Transgendered Judges

This past week, both the Globe and Mail and the CBC news site announced that Canada now had appointed its first transgender judge. Good for us!! Considering that that great bastion of progressive human rights to the south of us have three publically appointed individuals who also have been identified as trans, I guess we Canadians can be assured that we are in the forefront of all things politically correct. How nice for us.

 Please forgive the sarcasm.

Such an announcement raises two interesting and perhaps even important questions. One is why do we care? What makes this announcement even remotely interesting to anyone other than perhaps this newly appointed judge's closest friends and family? A corollary question could be: how long will it take until announcements such as this one are no longer considered newsworthy?

I appreciate that our judicial system needs to be in some way representative of the diversity of our population. I also accept that in the fairly recent past individuals who have expressed sexual identities different from the norm (as established by a puritan, conservative, judgemental and ethnocentric class) were not given a fair hearing in any of our pubic institutions including the courts. However to assume that the appointment of one or even ten transgender judges will do anything to correct the sins of the past or prevent such errors in the future is absurd. Just adding a representative of particular minority, underrepresented  or oppressed group to the bench is not a guarantee of justice in the future. For example in spite of the fact that we have had women sitting as judges for some time and that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is a woman, a  Canadian judge recently asked a rape victim is she could have just kept her legs closed? Clearly we have a long way to go in changing how at least some judges think. A single judicial appointment will have no effect on how the courts or in fact the public thinks.

The second question is why is it any of our business what this one individual has done to reconcile his sexual identity with his secondary sexual characteristics? Clearly there is none. While it might be interesting to know what sort of law this individual has specialized in, whether or not he has some standing in his community as a fair and honourable man or how engaged he is in the broader community, it is absolutely irrelevant as to what his sexual identity is. Furthermore, it seems to me to be an invasion of his privacy. While I hope this particular person is okay with being identified as a transgender person, we should never assume that everyone is as comfortable.

The bottom line is that I don't need to know and I don't want to know. The only conceivable reason why the story was deemed newsworthy is because it makes us look good. It makes it look as if we have done something noble or worthwhile. As a friend said to me - the really important news will be when we can make such appointments and not announce them as being something profoundly radical wonderful.