I don’t think there is any controversy about asserting that when everything works right the X and Y human chromosomes determine who is a boy and who is a girl. This is demonstrated in all but a minute fraction of a percent of childbirths. The products of this majority of births are capable of procreation and this is how we all got to be here. I mean only that it has to work this way or any species, human or other, will extinguish.
But things do not always work right. Some male offspring are sterile and some female offspring are barren. Some people are born with arms and legs missing, extra or missing fingers, blind, or with cystic fibrosis or achondroplasia. These are tragic birth defects. In each of these cases the abnormality is a birth defect and I don’t think there is any controversy about this.
But when a normal male body, with a Y chromosome, large larynx, beard, broad shoulders, big hands and feet, a penis, testicles, body hair and all the other trappings of masculinity has the misfortune of being born with feminine mind, the situation, in the present political narrative tells us the entire male anatomy is concluded to be the defect and the mind is argued to be the entire normality. Odd, isn’t it? This also is a tragic birth defect but in this one case (and its converse homologue) all the rules of normalcy are stood on their heads. Why does this peculiar aberration in thinking occur?
A major lesson we once learned from Rene Descartes has been forgotten by some of us. It’s called “dualism.” It simply recognizes that the mind and body are two different things, hence: dual. The ancient Greeks recognized that the body and mind can, in rare cases, be mismatched. They described this as a man inside a woman’s body and, of course the converse of a woman inside a man’s body. These anomalies are very much with us today.
The aberration in current thinking is that the physical body is believed to have nothing to do with its gender. But in reality it has everything to do with its gender. Reproduction is entirely a physical/chemical process. The mind only motivates and reacts emotionally to it.
But that’s a sterile, rational approach. The emotions are the judge and punisher of everything they doesn’t like and that can include the gender of the body. Thus the conflict when they don’t match can be emotionally agonizing for the individual.
The individual’s emotionality can over-rule the individual’s rationality. Craving emotional equanimity the individual may, and often does, deny the reality of the body and proclaim himself/herself to be entirely the conflicting gender. What is different today is that there is actually a movement defending this irrationality and it has become politically significant. Rationality is cast aside in favor of trying to make people feel better. Even if feeling better requires a denial of reality that borders on psychotic.
Emotional feelings are not physical reality. The undoing of all these well-intended exertions is that in reality things are what they are. A person with a mind of one sex and a body of the other is exactly that. It is not a complete male or female but an aberration which is, again, a birth defect. There is an objective reality out there no matter how loudly, violently or hysterically you try to deny it. Oscar Wilde left us a word of wisdom on the subject when he wrote, “One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.”
Then there are the efforts made to try to make the body conform, or at least appear to conform to the desires of the mind. There is a thing that is nonsensically labeled as sex reassignment surgery. It is, in the words of Dr. David Reuben in his book Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex: But Were Afraid to Ask, just a mutilation of the external genitalia. It creates an appearance. The appearance helps people who want to pretend they are the opposite sex to do that pretending. There is nothing wrong with that if it works for the gender confused, transgender, transsexual, whatever you want to call it. But it does not change a male into a female or vice versa. It only creates a male or female with disfigured genitalia or other organs. A man with his testicles removed is not a woman. He is a eunuch. Look it up. A woman with her breasts removed is not a man. She is a woman with a double mastectomy, nothing other than that.
But let’s take the inquiry a little farther and see what it would take to more closely approximate a genuine reassignment of sex. First, of course, you would remove the unwanted, external genitals as is done now. Then you would install the wanted counterparts, a working vulva and vagina on the woman-to-be and a real penis on the man-to-be. Then the functioning reproductive organs would have to be installed, properly functioning ovaries and testicles, respectively. Since the person is already grown this wouldn’t cause the desired developments that accompany puberty so the larynx and other fully developed organs would have to be modified; this would include skeletal re-proportioning including hand and foot reduction or enlargement as appropriate. The subcutaneous fat would have to be redistributed all over the body and of course the relative width and mass of the shoulders and hips would have to be altered.
Maybe there’s a shortcut to all this. Let’s find a man and a woman, both of whom want to change their sex and swap their brains. That would come closer except that the man would have a woman’s brain and the woman would have a man’s brain and yes, they are different too. (That difference is labeled sexual dimorphism and there is volume of medical literature describing it.) And now for the ultimate challenge: we must find that unique center of identity, the thing in the human entity that identifies each of us as himself or herself, the origin of self-awareness, and find a way to swap it so that each person will still be himself/herself. Now the transition is complete and maybe, just maybe, someday there will be a way to do this. Then it will be truly possible for a person to change gender, assuming each can find a person of the opposite sex who is willing to have his/her body.
Things are what they are
Meanwhile people with this particular birth defect will have to compromise and live with the condition as best they can. They can avail themselves of whatever surgeries, clothes, physical appliances they want and can afford and never be reproached for their condition or efforts to cope with it and adjust to it. They are of course free to pretend and fantasize. A person living in such a self-imposed fantasy is not to be envied but that person is himself/herself the appropriate one to make that decision. But the mandated psychosis of pretending that a man has been changed into a woman must not be imposed on the rest of us, if we are to consider ourselves a sane society. The rest of us are privileged, or rightful, to see that in fact things are what they are.
Discrimination? We have discrimination and have had it from time immemorial in the supervision of sports. Boys and men have separate competitions from girls and women. The reason for this is that we are at least sane enough to recognize that men hit baseballs, golf balls and each other harder than women do. Men and women have competitions in most sports today but we don’t make women compete with men because that would be the same as not letting them compete at all. And men who have been partly modified to be more like women and the converse can only fairly compete in their chromosomal gender. The reason is exactly the same as the original rule regarding gender separation in physical sports. The genitally disfigured, hormone injected, effeminately dressed and perfumed men and boys still hit those baseballs, golf balls and each other harder than women and girls do. It’s nature. The profound anatomy of one sex cannot be changed to the other. Sports, being physical competition, is an anatomical competition. The mind that disagrees with its body is not competing; it’s the bones and muscle, strength and stature that are competing. It’s also the male versus female chemistry and injecting one doesn’t remove the other.
And it is the worst imaginable lapse of etiquette to make the ladies compete physically with men. Shame on anyone who contributes to that rudeness. Where are your manners?
Postscript: I wrote this on Thursday, March 28, 2019. Things have changed a bit since then.
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