- The court, a child and a change of gender
- The Age
- 15/04/2004 Make a Comment
- Contributed by: admin ( 100 articles in 2004 )
The court's ruling raises a doubt about consent. That doesn't mean it wasn't right.
When a person decides that it is not possible to live happily as a member of the gender into which he or she was born, and therefore seeks to be medically "reassigned", the choice is momentous and not lightly made. If that person happens to be legally a child, the complexities and risks involved in making it are even more daunting.
Gender reassignment techniques involve several stages of hormone treatments and, later, surgery. Not all of these treatments are reversible, and their rationale is controversial: their effect is to alter a body structure, making it easier to live as a person of a particular gender, but they cannot turn someone into a fertile man or fertile woman. Some critics of reassignment argue that it is the wrong remedy for the patient's complaint, which should be treated by psychotherapy.
Those who administer reassignment are expected to determine carefully that a person seeking it is fully informed about what will happen, and is in a proper state of mind to make the decision. This is not easy to discover when the patient is an adult; it is scarcely surprising, then, that a Family Court ruling that a 13-year-old girl may begin reassignment treatment has caused alarm in some quarters, and prompted calls for government intervention.
Neither the fact that gender reassignment is controversial, however, nor the notorious difficulty of knowing whether an adolescent has given informed consent, imply that the court's decision was wrong, or that it is not the appropriate forum in which to decide such cases.
There is certainly a real question as to whether the 13-year-old concerned, known as Alex, fully understands that she is about to embark on a treatment that, in its later stages, will be irreversible and which, as an adult, she may come to regret. But with that question must be considered the circumstances of Alex's present life, which is reportedly one of deep unhappiness.
Since early childhood she has thought of herself as a boy and tried to live as one, and the physical changes associated with puberty have only increased her distress and her desire to change her gender. Adolescent unhappiness, by definition, is not measured by an adult perspective on life and sometimes what an adolescent may think of as unbearable would not seem so to an adult. But, precisely for that reason, anyone who must deal with an adolescent's misery needs to consider very carefully what the consequences of disregarding it may be.
If the Chief Justice of the Family Court, Alastair Nicholson, had ruled that Alex must wait until she was legally an adult before beginning reassignment treatment, the question about adolescent understanding would have been avoided. But what if, as a result of that decision, Alex eventually became so unhappy that she did herself harm? There is no simple rule or test by which such dilemmas can be resolved. They require a prudential judgement, based on the circumstances of each case, and that is what the court system is for.
When a person decides that it is not possible to live happily as a member of the gender into which he or she was born, and therefore seeks to be medically "reassigned", the choice is momentous and not lightly made. If that person happens to be legally a child, the complexities and risks involved in making it are even more daunting.
Gender reassignment techniques involve several stages of hormone treatments and, later, surgery. Not all of these treatments are reversible, and their rationale is controversial: their effect is to alter a body structure, making it easier to live as a person of a particular gender, but they cannot turn someone into a fertile man or fertile woman. Some critics of reassignment argue that it is the wrong remedy for the patient's complaint, which should be treated by psychotherapy.
Those who administer reassignment are expected to determine carefully that a person seeking it is fully informed about what will happen, and is in a proper state of mind to make the decision. This is not easy to discover when the patient is an adult; it is scarcely surprising, then, that a Family Court ruling that a 13-year-old girl may begin reassignment treatment has caused alarm in some quarters, and prompted calls for government intervention.
Neither the fact that gender reassignment is controversial, however, nor the notorious difficulty of knowing whether an adolescent has given informed consent, imply that the court's decision was wrong, or that it is not the appropriate forum in which to decide such cases.
There is certainly a real question as to whether the 13-year-old concerned, known as Alex, fully understands that she is about to embark on a treatment that, in its later stages, will be irreversible and which, as an adult, she may come to regret. But with that question must be considered the circumstances of Alex's present life, which is reportedly one of deep unhappiness.
Since early childhood she has thought of herself as a boy and tried to live as one, and the physical changes associated with puberty have only increased her distress and her desire to change her gender. Adolescent unhappiness, by definition, is not measured by an adult perspective on life and sometimes what an adolescent may think of as unbearable would not seem so to an adult. But, precisely for that reason, anyone who must deal with an adolescent's misery needs to consider very carefully what the consequences of disregarding it may be.
If the Chief Justice of the Family Court, Alastair Nicholson, had ruled that Alex must wait until she was legally an adult before beginning reassignment treatment, the question about adolescent understanding would have been avoided. But what if, as a result of that decision, Alex eventually became so unhappy that she did herself harm? There is no simple rule or test by which such dilemmas can be resolved. They require a prudential judgement, based on the circumstances of each case, and that is what the court system is for.
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