared in the Globe and Mail. The author was a woman named Margaret Wente. The article came out shortly after another CBC document about two trans people: one a cop who transition just as she retired, and the other a member of the Armed forces whose surgery was provided by the military. And, they fell in love with each other.

Sex-change surgery has nothing to do with gay rights, or human rights of any kind. I don't care who Cynthia and Sylvia love, or how they express themselves while doing it. They are perfectly free to make those choices. But I do not think we should condone surgical mutilation in the name of therapy. That's malpractice, pure and simple, and I'm against it.

Later she goes on:

It is profoundly unfashionable to question the value of this surgery and no one in the CBC does so. We never hear someone say it amounts to nothing more than crude genital mutilation, performed on people with problems that probably won't be fixed by it.

Flash forward: some time after that, I did a panel at University of Toronto about coming out in the workplace. One of the other people on the panel was a woman who worked for the Toronto Star and somehow we got to talking about Margaret Wente. "She just has this thing about trans people. She's always going on about it." She rolled her eyes in that dismissive way.

Back to the present: What's especially troubling about these statements of mutilation is that they always seem to be followed by a silent, "There, I've said it." As if the speaker knows that it's not polite to say, "you're mutilating yourself", but eventually they want to acknowledge that their gut just screams out "it's not right because it's mutilation."

I've been trying to think, for a while, what I want to say about this. I've though about deconstructing the idea of mutilation: what does this mean? What can we learn about comparing SRS to, say, having your tubes tied, or breast reduction surgery, or any form of reconstructive surgery? I've pondered the problem of categories: healthy, unhealthy, different, wholeness, incompleteness, left-handedness, whatever.

And, I must confess, I don't even think that these are worthwhile points of discussion because I think these ideas all come from the head, whereas people's sense of mutilation comes from the gut.

And how do you change that?