This story came to my attention this morning.  A person on trial for a series of killings is using a unique defense: s/he has had a sex change, is now a woman and so, as Donna, cannot be held responsible for crimes that s/he committed when s/he was Douglas.

Words fail me somewhat, but I wonder if this brings us to the limits of the madness of a world where we are whoever we think ourselves to be and where an operation is enough to justify changing birth certificates.  Let's hope the defense fails (which surely it must, though I tend to agree with Mr. Bumble on the nature of the law as a whole). And if it does, let us hope that the implications of that legal precedent start to feed back into the system and inject just a little bit of sanity into judicial proceedings and then into cultural thinking.   That might be hoping for too much, but stranger things have happened.