Thursday 22 March 2007

The Perfect Adelaide Story

Over at Tim Blair's place, a tragic story, yet one that has provoked scorn and derision.

From the Courier-Mail :
A Former Adelaide choir singer who had a sexual relationship with a teenage transvestite has been jailed for at least nine months.

Matthew Scott Barrowman, 38, was found guilty in the South Australian Supreme Court of four unlawful sexual intercourse charges and two counts of indecent assault.

Barrowman, a former soloist with the South Australian Police Credit Union choir and a St John's Ambulance officer, was today sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison, with a non-parole period of nine months.

Justice Michael David said Barrowman's offences, over a five-month period in 2004, were committed against a boy aged 15 at the time.

"The victim presented at trial as female and although he was, and still is, biologically male, I am told that he intends to have gender reassignment surgery in the near future," Justice David said.

"Your victim was clearly a dysfunctional, disturbed person who had been thrown out of his home because of a number of problems, including his own confusion about his sexuality," Justice David told Barrowman.

"He had been in a relationship with another man and you befriended him after that relationship had ended."

Justice David told Barrowman the victim was a "willing participant in all the sexual behaviour and it is also clear that your victim was not without sexual experience".

"However, the law is clear that irrespective of that, he was of such an age that your behaviour was forbidden," he said.

Here's my comment:
Here’s a similar story. It’s about a girl who was born with a cleft palate. Now she looked terrible, with a hole in her face connecting her mouth to her nostrils. At school she was teased and tormented, bullied, and called a freak.

Home was no better, and just past age 12, she was thrown out on the streets, partly for being so ugly, partly for being so emotionally crippled. She had been made dysfunctional by all the years of torment, with a really poor self-image.

With no other means of income, she peddled her body to try to save for plastic surgery. You see, there’s a lot of Men out there who really get off having sex with freaks. She was lucky, and found a Sugar Daddy - but that relationship went sour.

She got really good with makeup and cosmetic putty, and looked normal, so at age 15, when she found another guy to look after her, she went for it.

But he got caught and sentenced to 6 months for having sex with a minor, and she got called “dysfunctional and vulnerable”. Meanwhile the headlines called her a “monster” rather than a victim of a congenital condition. The article got FARKed, and even was quoted with some scorn and derision on some right-of-centre blogs.

Of course in our society, those born with surgically-correctable congenital defects are given sympathy, not treated as freaks. Or are they?

Harry Benjamin’s Syndrome - a congenital Intersex condition meaning a male-pattern brain in a female body, or a female-pattern brain in a male body, and about 1/4 of the time associated with other congenital Intersex conditions, is about as common as having a cleft palate. Like having a cleft palate, it’s not a mental illness (though the persecution and ostracism, and the constantly having to conceal the symptoms can cause that), it’s a biological condition. Like having a cleft palate, it’s surgically correctable. Unlike having a cleft palate, it’s not so obviously diagnosed, and the treatment sterilises the victim.

Please read the Fark discussion, there are some accurate comments there.

Please also realise that some of us, even RWDBs, were born Transsexual. A very, very few of us are able to live with it. A tiny, vanishingly small percentage have other Intersex conditions meaning we partly transition anyway, without treatment.

And For God’s Sake, have some sympathy for a 15 year old girl who was thrown out of her home for being born the way she was, and driven batshit crazy by the persecution she’d received. You might spare a thought for the guy in prison too: because she was Jailbait, and I bet she was good at appearing legal. People like her end up dead, dead, dead if they aren’t convincing.

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