The final episode of My Transsexual Summer aired last night, and I was able to get to watch it despite being on the road. Public reaction is still very heartwarming, though there were a few people on the hashtag last night who had clearly come spoiling for a fight. The usual rules apply, don’t feed the trolls.

Something that people may not be getting from the programmes, however, is that transition is very much a process, not an event. There are many ways in which that is evident, but an obvious one is appearance. Some of the comments I was seeing were along the lines of how, for example, Lewis and Donna look very convincing, but Sarah and Karen don’t, and therefore never will do. Partly that’s age, of course, but it ignores the very real changes that happen during transition, some of which take many years to unfold. You can get a glimpse of that by seeing the changes in Sarah from episode #1’s “bad tranny” to the much more elegant and self-assured person in episode #4. Some of that will have been a result of help and advice from her new friends (remember, many trans women have to learn make-up, fashion and so on by themselves – they don’t get to learn from mothers, sisters and school friends). Much of it is simply the self-confidence she’s gained from finally being happy about herself. But in the years to come hormones will make a big difference. Your appearance really does change.

By the way, one of the really cruel things about the way trans people are currently treated is that some medical people required them to live full time in their preferred gender for a couple of years before they will allow them hormones. That makes the process so much more difficult. And I see that Sarah has started a donations page to help her afford treatment. You can find it here.

Transition is also a process from the social acclimatization. Karen was getting a bit of flak last night for wanting to get a job as a secretary, having had very “male” jobs beforehand. I’m sure that Julie Bindel will have a field day over it when she finally gets to write about the series, and she’ll claim that all trans women are like that. Well of course some women never become feminists either, but many do, and that tends to be a result of experiencing life as a woman in a male-dominated world. It takes time for some trans women to process that experience, but process it most of us do. I’m sorry if this bursts your little prejudices, Julie, but actually there are very few things more likely to convince one of the necessity of feminism than the loss of privilege that happens when you transition from male to female.

Of course a common feminist idea is that women should try to break into male-dominated environments, and the fact that Karen wants to move away from that into a more female-dominated environment looks like letting the side down. But women who do work amongst men know that it can be rough. What they don’t necessarily know is what utter shits some men can be about women when they think that no women are around. Karen will have heard stuff that most women don’t, and I don’t blame her for wanting to get away from it for a while.

The process also affects family as well. It was lovely to see Lewis finally establishing a close relationship with his dad last night. Transition can be harder on families than anyone else. There are many reasons for that, but one is that they care about you and don’t want to see you hurt. Sometimes you need to prove that you can make a success of your new life, rather than end up selling your body for drugs on street corners, which is the life that tabloid newspapers want us to believe all trans people lead.

Anyway, that’s a wrap on the series for now. I rather hope that C4 decides to re-visit the cast in a year or so, because life isn’t just about transition, it is mainly about what happens afterwards. I think it will help a lot to show the audience how our seven new celebrities get on with their lives. It will make a big difference to have TV showing trans people doing something other than transitioning.

Oh, and did you see how steampunk Fox looked last night? One of us? I think so.

I suspect I will miss Episode 4 of My Transsexual Summer as I’ll be in London tomorrow night, but I’ll have it on record to watch when I get home. Meanwhile, if any of you were planning to donate to Lewis’s chest surgery appeal, that’s now open again. Also Max has launched a fundraiser to help him with the cost of his rabbi training. So all three fundraisers are:

• Fox
• Lewis
• Max

Er, ladies?

And for those of you who were wondering, that petition asking the UK media to treat trans people with respect, on just one day a year, currently stands at 216 signatures. *sigh*

The key issue arising from episode 3 of My Transsexual Summer is that of funding for surgery. Lewis and Fox both need “top surgery” (breast removal) if they are to be able to live without painful bindings and baggy t-shirts to disguise their shape. Lewis applied to the NHS for funding and was turned down.

Before getting into the issues here I’d like to point out that both lads have set up online appeals for help. If you have enjoyed the programmes (bearing in mind than none of the MT7 were paid for their involvement) you might consider donating. (And of course you might anyway, non-UK friends.) Lewis’s appeal is currently frozen for bureaucratic reasons — he needs to link his bank account to PayPal — but he’ll get that fixed soon, and Fox’s is still open. You can find them here:

• Lewis
• Fox

The GoFundMe site accepts PayPal and debit/credit cards.

So, what are the issues here? Well first of all it is by no means certain that Lewis’s local NHS Trust was within its rights to refuse him funding. Other trans people have had the surgery funded. It is quite possible that if Lewis dug his heels in and got help then he’d be able to force the NHS to cough up. Certainly my activist friends have been telling him that’s what he should do. And from a political point of view such decisions need to be challenged, otherwise all funding for treatment of gender issues could be stopped.

From a personal point of view, however, individuals may choose to go private. One obvious reason for this is time. The NHS, as is often the case, has waiting lists. Going private means you can get your surgery much more quickly.

Also NHS funding for gender affirmation operations is highly contentious. One of the top tweets from last night was from someone who said he supported trans people, but did not think they should get NHS money. Whatever you think of that attitude, the fact that the tweet was popular shows that many people share that view. Members of the MT7 may take the view that they don’t want to risk the massive public support that they have by challenging the NHS.

For the record, most of my treatment, including my surgery, was paid for privately. When I was living in Australia I wasn’t eligible for public health care, and back when I transitioned the NHS was a lot less friendly to trans people than it is now. I was lucky enough to be given the money for the surgery by my mother, who in turn had got lucky during the financial services boom of the 90s.

For my own part I don’t want to make judgements about individuals. I can see the political arguments for and against challenging NHS decisions, but I think that individual trans people have enough to cope with. In particular the MT7 have given themselves over to the cause in a massive way. I’m happy to leave them to decide how they want to go forward from here.

In the meantime, I’m off to donate to Fox, and Lewis as soon as he can accept money again.

Fame is a funny thing. Almost everyone seems to want it, but many of those who get it find that it isn’t all it is cracked up to be. In particular, though we often talk about “fame and fortune”, those two by no means always go together.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the young people involved in My Transsexual Summer to see how the show is affecting them. Sarah has blogged about being “homeless and penniless”. Max has been tweeting about needing an apartment and money for rent.

“How the heck did that happen?”, you ask. They are on national TV, with an audience of over 8 million people. The media are after them for interviews. Surely they must be rolling in it?

Well no, as this rather testy blog post from Max explains, they didn’t get paid anything for making the programmes. Max notes, “I also lost my job, in part because of the exposure I received and the amount of time I was required to give to filming.” He and his colleagues were told that they could not be paid because that would affect the integrity of the show.

So now the MTS Seven are the best known trans people in the country. And guess what being openly trans means? As Drew found out in Episode 2, it means it is very difficult to get work.

The Seven are now clearly celebrities, of course. As I understand it, the way celebrities make money is to hire a publicist who will get them gigs opening supermarkets, appearing on chat shows and so on. But who is going to want a trans person to open their store?

Max has launched a petition to try to persuade Channel 4 and the production company, Twenty Twenty, to share some of their profits. He says that Twenty Twenty were paid £180,000 per episode. A lot of that will have gone on making the programmes, but presumably there was some profit. C4 should be doing very well out of the advertising revenue for a programme that has become a surprise hit. I’ve signed it, though I don’t know how much good that will do.

Last night saw the broadcast of episode 2 of My Transsexual Summer. The narration is still pretty ropey — as if someone at C4 is trying to be respectful while also catering to those viewers who have tuned in for a freak show — but the cast continue to endear themselves to the nation. I spotted one troll on Twitter this morning saying that they should all be shot, but the vast majority of the messages have been very supportive. That’s really positive.

The issue that caught most people’s imagination last night was the sequence in which Drew applied for a job at a bridal store and was turned down in a fairly insulting way. This led to a lot of discussion on Twitter about employment legislation and how easy it is for trans people to find jobs. That’s what I’m planning to address here.

There are two principal pieces of legislation of interest here, the Gender Recognition Act of 2004, and the Equality Act of 2010. The former deals specifically with trans people, and the latter brings together many different forms of anti-discrimination legislation under one umbrella.

The first thing to note is that these laws are very much mired in the view that the only trans people deserving of protection are “classic” transsexuals. The Equality Act reads as follows:

A person has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment if the person is proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning the person’s sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex.

Drew is on hormones, so she’s probably protected here, but I can see it being argued that unless she’s on a specific course of treatment intended to lead to surgery then she’s not covered. Certainly someone who is simply living androgynously would not be.

There are also a bunch of specific exemptions to the legislation, primarily involving religious organizations and the armed forces. More relevant here, however, is that the bridal store is probably a very small business and if they have fewer than (I think) 5 employees then they are allowed to discriminate in various ways when hiring employees.

As a small business owner myself, I have a certain amount of sympathy here. If you are running a very small company there are all sorts of legal requirements that you don’t have the time or resources to follow. The government likes to encourage small businesses, and gives them exemptions from legislation to help them get off the ground and grow. On the other hand, there are basic issues of human decency to be considered here. I’ll get back to them later.

Before I do that, however, there is one final aspect of the “Equality” Act that deserves mention. The Gender Recognition Act basically stated that anyone who had gone through a full gender reassignment process was legal a member of their desired gender and should be treated as such. The “Equality” Act, however, has a section on “Occupational Requirements”. What it is trying to do here is define jobs in which it is a requirement for the applicant to be either a man or a woman. In doing so it effectively contradicts the GRA and states that trans people, even after surgery, are not legally members of their preferred gender.

This language was, I believe, introduced to allow the military and the church to continue to use gender-based requirements to exclude trans people, but the door is also left open for other employers to argue that gender is an occupational requirement. Even worse, as Zoe Imogen notes here, the guidelines about the Act issued by the Equality & Human Rights Commission appear to add a requirement that the victim must be “visually and for all practical purposes indistinguishable from a non-transseuxal person of that gender” in order to be fully protected.

Which brings us back to bridal stores. Is it an occupational requirement that staff involved in things like fitting women for their bridal dresses be women, and by “women” does that mean someone assigned to be female at birth, or does it also include trans women? As no one has yet brought a test case, no one actually knows. And if such a ruling was made against a trans person it would certainly be challenged in the European Court of Human Rights. But the fact remains that the UK government has gone back on the idea that trans people can legally change gender in all respects. Although the Act was passed by the current government, it was drawn up by the previous Labour administration, so this is cross-party back-stabbing we are talking about here.

The store owners, of course, clearly believed that it was inappropriate for brides to be served by someone who, as every tabloid journalist would have it, is “really a man”. Their “what would the customers think?” excuse was one that has been used to justify discrimination down the centuries. One tweeter noted that it was equivalent to saying, “I’m not racist, but my customers might be”. Farah noted that it was just an excuse, and suggested that the store owners should “own their bigotry”. Both of those responses were granted “top tweet” status, which I think means that they were re-tweeted lots.

One of the owners singled out Drew’s fairly prominent Adam’s Apple as an obvious giveaway, and said that could never be altered. Well of course it can. There are surgeries for that. And here I want to note that the frequent tabloid articles raging about how the “cosmetic” nature of trans surgery means that it should not be paid for on the NHS. Now sure Adam’s Apple reduction sounds cosmetic, but here’s Drew being told that she can’t have a job because of something that a relatively easy operation could fix. That’s no longer just cosmetic then, is it?

It is easy to be angry at the store owners here, and I hear that they had to shut down their Twitter and Facebook accounts within hours of the broadcast being shown because of the volume of negative attention they were getting. But they are also right, in that their customers are transphobic. Or at least a substantial proportion of them are, because despite the legislation transphobia is very much socially accepted in the UK. You can argue that they lacked courage and moral decency, but there is no doubt in my mind that if they had given Drew a job then sooner or later they would have to deal with some idiot who raised a stink about being served by “a man”. The customer’s case would be taken up by the Daily Malice. They’d lose business over it.

So by all means be angry with the store owners for their cowardice, both in being unwilling to stand up to bigoted customers, and being unwilling to confess to their own prejudices. But remember also that they exist in a social climate created by tabloid newspapers, television “comedians” (update – see below), radio shock jocks and the like, all of whom bombard them with the message that trans people are freaks who should be despised and hated. Those are the people we should really be going after.

I’d also like to question the whole set-up of that job interview. It is easy for us to forget, when watching television, that the camera is there, because that’s exactly what drama programme makers want us to do. When watching documentaries, however, we should always remember that they are being filmed. There appeared to be at least two camera involved in that shoot. They could have been hidden, but that would have involved manufacturing an excuse for two other people to present in the interview, or to have had them planted secretly. So presumably the store owners knew that something was up. They may even have known in advance that Drew was trans, and taking part in a documentary about trans people. And if they didn’t they may well feel that they were set up.

I have no doubt that Drew would be absolutely brilliant working in a bridal store. But I do have to question why, in following her search for work, the programme zeroed in unerringly on one of the few jobs where a) she probably could be legally discriminated against, and b) where a large number of people were likely to think that the store owners had a point. It strikes me as a piece of artificially manufactured drama, and that causes me to have less faith in anything else I see on the show.

The final thing that I want to discuss is the reality of trans employment issues. Laws are all very well, but without the support of the general public they can’t work in practice. So while it might be illegal to discriminate openly, it is very easy to do so quietly and subtly in such a way that the victim doesn’t stand a chance in court.

I have a certain amount of experience of this. I have been kicked out of two very well paid jobs, once in Australia, where I don’t think I had legal protection, and once in California, where I did. In both cases what the employers did was carefully designed to make it look like my being trans was not the issue, but it very clearly was. In Australia I tried to transition on the job. The Aussie staff were largely very supportive, but head office in the UK insisted that they get rid of me. The Californian company hired me knowing that I was trans, but when they were bought up by a larger, East Coast organization it quickly became clear that HR was looking for an excuse to get rid of me. I quit when I realized that they were encouraging other staff to make complaints about me so they would have a case if I tried to argue I was being discriminated against.

These days I don’t bother applying for jobs. I’m stuck in the UK, and the number of people involved in my chosen career is sufficiently small that word would quickly get round if I did so. It is actually a criminal offence for one employer to warn another off an applicant by revealing that the person in question is trans, but to prove such a case you would need written evidence. In any case, I’ve been very open here about my background, so I have no protection there.

In addition the various disruptions to my career that have been caused by my transition mean that I have never managed to rise to the level of management that would be expected of someone of my age. Even if an employer didn’t know that I was trans, I’d be viewed as having been a failure at work because of my lack of seniority. And age discrimination is rife. Employers know that older people are not prepared to work the 10-hour-day, 7-day-week schedule that younger people put themselves through in search of advancement in the consultancy business.

As it happens, I can keep myself going with self-employment. I had a meeting with my bank manager yesterday and she’s still happy with me, despite the ongoing losses at Wizard’s Tower. But it has been a rough road. There have been years when my net income has been well under £5k, I’m in rented accommodation, and I have very little in the way of pension provision. I would not have survived this long had it not been for the love and support of my mother and Kevin. Sooner or later I know that my luck will run out.

On the other hand, I have been lucky enough to live in a time when great strides have been made in the area of human rights. This morning I listened to a radio interview with Jocelyn Bell (the lady astronomer who discovered pulsars). What she had to go through, starting a science career back when I was a kid, was in many ways as bad as what trans people have to go through these days. The situation for women in science is now a lot better, though by no means perfect. I very much hope that the situation for young trans people like those on My Transsexual Summer will be better than it was for me, and I think that their being so open about themselves on national television will do a lot to bring that about.

Update: I’ve been hauled up on Twitter by trans comedian, Bethany Black, who objected to my putting the word comedians in inverted commas. Beth is one of a small number of trans people making a name for themselves on the stand-up comedy circuit. She’s very good. I’m sure the others are too. They’d have to be. Sadly a lot of the people who get on national TV still appear to be the sort of people who like to go for easy laughs by pillorying the vulnerable. There are exceptions, of course (hello again Tim Minchin), but it is a serious issue for trans people because it establishes an environment in which we are seen as people to be laughed at. I certainly wasn’t intending to tar all comedians, and my apologies to Beth and others if it seemed so.

Beth also notes that if people laugh at a joke then it is indeed comedy, and she has a point. I guess I’d counter that some things appear funny only because there is a social climate that deems them funny. Years ago you could raise a laugh from mocking people because of the color of their skin. Ricky Gervais still thinks it is funny to mock Downs Syndrome people. I’d like to see us get to a point when the mere fact that someone is not wearing “gender appropriate” clothes is not seen as funny.

Update 2: Beth tells me that Ricky Gervais has apologized for the recent upset. Good to know. More progress.

As I rather expected, the UK trans community is arguing furiously over aspects of the My Transsexual Summer documentary. I spotted Roz using the hashtag #halffull today and smiled ruefully. I hope people listened.

On the other hand, there does seem to be a story of some sort emerging. As you may recall from my post yesterday, one of the concerns expressed was the apparent lack of representation of people who don’t identify as either male or female. There was a brief hint from Donna, but nothing more to suggest that any of the other participants saw themselves as anything other than “classic” transsexuals — that is assigned one gender at birth, but preferring the other. It now appears that this is very much not the case. In this blog post Max bemoans the fact that almost everything the group said that suggested they were not all signed up to the gender binary got edited out. On Twitter he added “every interview where i talked about gender binary has been edited out”.

You might think, given that I have a boyfriend and am about as girly as it gets in many respects, that this wouldn’t matter much to me. But if you are going to make a TV show about multiple trans people it really would help to cover the whole range of trans experiences, not try to cover some of it up. Also, it is attachment to notions of gender essentialism that lies behind most of the hatred and fear of trans people by the rest of society. Only by getting away from the idea that everyone must be either male or female, and never the twain shall meet, will we ever get to the point where society can accept the wide diversity represented by trans and intersex people.

Last night the UK’s Channel 4 aired the first episode of a new reality TV series, My Transsexual Summer, following the lives of seven (mostly) young trans people. The series is unusual, firstly because of the number of trans people involved, and secondly because it was produced with input from TransMediaWatch, a UK pressure group that aims to improve the image of trans people in the media. As this is a subject about which I know somewhat more than the average person, I thought it might be worth elucidating some of the issues involved.

One of the interesting things about programmes like this is that expectations vary wildly. Those on the front lines of trans activism are liable to be outraged no matter what is said and done, because they hold everyone to extremely high standards. Others who are long-time post transition are liable to be cringing in embarrassment and worrying what this new round of the freak show will mean for them. TV critics will doubtless be asking whether the freaks are freakish enough for people to want to keep watching. There’s probably no such thing as a middle ground, but I’ll try to cover all the bases.

Let’s start off with the things I have seen friends of mine complain about. The most obvious trigger point is the frequent use of the word “tranny” by the participants to describe themselves. This is problematic, because people disagree as to whether it is a term of abuse or not. For many people, the word has meaning only as an insult shouted at them in the street, or used by “comedians” on TV. For others it is a vaguely affectionate term, and yet others regard it as a term of abuse that it is OK to reclaim for use within the community, but not to be used by others. The latter is apparently the official line of TransMediaWatch, but clearly the programme participants didn’t get the memo.

Another issue that is being raised by trans activists online is the breadth of coverage. With no less than seven people, from a variety of backgrounds and in different stages of transition, you might think that the whole spectrum of trans experiences is represented. The show seems to be presenting itself in that way. But at least 6 of the 7 appear to be what one might call classic transsexuals seeking full gender transition. Those whose sense of gender identity is less certain or fluid are feeling somewhat invisible.

Finally there is the question of clichés. In her preview of the show for The Guardian Paris Lees, the TransMediaWatch staffer who acted as a consultant on the show, mentions the Trans Documentary Drinking Game. If those of us watching the show had indeed taken a drink every time we saw a cliché we would have been rat-arsed after the title sequences.

Having said all that, I thought the show was remarkably good — much better than I expected, and that was down largely to the participants, and how they were able to speak for themselves rather than simply be subjects of voyeurism.

Let’s go back for a minute to the question of the selection of participants. I have no idea what the producers had in mind when they put the show together. They might have had only seven volunteers. They appear to have tried to get people who are going through different stages of transition. Some, I suspect, will assume that the programme tried to find people who obviously looked trans, though that’s by no means the case for all of them. What I am hoping they did, however, and appear to have succeeded at, is to pick people who have happy, outgoing personalities, get on well with others, and are generally fun to watch.

Looking at the comments on Twitter after the show, I was quite encouraged. There was the usual sniping from some. One bloke said he wanted to murder all of the participants (and if challenged doubtless said it was “only a joke”). Someone else raged, “God will judge them!” But by and large the watching public seemed charmed and touched by the people that they had seen and the stories that were told.

One area that I think the show may have missed out on is including someone who is many years post-transition. I know that goes against the set-up, which is to have a group of people all going through the same difficult life changes, but it may have added some perspective. Transition is a difficult process, and there’s a terrible tendency to over-do the gender performance in order to try to fit in. By concentrating on people in transition, TV programmes can give a rather unbalanced view of what the typical trans person is like.

The one cliché that the show has managed to avoid thus far is that of the “tragic transsexual”. Even Sarah, who has run away from home at the age of 28 in order to start transition, and is worried sick about what her family will say when they find out, manages to find her moments of hope and optimism. Yes, all of these people face terrible struggles in their lives, but they are also getting to be themselves. The standard narrative for a trans documentary, at least those that I have seen, is that the subject is deeply unhappy, but after much difficulty finally manages to start transition; the programme closes with the ominous suggestion that this will only lead to more unhappiness as the subject will never be accepted as the person they believe themselves to be. There wasn’t any of that last night. Despite all of their problems, these people were fun.

It is odd what some people think of themselves, of course. Drew apparently spends 2.5 hours doing her make-up each morning. I can’t imagine ever doing that. Fox spent much of the programme worrying that he doesn’t look masculine enough compared to Max and Lewis. Well maybe he’s not a hairy hunk, but he’d fit right in to any boy band. I bet there are teenage girls with posters of him on their walls already. If I wasn’t (ahem) many years older than him, I might have one too. But trans people obsess about their appearance like no one else. It comes with the territory.

Someone on Twitter mentioned that the programme passed the trans Bechdel Test. I’m not sure that it did, because I can’t remember any conversations which were not about being trans. But it may get there in later episodes.

One worry that I had was that the programme makers, in search of added drama, would encourage the participants to argue amongst themselves and compete to see who passed best. Listening to Max Zachs being interviewed on Radio 4 this morning I was pleased to discover that this didn’t happen, though I have no doubt that if this series is a success then someone will try to take the format down market (and some trans people will be desperate enough for money and fame to participate).

From my point of view, the ultimate test of such a programme is whether it is likely to improve the lot of trans people amongst the general public. As I said, the reaction on Twitter was, on the whole, very encouraging. There’s something inspiring about people being positive and happy in the face of great adversity. The reaction in the mainstream media has been less encouraging. The Guardian’s review of the programme starts by deliberately mis-gendering the participants, something that the programme never did, thereby showing that Lucy Mangan’s natural prejudices hadn’t been shaken one jot by watching it. If that’s what happens in The Guardian, I shudder to think what other newspapers have done.

Channel 4 are not exactly covering themselves in glory either. The programme makers may have listened to TransMediaWatch, but those responsible for promoting the show clearly haven’t. The adverts in the papers yesterday showed a picture of Drew with the caption “Ex Man”. On the radio today Max said he didn’t regard what surgery he had undergone to be a matter for public discussion, but the C4 website page about the programme leads with details of exactly what he has had done. It is still very much the case that many people in the media see trans people solely as freaks to be exploited.

Ultimately, however, these things are all incremental. Social change doesn’t happen overnight, it is a generational process, but it does get there. Back when I transitioned, which is not that long ago, such a programme would have been unthinkable. I’d like to finish by noting another article in yesterday’s Guardian. In it, a senior UK judge, Jonathan Sumption QC, complains that judges in the UK are becoming too politicized in this country, thanks to the influence of the European Court of Human Rights. One of the influences that court has had on UK law is to force our government, much against their will, to consider the human rights of trans people.

While I was transitioning, I had occasion to interact with the British legal system. The advice my lawyer gave me was as follows: “don’t contest anything, there’s no justice for people like you in British courts, and if you try to stand up for yourself the judge will throw the book at you.” Thanks to the European Court of Human Rights, that’s no longer the case. If that means that our courts are “too politicised”, well I’m all in favor of it. But courts by themselves don’t change social attitudes. The media has a huge role to play, and on the basis of the first episode My Transsexual Summer has added one more small nail to the coffin of transphobic bigotry. Progress.

Well, I watched it, and like most some things it had some good points and many bad ones. It turns out that the program was made in conjunction with the Oprah network, and if you want to see it you can do so here – no DRM, no region restrictions.

I’m seeing a lot of complaint online from intersex activists, and this focuses primarily on the pathologising of intersex conditions. Unsurprisingly there is continued outrage at the use of the term, “disorders of sexual development”, and I noted that Dr. Devore, the one intersex medical expert involved, carefully used the word “differences” instead of “disorders”. In addition the programme, with the usual emphasis on “balance”, gave plenty of time to doctors who believe that surgical intervention to “cure” intersex babies is necessary and right. Intersex activists prefer to call this practice “mutilation”. As it can not only be painful and terrifying for the young children involved, but deprive them of sexual sensation when they are adults, you can see why.

Of course you can see why it happens too. The social stigma that is attached to having a child who is not clearly male or female is intense. Frightened parents are told that their children will be mercilessly bullied at school unless “corrective” action is taken, and in part this is true, though the bullying may well happen anyway. Parents have no way of knowing whether their kids will be happy with the decision they take, no matter which way they go, and the temptation to take action to protect your child against an apparent threat is very strong.

One thing that surprised me was that there was very little mention of gender identity, and none of it by the medical people. Transsexuals often start expressing a gender identity around the age of 2 or 3. You don’t have to wait until the children become adults to know what gender they think they are. But of course social pressures demand that you decide on a gender for your child from the moment of birth. No one is allowed time to make up their mind. Thus intersex kids are often assigned a gender, and are surgically “corrected” to conform to that gender, only to be very unhappy with that assignment as they grow up.

A further complication is that intersex people who want this fixed later in life cannot do so in the UK without jumping through a bunch of potentially unwanted hoops. The Gender Recognition Act applies only to transsexuals. You can’t just say, “look, my gender was indeterminate at birth, I was assigned X and I’d rather have Y”. This in turn has knock-on effects with things like the right to marry.

One other thing that struck me from watching the programme was that of the hierarchy of conditions. At one point a parent (or possibly an actor playing a parent) commented that it would have been so much easier if her child had been diagnosed with cancer, because at least then she could talk about it and people would be sympathetic. Instead her child had a condition that she would have to lie about because it was so shameful. This is idiotic, but given our society’s obsession with the gender binary it is the way the world is.

Possibly programmes like this will help. Although aspects of it were annoying, some of the participants, particularly Dr. Devore, were very impressive and may have helped change some minds. I was also pleased with the variety of different intersex conditions shown — intersex people are by no means all the same. So plus one to Oprah and the BBC for making an attempt. Equally, of course, many people may have been convinced by the doctors saying that treatment is necessary, so minus one there. That’s what you get when you try for “balance”. And finally, one of the things that really stands in the way of acceptance for intersex and trans people is how they are portrayed, not in specialist programmes like this, but in the general media. While the BBC and others continue to regard merciless bullying of anyone who doesn’t fit social gender norms as a legitimate form of “comedy”, the problems that intersex kids face will never lessen. The ball’s in your court, BBC.