Television
No regrets, Julia?
Nigella Lawson
Julia Grant, not the sister of the more famous Hugh, but the subject of last Thurs- day's Change of Sex (BBC2 9.30 p.m.) claimed to have been 'a woman trapped in a man's body'. That's what they all say. But how do they know? They don't know what it feels like to be a woman trapped in a woman's body. I'm not sure I could really say what it feels like, either. But I'm quite certain that the sort of woman the transsex- uals feel themselves wistfully to be, has very little in common with a woman's idea of a woman. Yes, I know the first two episodes of A Change of Sex originally went out in 1981, and so there are other excuses for it, but lip-gloss and six-inch heels do not a woman make. Besides, and pace Sig- mund Freud, the notion of a woman as a penisless male, is as unsatisfactory as it is insulting. The sex change operation is a misnomer; the sex of the patient isn't changed. Rather, it's emasculation with fancy footwork: the male genitalia are removed, and an artificial vagina put in their place, or thereabouts.
But as poor Julia, once George, revealed last Thursday, in her case the operation was not a success. She (and I shall use the female pronoun throughout) was not able to live, in her coy phrase, 'fully [as] a woman'. To put it bluntly, the walls of her newly fashioned vagina started caving in six weeks after the op. But of course she could not have been 'fully a woman' however enduring the surgeon's art had proved, The pity for Julia and others like her, is that so few people, other than the virulently hostile, seem prepared to point out that the transsexuals' sincere beliefs are in fact delusions. Although Julia stressed quite firmly, if pathetically, that she had no regrets about having the operation and felt, despite how it turned out, still liberated and released by it, it became evident in the course of the programme, that she saw at last what she refused to see, and was not helped to see, in the previous two pro- grammes: that there may have been other ways of dealing with her sense of inadequa- cy and inauthenticity than having her penis lopped off.
The psychiatrist who initially saw her, remarked that it was pretty evident that those who had a sense of inadequacy as men were no less likely to have a sense of inadequacy 'as women', and indeed asked Julia if she wanted psychotherapy to help her to feel other than she did, to come to terms with being male. (And presumably, though it wasn't said, with being homosexu- al.) Julia answered no and that was that.
In the course of one of the interviews, Julia revealed that she had felt abandoned by her father, whom she'd seen about 30 days a year throughout her childhood and that she hated him. You might think that the psychiatrist would make some sort of link between the sense of rejection that Julia felt for the male figure in her life and her consequent rejection of her own male- ness. Not a bit of it. But then, it is as well to remember that psychiatrists are doctors interested in psychiatric medicine, not in people.
But as these three marvellous, curiously dignified programmes showed, the real perversion is that of the medics. We are all free to mutilate our bodies as we wish, but a doctor might do better to dispense appro- priate treatment. Therapy, not surgery is what's required. The shots of Julia, working as a disco DJ, bellowing to the girls she summons up on stage, 'Has your boyfriend got a big dick? Can he use it properly? How often do you do it?' aren't ribaldry. They are agony. No regrets?
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