No such thing as a sex change

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A convoluted custody case in Florida may force a judge to decide an uncomfortable question that American society has been struggling for years to avoid: Can a so-called “sex change” operation legally transform an individual from one gender to another?

Michael Kantaras, 42, was born a woman, but went through elaborate, painful and expensive medical procedures intended to change her from female to male. If the court decides that such surgeries and hormone treatments actually turned Kantaras into a man, then his 9-year marriage to a woman constituted a legal union – strengthening his claims for visitation rights and shared custody over that woman’s two children.

If, on the other hand, the judge holds that Kantaras remains a female in the eyes of the law, then her “marriage” was never legal and the transgendered plaintiff has only a weak claim over another woman’s children.

Though sympathy for Kantaras, a hard working bakery manager, may eventually tilt the legal proceedings in his/her direction, the answer to the underlying question remains inescapably obvious. The simplest DNA analysis on Kantaras or any other transsexual will confirm the fact that the very idea of a medical “sex change” is a cruel fraud.

If you are born female, every cell in your body will remain genetically stamped female – no matter how inventively the surgeons rearrange your urinary tract, or what external sex characteristics they remove, or how many hormones you consume. Intimate relations for any transsexual remain difficult and complicated and can, of course, never produce a child. No, you can’t change your sex … you can only mutilate your private equipment.

Nevertheless, the political and cultural left seem determined to defend the sex-change hoax, and even suggest sweeping governmental support of “transgendered rights” – with statutes granting such protection already on the books in Minnesota, California, and elsewhere.

The appalling hypocrisy behind this movement reveals itself when comparing the politically correct attitude toward sexual orientation with the popular approach to “gender reassignment surgery.” Enlightened opinion vehemently rejects the idea that medical procedures can change a patient from gay to straight: When it comes to sexual orientation, biology is indeed supposed to be destiny. The familiar argument asserts that if you’re born gay, you’re only kidding yourself to think that you can ever shift successfully to heterosexual life. How then, do leading apologists for gay rights make the case that someone can make the vastly more difficult transition from male to female, or female to male?

The physiological differences between gay and straight people are insignificant, perhaps non-existent. While scientists continue to search for a “gay gene,” they haven’t come close to locating it, nor can they point to external characteristics that clearly reflect one’s sexual orientation.

In contrast, the differences between men and women remain vast and unavoidable. Even male and female brains are constructed (and wired) differently – to such an extent that pathologists can instantly identify a brain as coming from a man or a woman. As society has recently rediscovered, “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus.” Despite former attempts by feminists to downplay all distinctions, we recognize gender differences as not only apparent, but important.

“Sex change” procedures do nothing to alter the most important distinctions between males and females, and blur only a few external characteristics. The surgery can erase a previous gender identity, but can’t create a new one – taking physically functioning (if emotionally troubled) males and females and turning them into cunningly reconstructed eunuchs.

The main justification for such sterilization involves the common declaration that “I’ve always felt like a man trapped in a woman’s body,” or vice versa. Indeed, psychiatrists agree that such gender dysphoria can prove potent and intractable, and history abounds with examples of princes, poets and peasants who felt the need to dress or live as a member of the opposite sex.

Our current willingness to address such desires by attempting radical physical transformations, rather than moderating or overcoming the desires, betrays our arrogant preference for feelings over facts. Conventional wisdom now tells us that emotional identification with the opposite sex is immutable and unconquerable, while the physical gender into which you have been born lends itself to medical transformation.

Of course, overcoming gender dysphoria – the sense that you don’t belong in the male (or female) body to which you are born – may prove hellishly difficult, even impossible for some people. By the same token, overcoming the homosexual tendencies that emerge so powerfully (often in early childhood) is also difficult, and frequently impossible. But hundreds of thousands of former homosexuals have made the transition (does anyone remember former lesbian poster girl Ann Heche?) to straight relationships and, unlike so-called transsexuals, they can produce children and live normal lives.

Pity is the appropriate reaction for unfortunate individuals like Michael Kanteras – whose problems will hardly end, even if the Florida judge gives him visiting rights to the children of his former wife. The most important act of compassion for members of the transgendered community would be to respect them enough to speak the undeniable truth: There is no such thing as a sex change.

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