Hey, Christians.
You don't mind people being LGBT so long as they don't act on it, try to make people approve, and work to get laws passed that gives them special rights and try to make people approve? Teaching little kids it is normal shouldn't be allowed. Why don't they keep in the bedroom?
Well, I don't mind you believing what you like so long as you don't act on it, and work to pass laws that give you special rights,and try to make people approve. Teaching little kids it is normal shouldn't be allowed. Why don't you keep it in your churches?
This is fun, isn't it?
One more. . .
Anyone who de-converts from their present belief/philosophy to Christianity is doing the right thing. Never mind what your family and peers say, just keep hold of the truth. They are in the wrong and are rightly condemned for trying to turn you away from the truth.
Anyone who de-converts from Christianity to another belief/philosophy is evil, a liar who is rightly condemned for making the wrong choice. They should hurry up back as soon as possible.
Bloody brilliant.
Thursday, 26 April 2012
Tuesday, 24 April 2012
GENDER BORN
My Mum had this friend who was a male to female transsexual. She was absolutely brilliant. She was the only person who I know who was more of a misanthrope than me.* But then, she did have more cause.
I saw 'had', because she was found drowned in the canal not far from where she lived. Whether it was suicide or murder or accident no one was sure. Bloody shame, really.
My point?
A lot of people actively disliked my Mum's friend because she was transgender. Not because of what she'd done. Because well, it wasn't natural was it? Or normal. All right, if they choose to chop their parts off it's up to them but they're still a man because it's their bits, innit? Men have penises and women have vaginas. Mutilating their bodies don't make them the other sex and no one should be forced into calling them what they aren't. They shouldn't be on their own with little kiddies and they can't go round expecting people to call 'em 'lady' when they're 'man', or the other way round.
OK, we've established the biggest reason why the majority don't like the idea of people being transgender. Because it isn't normal.
Did you know there is a condition called intersex. Hermaphrodite is the old time word for it. That is, some people have XXY chromosomes or XYY** chromosomes. There is a veritable cornucopia of sex hormonal differences, a horn of plenty of XY combinations. XX for female and XY for male are just the most common.
Very, very occasionally you get people born with two perfectly functioning sets of sex organs, one male, one female.
Mostly, you get those with male organs on the outside and female organs on the inside. Or women with no breasts and large clitorises or men with very tiny penises.
Or people with ambiguous genitalia, who are XX but it's hard to tell what their gender is by looking at their organs. This condition is subject to plastic surgery, a tidying up process, while the subject is young as possible, to make their outer match their inner self, so to speak.***
You get the idea. The whole business of intersex is fascinating and I could fill pages with what I've learned recently, but this isn't the place. Intersex is a recognised birth defect which can sometimes be cured by surgical intervention, or if not, sometimes the subject needs counselling and understanding to help them be who they are.
But suppose. . .
The defect is not in the sex organs but in the brain.
Suppose a foetus in the womb's brain is swamped with male sex hormones but their body is perfectly XX female? Or the other way round. As soon as the subject is old enough to perceive and understand the difference between little and little girls, they know, it isn't a choice, they aren't doing it because they are spoilt brats or want to annoy everybody, they just know, that they are in the wrong body.
Don't laugh. You wouldn't laugh at someone with Down's syndrome or cerebral palsy or diabetes or cystic fibroses, would you? They're all genetic birth defects. You wouldn't sneer at them and tell them to stop being a brat and wait till they were older for treatment and to live with it.
All right you might. But in that case you are totally horrible and you should remove yourself from the gene pool and not leave any evidence you were ever there behind. I mean it.
Back to this kid with the birth defect where their brain is female and their body is male. Just imagine, what absolute, total hell this kid is going through. They just know everything is wrong and they can't understand why. Most kids with this birth defect know as soon as they are old enough to understand, say two or three, something is terribly wrong, and their body doesn't match with what they are.
Have you, has anyone, the right to pass judgement on this kid, to make out they're going through a phase or don't know what they want, when they have a birth defect that can be corrected with medication and then surgery? To say they have no right to have this defect corrected because it isn't natural in your thinking?
If a kid is born with an extra nose or eye or an extra limb or develops body hair so by the time they are three they are covered in downy fur, and they beg to have it removed, and their parents get it done, would it be all right for people to refer to them as 'the kid with two noses, she's got one now, but she was born with two and therefore she will always have two noses' or 'he's hairy really, I know he's had his hair removed, but he is a hairy kid, he's just going around pretending to be not hairy'?
So why is it all right to say transgender people are bogus, they are one sex who have chosen to make themselves look like the other.
Think about it.
One more thing: if a person with a birth defect has it corrected by medication and then surgery, why does that make them unfit to be around children? Would you have a problem with someone with any disability which has been corrected babysitting or teaching your kids? Or is it just because it involves sex on some level?
*I choose not to get on with people, and everyone I meet I am testing in my mind, waiting for them to do something human so I can jettison them and settle deeper into my personal aloneness, once again proven right. She didn't even wait for them to do anything cruel. They had to do something actively charitable towards her for her to accept them. My Mum got on with her because she likes everyone, is the opposite of a misanthrope, she expects humans to do good things, and gives the human race chance after chance to prove itself. Plus, anyone who doesn't fit into society's idea of norm is all right in my Mum's eyes. After all, she did live with an odd ball for forty years.
**Both the late Richard Speck and very much with us Edmund Kemper are XYY chromosome men, and scientists, backed by the FBI, tried to blame their crimes on this. They didn't succeed because the great majority of XYY men look different than the norm but don't get their jollies from raping women and killing them. Or vice versa. Plus, the massive majority of male serial sex killers are straight XY males.
***Guilty.
I saw 'had', because she was found drowned in the canal not far from where she lived. Whether it was suicide or murder or accident no one was sure. Bloody shame, really.
My point?
A lot of people actively disliked my Mum's friend because she was transgender. Not because of what she'd done. Because well, it wasn't natural was it? Or normal. All right, if they choose to chop their parts off it's up to them but they're still a man because it's their bits, innit? Men have penises and women have vaginas. Mutilating their bodies don't make them the other sex and no one should be forced into calling them what they aren't. They shouldn't be on their own with little kiddies and they can't go round expecting people to call 'em 'lady' when they're 'man', or the other way round.
OK, we've established the biggest reason why the majority don't like the idea of people being transgender. Because it isn't normal.
Did you know there is a condition called intersex. Hermaphrodite is the old time word for it. That is, some people have XXY chromosomes or XYY** chromosomes. There is a veritable cornucopia of sex hormonal differences, a horn of plenty of XY combinations. XX for female and XY for male are just the most common.
Very, very occasionally you get people born with two perfectly functioning sets of sex organs, one male, one female.
Mostly, you get those with male organs on the outside and female organs on the inside. Or women with no breasts and large clitorises or men with very tiny penises.
Or people with ambiguous genitalia, who are XX but it's hard to tell what their gender is by looking at their organs. This condition is subject to plastic surgery, a tidying up process, while the subject is young as possible, to make their outer match their inner self, so to speak.***
You get the idea. The whole business of intersex is fascinating and I could fill pages with what I've learned recently, but this isn't the place. Intersex is a recognised birth defect which can sometimes be cured by surgical intervention, or if not, sometimes the subject needs counselling and understanding to help them be who they are.
But suppose. . .
The defect is not in the sex organs but in the brain.
Suppose a foetus in the womb's brain is swamped with male sex hormones but their body is perfectly XX female? Or the other way round. As soon as the subject is old enough to perceive and understand the difference between little and little girls, they know, it isn't a choice, they aren't doing it because they are spoilt brats or want to annoy everybody, they just know, that they are in the wrong body.
Don't laugh. You wouldn't laugh at someone with Down's syndrome or cerebral palsy or diabetes or cystic fibroses, would you? They're all genetic birth defects. You wouldn't sneer at them and tell them to stop being a brat and wait till they were older for treatment and to live with it.
All right you might. But in that case you are totally horrible and you should remove yourself from the gene pool and not leave any evidence you were ever there behind. I mean it.
Back to this kid with the birth defect where their brain is female and their body is male. Just imagine, what absolute, total hell this kid is going through. They just know everything is wrong and they can't understand why. Most kids with this birth defect know as soon as they are old enough to understand, say two or three, something is terribly wrong, and their body doesn't match with what they are.
Have you, has anyone, the right to pass judgement on this kid, to make out they're going through a phase or don't know what they want, when they have a birth defect that can be corrected with medication and then surgery? To say they have no right to have this defect corrected because it isn't natural in your thinking?
If a kid is born with an extra nose or eye or an extra limb or develops body hair so by the time they are three they are covered in downy fur, and they beg to have it removed, and their parents get it done, would it be all right for people to refer to them as 'the kid with two noses, she's got one now, but she was born with two and therefore she will always have two noses' or 'he's hairy really, I know he's had his hair removed, but he is a hairy kid, he's just going around pretending to be not hairy'?
So why is it all right to say transgender people are bogus, they are one sex who have chosen to make themselves look like the other.
Think about it.
One more thing: if a person with a birth defect has it corrected by medication and then surgery, why does that make them unfit to be around children? Would you have a problem with someone with any disability which has been corrected babysitting or teaching your kids? Or is it just because it involves sex on some level?
*I choose not to get on with people, and everyone I meet I am testing in my mind, waiting for them to do something human so I can jettison them and settle deeper into my personal aloneness, once again proven right. She didn't even wait for them to do anything cruel. They had to do something actively charitable towards her for her to accept them. My Mum got on with her because she likes everyone, is the opposite of a misanthrope, she expects humans to do good things, and gives the human race chance after chance to prove itself. Plus, anyone who doesn't fit into society's idea of norm is all right in my Mum's eyes. After all, she did live with an odd ball for forty years.
**Both the late Richard Speck and very much with us Edmund Kemper are XYY chromosome men, and scientists, backed by the FBI, tried to blame their crimes on this. They didn't succeed because the great majority of XYY men look different than the norm but don't get their jollies from raping women and killing them. Or vice versa. Plus, the massive majority of male serial sex killers are straight XY males.
***Guilty.
Saturday, 21 April 2012
ABORTING MORALITY
I've have my attention pulled around to the abortion debate.
Mostly Christian groups Abort67 and 40 Days To Life have upped their picketing of British Pregnancy Advice Clinics, stopping women going in and coming out and offering them leaflets and waving pictures of dead foetuses in the hope of what they believe is saving a life.
Roman Catholic Tory MP Nadine Dorries has tried to slip in a law that makes pro-life pregnancy counselling the only counselling allowed.
I know, I know what I should say. I'm not a Christian. I should pull out that old chestnut 'it isn't alive till it's born' and insist on calling it a 'foetus' instead of an 'unborn baby'. But, well, I have more than one team in this game.
I was born with a life-threatening condition for which there is no cure. In the early 60s when I was born it was still in the guinea pig stage, out of the animal testing and into people testing. That is, I spent almost all of the first five years of my life in hospital, sometimes due to the effects of the treatment fed me to keep me alive. Up to being five, the doctors didn't know if I would survive beyond a certain age.
In fact, I remember, very vaguely, being on the ward in a hospital gown in a cot and attached to a drip feed and a little lad coming up to me and saying he had this illness (can't remember what it is) and knowing he would be dead before he reached his early twenties, and I would probably be, too. Because I hadn't been told any different.
I used to mention it a lot to my Mum, 'will I die before I'm old' and my Mum used to say 'no one know when they are going to die', that is, she wasn't going to lie to me because she didn't know because the doctors didn't know.
Now, today, it is possible to tell the parents of one born with my condition that they will live a normal life span, so long as they put restrictions on their behaviour, the first one, always remember to take your tables at eight am every morning, for ever.
God, that was drummed into me, so much so that I instinctively wake at eight am to swallow my life-giving tablets, even if I've just got into bed a couple of hours before. If I get in from work at seven I can get ready for bed, see to my cats, and then get my head down and I will wake, a silent alarm drummed into me, at eight, for my tablets. My ex was fascinated by this.
Even today, they can't make this condition go away, can't even promise to cut down the number times it will threaten my life, but they can monitor it. And they can test for it while still in the womb.
My point, if you're still with me. Suppose medical science was as it is today but my condition was at the same stage of understanding it was in the 60s. Suppose a pregnant woman, first time mother, is examined and told by a grave faced doctor that the foetus she is carrying has this mysterious illness, barely named, and they can't say if it will be born health and live and thrive, and it will need constant care and medication and be in hospital more than it's out and it could die early and it will die without treatment.
What is to stop that woman aborting someone like me? Getting the disability out of her and then catching again in the hope of replacing me with a healthy baby?
I can function, I'm more or less healthy, I've a good brain, I can contribute. If I could step out of this genetically deficient body and into one that works, like Jake Sully in James Cameron's Avatar, I would, so I could be well, but I'm alive, and can live a life alone, without having to constantly rely on others. But medical science could not have predicted, then, that I was going to be here now.
You see what I'm getting at. Abortion is not cut and dried, and those who say 'it is murder, there is no excuse' have as much right to have their as those who say 'it's up to the woman'. They aren't doing it to annoy people, they genuinely believe it, just like 'it's up to the mother' also believe it. Neither side in the war is fully right.
But you can't tell one side that about the other. Not if you want to be accused of being for the other side and words like 'insane' 'fanatical' 'lefties' 'fascist' 'feminist' 'misogynist' are more penetrating than bullets, and the blood spilled is in the soul and the wounds make the injured more enraged, more sure of their righteousness in this case.
The pro-lifers, well, you're all right so long as you are in the womb. Soon as you're born, you can shift for yourself. Those who are pro-life are more often than not anti social care programmes to give the kid a chance once it comes out screaming into the cold world. No disabled baby can hope for the money provided to make the necessary medications to maintain life.
The pro-choice lot, it's all about 'a woman's right to choose', 'she hasn't to carry it, she can get rid of it if she likes', 'it's a painless, five minute process'. 'Maybe, if it's not going to survive, better if you get rid of it.' Then they pull out the emotion-primed 'in the case of rape or incest' or 'the mother's life in danger' card, flinging it at the stone hard inexorable 'abortion is murder' 'she should have kept her legs closed' opponents.
But both sides are so lost in a blizzard of words and accusations and lies and hysteria they have forgotten the foetus itself.
If you're reading this, and you are disabled, when you get the chance, if you don't already know, and you feel comfortable doing so, ask your Mum what would she would do if you'd been conceived at a time when medical science was up to date with everything except your disability, and the doctors discovered you had this disability and suggested an abortion.
Me? My Mum would have kept me. A life is a life, after all. Even if it's a potential life.
Even if it's old demmick, innocent victim of a cluster of enzymes that didn't switch on and missed a hormonal connection when the body was being formed.
Mostly Christian groups Abort67 and 40 Days To Life have upped their picketing of British Pregnancy Advice Clinics, stopping women going in and coming out and offering them leaflets and waving pictures of dead foetuses in the hope of what they believe is saving a life.
Roman Catholic Tory MP Nadine Dorries has tried to slip in a law that makes pro-life pregnancy counselling the only counselling allowed.
I know, I know what I should say. I'm not a Christian. I should pull out that old chestnut 'it isn't alive till it's born' and insist on calling it a 'foetus' instead of an 'unborn baby'. But, well, I have more than one team in this game.
I was born with a life-threatening condition for which there is no cure. In the early 60s when I was born it was still in the guinea pig stage, out of the animal testing and into people testing. That is, I spent almost all of the first five years of my life in hospital, sometimes due to the effects of the treatment fed me to keep me alive. Up to being five, the doctors didn't know if I would survive beyond a certain age.
In fact, I remember, very vaguely, being on the ward in a hospital gown in a cot and attached to a drip feed and a little lad coming up to me and saying he had this illness (can't remember what it is) and knowing he would be dead before he reached his early twenties, and I would probably be, too. Because I hadn't been told any different.
I used to mention it a lot to my Mum, 'will I die before I'm old' and my Mum used to say 'no one know when they are going to die', that is, she wasn't going to lie to me because she didn't know because the doctors didn't know.
Now, today, it is possible to tell the parents of one born with my condition that they will live a normal life span, so long as they put restrictions on their behaviour, the first one, always remember to take your tables at eight am every morning, for ever.
God, that was drummed into me, so much so that I instinctively wake at eight am to swallow my life-giving tablets, even if I've just got into bed a couple of hours before. If I get in from work at seven I can get ready for bed, see to my cats, and then get my head down and I will wake, a silent alarm drummed into me, at eight, for my tablets. My ex was fascinated by this.
Even today, they can't make this condition go away, can't even promise to cut down the number times it will threaten my life, but they can monitor it. And they can test for it while still in the womb.
My point, if you're still with me. Suppose medical science was as it is today but my condition was at the same stage of understanding it was in the 60s. Suppose a pregnant woman, first time mother, is examined and told by a grave faced doctor that the foetus she is carrying has this mysterious illness, barely named, and they can't say if it will be born health and live and thrive, and it will need constant care and medication and be in hospital more than it's out and it could die early and it will die without treatment.
What is to stop that woman aborting someone like me? Getting the disability out of her and then catching again in the hope of replacing me with a healthy baby?
I can function, I'm more or less healthy, I've a good brain, I can contribute. If I could step out of this genetically deficient body and into one that works, like Jake Sully in James Cameron's Avatar, I would, so I could be well, but I'm alive, and can live a life alone, without having to constantly rely on others. But medical science could not have predicted, then, that I was going to be here now.
You see what I'm getting at. Abortion is not cut and dried, and those who say 'it is murder, there is no excuse' have as much right to have their as those who say 'it's up to the woman'. They aren't doing it to annoy people, they genuinely believe it, just like 'it's up to the mother' also believe it. Neither side in the war is fully right.
But you can't tell one side that about the other. Not if you want to be accused of being for the other side and words like 'insane' 'fanatical' 'lefties' 'fascist' 'feminist' 'misogynist' are more penetrating than bullets, and the blood spilled is in the soul and the wounds make the injured more enraged, more sure of their righteousness in this case.
The pro-lifers, well, you're all right so long as you are in the womb. Soon as you're born, you can shift for yourself. Those who are pro-life are more often than not anti social care programmes to give the kid a chance once it comes out screaming into the cold world. No disabled baby can hope for the money provided to make the necessary medications to maintain life.
The pro-choice lot, it's all about 'a woman's right to choose', 'she hasn't to carry it, she can get rid of it if she likes', 'it's a painless, five minute process'. 'Maybe, if it's not going to survive, better if you get rid of it.' Then they pull out the emotion-primed 'in the case of rape or incest' or 'the mother's life in danger' card, flinging it at the stone hard inexorable 'abortion is murder' 'she should have kept her legs closed' opponents.
But both sides are so lost in a blizzard of words and accusations and lies and hysteria they have forgotten the foetus itself.
If you're reading this, and you are disabled, when you get the chance, if you don't already know, and you feel comfortable doing so, ask your Mum what would she would do if you'd been conceived at a time when medical science was up to date with everything except your disability, and the doctors discovered you had this disability and suggested an abortion.
Me? My Mum would have kept me. A life is a life, after all. Even if it's a potential life.
Even if it's old demmick, innocent victim of a cluster of enzymes that didn't switch on and missed a hormonal connection when the body was being formed.
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