‘My name’s Josie... and I have a penis’

[Butterfly]

'My name's Josie... and I have a penis'
Spiked
By Patrick West      
Friday 23 October 2009


http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7606/


The issue of sex-change has the tendency to bring out the cynical side in people. There is sometimes the unfortunate temptation to assume that transgendered people are somehow wrong in the head, or frauds, or just freaks.

Thanks to highly dubious methods employed by Stalinist countries during the Cold War, in an effort to cheat at Olympic Games, some of the most high-profile transgendered people in living memory have simultaneously been disreputable impostors. The caricature of the grotesque, butch East German 'female' athlete was parodied in the 1984 film Top Secret! (1). Yes, that was a quarter of a century ago, but as the case of Caster Semenya - the South African athlete who was just this summer accused of being a man - showed, there remains a suspicion that some change their sex principally for deceitful purposes. Ergo, the transgendered are subconsciously associated with charlatanism.