Book Reviews
| Date | 01 December 2003 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663903012004009 |
| Author | Dave King |
| Published date | 01 December 2003 |
| Subject Matter | Reviews |
STEPHEN WHITTLE, Respect and Equality: Transsexual and Transgender Rights.
London: Cavendish, 2002, 308 pp., £25 (pbk).
Not surprisingly, the availability, from around the middle of the twentieth century, of
the technology to ‘change sex’ has raised complex legal issues. In the midst of the
massive press coverage given to the case of Roberta (formerly Robert) Cowell, an
article in the Manchester Guardian on 19 March 1954 carried the headline, ‘What is
a Man? Parliament May Have to Decide’. Nearly 50 years on, we find Stephen Whittle
writing here that, ‘in law, the question of what is a man or a woman still requires a
tremendous amount of clarification’ (p. 166).
For over 25 of those 50 years Stephen Whittle has been a member of what we now
call the transgender community and has been at the forefront, through his work with
Press for Change and other organizations, of the movement to gain respect and
equality for transgender people. He is also Reader in Law at Manchester Metropolitan
University and is uniquely qualified to provide this guide to the problems caused for
transgender people by the law and to the ways in which some of these problems can
be addressed.
The legal questions raised by the case of Cowell and others in the early 1950s have
still not been satisfactorily addressed and new questions have arisen. What we see as
the transgender phenomenon, too, has changed. Cowell and her doctors were pioneers
in an area where terminology was uncertain and surgical and other procedures experi-
mental. During the 1960s and 1970s there was a gradual ‘bedding-in’ of the idea of the
transsexual and the establishment of treatment protocols. In the 1970s and 1980s there
was the development of the basis of today’s transgender community. In the 1990s that
community received a tremendous boost with the development of the internet (this
latter topic is dealt with by Whittle in chapter 5) and has become much more confi-
dent and active. Moreover an increasing number of members of the community have
become more visible. During the 1990s it became more and more obvious that the
‘classic’ transsexual who blended unremarkably into the ‘new’ sex with only a few legal
traces to spoil things was only a part, and maybe a small part at that, of the picture.
Becoming more visible were people who could not or did not wish to fit into one of
the two gender categories, people who were obviously and openly transpeople.
This last development in particular has shifted the terrain as far as the law is con-
cerned. Cowell was able to have her birth certificate amended but the subsequent
denial of that possibility to others has been one of the focuses of legal battles over the
years alongside that of the right to marry as a person of the ‘new’ sex. These are what
Whittle here describes as the ‘traditional issues’ (p. 188). He goes on to point out that
in the last few years the more open transpeople are ‘no longer asking the law to recog-
nise them simply as men and women, but rather they are seeking for the law to recog-
nise them as trans men and trans women – a status that goes beyond the dichotomous
structures of sex and gender roles recognised within and by the law’ (p. 189).
The book consists of 16 chapters which fall into three categories. The first group of
chapters provide insightful theoretical discussions of such topics as the construction of
the category of the transsexual in medical and legal discourses and the changing nature
of the transgender community and transgender politics. These are followed by more
specific chapters on the state of the law in a number of areas including employment
discrimination, sterilization requirements, adolescents with gender dysphoria, policing
and imprisonment. The book ends with some examples of successful affidavits. The
chapters have obviously been arranged in this way and it might have been a good idea
to follow through the idea and arrange the book into two sections with the affidavits
in as appendices. An affidavit does not make a good ending to a book and I was left
wanting a summing-up and forward-looking conclusion. A number of the chapters
have been published previously (including the excellent ‘Trans-Cyberian Mail Way’)
BOOK REVIEWS 559
To continue reading
Request your trial