Tuesday 25th July

I have never questioned my gender.  I have sometimes wondered what it must be like to be a woman, but have never had any desires to change my gender.  It has never occurred to me.  I grew up a boy, I knew I was a boy – and although I sometimes played with my sister’s dollies I never wanted to be a girl.

We have grown up since the Nineteen Fifties having to assimilate an awful lot of change.  We have had to re-learn and overcome our possibly nurtured prejudices about Race and Religion and Sexual Orientation.  I never had that much difficulty as I worked in the cosmopolitan Catering industry where black and brown people are everywhere.  As to Gay men; there often seemed more than straight men – and open with it too, though Gay women have tended to be less open.  Then there have been Transvestites and openly Bi people too.  Now, Gay marriage is generally accepted – and hopefully most parents can accept a gay child.

But I do struggle with the idea of Gender Re-assignment.  I suppose I just feel a bit queezy and nervous about the idea of people going through what must be serious surgery and drug therapy for something that, in my mind, is not an illness.  I feel the same way actually about Cosmetic Surgery when it is simply for vanity.  But, I accept that the technology is here and we cannot go back.  And if people feel that they will finally be happy then who am I to stop them.

But I do wonder if this Gender Re-Assignment will really make them happy.  Humans are complex creatures and unhappiness is part of our make-up.  Many of us struggle with depression and self-confidence, and we sometimes fixate on one thing as the cause of our unhappiness.  My own view is that without experiencing unhappiness you don’t really appreciate the good times.  But it does seem a strange world where a lot of money and surgeon’s skills can be spent on this sort of surgery when many people have to wait years for far less invasive and routine surgery for real physical ailments