By Molly Slag
Fortunately for us, the world is binary. Truth value is binary. Of the four kinds of sentences in the English language—declarative, exclamatory, imperative, and interrogatory—only one, the declarative, has a truth value, and that truth value is always either true or false. Existence itself is binary. Every entity that can be conceived either exists or not. Computer science, too, is binary. Computer science depends upon the fact that electrical circuits are either closed or open. And, of course, human sexuality is binary. Each human being is either male or female. Moreover, every cell in the human body is either male or female.
Regarding human sexuality’s binary nature, Psychiatrist Miriam Grossman, M.D., writes in Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness, “Each of the 70 trillion cells making up (the human body) is stamped ‘XX-female’ or ‘XY-male,’” (p 224.) Ergo, surgery cannot change a person’s sex. Working with that core fact, let’s take the logic a bit further.
In law, a tort is a civil wrong that causes a claimant to suffer loss or harm. Fraud, a form of tort, is an “intentional misrepresentation or concealment of an important fact upon which the victim is meant to rely, and in fact does rely, to the harm of the victim.” The essence of fraud is intentional deceit. Deceit, in turn, comes in two flavors: misrepresentation and concealment.
Imagine the case of twelve-year-old Susie, who, with encouragement from her teacher, wants to be a boy. After Susie starts cutting herself and is clearly and unquestionably deeply unhappy, even to the point of suicide attempts, her parents, at their wit’s end, take Susie to a psychiatrist. He tries valiantly to deal with Susie but eventually refers Susie to a surgeon, along with offering the parents a stark choice: “Do you want a dead daughter or a live son?”
The top and bottom surgery is expensive and requires informed consent from both Susie and her parents (a hollow act because Susie cannot legally give consent, so her sign-off is meaningless). To obtain this consent, the surgeon gently describes the top and bottom surgery and its pros and cons.
Does the surgeon ever tell Susie or her parents that the surgery will make her a boy? Probably not in so many words. Do the parents or Susie ever directly ask, “Will this surgery make Susie a boy?” Maybe, but if they do, the answer they receive will be equivocal yet tinctured with sufficient assurance to keep alive their spark of hope that this surgery will make Susie a boy, ending this episode of excruciating agony.
With this kind of equivocating, it’s most likely neither Susie nor her parents could later be able to testify in court that the doctor explicitly stated, “Susie, we are going to make you into a boy!” However, the Cleveland Clinic website comes astonishingly close to that, stating, “Gender affirmation surgery refers to procedures that help people transition to their self-identified gender.”
They say this knowing that most people don’t distinguish between “sex” and “gender”—which is reasonable given that the words historically have been understood to mean the same thing. Again, this mush language cleverly moves the parents’ hands toward the bottom of the consent form while maintaining plausible deniability.
After Susie has been put to the horror of top and bottom surgery, only to realize that, cosmetic surgery notwithstanding, she’s still a girl, her parents may be inclined to sue the surgeon for fraud. Imagine now that the case goes to trial, and the plaintiffs’ first witness is the doctor.
Susie’s Attorney: Doctor, before the top/bottom surgery, was Susie a boy or a girl?
Surgeon: She was a girl.
Susie’s Attorney: Post-surgery, is she a boy or a girl ?
Surgeon: She is a girl.
Susie’s Attorney: Doctor, did you ever tell Susie and her parents that, after the surgery, she would be a boy?
Surgeon: Certainly not.
Susie’s Attorney: Did you ever tell Susie that, after the surgery, she would still be a girl?
Surgeon: Well, perhaps not in so many words.
After excusing the surgeon, the attorney then calls Susie to the stand as the next witness:
Susie’s Attorney: Susie, did the doctor ever tell you that, after the surgery, you would still be a girl?
Susie: No.
So, there we have it. Unless the jurors are in DC or San Francisco, they know that Susie and her parents hoped the surgery would change her sex, that the doctor knew that’s what they hoped, and that the doctor knew it was impossible but did not tell them so. He concealed from them the key central fact that suffuses the entire episode, a concealment that constitutes fraud.
Leading credulous families to believe that their emotionally fragile child can become something other than his or her biological sex through surgery is fraud and should be treated as such in courtrooms across America.
Fiat Justitia! (Let Justice Be Done)
