Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

by Helen Joyce

For Ashley, the hearing in 1969 was an utter humiliation. ‘Intercourse using the completely artificially constructed cavity could never constitute true intercourse’, Lord Justice Ormrod ruled. Her deportment was ‘reminiscent of the accomplished female impersonator’. Most devastatingly, he concluded that ‘the respondent is not, and was not, a woman at the date of the ceremony of marriage, but was, at all times, a male’. It was irrelevant, he said, that Corbett had known Ashley was transsexual. Only the union of a man and a woman constituted marriage. And Ashley and Corbett were both men. The ruling established in British law that, at least for the purposes of marriage, man and woman were purely biological terms. Since no operation could change biological sex, no transsexual would be allowed to marry in their new sex role. Since the National Health Service was already carrying out the occasional sex-change operation, that meant the British state was willing to pay for a man’s body to be reshaped to approximate a woman’s, but not to enable that person to marry, since a union with a woman would be practically and socially impossible, and one with a man would be unlawful. (At the time the obvious solution – to allow same-sex marriage – was inconceivable.)