UK Embraces Transsexuals
Last November, Vicar Peter Stone, tall and slim, wearing his chestnut hair in a neat bob, sporting a navy pencil skirt, floral scarf and black court shoes, stepped into the limelight. Having sat down on one of the bishop’s dining chairs, he told reporters in Britain that he had returned to work the day before as a woman named “Carol Ann” after having a sex change operation, fully condoned by the Church of England. “Miss” Stone added that she was still developing “her look.”
Respected British newspaper the Telegraph reported, “It was the first time Stone, 46, had appeared in public since he was given leave by Bishop Rogerson to take three months off to undergo ‘gender redesignation.’ On Sunday he will deliver his first sermon as Carol Stone at St Philip’s, Upper Stratton, Swindon, where he has been vicar since 1996. All but four of the 80-strong congregation agreed to welcome their priest back as a woman” (Nov. 28, 2000).
As Bishop Rogerson talked to the congregation about giving his blessing to allow Stone to carry on preaching after his sex change, there was spontaneous applause. Later, the bishop admitted, “It is not a decision I have had any sleepless nights about”—a sentiment which, after the operation to supposedly change his gender, Vicar Stone, father of an 18-year-old girl by his third marriage, said was firmly echoed by his family. “My daughter has been tremendously supportive. She is doing her A-levels at the moment and so she has a lot on her mind. Her mother wants my happiness.”
These days, transsexuals like Peter Stone are becoming increasingly accepted by mainstream society. For example, in most of Europe, men and women who have had sex-change operations are now allowed to legally marry, and in some cases even adopt children.
What’s more, sex-changed soldiers can now remain in active service in the UK army, following a recent European Court of Justice ruling that it was unlawful to discriminate against transsexuals. This recent decision “follows a controversy over a planned sex change by Sgt. Maj. Joe Rushton, 38, who now calls himself Joanne. Rushton, of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, is a former army boxer who has served in Ulster and Bosnia” (Electronic Telegraph, Aug. 2, 1999).
Not only that: In Britain, people can now even get “free” sex change operations—paid for with taxpayers’ money, on the National Health Service!
Why the relatively sudden change in policies and views?
Unquestionably, the constant publicity given to liberal pressure groups canvassing homosexual and lesbian-related issues—especially since the raving 1960s—has wreaked tremendous, lasting damage on the perception of core, family values in Western society in a way which would have been unimaginable before World War ii. Surely the fact that Britons have come to so readily embrace transsexuals and transvestites as “normal” individuals is a clear barometer of how far into the cesspool morals have plunged.
Frankly, within the British Isles, from whose shores homosexuals, effeminate men and other sexual perverts used to flee “with their shame” to escape the long arm of the law at the beginning of the 20th century, the subject of homosexuality no longer stirs more than a ripple.
