HILLARY and Bill Clinton's daughter Chelsea has expressed her disgust on Twitter at a far-right group's anti-transsexual campaign on the side of a bus, which has been impounded in Madrid on its tour of Spain on the grounds of incitement to hatred.
The ultra-Catholic platform Hazte Oír ('Make Yourself Heard') calls itself defenders of the 'traditional family unit' and has spoken out about what it considers to be 'the gay dictatorship' – despite the fact that homosexuality and transsexuality are completely separate and unrelated issues.
Chelsea Clinton retweeted a link to the story about Madrid's having banned the campaign, adding: “Please don't bring these buses to the US (or anywhere.”
The daughter of the north American Democrat candidate, who lost the winter elections to Donald Trump, regularly tweets about social and humanitarian issues, including domestic violence and first and third world healthcare deficit problems.
She is an author, teacher and human rights advocate, well-known internationally in her own right – not only through her famous parents – and her comments come within days of her mother's political polar opposite having scrapped laws allowing transsexuals to use the toilets of the gender they identify with.
Hazte Oír's orange bus shows male and female cutouts and bears the slogan: “Boys have a penis. Girls have a vulva. Don't let them fool you. If you're born a man, you're a man. If you're a woman, you'll carry on being one.”
Transsexuality, also known as 'gender dysmorphia', is a relatively rare condition affecting 0.8% of the population and is where the person does not identify with the gender of his or her biological sex.
From puberty, this can be treated with hormones to effectively change the person's gender, and a reassignment or 'sex change' operation can be carried out from 18 – although some trans people choose not to go through the ordeal and expense of surgery, simply taking hormones and living as the gender they identify with.
Transsexuality is typically diagnosed in very earliest childhood, and the youngest person in Spain to officially change her name and sex on her identity records did so at age four.
This means campaigns such as those by Hazte Oír can be extremely damaging to children, who already suffer either actual or feared rejection and psychological trauma as a result of their situation.
Happily, those successfully treated, whether or not reassigned, are generally content in themselves once the 'problem' of being in the wrong body has been solved either completely or to a level they can live with.
