The ‘Evidence’ of sex, the ‘Truth’ of gender: Shaping children's bodies

Abstract

This paper is about the body, specifically a child's body, as a site where identity becomes contested. It is also about a surface or space where we lay claim—a site of vested interest. In April 2004, the Australian Family Court ruled that a 13-year-old child (Alex) had gender identity dysphoria and decided to allow reversible hormonal treatment. The Court ruling produced considerable legal, medical and public reflection over whether these decisions were in Alex's best interests, whether Alex was able to make such a decision at his age, and to assess Alex's competency. These debates also aimed to fix sex and gender through the deployment of a nature and nurture framework. The purpose of this paper, using the example of Alex, is to illustrate the various ways that these claims over a child's body, undermine the possibility for rethinking sex and gender.

Keywords:

• Children
• bodies
• geography
• sex
• gender
• sexuality

Notes

1. Alex is under the legal guardianship of a government Department, which remained unnamed in the proceedings.

2. The treatment involves the administration of the female hormones oestrogen and progestogen, which in combination suppress the menses in much the same was as a contraceptive pill, without the usual one-week break.

3. Henceforth this case will be referred to as Re Alex.

4. Of course, this absence reflects the confidentiality granted to children in Family Court decisions in Australian law. Alex's voice and body can be considered present in this text only insofar as they were represented in the court judgment and media discussion.

5. The newspapers sourced were from the ‘mainstream’ press and did not include an analysis or search of the gay and lesbian media. This decision was made because the authors considered such a process to reinforce the notion that the Alex case amounted to a ‘special interest’ case for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex community. We do not want to suggest that Alex naturally belongs to these communities or is even transgendered. To engage with the GLBT press would give the impression that these are somehow ‘authorative’ voices.

6. A three-week interval for following newspaper reportage was determined as a direct result of the volume of material published. During this three-week period there were approximately 78 items published in the newspapers, most of which were published in the first six days. This is not indicative of much more than the fact that the ‘story’ had run its course for the newspaper outlets and/or editors. We have no evidence of what was not published or refused during or after the immediacy of the event. We recognise that there exists a valuable discussion about the decision making processes behind why and how this event became no longer ‘interesting’. During the same period there were only three editorial pieces by social commentators and a further 24 individual letters or comments to the editor were published. This count was determined by the actual number of people whose opinions were published. For example, one newspaper opinion column was headed as ‘Is 13 too young to consider a sex change?’ (MX Melbourne, 2004, p. 16) and contained three different opinions. In this case a count of 3 was registered. The decision to count in this way was made because it best represented the volume of public discourse. Owing to the nature of the Australian media economy, many of the articles were reproduced across newspaper stables. These duplications were not excluded from the count as they indicate the volume of public interest that was generated around this decision.

7. The authors acknowledge that the contemporary term transgender is more commonly used in this context. In this paper we do use the term transsexual to mark Alex. The term transsexual has only been use when critiquing direct quotes from the Court documents and media reports.

8. The names and/or locations of the places themselves were removed from the Judge's notes. Given the context of this comment in the discussion of Alex's possible lesbianism, we are left to assume that these places would likely be patronised by gay men and lesbians.

9. Alex may indeed identify as a lesbian one day, something that should not be discounted. However the point we are making here is that Alex's identity needed to be firmly inscribed now and the intervention by the social worker did not allow for the possibility that Alex might later adopt many different modes of self identification.

10. The Court did not entertain the possibility that Alex might grow up to be a gay man. That possibility exists even further outside of the sex–gender, nature–nurture logic engaged by the Court and medical witnesses.

11. We would like to acknowledge Cindi Katz for pointing out how extraordinary it is that Alex was even seen as a sexual being.

12. However, Justin Oakley, director of the Monash University Centre for Human Bioethics, felt the treatment was ethically justifiable if it was a last resort and the child was competent to make the decision (Symons, 2004), while Dr Simon Longstaff, director of the St James Ethics Centre, acknowledged that the Court was motivated out of concern for Alex (Lamont, 2004).