From the title alone, I'm quite sure this post will raise some hackles. I also admit upfront that I am a practicing Christian, but I will not be bringing my religious beliefs into this article. In fact, to argue against something on religious grounds is to argue based on a moral opinion, and I'm not doing that because this is a matter objective fact can more than argue against just fine.
Now, before I continue, I also want to say I'm an absolute advocate of free will and personal conscience, and it goes both ways. If someone wants to be transgender and has decided of their own free will it's the best choice for them, then so be it, I have no right to complain. However, I reserve the right to regard them as what they are, someone who cosmetically changed their appearance to match a sexual appearance based on another gender, but they still remain the gender they were born as.
In fact, here's objective argument number 1: It is unethical to make someone pretend a person known to be born male is female when their DNA will tell the truth. Personal feelings are irrelevant to the objective facts in this case, especially if you are compelled for legal or medical reasons to tell the truth about someone. Lying is a crime in these cases, and it is universally recognized in all countries that value civil liberty that no human being should be compelled to make a false statement against their will.
Ergo, to humor a transgender person by calling their "preferred pronouns" is just that. There is no legal requirement in the US (where I reside) saying the freedom to express oneself is abrogated for the sake of someone else's personal feelings. In a broader sense, no person anywhere that recognizes the truth is an objective statement of fact can or should be compelled to give a false answer to any matter, there is no legally recognized right to force anyone to say black is white, and if there is one, then that is a violation of a person's right to exercise personal conscience.
Another thing those who push transgenderism say that is false is that children can and should be able to take puberty blocking drugs as a safer alternative to mental and physical harm of not being able to deal with gender dsyphoria.
While I'm not going to argue the finer scientific points because I admit I'm not well versed in them, anyone who knows basic biology knows delaying puberty is unwise. Even if the body later tries to make up the difference, the adolescent period when puberty occurs is very critical to proper development of someone as an adult, and if this interfered with even temporarily, not all the difference can or will be made up, the fact humans are just as subject to entropy and the aging process as any other living being means that it is physically impossible to resume all the functional development of the onset of puberty after a certain point, the person who chose to delay that period will be stunted to some degree developmentally, the only difference is how severe said stunting will be depending on how long the blockers were used.
In a broader sense, any attempt to stop the developing of the human body in some way will have some sort of long-term effect on how that human body develops, this is a basic concept virtually any physician or a layman who can understand the basic concepts of that field would learn in any health class.
Another argument that makes no sense is that becoming transgender is not a sex-based decision, or it is not the primary motive for all people of that nature.
This is objectively not true for several reasons. Any attempt to alter the body to conform to a specific desired sexual set of characteristics is based on human sexuality and it's perception to the party in question and to others. Second, in the event the party in question want to "pass" as that gender, it requires they be able to make another party perceive them as presented in a certain manner. For example, a man wanting to pass as a woman must be able to make unwitting men believe they actually are a woman and/or make women believe they are in the company of another actual woman.
This involves the successful deception of human sexual norms if this is to be completely successful. If a man presenting as a woman wants other men to truly believe they are a woman, then the deception must pass their sexual perceptions of that party attempting to come off as a woman.
Ergo, even if this is not necessarily based on sex as in as a fetish or for purposes of sexual intimacy or arousal, this is still going to involve sexuality as humans are aware of it for the whole concept to work.
Finally, the cutting, mutilation, or surgical manipulation of body parts does not change no matter the reason. If you have a fully functional arm and cut it off, you cut off your arm. If your genitals were normally functioning prior to having them manipulated or altered with surgery, then you did irreparable changes to those genitals. While it's possible to survive such surgical changes, they are not something that needed to be done to a normally functioning body part if the change makes them less functional than before, especially by their irreversible removal or mutilation.
On a related note, getting silicon in your chest does not give you female breasts if you are a man, you are a man with silicon in your chest. A woman getting her breasts hacked off and replaced with a simulation of a male chest does not make her male, just a woman with a simulacrum of a male body but has not stopped being a woman internally.
Basically, surgery to render a perfectly functional body part less functional than what it was is not a corrective surgery, it's a mutilation and should be regarded as such. It's cosmetic mutilation given other names to hide what it really is, but remains a purposeful surgical disfigurement of the original body of the party in question.
As an addendum, one could apply this to a vasectomy or some other operation to render genitalia infertile, and it would be true in those cases as well that the end result is to remove the function of those body parts to some degree, so even for those who are not transgender but have a surgery to render them infertile in some manner would be subject to similar logic of reducing the natural function they were originally in possession of.
The key difference, though, is that there can be legitimate health reasons like cancer to excise fertility while still leaving the genitals more or less intact, but if that is not the case, then it is merely cosmetic mutilation.
There are other arguments one can make that can be based entirely on things provable by objective fact anyone with a knowledge of human physiology and psychology can argue, but as the above should show, while I'm still not going to stand in the way of anyone who makes an informed decision to become transgender, neither will I pretend objective fact is anything other than what it is, and if they are truly making that decision with open eyes and a clear conscience, they will have to make that decision knowing those truths do not change for them in any event.
No comments:
Post a Comment