I certainly agree with the last point you make and I remember reading something about this kind of attitude being taken in the case of hermaphrodites and the ‘assigning’ of their sex/gender.

For me the most worrying aspect of the programme personally was the way the narrator consistently used the wrong pronoun, presumably in an attempt to sensationalise the issue. So referring to a transboy as ’she’ to me seemed particluarly nasty. It was akin to calling black people ‘coloured’ effectively an insult to these children who tried so hard to appear as the opposite sex.

One of the reasons why the transgirl may have been so keen to present an all-feminine image comes from the findings of Kessler & McKenna in their 1978 book “Gender”. They investigated the way in which people assign gender to others and found that, contrary to what might be expected, just about everyone works on the principle of ‘male or not-male’. So that if there is just one masculine quality evident, the individual is considered male, and that it would take the complete absence of anything masculine before an individual is unambiguously considered female.

One of the more unfortunate aspects of the gender binary system that we live with is the “if it isn’t heads it must be tails” logic, which means gender recognition functions on the ‘if it isn’t male it must be female.’ principle. This may go some way to explaining why male-to-female transgendered people go to such extreme lengths to be appear feminine, they are subconsciously aware of the need to ensure that they display nothing masculine at all in order to be confident at being considered female.

As for the moral issue of whether you should always inform partners about being trans – why would it amount to deceit if you didn’t tell them? If your partner is attracted to you then they are attracted to you, surely it shouldn’t matter how you identify your gender or sex. If you believe that we need to open up our thinking on the restrictive gender binary of male and female, then surely we need to also adjust our traditional categories of sexuality (e.g. ’straight’, ‘gay’) accordingly.

Plus, the deceit argument would imply that trans people are always obligated to ‘come out’ to every sexual partner they have, because it would be deceitful not to. But, by this logic, you could say that trans people are in a sense ‘deceiving’ everyone by ‘fooling’ them into believing they are a different sex! Which, clearly, is rather daft.

It was an interesting topic to raise, though.

It was offensive and undermining.