Whatever

When I was about twelve my schoolfriends and I used to waste a lot of our energy worrying if we were really proper females. We tried lots of different tests to gauge our femininity (or, horrid thought, its absence) – nothing invasive, just things like which way you struck a match – if outwards, it was quite a major worry (proper women, being silly creatures, would, of course, strike them towards themselves, ignoring the fact that the head might fly off and burn them) – and how you looked at your nails – if you folded your fingers over and looked at them in the palm of your hand rather than spreading your hand out and looking at them that way, you were almost certainly doomed to a life of dreaded manliness. You couldn’t get away with trying to change your natural match-striking and nail-viewing tendencies either. You might be able to fool some of your friends, but deep within you the dye was already cast.

I thought of this nonsense today, while listening to the news, which reported the case of one Conor Montgomery, aged 50. Young Conor (yes, I did say ‘young’ – 50 is the new 30 apparently, didn’t you know?) was born a woman but ‘a few years ago he borrowed 10,000 dollars to have what transsexual men call top surgery ... He has also taken male hormones.’ However, for health and financial reasons, Mr Montgomery has had nothing else done. In other words, physically, he is essentially a woman who has had her chest cut off. In these circumstances, Mr Montgomery has persuaded the authorities to give him a passport that describes him as ‘male’, which is probably sensible - things could be awkward at the airport without it. Mr Montgomery is not satisfied with this though – he is now fighting for the right to have his birth certificate revoked and replaced with one that says he was born a man.

Does this strike anyone else as ludicrous or am I just a horrible person? I am not saying I don’t feel sympathy for Mr Montgomery – clearly, life is confusing and probably not entirely satisfactory in his situation. Nevertheless, if what Mr Montgomery is requesting is agreed to, we will be complying with rights demands that have more to do with delusions than reality. This person thinks they are a man, they dress like a man, they have had bits of themselves cut off so that they look more like a man, but they aren’t a man, and they were not born a man. I am happy to call this person ‘he’ but, if he is allowed to change his birth certificate as he wishes, the result will be that it will state something that isn’t true. This person was not born male and no matter how much surgery he has, that fact cannot be altered. If the change he is asking for is carried out, what will happen next? Will I, if I take it into my head that I am a small grey Angora rabbit, be able to have that put on my birth certificate?

Do words have meanings or not? That is the essential issue here. In this context, as so often, Lewis Carroll’s Alice crystallises the dilemma. I am not, of course, referring to that excrescence that claims to be a related film, but to Alice through the Looking-Glass and Alice’s conversation with Humpty Dumpty:

‘“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, ‘whether you can make words means so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

Even as a small child I found Humpty Dumpty’s cavalier attitude very disturbing. Perhaps this was simply the first of many indications that I was going to be a hopeless bigot and spoilsport in adult life. Certainly I haven’t changed - I still hope that the Humpty Dumpties of this world will not triumph over words.