News

By Hilary White

  SHEFFIELD, May 23, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Muslim husband from Sheffield England, has launched a complaint that an all-woman driving school has sent a man to teach his wife to drive. The teacher in question, Andrew Sherdley, who now calls himself “Emma”, is legally considered a woman by the British government. 

  Sherdley, who was married with two children, has obtained a legal birth certificate and “gender recognition certificate” even though he has yet to undergo surgery. He called the complaints “hurtful, offensive and deeply upsetting”. The man who complained, who remains unnamed in the press, called the school and accused management of assigning his wife a male teacher, “disguised as a woman” and “with a deep voice”, because he was a Muslim. In traditional Muslim communities, it is considered improper for a married woman to be alone with a man who is not a relative.

  Joanne Dixon, the owner of Laugh n Pass, said, “Here at Laugh n Pass we says each of our female instructors promise to be friendly, professional and patient – that is exactly what Emma is and for her to be subjected to abuse and threats is simply intolerable.” The man is threatening to sue the school because it presented Sherdley as a woman. The school maintains the claim that it has an entirely female teaching staff.

  The practice of “gender reassignment” or sex-change therapy comes from the popular opinion among psychiatrists that there is a distinction between a person’s sex and his “gender”. The theory, promoted heavily by the homosexualist movement, is that sex is genetically and hormonally determined from conception, while gender is culturally conditioned and is therefore malleable. Hence the theory of “gender dysphoria” where a person feels as though he was born with a sex that conflicts with his “gender”.

  Paul McHugh, Director of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and Psychiatrist-in-Chief of the Johns Hopkins Hospital believes that the acceptance of transexualism and gender reassignment therapy is a “misdirection” for the field of psychiatry. Classifying transsexualism as merely one symptom in a larger complex of personality disorders, McHugh had long believed that psychiatrists should treat such patients with the talking cure, not radical, irreversible surgeries.

  McHugh was among the voices protesting this month when Boston Children’s Hospital announced it was opening a clinic for “transgendered” children. Dr. Norman Spack, a paediatric specialist at the hospital, launched the clinic that offers younger patients counselling and drugs to delay puberty. This, he says, allows patients more time to decide whether they want to make the change.

  Writing in First Things magazine in 2005, McHugh bluntly identifies the “transgender” condition as a psychological disorder treatable with talking therapy.

  But the concept of a nearly infinitely malleable “gender” has been identified as primarily a political, not a medical concept. It is the result of certain philosophical and political trends that became popular in the 1960s and ‘70s with the growth of the radical feminist movement. Since then this notion of multiple “genders” has flourished through the work of radical feminist lobbyists at the United Nations who have worked for years to downgrade traditional notions of gender and the family.

  A long-time family campaigner at the United Nations, Babette Francis, told LifeSiteNews.com in 2003 that radical “genderist” lobbyists at the UN now count as many as eleven “genders”. 

  Francis said, “There were asexual, homosexual, bisexual, hermaphrodite, transvestite, transgendered. And the ‘transgendered’ further divided into those who have had the hormones but not the surgery, those who have had both hormones and surgery, and those who have had the surgery but are not happy and want to go back.”

  Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:

  Children’s Hospital Boston Offers “Sex Change” to Adolescents
  https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/apr/08042107.html

 Interview With Babette Francis on the UN’s Destruction of the Concept of Gender
  https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2004/mar/040323a.html