663 Neither male nor female: Norrie is 'androgynous': Not He or She but It

Neither male nor female: Norrie is 'androgynous': Not He or She but It

Newsletter published on 20 May 2014

(1) Neither male nor female: Norrie is 'androgynous': Not He or She but It
(2) Norrie May-Welby of 'not specific' sex
(3) Norrie: 'I am both a man and a woman, I am not simply one and not
the other'
(4) Norrie's a real agenda bender: androgynous activist wins the right
to be called nothing at all
(5) French Government encouraging school children to question their
sexual identity
(6) Jesus was depicted as Androgynous, in early Christian Art
(7) Cultural studies: a cancer in the University
(8) The rise of the 'third gender'
(9) Intersex children in Germany can now choose their own Gender later
in life
(10) Leading South Korean sex change surgeon says he's correcting 'God's
mistakes'

(1) Neither male nor female: Norrie is 'androgynous': Not He or She but It

https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/56214

Neither male nor female: Norrie victory advances sex and gender rights

Saturday, April 5, 2014

By Rachel Evans

An historic High Court case on April 2 granted Norrie, a Redfern
resident and activist, non-sex specific status. Norrie had been granted
"sex: non-specific" status by the NSW Registrar of Births Deaths and
Marriages in 2010, but, under the reign of ALP Premier Kristina
Keneally, reversed its decision.

It's been a four year long legal and political battle, with two legal
challenges by Norrie proving unsuccessful, but a third in May last year
proved successful in the NSW Court of Appeal.

The positive High Court decision is recognition by the highest court in
the land that ''sex'' is not binary -- it is not only ''male'' or
''female'' -- and that this should be recognised by the law and in basic
legal documents. It has national implications -- most states are likely
to be bound by the High Court's decision -- particularly Victoria and
Queensland, who have similar legislation to the NSW Births Deaths and
Marriages Act.

Norrie told Green Left Weekly: "The decision is correcting or
eliminating ambiguities. It's an outcome that opens up more
possibilities for other people instead of thinking there are just two
boxes to choose from."

Norrie, who uses the non-gender specific pronoun "zie", has been
fighting for sex and gender rights, but has joined many other battles.
Zie is a well-known marriage equality campaigner, and has spoken at many
of the equal marriage rallies in Sydney. Zie is also a refugee rights
advocate, and campaigner for Aboriginal rights, who stood up against the
social cleansing of Aboriginal people from Redfern.

The Socialist Alliance, who were active supporters of Norrie's case,
congratulated zie on the win. "Socialist Alliance congratulates norrie
mAy-welby on a hard-fought, well-deserved victory in finally obtaining
recognition of a third gender in NSW. We commend the decision of the
high court of Australia whose ruling now makes Australia the third
country in the world to recognise people 'other than male or female'.

"The Socialist Alliance pledges active solidarity with Norrie and all
people whom are incorrectly and simplistically labelled by the state or
by society.

"We call upon the courts, the state and federal governments to take this
opportunity to speed up the process of recognising the equal rights of
all people regardless of sex, gender, sexuality, relationship status."

 From GLW issue 1004

(2) Norrie May-Welby of 'not specific' sex

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norrie_May-Welby

Norrie May-Welby (born Bruce Norrie Watson, 23 May 1961[2]) is a
Scottish-Australian transsexual person who pursued the legal status of
being neither a man nor a woman, between 2010 and 2014.[3][4][5][6][7]
The High Court of Australia ruled in April 2014 that it was in the power
of the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages to record in the
register that the sex of May-Welby was 'non-specific'. At least two
other Australians - both born intersex - are known to have birth
certificates and/or passports showing an indeterminate or unspecified
sex as early as 2003.[8][9][10]

May-Welby was born in Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland as a male and
moved to Perth, Western Australia[11] at the age of seven. May-Welby
underwent male-to-female reassignment surgery on 3 April 1989,[11] but
later found that being a woman was not what May-Welby felt like
either.[4][5][12] May-Welby moved to Sydney, New South Wales in the
early 1990s, after a highly publicised court case in Perth.[13]

Doctors stated, in January 2010, that May-Welby was a neuter, with a
self-image that was neither male nor female, and no sex organs.[1]

The New South Wales Government Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages
initially recognized May-Welby as being neither male nor female with a
registered details certificate stating "not specified" in 2010. However,
the Registry rescinded its decision in a formal letter of cancellation
on 17 March 2010.

In response, May-Welby filed a complaint with the Australian Human
Rights Commission and to the Court of Appeal.[14] The Court of Appeal
ruled in favour of May-Welby but the Registrar appealed to the High
Court. In April 2014 the High Court ruled that it was within the
Registrar's power to record in the register that the sex of May-Welby
was 'not specific'. In commenting on the four-year battle, May-Welby
stated "It was swings and roundabouts, but I'm on Wikipedia now".[15]

This page was last modified on 9 April 2014 at 23:15.

(3) Norrie: 'I am both a man and a woman, I am not simply one and not
the other'

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/07/opinion/neither-female-nor-male.html?_r=0

Neither Female Nor Male

APRIL 6, 2014

Julia Baird

SYDNEY, Australia -- PRETTY much the No. 1 question you are asked when
you're pregnant is: "Girl or boy?" If you choose not to find out, but to
be deliciously surprised at birth, as I did, then you will be asked to
guess: "What do you feel it is?" I used to scrunch up my eyes and try
hard to draw on what people told me was an age-old female intuition:
Which genitals were sprouting in my round belly? I could never tell, though.

It is as though the entire world is trying to guess what, or who, is
inside you. One oft-told tale is that girls steal your looks and make
you fat, while boys just make your belly stick out straight. When I
stood wearily bulging at one friend's baby shower in Manhattan, a
stylist confided that she thought our mutual friend was having a boy,
because she looked so pretty. Then she looked me up and down: "I think
you're having a girl." (I placed her in the same category as the
neighbor who yelled, "Morning, Fatty!" over the side fence each day.)

Why is whether a baby wears blue or pink the most pressing matter for
adult acquaintances of a soon-to-be-born? Green is just fine, or white.
But a 2007 Gallup poll found that most young Americans, and women under
50, would like to find out the sex of their baby before it is born. In
some American fertility clinics, staff experts check the embryo's sex
before they implant it in the womb.

So what will it do to our collective minds when forced to grasp that
some people are neither gender? Not male, or female, but something else
either encompassing, or rejecting, or just adapting from both? Last
week, Australia had to grapple with just that after the High Court, in a
historic decision, ruled that a person called Norrie May-Welby could
register as "nonspecific" on official certificates. Now 52, Norrie was
identified, physically, as male when she was born, in Scotland, but was
drawn to the world of girls, playing with dolls at age 4 and tying her
school tie around her head at night to create the illusion of long hair.
She escaped into the library monitors' group at school and made up
adventures where she played six characters, five of whom were female: "I
didn't think there was any problem with this," she says. "After all,
just because I wasn't really from Krypton, didn't mean I couldn't
imagine being Supergirl."

In 1989, Norrie underwent gender reassignment surgery. But after awhile
being purely female did not seem right, either. She had been exploring
gender theory, "began questioning the sex binary, and realized I didn't
want to dissociate myself from aspects of myself simply because they
were labeled masculine, so it's not so much about not being female, as
not being exclusively female. I am both a man and a woman, I am not
simply one and not the other."

And now the law recognizes this. Australia's highest court found that
the 1995 Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act (New South Wales)
recognized that a person's sex might be ambiguous and "does not require
that people who, having undergone a sex affirmation procedure, remain of
indeterminate sex -- that is, neither male nor female -- must be
registered, inaccurately, as one or the other. The Act itself recognises
that a person may be other than male or female and therefore may be
taken to permit the registration sought, as 'nonspecific.' "

The implications are enormous. Although the ruling relates to New South
Wales, five of the seven Australian states and territories have the same
language in their legislation, so it is expected to apply to most of the
country, and to be used for interpretation of any laws that refer to the
sex of a person.

It follows a ruling last year in Australia that people could mark X for
"indeterminate" in the gender category of their passports (without
having had surgery); the same decision had been made a year earlier in
New Zealand. Other countries also shifted significantly toward full
recognition of "nonspecific" gender in 2013: Nepal started to issue
citizenship papers with a category for a "third gender," and Germany
became the first European country to allow parents of intersex children
-- those born with both genitals, or ambiguous sex characteristics -- to
mark their birth certificates with an X.

The global third-gender movement is gaining momentum with a startling
rapidity that our laws and language are scrambling to keep pace with.
Norrie prefers the term "androgynous." Other words considered in the
case were "neuter," "intersex" and "transgender," but the court decided
on "nonspecific." Members of the intersex community had argued that
Norrie should not be able to call herself "intersex" because she had not
technically been born so. (Norrie does not mind being called "her" or
"she," though she also likes the pronouns "xie" or "hir.")

The "nonspecific" category is broad, mind-boggling and potentially
hugely subversive in terms of the way we think about boys and girls, men
and women, and our habit of dividing people into two distinct, gendered
groups. Now it's Adam, Eve -- and Norrie.

"The normal distribution curve, after all, is not just about the bulk in
the middle, but also the outliers," Norrie said triumphantly. "Diversity
is normal."

It will be many years before most fully grasp what this means.

When Norrie heard the news of her win, she was lying on her bed, rubbing
a luffa on her legs, preparing to shower. She screamed and howled with
delight, dancing across to the bathroom: "We won, we won, we won!"

Ever since then she has fielded media calls, tried to respond to
"overwhelming and positive response from people in Australia and around
the world," held news conferences, walked barefoot into TV studios and
posed on her rainbow-colored bicycle, equipped with a bubble-blowing
machine, for photographers.

And then? She got engaged to her best friend, Samuel. This is what lies
next for Norrie: Do laws prevent someone "nonspecific" from marrying a
man? Same-sex marriage is illegal in Australia. But can a xie marry a
he? Having freed herself from one large lump of legal kryptonite, Norrie
now intends to find out.

Julia Baird, a contributing opinion writer, is writing a biography of
Queen Victoria.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 7, 2014, on page A23
of the New York edition with the headline: Neither Female Nor Male.

(4) Norrie's a real agenda bender: androgynous activist wins the right
to be called nothing at all

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/norries-a-real-agenda-bender-androgynous-activist-wins-the-right-to-be-called-nothing-at-all/story-fni0cx12-1226872839781

ANDREW CARSWELL  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  APRIL 03, 2014 12:00AM

Norrie has won a High Court decision that paves the way for there to be
three classifications of gender - male, female, and other / Picture:
Adam Taylor Source: News Limited

Norrie ... not a he or she, but nothing at all / Picture: Adam Taylor
Source: News Limited AFTER waging a war against institutions and
governments for two decades, Norrie has finally won the right to be
called, well, nothing.

A High Court decision yesterday upheld the right of the transgender
Sydney resident to be legally classified as neither male or female.

The historic decision reshapes society's system of male-female
designations on official documentation, allowing people who do not deem
themselves as being of traditional gender to have their own category --
non-specific.

The groundbreaking ruling determined that sex is not confined to male
and female status, opening the door for Norrie -- self-described as
androgynous or a neuter "because I am the sex of most people's pets" --
to become the first person in the state to be recognised by the NSW
Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages as "sex not specified".

"I am excited about people in the future having the option to choose
their sex identity"

Norrie, born with the physical attributes of a male but supposedly
possessing the mind of a female, "screamed with delight" when the
four-year legal brawl with the registry ended in victory.

"It is a marvellous vindication now for all of this to come good,"
Norrie said.

What you said Norrie now just has to change the whole worlds traditional
way of sexing people. Good luck with that one. - Quentin

The NSW Government cost taxpayers because they didn't understand their
own law. The current HC is conservative in its interpretation of the law
- that is they apply a strict reading of the legislation as opposed to
any intent. Well done Norrie for schooling a plethora of high powered
legal minds. -Rob

Good on Norrie for pursuing excellent decision pretty simple when you
think about it - Kosta

It is on your birth certificate. If you want to change your sex, fine,
but you were still born male or female. - Grant

"I am excited about people in the future having the option to choose
their sex identity, even if it is not male or female. Now they can live
their lives knowing that they don't have to sit in this box or that box
-- they can make up their own box."

Norrie began lobbying for change in the early 1990s, forming the
Transgender Lobby Coalition which was instrumental in altering the law
in 1996 to allow people to change their birth certificate.

A relaxed and affable character, the Redfern resident, who goes only by
a first name, was originally given a "sex not specified" registration by
the State Government in 2010. But four months later, the Registry of
Births, Deaths and Marri-ages wrote claiming it had "issued in error".

Norrie took the matter to the NSW Court of Appeal, which overturned the
decision, forcing the registry to launch proceedings in the High Court,
unsuccessfully.

The High Court judgment ruled that "for the most part, the sex of
individuals concerned is irrelevant to legal relations'', except in the
case of the Commonwealth Marriage Act.

Preparing for a night celebrating with friends, Norrie has never been
concerned what people call her, as long as there is no ill-will.

(5) French Government encouraging school children to question their
sexual identity

http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2014/02/14/the_great_french_gender-bending_panic_of_2014.html

The Great French Gender-Bending Panic of 2014

By Robert Zaretsky

As French President Francois Hollande returns home from a three-day
state visit to the U.S., he may be wishing he had stretched his trip out
for a few more days. Lord knows Hollande will not be given a hero's
welcome back home. As the fallout from his handling of his private life
continues, the president's handling of France's public life stands in
equally bad repute: France's unemployment rate (12 percent and climbing)
threatens to overtake Hollande's popularity rating (19 percent and
falling). Yet, just when affairs could not get any worse, they did: Last
month France discovered that the government was covertly teaching boys
to become girls, and encouraging school children to question their
sexual identity.

Or so ran the rumors, which first surfaced at the end of January. As
they expanded via text messages and tracts, they became more expansive:
gay teachers, it turned out, most often led these classes, in which they
also encouraged their young charges to masturbate. Moreover, a
government minister had declared that France's children belong to the
state, not to their parents. Urged to protest this pedagogy of
perversion -- labeled by its critics as "gender theory" -- parents kept
their children home: by the end of January, grade schools across France
reported high levels of student absenteeism.

In the face of this popular panic, school administrators also began to
panic. Parents demanded to know why their children were being taught to
doubt what nature, or God, had given them. What to do? Predictably,
official denials of these claims simply gave them greater credibility in
the eyes of worried parents. When the minister of education, Vincent
Peillon, reminded parents that it was illegal to keep their children
from school, the extreme right-wing politician Marine Le Pen accused him
of "aggravating the situation" while conservative opponents of the
Socialist government warn that it is "playing the sorcerer's apprentice."

Similarly, the mainstream media's skeptical accounts of these "folles
rumeurs" struggled to compete with alternative sources on the Internet
that propagated them. (In fact, an extreme right wing website improbably
named "Equality and Reconciliation" appears to have launched the rumor.)
What Le Monde labeled a "fronde" -- the word for "sling," denoting the
popular rebellions against the French monarchy in the 17th century --
has yet to be tamped down. Just recently, there unfurled along the
boulevards of Paris a vast demonstration protesting the government's
perceived "family-phobia." The same groups behind last year's "Manif
pour tous" demonstrations against the legalization of gay marriage had
begun to orchestrate this particular demonstration well before the rumor
took hold. Needless to say, they welcomed its galvanizing effect: while
police placed the number of demonstrators at 80,000, the organizers
claimed 500,000.

Perhaps the truth is somewhere in between. Can the same be said, though,
of the competing claims of the government and its opponents? Remarkably,
the soil from which the rumor sprouted was thoroughly unremarkable. Late
last year, the government introduced a new course in several dozen grade
schools. The program, given the moniker "The ABC of Equality," is one
part common sense, one part gender theory for kids. The children were
taught that while certain differences between the sexes were determined
by our biology, others are "constructed" by society. For the Ministry of
Education, one needn't be Judith Butler -- who, quite suddenly, has been
thrust into the French media's limelight -- to appreciate such an approach.

Of course, the epidemiology of rumors does not recognize national
borders; all nations are liable to such epidemics. We need think only
of, say, Orson Wells' "War of the Worlds" radio address, or, more
recently, claims that Barack Obama is not an American citizen. Yet
rumors flourish only in fertile soil. For most Americans in 1938, it was
not a great step from the reality of Nazi Germany's destructive march
across the continent to the fantasy of insidious invaders from Mars.

By the same token, there is something peculiarly French about these
rumors of gender bending. Rumors have not just a long history in France,
but also tend to make history. Most notably, this year marks the 225th
anniversary of "The Great Fear": the wave of panic that swept much of
the country following the fall of the Bastille. Worried over harvests
reduced by a long drought, farmers "learned" that the nobility planned
to impound what little there was. Of course, their credulity was
reinforced by an ageless animosity toward their local lords, as well as
news from Paris about the aristocracy's resistance to revolutionary
events. The peasantry was thus especially vulnerable to what historian
George Lefebvre called "the monstrous false news." A vast wave of
destruction, aimed at tax offices and local nobles, exploded across the
country, hastening the revolutionary changes that Paris had first set in
motion.

With this latest outbreak of "monstrous false news," is France facing
yet another "Great Fear"? Over the last quarter of a century, France
seems to have erased one traditional frontier after another. With the
creation of the European Union, France surrendered significant control
of its physical and judicial borders; with the burgeoning of
globalization, its mastery of its commercial and cultural frontiers is
also besieged. For many, the last rampart, the final frontier, is the
traditional family. This is not the case only for conservative
Catholics. Many French Muslims and Jews also oppose state interference
in what they see as the one domain left to them: the family.

Earlier this month, the government beat a hasty retreat, withdrawing a
proposed law that opponents believed would allow gay couples to adopt
children. This "Great Fear," apparently, has yet to run its course.

Robert Zaretsky is a professor of history at The Honors College at the
University of Houston and the author of "A Life Worth Living: Albert
Camus and the Quest for Meaning" (Harvard University, 2013).

(6) Jesus was depicted as Androgynous, in early Christian Art

http://www.waldemar.tv/2012/11/lighting-up-the-dark-ages/

Lighting up the Dark Ages

NOVEMBER 28, 2012

Waldemar talks about his brand new BBC4 series, The Dark Ages: An Age of
Light

Almost everything about the Dark Ages can be disputed. You could, for
instance, have an excellent dispute about the name. Nobody in academic
circles today calls the Dark Ages the Dark Ages. If you used the term in
an American university, your effigy would be carried across the campus
and set on fire. Today, the history police prefer to call this the early
medieval period, which smacks of desperation to me, and certainly gives
you the wrong flavour of the times.

There was nothing in the slightest bit "early medieval" about the
outrageously large gold tiara, studded with rubies and emeralds, that I
filmed last month in Budapest, and which was once worn by a particularly
fortunate Hun princess. Come to think of it, there is nothing "early
medieval" about the Huns, full stop. Or the Vandals. Or the Visigoths.
Or any of the undervalued barbarian creatives whose art has recently
been tickling parts of my body other art cannot, or will not, reach.

Not, of course, that there were ever any actual "barbarians". That, too,
is a term that needs tons of disputing. It comes from the Greek word for
foreigner, and the Romans used it to describe anyone who was not a
Roman. The name Barbara comes from the same source. So Barbara Windsor
is, technically, "Windsor, the barbarian woman". Lots of words were
given a frightful Dark Age twisting by the chief falsifiers of the era:
the Christian scribes. Look what they did to the Vandals. Here was an
energetic barbarian nation, famous for making mosaics and writing
poetry, who ended up passing their nomenclature to the kids who sniff
glue in cemeteries.

Anyway, once you have finished disputing the names of the Dark Ages, you
can start another fierce dispute about time spans. When did the Dark
Ages begin and end? In my new series for the BBC, I've gone for some
precise dates. I start in AD313, the year when Christianity was
legalised in the Roman empire by Constantine's Edict of Milan, and I end
in 1066, when William the Conqueror invaded Britain. Artistically, that
gives you a period of intense cultural instability, when nothing was
fixed and so much was up for grabs. My kind of period.

Until the 19th century, the Dark Ages were understood as 1,000 years of
backwardness, when civilisation basically stopped, stretching from the
fall of the Roman empire to the arrival of the Renaissance. This
ridiculous world-view was kicked into touch when the Vic torians
developed their taste for gothic and the medieval age began to take
shape in their imaginations. But that too involved a profound
misunderstanding of what came before, because there was nothing gothic
about the Goths.

In Ravenna, the Ostrogoths, led by their fabulous Dark Age king,
Theodoric, created the finest mosaic cycles of the entire epoch. Walk
into the Ostrogoth church of Sant'Apollinare or, better still, the Arian
Baptistry, look up and around, and you will feel shafts of actual
sunlight arrowing into your heart, directed there by the deliberate
angling of the mosaics. The Goths in Ravenna knew how to shape sunlight.

In Uppsala, Sweden, in the library of the university, I was lucky enough
to examine the so-called Silver Bible, an exquisite Gothic text, also
produced in Ravenna, in which the writing was done with silver on pages
of deep purple vellum. It was as beautiful a book as I have ever seen.
Yet if you believe the Christian scribes on the subject of the Goths,
they were just a bunch of illiterate heretics.

Christianity has a lot to answer for in the Dark Ages. But it also has a
lot to celebrate. By starting with Constantine's conversion, I was able
to watch the most heroic and long-winded creative struggle of the entire
epoch -- the invention of Jesus. What a tussle that was. For the first
few centuries of Christianity, there was no need to imagine what Jesus
might have looked like. As a tiny and insignificant cult religion,
practised in ramshackle room conversions called "house churches" (the
best surviving example is in Britain, in Lullingstone, Kent),
Christianity didn't require pictures. It preferred codes and symbols:
the fish, the anchor, the chi-ro, made by combining the first two
letters of the name Christus.

When Constantine made Christianity the official religion of Rome,
however, the secretive little faith suddenly found itself having to
create a grand official look for itself -- from scratch. Well, nearly
from scratch. The Dark Age Christians were surrounded by a particularly
plentiful cultural resource: the art of the pagans. So they stole
everything from that. The earliest Christs were blond, curly-haired,
fresh-faced and beardless, a look borrowed inch-perfectly from Apollo,
the pagan god of the sun. The Vatican, in Rome, has several galleries
packed with marble likenesses of these cheerful initial Christs, armed
with their Harry Potter wands, which they wave busily as they perform a
succession of helpful miracles: turning water into wine, multiplying the
loaves, raising Lazarus from the dead. No sign anywhere of wounds or
crosses or crucifixions.

It wasn't just a likeness of Jesus that the Christians had to find. The
entire Christian iconography needed to be invented. The halo was another
straight steal from Apollo, who had long sported one to indicate that he
was god of the sun, while the image of the angel was taken directly from
Roman sarcophaguses where winged figures of victory, Nikes, can
invariably be seen carrying the soul of the deceased to heaven.

Interestingly, there were no female presences at all in this first
Christian art. To compensate for this absence, several of the earliest
Christs seem to have been deliberately given feminine characteristics.
There's one in the Terme museum, in Rome, that everyone thought was a
girl when he was dug up, because he had beautiful long hair and tiny
swelling breasts. In Ravenna, the beautiful Ostrogoth Christ on the roof
of the Arian Baptistry has a girly look about him, too, particularly
when compared with the heavily six-packed pagan river god who's up there
with him. This splendid religious confusion is one of the best and most
exciting things about the Dark Ages. None of our current boundaries was
fixed. All of creativity was up for grabs.

Mary did not appear until the 3rd century. When she did turn up in art
-- in a poignant fragment found in the Catacomb of Priscilla, in Rome --
her image was a clear steal from Isis, the Egyptian earth mother. The
Christians were particularly keen to borrow the image of Isis as the
mother of Horus, the Egyptian god of the sky, whom she holds fondly on
her lap. It's the source of a wonderful Christian parade of subsequent
Marys and Jesuses. Incidentally, Horus's birthday was on December 25, so
we should be getting ready to celebrate it soon.

Thus, for the entire span of the Dark Ages, there are no dark images of
Jesus -- Jesus tortured, Jesus in pain, Jesus with the crown of thorns.
When he did eventually grow a beard and man up, around the 6th century,
it was in clear imitation of the supreme god of the Romans, Jupiter,
from whom the early Jesuses also inherited a throne and a grave
magisterial air. One of the firmest reasons why we can be certain the
Turin shroud is a medieval fake is because the Jesus it shows --
scarred, gory, bleeding -- does not actually appear in art until the
Middle Ages.

Unless, of course, Jesus deliberately misled his followers about what he
looked like for the first 1,000 years of Christianity. Now that would be
a really dark thing to do.

In the last film in the series, the one about the Vikings and the
Anglo-Saxons, there's a cameo appearance from an extraordinary man. His
name is Shaun Greenhalgh, and he gained considerable notoriety a few
years back when he was arrested as part of a gang that came to be called
the Bolton Forgers. Shaun was the one who actually made all the pieces.
For The Dark Ages, he creates a gorgeous Anglo-Saxon brooch, using the
methods the original artists would have done. At one point, he tells me
to hold it up to the light and to watch the gold glow. Boy, does it
glow. I think it's my favourite moment in the series.

(7) Cultural studies: a cancer in the University

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/cultural-studies-a-cancer-on-the-academy/14701

Cultural studies: a cancer on the academy

The death of Stuart Hall is a useful moment to reflect on the corrosive
effect of cultural studies on the promotion of knowledge.

24 February 2014

Who should decide what students learn at university? Traditionally,
especially in the humanities and social sciences, individual academics
have constructed a curriculum based on an established body of knowledge,
often encapsulated in the works of canonical authors. More recently, the
academic project of transmitting knowledge to the next generation has
been called into question. Instead, the idea that students themselves
should be able to determine the content of the curriculum has come to
the fore. Economics students from Manchester University have been lauded
for challenging the neoliberal, market-driven assumptions of their
course and their success in having the curriculum changed to reflect the
impact of the latest financial crisis has been celebrated.

Some academics do bemoan the fact that 'my students are trying to run my
course' and blame this trend on the prioritisation of the 'student
experience' in universities. Elsewhere on spiked, I have argued that
frequent soliciting of the student voice erodes both the autonomy of
both academics and subject knowledge. However, this offers only a
partial explanation as to why lecturers capitulate to students' demands
on the curriculum; it's also important to look at what has occurred
within academic disciplines as well as policies that have been imposed
on academics. With the recent death of cultural theorist Stuart Hall, it
is time to assess the impact of cultural studies on higher education.
The Australian academic Toby Miller, a leading light in cultural
studies, argues his subject has had a profound impact 'on a host of
disciplines' and that it 'accretes various tendencies that are
splintering the human sciences: Marxism, feminism, queer theory, and the
postcolonial.'

Cultural studies began life at the University of Birmingham in 1964 led
by Richard Hoggart, academic and author of The Uses of Literacy. The
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was to play a leading role in
Britain's New Left, a loose political grouping influenced by Italian
political theorist Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and so-called
structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers like Louis Althusser. The
key moment was when Hoggart invited Stuart Hall, founder of the New Left
Review, to join him at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies in 1964. In 1972, Hall took over as the Centre's director.

The New Left itself arose out of disillusion with Stalinism abroad and
the failure of the working class to bring about revolution at home. Hall
acknowledged as much when he wrote: 'The Centre for Cultural Studies was
the locus to which we retreated when that conversation in the open world
could no longer be continued' (emphasis in original). The New Left
rejected the perceived economic determinism of Marxism and argued that
the hegemonic role played by contemporary culture cohered the working
class to the dominant ideology of the ruling elite. The founding
assumption of cultural studies was that mass or popular culture needed
to be studied in order to understand 'what was wrong with Britain in
particular and capitalism in general'. In other words, the working class
had been duped by popular culture into accepting capitalism as natural;
only through studying topics such as the pervasive influence of the
media could some people hope to understand the deception at play.

In his 1990 article, The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of
the Humanities, Hall argued that cultural studies 'emerged precisely
from a crisis in the humanities', which had arisen because they 'were
conducted in the light, or in the wake, of the Arnoldian project. What
they were handling in literary work and history were the histories and
touchstones of the national culture, transmitted to a select number of
people.' Hall was critical of the elitism inherent in the ideas of both
Matthew Arnold and FR Leavis. Leavis and Arnold argued that it was
possible to discern quality in the arts and that educators had a duty to
promote high culture. Through cultural studies, Hall sought to develop
'an ideological critique of the way the humanities and the arts
presented themselves as parts of disinterested knowledge' and did not
allow contemporary cultural forms to 'constitute a serious object of
contemplation in the academic world'.

 From the outset, then, cultural studies relativised academic content
through its rejection of high culture and focus on popular culture.
Indeed, the word 'culture' itself came to be disassociated from the arts
and was instead used to refer to everyday experiences. Cultural studies
began by applying the tools of literary criticism to mass culture to
expose the interplay of culture, power and politics. Hall's aspiration
was to develop an entirely new theoretical approach to analysing popular
culture that drew on sociology, linguistics, Lacanian psychotherapy, and
an array of methodological approaches drawn from other disciplines. This
approach, in relation to both content and method, has since had an
impact across much of academia. When all subject knowledge is considered
equally worth studying, it is more difficult for lecturers to defend
their content over students' preferences.

Furthermore, cultural studies was built on the assumption that all
content is political, that knowledge is reducible, as Michael Young
describes it in Bringing Knowledge Back In, to the experiences of
knowers and ultimately to an ideological expression of power relations.
As such, Hall reportedly 'half-joked' to friends that 'his cultural
studies project was politics by other means'. Hall's former colleague at
Marxism Today, journalist Suzanne Moore, wrote recently that 'Cultural
studies, as practised by Hall, was never a smug academic activity, but
one that often involved facing awkward truths about oneself and how one
was deeply, painfully implicated in existing power structures... It was
the study of how power operates in the everyday.'

Toby Miller describes this commitment to exposing power structures for
'progressive social change' as being 'animated by a desire to reveal and
transform those who control the means of communication and culture'.
This belies any pretence to truth or objectivity, values previously
fundamental to the academic enterprise. Instead, as Young says of the
sociology of education in the 1960s and 1970s, the truth was known in
advance, it lay in the link between power and knowledge, and the aim of
academics was to show how this truth manifested itself. Hall claimed his
aim was 'to take the whole system of knowledge itself [and] attempt to
put it at the service of some other project'. Certainly it is the case
that a suspicion of truth claims and an assumption that knowledge is
political is now endemic throughout humanities and social-science
departments.

The instrumental use of education to serve political ends led to some
peculiar tensions within the discipline concerning what 'counted' as
mass culture and whether it was to be celebrated or critiqued. Miller
describes cultural studies as offering a celebration of the
counter-culture as opposed to the 'achievement-oriented, materialistic,
educationally driven values and appearance of the middle class'. This
patronising view elevates working-class culture in a celebration of
ignorance. Jonathan Rose's excellent study, The Intellectual Life of the
British Working Classes, provides numerous examples of people overcoming
huge obstacles of time, money and lack of formal education to gain
access to classic works of literature. Such autodidacts were not
fighting to have their daily experiences celebrated; on the contrary,
they wanted access to a world beyond their everyday lives. The 1945
Labour Party manifesto made the bold claim that 'we desire to assure to
our people full access to the great heritage of culture in this nation'.

Thirty years on from this, cultural studies illustrated the extent to
which the New Left had lost touch with the aspirations of ordinary
people and, having emerged from political defeat, began to look on the
masses with disdain. In The Intellectuals and the Masses, John Carey
describes how Roland Barthes, a critical theorist whose work influenced
cultural studies, '"decodes" various items of popular culture
(all-in-wrestling, steak and chips) to show how their real meaning,
discernible to the intellectual, escapes the gullible masses'.

In his 1990 article, Hall acknowledged the limitations of cultural
studies in bringing about social and political change: 'Anybody who is
into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel,
on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it
registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody
to do anything.' Others are quicker to claim impact on Hall's behalf. As
Suzanne Moore argues: 'Well, maybe he is the godfather of
multiculturalism, but as he increasingly understood race through the
modality of class and vice versa, as he understood gender politics as an
unsettling challenge, we can see that... is not new; that Hall's work
embodies it, that he is more pioneer than prophet. His insistence that
identities shift and drift, that new forms of power and opposition are
always emerging, is still vital.'

So, cultural studies may not have changed the world. However, its impact
on academia has been substantial. As Miller notes, 'the "cultural" has
become a master trope in the humanities' and intersectionality and
identity politics now hang over the social sciences. Of more impact than
any of this is the fear of knowledge and a suspicion of truth that
pervades the academy. Cultural studies has contributed to the
intellectual hollowing out of the university. Today, when students
challenge the content of curriculum, they are pushing at an open door,
as many lecturers have given up on the traditional academic project of
promoting knowledge and truth. Back in 1990, Hall was proud to suggest
'the contestation that cultural studies was partly responsible for
putting on the agenda has been taken into the humanities themselves'. In
2014, I would argue that this contestation has been taken into all areas
of the university - and that it is time for academics to reclaim the
values of knowledge, objectivity and truth.

Joanna Williams is education editor at spiked. She is also a lecturer in
higher education at the University of Kent and the author of Consuming
Higher Education: Why Learning Can't Be Bought. (Buy this book from
Amazon(UK).)

(8) The rise of the 'third gender'

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-rise-of-the-third-gender/14714

Chrissie Daz

The rise of the 'third gender'

Trans activists calling for the institution of a third gender miss the
point - language changes with society, not the other way around.

25 February 2014

The idea that people should have the right to be recognised as
inhabiting an alternative, or 'third' gender has been bubbling away for
quite a while now. And this is not just a question for trans people. In
fact, until recently the overriding desire of most trans people was to
be accepted as their chosen gender.

Now Facebook has implemented a customisable gender option. Exactly where
the pressure for the campaign for this move came from is hard to tell.
While conducting research for this article I was directed to a Facebook
page called 'This site needs a third gender option'. This page was set
up in May 2011 and has to date received a total of 74 likes.

In the real world, changes have been taking place for more than half a
decade to accommodate the concerns of non-binary gendered people. Since
2007, several countries including India, Pakistan, New Zealand,
Australia and most recently Germany have made legal provisions for the
inclusion of a third gender on passports, identity documents and birth
certificates.  In the case of Germany, this change is focused
exclusively on those babies that are born with ambiguous genital
characteristics (known as intersex). In the other cases, the change
allows adults, under varying circumstances, to assert their right to be
classed as a third sex.

The legal recognition of intersex people and others who cannot properly
be said to be either male or female is probably a good idea, but this
should not impact upon the vast majority of people who have no problem
living in a binary-gendered world or using binary-gendered language.

History is replete with failed attempts to re-invent or modify language,
from Esperanto to the feminist PC language of the Eighties. But this
campaign to institute a third sex in language and law may well prove to
be the most unstable project yet. The ever-changing and ever-expanding
taxonomy of words and identities aimed at respecting difference among
transsexuals, always seems to cause undue offence among transsexuals
themselves. To use the word transsexual, for instance, as a noun (rather
than as an adjective) is said, by some, to diminish a person's identity
down to a single trait. The very term transsexual has been replaced,
first by transgendered (to assert that fact that it is about gender not
sexuality) and now by Trans*. The capital 'T' is obligatory and the
asterisk is meant to represent inclusivity. Apparently, to simply call
someone 'Trans' implicitly denigrates the experiences of cross-dressers
and gender-queer folk who are not intent upon making a full transition
from one gender to the other.

Amid all the offence being taken over these linguistic acrobatics, the
one thing trans campaigners, and now Facebook, fail to realise is that
language does not respond well to being artificially manipulated. As
Wittgenstein once remarked, language is like a toolbox, you use the best
tool available for the job in hand. With general use, over time, words
and their meanings change to reflect changing forms of social
consciousness. It is not the other way around. Any attempt to force
language to respond to the presumed delicate sensitivities of marginal
groups not only underlines and reifies these presumed vulnerabilities,
it also undermines the responsiveness of language to real experience.

Chrissie Daz is a writer and cabaret performer based in Birmingham.

(9) Intersex children in Germany can now choose their own Gender later
in life

http://www.dw.de/the-third-sex-german-intersex-law-draws-attention-to-the-biological-facts-of-life/a-17285459

The third sex: German intersex law draws attention to the biological
facts of life

Gender is determined by the way our gonads develop. But gender is not
always clear. So what if you're neither boy nor girl? You're "intersex"
- a status that only few countries recognize.

Blue is for girls and pink is for boys - from the children's book "Lila
or what is intersexuality"

The first question parents often ask in the delivery room is whether
their baby is a girl or a boy. But in one out of several thousand
births, the doctor or midwife is unable to determine the baby's sex.

Are they male, female…or the third sex? Intersex?

If the newborn's external genitals look ambiguous - if the penis is too
small or the clitoris too large, the medical community calls this
condition DSD - Disorders or Differences of Sexual Development, or
simply "intersex."

But it's only recently that the legal community has recognized the
condition too.

It's a year since Germany passed legislation to recognize intersex
people. And the law came into effect late last year. It gives parents
the option to leave the gender of their child blank on the birth
certificate and other official documents.

What might appear to be a small bureaucratic detail means that intersex
children in Germany can now choose their own gender later in life.

Gender is a spectrum

More than this, the law has brought to public attention a biological
fact of life - that even a human trait such as gender is not a
male-female binary, but a continuum that includes individuals who
possess the anatomy and physical characteristics of both sexes.

In most cases, however, being intersex is not apparent at birth.

Intersex is a congenital condition

"It was a boy with a penis. The doctors also said, 'he is perfect' and
we had a son named Thijs," says Reinie Bloemendaal, the mother of an
intersex child and two other sons.

When Thijs, now Maya started school, Bloemendaal felt something wasn't
quite right with her middle son, but couldn't pinpoint the problem.

"I never heard about intersexuality. Nobody talked about that. We have
boys and we have girls and there are no more kinds of people," she says.

Bloemendaal's daughter Maya Posch is now 30 and a software engineer
living in southwest Germany. She is tall, slim and clearly looks like a
woman with her long wavy chestnut hair, pale porcelain skin and delicate
features. But as a child and teenager, Maya also couldn't figure out why
she was so unhappy.

"I never grew into a male role. I stayed a child emotionally, I skipped
puberty emotionally. I have never been able to see myself as a boy,"
says Posch.

Intersex - not transgender

Only at 21 years of age did Posch realize she had never decided on a
gender for herself. She had female hips, no Adam's apple, mostly looked
and felt like a woman, but was not transsexual.

Transsexuals are biologically fully male or female, but have gender
identity issues.

Intersex people are a genetic, anatomic and hormonal mix of both sexes.

Posch is a true hermaphrodite. She possesses both male and female sex
organs as well as XX and XY chromosomes due to the merging of twin
embryos in the womb.

The incidence of intersexuality is more common than statistics at the
time of birth would suggest, since the condition often doesn't surface
until puberty or later in life - as it was for Posch. Maya Posch
Intersexuelle

At 21, Maya Posch realised she had never decided on a gender for herself

Dr. Olaf Hiort, a pediatric professor who is head of the endocrine
division at the University Clinic in Lübeck, estimates that roughly 1
out of 2,000 inhabitants in Germany is intersex.

XY males who are "perfectly normal females"

We all start life as females - until our gonads develop.

But when the gonads - testes in boys and ovaries in girls - fail to
develop, the embryo remains female.

"This means the individual can't develop testosterone, the male hormone.
And due to the lack of testosterone, their outer appearance will be
completely female," explains Hiort.

Since these XY males grow up as girls, nothing appears out of the
ordinary until puberty when they fail to menstruate or develop secondary
female attributes such as breasts and hips.

"If you don't have a gonad, if you don't have testes, you do not have an
ovary, you will not get into puberty because the hormones are lacking,"
he says.

But it's possible, says Hiort, to substitute female hormones such as
estrogen for the girls to grow into women.

Programmed in your genome

Intersex individuals are usually physically healthy, but they tend to be
naturally infertile.

"There are many women in the world, who are perfectly normal females.
The only thing is that they are infertile, because they've got XY
chromosomes," says Posch.

A few may become biological parents with assisted reproductive technology.

"Most of the intersex conditions are associated with infertility, which
is kind of interesting, because it's coming again and again through
healthy carriers. It's not rare to have an intersex condition programmed
in your genome," says Hiort.

Some intersex conditions have been traced to specific genes, which are
often passed on from parents to children in a recessive pattern in the
same way that two brown-eyed parents can have a blue-eyed child. „ L I L
A oder was ist Intersexuealität, ISBN 978-3-00-029591-1“

Intersex people often possess both male and female genital organs

In other cases, a spontaneous mutation may be responsible for an
intersex condition.

What causes these mutations is unknown, but endocrine disruptors
associated with pesticides could play a role in some minor
abnormalities, such as the failure of the testicles to drop, or
malformation of the urethra tip, according to Dr. Hiort.

"Endocrine disruptors act like hormones that disrupt the usual pathway
of hormonal action. But most researchers would probably agree that the
most severe differences of sexual development are caused by genetic
aberrations," Hiort says.

Intersexuality is a condition that has always existed in nature - though
seldom in law.

Besides Germany, the following countries legally recognize intersex
people: Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.

The laws have raised awareness about intersexuality, but some say they
do more bad than good by reinforcing gender stereotypes.

But for those in the medical profession, Hiort says Germany's intersex
law has taken the pressure off to perform unnecessary genital surgery to
make a child conform to one sex or the other.

"We do not do any irreversible intervention unless they are medically
necessary. We rather leave the option for the child to decide on this
later," he says.

Maya Posch has already had one operation to remove her testicles. The
castration eliminates the need for her to take testosterone blockers.
But she's keeping her vagina as well as her penis.

"I'm going to keep it," she says, "I was born this way."

(10) Leading South Korean sex change surgeon says he's correcting 'God's
mistakes'

http://www.smh.com.au/world/leading-south-korean-sex-change-surgeon-says-hes-correcting-gods-mistakes-20140402-zqpi2.html

Date: April 02 2014

Hyung-Jin Kim

Busan, South Korea: As Dr Kim Seok-Kwun begins surgery to create a
functioning penis for a Buddhist monk who was born female, he is well
aware of the unease his work creates in this deeply conservative
country. The devout Protestant known as the "father of South Korean
transgender people" once wrestled with similar feelings.

"I've decided to defy God's will," Kim, 61, said in an interview before
the monk's recent successful surgery to become a man. "At first, I
agonised over whether I should do these operations because I wondered if
I was defying God. I was overcome with a sense of shame. But my patients
desperately wanted these surgeries. Without them, they'd kill themselves."

Kim is a pioneer in slowly changing views on sexuality and gender in
South Korea, where many have long considered even discussions of
sexuality a taboo. He has conducted about 320 sex change operations over
the past 28 years, widely believed to be the most by any single doctor
in the country.

Kim said the monk, who underwent 11 hours of surgery, did not want to be
interviewed for fear of offending Buddhist believers at his temple. The
doctor said the monk has been taking hormone therapy and has been living
as a man for a long time.

When Kim first started doing the surgeries in the 1980s, his pastor
objected. Friends and fellow doctors joked that he was going to hell if
he didn't stop. He now feels a great sense of achievement for helping
people who feel trapped in the wrong body. He believes he's correcting
what he calls God's mistakes.

"Some people are born without genitals or with cleft lips or with no
ears or with their fingers stuck together. Why does God create people
like this? Aren't these God's mistakes?" Kim said. "And isn't a
mismatched sexual identity a mistake, too?"

A strong bias against sexual minorities persists in South Korea, the
result of lingering Confucian beliefs that children should never damage
the bodies they received from their parents; a large, vocal conservative
Christian community; and past military-backed dictatorships that ignored
minority voices.

Sex change operations "are a blasphemy against God and make the world a
more miserable place," said the Reverend Hong Jae Chul, president of the
Seoul-based Christian Council of Korea. He called Kim's remarks "cursed
and deplorable."

Kim, a plastic surgeon at Dong-A University Hospital in the southeastern
port city of Busan, specialises in fixing facial deformities. He began
doing sex change operations in 1986 after several men wearing women's
clothing visited him separately and asked him to construct vaginas for
them. The first visitor had already had his penis removed, Kim said.

Kim initially turned them away because he knew nothing about sex change
surgery. But he kept thinking about their pleas, studied foreign
publications and began performing the surgeries a year later.

His best known patient is South Korea's most famous transsexual
entertainer, Harisu, who had Kim officiate at her 2007 wedding to a male
singer.

Harisu, who only uses a single name, said in an interview at a Seoul
coffee shop that the pain she felt after her 1995 male-to-female surgery
"was like a hammer hitting your genitals." But days later, when she left
the hospital, she felt reborn, comparing her transformation to the
Disney film The Little Mermaid, where a mermaid gives up her fish tail
in exchange for human legs and eventual happiness.

Many of Kim's earliest patients were in their 40s and 50s. Sometimes
parents showed up just before surgeries, furious and threatening to
disown their children.

Today, most of his sex-change patients are in their early 20s, and
sometimes their parents agree to pay for the surgery. Male-to-female
procedures cost 11 million to 15 million won ($A11,044 to $A15,057), and
the more difficult female-to-male procedures cost 31 million won (SA31,109).

The changes in his clientele reflect changes in South Koreans' views of
sexual minorities.

Several gay-themed movies and TV dramas have become hits. An actor once
banned from show business because of his homosexuality is working again.
A well-known male movie director symbolically tied the knot with his
male partner last year in what was the first high-profile ceremony of
its kind in South Korea, which still doesn't legally recognise same-sex
marriage.

At the same time, activists say transsexuals remain likely to face
harassment, abuse or insults, and many suffer from depression and have
attempted suicide. The conservative government of President Park
Geun-hye, which took office in early 2013, said it would create a broad
anti-discrimination law, but there's been no major progress.

In 2012, vehement protests by conservative activists and Christian
groups forced a TV channel to scrap a talk show program featuring
transgender people after airing its first segment.

Transgender people who want to legally change their gender also face
obstacles in South Korea. The Supreme Court suggests that judges allow
such changes only for those who have undergone sex change operations,
have lost reproductive capability, are not married and have no underage
children.

The lack of any binding rules has led transsexuals to flock to judges
rumoured to be less strict about approving gender change requests,
according to Hahn Chae Yoon, leader of the Korean Sexual-Minority
Culture and Rights Centre in Seoul.

Last year, a Seoul court approved gender change requests for five people
even though they hadn't yet completed their female-to-male procedures,
something previously deemed necessary. Since then, about 30 other people
in similar situations have been allowed by the court to legally change
their sex, according to court officials.

Kim requires his candidates for surgery to get testimony from at least
two psychiatrists showing a diagnosis of gender identity disorder.
They're asked to live for more than one year in the other gender's
clothing and hairstyle and to get parental approval. Of his 320 sex
change operations, about 210 are male-to-female, the rest female to male.

Many patients see the operation as a matter of life or death. Before her
surgery, Harisu, the transsexual entertainer, signed a document
acknowledging that she knew she could die during surgery, though Kim
said none of his sex-change operations have gone so horribly wrong.

"If I had lived as a man without undergoing a sex change operation, I
might be dead already," Harisu said. "I was already a woman except for
my genitals. I didn't want to live an awkward life with those genitals
... I'm a woman, so I wanted to live as a woman."

AP