VIEW FROM THE GALLERY SALLY VINCENT
It was, I confess, almost intolerably discreet. All except for the Hansard shorthand writers assembled outside the Chamber while our Honourable members are saying their morning prayers within (please God, a slip of the tongue. would be disastrous)— pulsating anticipation for the excogitations to come like an Old Compton Street cinema queue; fluttering their order papers and whispering excitedly at its contents. Amend- ment number two, page one, line sixteen of the Nullity of Marriage Bill, hey, get this, 'part C, that the parties are not respectively male and female'. And this: 'add at end, "that at the time of the marriage both parties were of the same sex but one or both held a reasonable belief that the mar- riage was between differing sexes".' It's better than the budget.
Author of the amendment, heavy headed and serge to his boots is definitely one of Us. None is more manly in mind and body than Alexander Lyon (Lab. York) in his valiant struggle to fend off the objections inevitable to his case, that he and his sup- porters are attempting to allow homosexual marriage in (and the phrase is unfortunate, but positively stated) at the back door. Although he refers copiously to the Corbett case without once mentioning the name of April Ashley. he otherwise seems to see both sides of his argument. and indeed, to float somewhere in the middle of it.
He has, he says, wrestled with the notion that by structuring .thic law so as to include homosexual marriage in the rules apertain- ing to nullity, we would he in some obscure way condoning the fact of homosexual marriage. And since we do not countenance homosexual marriage, the whole thing is a bit of a conundrum. This bothered him, he admits, until it occurred to him that neither does our society accept the idea of polygamy, and yet a bigamous marriage does fall within the category of marriages that may be declared void._ thus implying an interim acceptance of polygamy. It is. to say the least. a point to conjure with, but Mr Lyon abruptly condemns his thinking as totally academic. A declaration that a marriage is void, he says somewhat testily to his alter- ego, is a declaration that it has always been void and never had any legal effect. He is not therefore. advocating homosexual mar- riage or acceptance Of a homosexual union.
A biological male. Mr 1.yon is as sure as he can' be. is a male. is a male, is a regardless of any operations performed upon his person. Such is the current climate of medical opinion. There is no such thing as sex change and•English marriage is based on sex and not on gender. Which makes us wonder why Mr Lyon has made his amend- ment and harken more attentively to the quarrel he is having with himself. The present state of medical opinion, he says, Is disputed- by some who believe that a sex change, at least in terms of 'psychological factors' is indeed possible. In other words. since medical opinion is in a developing condition, Mr Lyon cannot he too sure of the tendency his own Opinions will take. Suffice it to observe that Mr Lyon has been made aware in the course of his researches
of the fact that the partners in no fewer than four English marriages might (or might not) avail themselves of the new amendments and that such people, and many others, urge the view that a sex operation should decide the sex of a person, so that if a biological male undergoes an operation to construct an artificial vagina, then that person should be regarded in law as female, whatever the state of his chromosomes., On a dying fall, Mr Lyon announces that so far he regrets he is unable to take that view. And to prove he is not the owner of a buttoned down mind he implies that should medical opinion waver in the future, his own would be up for grabs. Thus covered, he vacates the field to Mr Abse. '
The member for Pontypool is altogether a more adamant fellow than his sympathiser, as the large ring he wears on his first finger right hand would indicate. The subject matter of our discussion, he is so bold as to remark, is neither so rare nor so esoteric as some would like to affect. To prove it he paints a garish portrait of life in our times, with drag queens camping it up on bar tables and pop-ladies thrusting their charms in hot pants at newspaper photographers, with a community warding off its intimations of trans-sexualism by laughter and attempting to dissipate the disturbing implications of hi-sexuality in design and fashion. It sounds disturbingly like the preface to a puritanical outburst against the filthy permissive society, but it turns out to he nothing of the sort. Just one of Mr Abse's dramatic effects, nothing else.
'We are addressing ourselves,' he about- faces, to the problem of those who have a male sex but a female gender.' Such folk, he says, live under a law that is too hide- bound, too rigid and too frightening to acknowledge that not all the human race can be neatly divided into two, and only two, separate compartments. Which sets us up, clear in our minds, for story time. It is the tale of pretty Flora, gleaned, piece by piece from Mr Abse's association with letters from pseudo-hermaphrodites, doctors and a Cali- fornian psycho-analyst. Mr Abse, who is entertaining enough to be afforded a high degree of poetic licence in his attempts to illustrate his commitments, has, for reasons
best known to himself, chosen what sounds remarkably like a genuine hermaphrodite for his hero-heroine.
Flora, born with all the attributes of a baby girl, goes into hospital at the age of thirteen, where it is discovered. suite by chance, that she is a boy. Biologically speak- ing. that is. There follows an immaculate description of Flora's physique, visible and invisible, all of which serves to identify the inter-sex with male chromosomes. Mindful, however, of the fact that Flora's soul is female, on account of the way she was brought up like a girl to enjoy her dresses and revel in her dolls, the doctors make the laudable decision to tidy up her genitalia, dose her with oestrocens and thus give her soul to her body, or vice-versa.
Growing up to be an 'attractive young lady'. Flora is soon encased to John. He accepts the facts of her nhysique and they marry. thereafter adopting two children. Flora's troubles, however, are far from over. The faithless John now comes un against the seven year itch and overcomes his problem by deciding to marry another lady. Which brings us to the crux of the matter. Flora, under the present system, or lack of it. may be turned out of the matrimonial home with nary a penny of support from her husband.
So persuasive is Mr Abse in his expression of this tragic occasion. that it almost does not occur to us to entertain the'thought that had the cood doctors possessed a little less respect for Flora's dresses and dolls, they might _have made the decision to reveal her as a boy. thus allowing him to take his chances in the wide world with the comfort. however specious, that the experiences of Tiresius are not necessarily unenviable to everybody. Unlike the experience of the trans-sexual, upon whose life Mr Abse chose not to reflect, but instead to turn as though to an entirely new subject.
His own personal prediliction, he states. is that if a man has knowingly married a man with a female gender. who has been assisted by an operation, and if both parties went into the marriage with their eyes open, then that marriage should he ended by divorce in precisely the same fashion as anybody else's marriage. 'I do not.' he announces. 'boggle at the idea of a marriage between homosexuals.'
Mr Abse has been the thin end of many a social revolution. And this, if 1 am not very much mistaken, is only another apex.
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