You can’t change your sex (it’s in your chromosomes). All you can do is mutilate yourself. I don’t think a healthy society encourages that.
A serious society would expel anyone who tries to change their sex and then the other confused souls would get the message.
Chaim Amalek writes:
It is impossible not to notice that the New York Times has been giving massive coverage to the championing men who choose to dress up as women and use their public bathrooms. “Transgendered” is indeed the new Black. Not that “Black” is completely out of fashion at the Times. There is always room for the story of the innocent black man who is gunned down by a cop somewhere. Not so much for the innocent white man who is gunned down by a copy, or a kid who is raped and mutilated by homosexuals (e.g., Jesse Dirkhising).
Let’s get serious. Real women do not want to see or even think of seeing men in women’s clothing, unless it is part of a theatrical production. Our elites are desperately trying to mold humanity into their twisted image of what it should be.
I do not mean anything personal by my comments. I am simply describing how men, most men, really are. And I think just about every man reading this knows it to be so, even if women (and men) might wish things were otherwise. A fifty year old man is like a fifty year old homosexual in this respect. Neither one is hot to have sex with a fifty year old woman, and the reason in each case is basic biology. It is just how we are, gay or straight. And just as a progressive woman (or man) would never think to criticize a 50 year old gay man for not being hot for 50 year old women, so too should she not criticize 50 year old straight men for not being hot for 50 year old women. I know, there are always exceptions, but this is how life is for the vast majority of us. And I should think that such a convergence would be a cause of cheer for champions of gay rights.
WASHINGTON — A 17-year-old transgender youth, Leelah Alcorn, stunned her friends and a vast Internet audience in December when she threw herself in front of a tractor-trailer after writing in an online suicide note that religious therapists had tried to convert her back to being a boy.
In response, President Obama is calling for an end to such therapies aimed at “repairing” gay, lesbian and transgender youth.
Steve Sailer writes: According to the President of the United States, transgenderism is Good, but trans-transgenderism is Bad, as is, apparently, genderism.
COMMENTS TO STEVE SAILER:
* He/she was a teenager. Unfortunately, teenagers have a high suicide rate. And they can latch onto any rationale.
* So, this is where we are now.
A mentally ill person wants to be the opposite sex. A counselor suggests that the person consider accepting the natural sex. Mental patient commits suicide and blames counselor’s suggestion of just going natural.
n=1
Based on this sample size, the President (not a psychiatrist nor a peer committee of such) suggests as a matter of public policy and professional practice that mental patients not be counseled to accept their natural sex rather to embrace their delusions of being the opposite sex.
Are we serious?
This is at least as stupid as any religion.
Is the president now some kind of high priest who advises all people on all matters whatever without regard to being entirely unqualified?
* There was an interesting article over The Atlantic today about Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), basically an anthropologist interviewed a bunch of women in countries where it is common practice and they were basically OK with it.
Of course, most Americans, and in particular feminists, are horrified by this kind of ritualized genital mutilation and I am, too, but the argument is that these women are brainwashed and don’t really want to be doing this, it’s the culture that is making them do it.
At the same time, the overall culture in the US is endorsing the idea that, if individuals believe they are trapped in the body of other gender, then the self-mutilation that must inevitably accompany “transition” is laudatory. And what does that say about our culture?
* They never even consider for a second that it might be a bad idea to groom troubled teenagers to assume that their depression means that they are permanently gay or really the opposite sex, and therefore they will only be happy with either tons of meaningless and degrading nastyness in bathroom stalls or else expensive and irreversible surgery.
So when a troubled kid kills himself after being egged on by people in the internet, his parents are blamed not enablers. The enablers and hecklers on the internet are encouraged by the President of the United States himself, against the parents.
Its hard to see how our society could become any more loathsome.
* First, it may be that the social difficulty of being transgendered caused an otherwise-sane person to commit suicide, but wouldn’t a more parsimonious explanation be that this individual had serious mental issues that manifested themselves as both gender drama and suicidal action?
Second, I would think that the Internet Age provides plenty of friendly affirmation to people who need it. Note that Alcorn had “friends and a vast Internet audience.” I assume that refers to some kind of blog or whatever. So Alcorn apparently had no shortage of people providing support and agreeing with her gender-related views. Question: is there any amount of sympathetic attention or applause that would have dissuaded Alcorn from committing suicide?
If not, then maybe this tragedy has more to do with the unfortunate internal state of a troubled person than with the purported bigotry of some therapist. And maybe we shouldn’t give that troubled person a heckler’s veto on national policy.
* In general, the “I was born this way” argument is a pretty powerful one. Leaving aside the question of how true it is in the specific case at hand, it’s a direct and compelling statement.
The problem with it, from a progressive perspective, is that it’s a fundamentally conservative argument. After all, it implies that some characteristics of people may be impervious to social engineering. Some may even be (gasp!) hereditary.
The result is a conventional wisdom that says some identities are good and natural and unchangeable while others are the socially constructed products of false consciousness. Who-whom.
* I’ve always thought that a better way to sell conversion therapy is that instead of turning a homosexual into pure straight, that they would just try to attain bisexuality. This wouldn’t require sexual attraction to be unlearned, which seems a hard goal to attain, but merely to expand sexual attraction to the opposite sex.
To use a metaphor, you can’t unlearn a language you know, but you can learn a new language.
From a Christian point of view, you just want people to be able to function in a happy opposite sex marriage, and this only requires bisexuality, not a total absence of same sex desire. From a leftist point of view, expanding sexual options is easier to defend than suppressing sexual desire.
Is it possible to expand sexual attraction in this way? Here’s one obvious example:
Men learn to find older women attractive as they themselves get older. Very few teenage boys find 45 year old women attractive, but many 45 year old men learn to adapt themselves. Social pressure plays a big role in this – older men are expected and pressured into finding older women attractive and are also very strongly discouraged from acting on their attraction to much younger women.
I think this a process of expanding sexual attraction – men never stop finding 18 year old girls attractive, but they learn to find older women attractive too (to some degree), like learning a new language.
So this seems a clear cut case of social expectations manipulating sexual attraction, and doing so in a socially constructive way.
And it’s one feminists will have hard time arguing against. They are already committed to the idea that beauty is socially constructed, and they hate it when older men pursue younger women.
To a lesser extant race is another example, I think many men have had the experience of learning to appreciate the beauty of women of various races. You’ll hear men describe how they had never noticed, say, Asian women, until one beautiful Asian girl came along and from then on they kept noticing others. This is a learning process, once you learn it you don’t usually unlearn it. Race isn’t as big a difference as sex, but it’s something.
* Just because your brain is wired incorrectly does not mean society should affirm that situation. If someone is wired to believe they are Napoleon, that doesn’t mean we agree with them send them off to conquer Russia with an army. I mean doing any less is not accepting and affirming who they are are.
The belief that chopping off/attaching organs and rearranging body parts is going to help someone with mental problems is flawed. It’s the equivalent of removing a person’s eyes because they see illusions. The same way it is flawed to accept a sexual orientation that is harmful to the people involved and naturally disordered. This doesn’t mean hunting them down to abuse them or necessarily trying to remake them against their will. It does mean not humoring them and telling them they are great, normal, and wonderful. They aren’t, they are damaged in some way and should be offered help if they want it.
“Imagine if someone was trying to force you to become gay with therapy, you would go nuts.”
You see homosexuals trying to convince heterosexuals of it all the time.
