tim's experiment

I am puzzled by the spectacle of the government fighting a flat-out legal battle over whether the mysterious Ms W (who was Mr W several operations ago) can marry her Mr Right. I mean we taxpayers have been pushing the boat out here. I have no idea what fees were paid to the QC flown out specially from London to argue on the government’s behalf, but I’ll wager she did not fly tourist and she did not stay in Chung King Mansions either.

I can see how we got to this stage. Faced with an applicant for marriage with a birth certificate in the wrong gender the bureacrat behind the desk would pass the matter to higher authority. This higher authority, still pretty junior, would take the safe course and say “no”. This would then work its way up the pyramid, with successive layers concluding that they must support the front-line staff and those people know what they are doing anyway. So the underlings say “no” becasue they think the matter should be decided higher up and the higher-ups say “no” because they think it should be decided by the underlings. This is how public administration works, or doesn’t work, as the case may be.

With the arrival of the court case the matter has to go to the Department of Justice, but to the part of the department where justice takes second place to finding legal pretexts for whatever the government has decided it wants to do. Since government policy is to say “no” the department says “no” and everyone is happy except Ms W. And so we go to court. Probably the best thing, actually. The gender situation is a good deal more complicated that it was when the law was drafted. And in all the paper-shuffling so far, nobody has really had a chance to sit back and consider the matter from scratch. Let a judge have a look by all means. But why the enormous trouble and expense? What has the government got to lose?

After all the fact is that this particular question is not going to come up very often. People in W’s situation have a hard row to hoe. Years of psychological confusion lead to prolonged and painful medical encounters. Finally making the longed-for transformation tends to lead to loss of friends and job. And having arrived, the new you is not going to be a prime property in the marriage market. Not only do you have an exotic personal history. Medical science has not actually reached the stage where pregnancy is possible. So the number of eager couples who are going to turn up at the registry with confusing birth certificates is minute. This is a decision which has virtually no practical consequences, except for those personally involved, for whom it is all-important. Saying “yes” would have done them a great kindness and done nobody any harm.

So why is the government resisting with such enthusiasm? I do not believe that this is a slippery slope situation. Are we really to believe that a homosexual man, wishing to contract a same-sex marriage, might undergo prolonged psychological therapy, have his hormones sabotaged, endure extensive and painful surgery to rearrange his private parts and turn himself into a woman to marry someone who prefers men…? This is nonsense. Some of our leaders lead a sheltered existcnce but surely there are experts who can put them straight on this sort of thing. The worrying rumour is that they are consulting the wrong sort of experts. It seems that a surprising number of our political appointees are members of fundamentalist sects of one kind or another. They spend their Sunday mornings being told that God inteended sex to be conducted on rare occasions between married couples of opposing sexes in the missionary position. This is a poor basis for policy-making, but then these unelected people don’t have to tell us what they really think about anything.