posted on February 14, 2004 07:27:06 PM new
LindaK, I've begun this thread with you in mind, in the hope that I can explain -- in a way that your rocks will roll with, heh -- the difference between personal opposition/morality/whatever-you-want-to-call-it and interference in the destiny of others under religious, or any other, pretexts.
Personally -- as in, I, Pat Smith -- believe (as opposed to know for a fact that I'm willing to foist off on others) that surgically altering one's sex is wrong. I believe (as opposed to know for a fact that I'm willing to foist off on others) that it's a way for people to discount their own lives; to say, "I don't like the world in the skin I'm in", and, rather than contemplate seriously just why they're in the skin they're in, they opt for an external fix. (And, in case you're wondering, I think Botox and cosmetic surgery are just as outrageous.) I believe (as opposed to know for a fact that I'm willing to foist off on others) that it's tantamount to saying, "God screwed up."
Where you and I differ as human beings on this one earth is in how we let our beliefs shape/run our lives. (And I'm going to *assume* that you're opposed to transgenderism based upon my understanding of your overall 'straight-arrow' approach to life. Please correct me if I'm wrong in that assumption.)
Whereas I would never let my beliefs corral someone else's decisions about their own life, their own body, you feel that you've every right to horn in and prevent people who aren't cookie-cutter replicas of what you deem 'normal' from living the lives they choose.
The questions I have for you are: Why? How did you decide that you had the right to 'vote' on other people's behavior?
posted on February 14, 2004 08:17:07 PM new
If I may, Pat... I'm wondering why you and others feel the need to catagorize things as either being right or wrong? Doesn't that just promote the idea that you only have two options to choose from?
posted on February 14, 2004 08:23:32 PM new
Not now, Krafty, I'm trying to speak in popular terms!
Edited to add: Krafty, I actually *do* live a life of absolutes; good/bad, right/wrong; up/down. What I *don't* do -- and never will -- is demand that anyone else live by my rules; in fact, I will march in the streets if need be to support the rights of others, even when I, personally, am not in agreement with their issue(s) -- with the exception of NAMBLA! Above all, I know I'm not perfect; I have broken my own rules many times. Probably this is a good thing, as I am plagued by Pride and frequently need to be taken down a few rungs. In realizing my own limitations on more occasions than I care to enumerate, heh, I have grown in compassion and acceptance of people and, most importantly, myself...
posted on February 15, 2004 05:53:46 AM new
I'll give it a shot Pat, and while I respect your feelings on the transgender issue, I disagree.
Humans routinely alter their physical characteristics to better interface and interact with the environment they live in. Glasses, contacts, artificial arms, legs, hip replacement, pacers, implantable defibrillators for SDS (Hah, that one cracked me up the first time I heard it in SICU), to just mention a few examples. Gender reassignment allows a person born into or made into [1] the "wrong" sex to interface and interact with the world in a vastly improved way.
[1] Babies with ambiguous gentalia have been routinely made female despite chromosonal gender
putinn
You have the right to an informed opinion -Harlan Ellison
[ edited by snowyegret on Feb 15, 2004 05:54 AM ]
posted on February 15, 2004 10:50:52 AM new
I was watching a program on tv lastnight that was about transgenderism and it got me to thinking about all the debate going on about same sex marriages and the pending laws on the definition of marriage. On this program there were male and women married couples where the male suddenly decided to become a female. Not just cross dress, but to go all the way genitalia speaking. So my question is if the laws are made to define marriage as a legal union between a man and a woman only, then won't these couples that were previously married as a male and a woman but after surgery become woman and woman married be suddenly breaking the law??
A while back I saw a case where a guy had a sex change opperation to become a female and then after a couple of years she decided that she didn't like her new look or how it felt to be female and wanted to be changed back to a male. The doctors told her that it couldn't be done. I searched the internet for the story but I couldn't find it. I guess she realised that she liked females afterall but now she was stuck with her decision to become a female. So I guess all she accomplished was to transform herself from a male into a homosexual female.
posted on February 15, 2004 10:57:07 AM new
Well, since you asked Pat... I don't always see things as black & white, right or wrong. That kind of judgement is man-made, as far as I can tell, and it's too confining for me personally.
posted on February 15, 2004 03:38:25 PM new
Here's the thing though, Snowy: artificial
limbs, glass eyes, implantable defibrillators ( -heh, I like that one too)do not alter one's essential physical/social identity. (I could go skiing one day and lose a limb. If I was fitted with a prosthesis that enabled me to walk (and ski) again, I'd still be 'Pat Smith', female, from California.) And before I go on, please understand that I don't have some 'holy roller' dogma in my head about this; what I think comes from my mind and nowhere else. And I'd be the first to admit that I'm not the most evolved thinker on the planet.
Back in the '70s, I worked at the South County Women's Center. You know, divorce support groups, battered wife aid, lesbian rap, and lots of steering committee meetings about whether to use paper or styrofoam coffee cups. The most contentious meeting by far though, was when the issue of transgendered people arose. 'Delia'
and 'Gloria', lovers, had been lesbian rap participants some years earlier but hadn't been heard from in a long while. One night, they showed up -- as 'Ed' and Gloria. Ed had a male physique, a mustache, and a very deep voice. Maybe you can already see where this story is headed... half the lesbians in the room threw a fit -- "Hey, no men allowed!" -- and a brouhaha ensued that ultimately required the steering committee to make a real decision. It was determined that Ed, even though he'd once been a lesbian, was now a straight man, so he was barred from attending lesbian rap. So was his lover, Gloria, who'd once been a lesbian but was now a straight woman in a relationship with Ed.
All of which is incidental to a further
explanation of my personal position about gender reassignment. I truly believe that we are born in the age we are, in the body we are, in the country we are by design. I lean more toward a karmic design as opposed to one that has Jesus sitting in the sky issuing passports to earth. So, in my economy, you are Snowy for a reason beyond your parents' love; you were born female for a reason beyond whether or not you like it or there was some gaia principle at work; you were born in this era for a reason beyond whether there have been or will be 'better times' in which to live. To me, this life is fundamentally a spiritual journey, one that came with certain built-in aspects, i.e.: my particular parents, my native country, my gender, but all the rest of it -- of Life -- was and is wide open. In that context, I honestly believe that people who opt for gender reassignment are missing an opportunity to advance spiritually, karmically -- not because it's somehow 'morally' wrong, but because it rules out the possibility of greater understanding of one's intended reason for being, in this life, in this body. These bodies we're born in, in my view, are the containers, the vessels, by which we are meant to experience this life. When we go to the very core of those vessels and alter them, we alter what it was we were meant to learn in them spiritually. As painful as it would be, (and no meaningful spiritual journey is easy) I do believe that those who seek gender reassignment would become their true selves, in the skin they're in, if they spent those same five years it generally takes to qualify for the surgery in deep contemplation of what Life really is, and what their 'container' really is. Honestly, I think gender reassignment is a bottom-rung-of-the-spiritual-ladder thing to do, but not 'morally' wrong. It's an external 'fix' of an inside
journey that one is unwilling to undertake. Which is why I don't stomp around
legislative corridors demanding that transgendered people be discriminated against on paper, by law. I do hold sacred the right of each person to shape his own destiny, even when my personal beliefs balk at the unnecessarily circuitous routes some travel to manifest it.
Course, you *could* make the argument that gender reassignment *is* one's karmic destiny, and maybe you'd be right. As I said, I'm not the most evolved thinker and what strikes me as a 'spiritual
shirking' of sorts may in fact be the very remedy Jesus came up with for those whose passports flew across His desk in such a hurry that He checked the wrong box...
posted on February 15, 2004 03:55:36 PM new
Yellowstone, I think I saw that same program. The person was woefully unhappy, and now had the external fix of gender reassignment to target for her misery, when it seemed to me that if he'dthought deeply about the consequences and not had the surgery, he'd've reconciled himself -- powerfully -- to the life he was given, and learned to live it fully. Now he is neither man nor woman -- just like 'Ed' in my story above, who still felt more comfortable in a group of lesbians than at a sports bar, yet was eschewed by the lesbians for being a man and intimidated by Budweiser men because he was not comfortable in his new skin.
posted on February 15, 2004 06:10:05 PM new
Pat, I could make that argument, but you already made it for me.
So, I'll merely say that, especially in this age of transplants, birth control, artificial insemination, dialysis, and finicky neurosurgery, biology is not destiny, which is the basic premise of your karmic argument. That also goes for the transgendered.
You have the right to an informed opinion -Harlan Ellison
posted on February 15, 2004 06:36:22 PM new "I do hold sacred the right of each person to shape his own destiny, even when my personal beliefs balk at the unnecessarily circuitous routes some travel to manifest it."
That sums up my feelings on the subject.
I agree with snowyegret too and yellowstone made a good point about the operation being irreversible.
