Miss Warren hasn’t bothered to tell any of her 1,000-odd partners that she started life as a man. ‘There must be a lot of angry men out there,’ she said.
Before my wife’s wrath, in the shape of a frying pan, comes crashing down on my head, I hasten to swear that I never had sex with Miss Warren, either in her present incarnation or when she was still Christopher Snowden. The former isn’t my taste; the latter, my inclination.
It’s just that the other day I wrote a piece on Crystal without an inkling that she used to be Christopher. Had I known it then, I would have written something different, something along these lines:
Free will is one of the seminal doctrines of Christianity, which is to say our civilisation. Without complete freedom to make a choice between good and evil, man would be an automaton, with his buttons pushed by either God, if you believe in Him, or Darwin, if you believe in Richard Dawkins. And automata can’t do what the religion demands: imitatio Christi.
When our civilisation began to be shaped not by Christianity but by market transactions, the doctrine was stolen from its rightful owner, shifted into the secular realm and turned into a consumer’s freedom to choose anything he can (or even, these days, can’t) afford. At first this freedom extended to things like socks, furniture and household appliances.
But eventually, people were encouraged to exercise their free choice to refurnish not just their houses, but also their bodies. And why not? If a man recognises no authority higher than himself, then his sovereignty over his body is absolute. Out comes the scalpel, wielded by surgeons the way sculptors wield chisels. Except that the surgeons’ media aren’t marble — it’s noses and chins, eyelids and lips, breasts and buttocks.
Thousands of men and women have given a whole new meaning to ‘self-made’, redefining their bodies in search of elusive happiness, to which we are all entitled. Sometimes things go awry, as in the current case of faulty breast implants, most of them cosmetically motivated. Soldier’s chances, I’d say — the road to happiness, even when defined in this trivial way, is often thorny.
Some of the men and women, however, aren’t just unhappy about their various bits. They are unhappy about being men or women. They want to be what they aren’t, or at least weren’t born to be — and who says there’s anything wrong with this? We all believe in social mobility, so why not the sexual kind?
Since then the medics have found appropriately recondite terms to describe the urge to change one’s sex. Sometimes it’s referred to as ‘gender dysphonia’, at other times it’s described as GID (Gender Identity Disorder).
The second term is contentious: many experts deny that transsexualism is indeed a disorder. It is rather a perfectly valid desire to bring one’s body in line with one’s natural conduct. It’s not our biological sex, they claim, but our social environment that affects our behaviour. And, if a man acts in a feminine manner, then he is more of a woman; for him to be at peace with himself, his body must be altered accordingly.
Now, if professionals disagree on the background to the problem, a rank amateur like me has no chance of sorting it out. But even today’s rankest of amateurs are aware of chromosomes, XY in men, XX in women. This is the sole criterion used by, say, sports authorities to decide an athlete’s qualification to compete in women’s events.
When the chromosome test was first introduced in 1966, many female athletes from communist countries (the Soviets Tamara and Irina Press, Tatiana Shchelkanova, Klavdia Boyarskikh, the Rumanian Iolanda Balàzs, the Pole Ewa Klobukowska and many others) announced their retirement. The test was, and still is, deemed sufficient to determine a person’s sex, regardless of the putative self-perception.
We are also aware of many conclusive tests showing that testosterone is a major factor of aggressiveness in general and sexual aggressiveness in particular. When female mice are injected with large doses of the male hormone, they begin to act like males. And even in our liberated times, when women fight in pubs, any unbiased observer will notice that pugnacity comes more naturally to men. We seldom cross over to the other side of the street when a couple of girls block our path, and it’s men, not women, who tend to start wars.
This may explain Crystal-Christopher’s atypical sexual voracity. Someone born a man has testosterone coursing through his veins, and subsequent hormone treatments probably can’t quite change this.
I’ve known a few ex-men who act in a similar fashion. One chap (let’s call him Nick) converted himself to a woman (let’s call her Alexia). Unlike Crystal-Christopher, Nick, as a man, had never had sex with men. On the contrary, he was an unusually aggressive heterosexual predator, trying to drag women into the lavatory at office parties and so forth. When Nick became Alexia, he/she did take a couple of men out for a trial run, only to find them wanting. Alexia then became a lesbian, pursuing women just as ardently as before, but this time consummating the conquests differently.
Nowt as queer as folk, as they say upcountry, and I really have nothing to add to that simple statement. In fact, there is nothing to add without plunging into the depths of metaphysics, thereby branding oneself as a hopelessly uncool individual.
There is one thing though: I genuinely pity people who are so confused that they are prepared to mutilate themselves. I’m willing to pray for them — but I’m not willing to pay for them. If they wish to act out their odd urges, they ought to pay for the privilege out of their own purse.
I suspect Crystal became Christopher on the NHS. Boys will be girls and all that, but this shouldn’t be allowed. I suspect that even Richard Dawkins will agree.