Please Explain This One

Please Explain This One

Chastity Bono has completed the transition to being male. In some ideal world, what Chastity/Chaz does in private would be completely irrelevant to anyone else.  But unfortunately, the continual yammering and hammering by the transgender crowd for governmental action means that nothing is really private anymore: the personal is the political.

This transition raises several interesting questions about "Chaz" Bono and her/his relationship with "partner" Jennifer Elia.

1. If Chastity is now a man, then he is having sex with a woman (Jennifer Elia).  Does that mean Chaz Bono has changed from being a lesbian to a heterosexual man?

2. If Jennifer Elia is now having sex with Chaz Bono, a man, does that mean that Jennifer Elia has changed from being a lesbian to a heterosexual (or at least a bisexual)?

3. Wait a minute: I thought that the claims that you could change your sexual orientation from gay to straight were just lies.  But here we have two lesbians changing their sexual orientation!  Or is Chaz not really a man?

4. A number of trouble makers like myself have long suspected that there is a connection, for at least some homosexuals, between childhood sexual abuse, and adult sexual confusion.  Even those championing homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle have sometimes made damaging admissions in this area.  If a woman preferring another woman is a natural, completely healthy and normal orientation, isn't there something just a bit weird about Jennifer Elia being a lesbian, now is "partner" to an ersatz man?  Isn't this exactly what you might expect if Elia's sexual orientation was the result of a traumatic or destructive relationship with a real man?

The Transgendered Elementary School Kids of Maine

The Transgendered Elementary School Kids of Maine

A reader sent me a link to this April 13, 2010 Fox News news story and interview about the Maine Human Rights Commission's proposal to eliminate sex-specific restrooms in elementary schools. This April 14, 2010 Bangor (Maine) Daily News article confirms that this was actually under discussion, but there are apparently a few people living in Maine still who haven't bought into the whole transgendered lie:

AUGUSTA, Maine — The Maine Human Rights Commission is backing away from controversial plans to issue new guidelines for how schools should accommodate transgender students.

Commission members decided Monday to cancel a public hearing on the issue and to shelve, at least temporarily, work on a guidance document called “Sexual Orientation in Schools and Colleges.”

The proposed guidelines have sparked a heated debate over what steps, if any, schools should take to accommodate students who identify with the opposite gender rather than with their biological sex. The issue becomes particularly thorny when dealing with questions over transgender students’ use of locker rooms and bathrooms and ability to play on athletics teams.

This isn't a matter of lunatic bureaucrats worried about issues that aren't real:

The guidance is intended to help schools follow the anti-discrimination laws within the Maine Human Rights Act and to avoid complaints against schools filed with the commission. The Penobscot County Superior Court is reviewing a commission ruling against the Orono School Department, which had denied a transgender boy from using the girls bathroom.

Keep in mind that "transgender boy" likely means a boy who has not had a sex change, but is dressing as a girl and expects everyone to treat him as a girl.

As I have pointed out in the past, this whole transgender and sex change thing makes homosexuality seem positively normal. There seems to be no stopping point on the road to destruction.

Not Waiting Until 18

Not Waiting Until 18

I was told by a reader that for all the fuss in Britain recently when a boy came back to school as a girl, that this only hormone therapy and dressing up as a girl; that surgery waits until they are 18. Apparently not in Germany. From the September 21, 2009 Independent (one of the left-wing newspapers in Britain that doesn't impress me with the quality of its reporting on other matters):

Petras started hormone therapy at 13 and in 2006 appeared in a German TV documentary which drew attention to the plight of transsexuals and German laws which prohibit sex change operations on people under 18.

Her campaign led to her being given legal permission to undergo the reassignment operation in November last year, when she was 16. "I went to a lot of psychologists and many of them agreed that it would be really important for me to have the surgery as soon as possible and not wait until I was 18," Petras said in a recent interview with the German media. "Because I had so many psychologists on my side, I got the legal permission I needed."

She says she has no regrets about her surgery and insists that the operation did not really change her, although she admits to feeling a soaring sense of deep satisfaction when the doctors had finished their work. "When I first saw my body I was just so happy," she said. "I finally knew that I was complete."

She enjoyed singing and – thanks to the early age at which she started hormone therapy – her voice never broke. She started making videos of herself singing Alicia Keys songs in 2007. But nowadays she writes, performs and co-produces all of her own music, using her past as an inspiration for her lyrics. She has just signed a deal with the top German record producer Fabian Gorg.

I do find myself wondering how much of this, "I was born a girl" might be tied to this:

Kim Petras is quietly moving on from the issue which defined her adolescent years. For Kim began life as Tim, a little boy growing up with two older sisters in the German city of Bonn.

Lots of boys grow up as the only boy in a family of girls, of course, and don't become convinced that they are really females born in the wrong body. But I find myself believing that makes more sense than the notion that somehow Tim Petras was born female, trapped in a male body.

There's another case now in Britain, involving a nine year old boy who just returned to school as a girl. From the September 19, 2009 Daily Mail:

A boy of nine has returned to school as a girl in what is believed to be Britain's youngest gender swap.

Children at the school in southern England were told the child had left and been replaced by a female pupil.

The child came dressed in girls' uniform with long hair tied in a pink ribbon.

The case comes after it was revealed yesterday that a 12-year-old boy had started his first term at secondary school in southern England as a girl.

Some parents at the school have criticised staff for not informing them before telling children about the gender change at a special assembly.

Now, the nine year old is too young to start on hormone therapy, but I find myself wondering what is being put in the water to make parents go along with this idiocy. Part of why I am so skeptical of the whole transgender craziness--aside from the some of the articles and studies that I have previously linked to--is that young kids are highly impressionable. As I explained several years ago:

About twenty years ago, my wife and I attended a class about child sexual abuse. My wife and I had run into an astonishing and depressing number of adult survivors (this was California, remember), and we decided that we wanted to know more about abusers and the problems of the victims. Most of the other students were in the health professions, and I was almost the only guy in the class.

Anyway, over lunch we got to talking to a woman in the class whose husband today would doubtless be considered "transgendered." He wanted a sex change, because he didn't feel like he really belonged in a male body. His wife was distraught about this; she explained that her husband had grown up in a home with a macho Marine father, and a mother who had desperately wanted a little girl, not a little boy. As a result, Mom had made him wear dresses (at least at home), had painted his nails, etc. until he was old enough to refuse. Gee, why do you think he was conflicted about his sexual identity?

Oh Yeah, This Makes Sense

Oh Yeah, This Makes Sense

From the September 18, 2009 Sun, one of the British tabloids (which make most American newspapers look pretty respectable), so take it for what it is worth:

A BOY aged 12 turned up at school as a GIRL - after changing sex during the summer holidays.

Teachers called an emergency assembly to order fellow pupils to treat him as female.

The lad, whose parents have changed his name to a girl's by deed poll, arrived in a dress with long hair in ribboned pigtails. He is preparing for sex-swap surgery.

Angry parents told yesterday how their kids were left tearful and confused after school staff announced the boy pupil was now a girl.

They said the head teacher should have informed them in advance of the "sex change" so they could prepare their sons and daughters and inform them about gender issues.

They added that the school's failure to do so had left the boy to suffer cruel taunts and bullying.

One mum said: "They behaved appallingly by throwing this hand grenade into the room and then leaving the inevitable questions about it for unprepared parents.

"Maybe we could have explained sexual politics and encouraged our kids to be more sensitive if we'd had a chance to be involved."

Over the summer holidays his parents changed his name to a female one by deed poll. He is preparing to undergo hormone treatment and surgery - and could become the world's youngest sex-swap patient in the coming years.

Oh yes, sex change surgery makes so much sense--and especially for someone that age! I've said it before: sex change surgery makes homosexuality look downright normal and healthy.

UPDATE: A reader points out that some people regard circumcision as bad. This is irrevocable, lifelong mutilation of a confused young boy.

Long Shot? I Could Be Surprised

Long Shot? I Could Be Surprised

This Associated Press article makes this transgendered candidate for mayor of Nampa, Idaho, sound like an utter impossibility:

NAMPA, Idaho (AP) - About a block from a street concert in downtown Nampa, Melissa Sue Robinson strolls with purpose into a trendy coffee shop - the unofficial liberal embassy of this sprawling Republican stronghold in southwest Idaho.

Dressed in a cream-colored pantsuit, a political flier clutched in one hand, a soft brown leather purse in the other, she orders a mocha and takes a seat as a group of teenagers stare at her from near the door.

The 58-year-old was born male and still carries the slightly larger-than-an-average-woman build of Charles Staelens Jr., who legally changed his name and underwent surgery in 1998 to become a woman.

She also kept his voice.

He was married for 17 years, owned a construction company, and was a Republican when he ran for city council in Lansing, Mich., where he was raised with his identical twin brother until their parents divorced in the 1960s.

Now she says she is celibate, a telecommunications worker who is "just another cog in the machine," and a Democrat who in 2004 became the first transgender to run for the state legislature in Michigan.

This farming and manufacturing town of about 83,000 residents, where a sugar factory and a local hospital are among the biggest employers, doesn't seem to be all that concerned that Robinson previously lived as a man.

But they are scratching their heads that a newcomer, a non-Republican, would run for mayor.

...

"It doesn't seem like her chances are high - or there at all," said Joseph Shafer, a boutique owners in Nampa. "We're one of the most conservative counties in the state. I think we're one of the most conservative in the country."

Shafer also works as a barista at the Flying M coffee shop, where Robinson met on a recent evening with her campaign manager, Leah McManus, a coworker and 32-year-old mother of two. Robinson's ex-wife, Linda, serves as campaign treasurer.

The two were married for 17 years and still live together.

"People are going to say I haven't been here long enough, but if you get me behind the mayor's desk I'm going to run this city," said Robinson, a self-described activist. "Right now, it's a good ol' boys club."

Idaho has this reputation for being very conservative, but I think it is really not a deserved reputation. Many of the "conservatives" here are inconsistent libertarians with only a very limited support for traditional moral values--they take a "wide stance" with respect to what people do in the privacy of airport restrooms. I discovered in the my election campaign last year for state senate that being an outsider (someone who hasn't lived here for several generations) is an enormous disadvantage. But Idaho Republicans are so intent on proving that they aren't homophobes that they might turn out to vote for him/her just to prove it.

What's Wrong With This Sentence?

From the September 12, 2007 Idaho Statesman:

While in prison, Spencer cut off her own testicles with a disposable razor blade in an apparent effort to rid her body of testosterone. Spencer survived the self-castration, and prison doctors prescribed testosterone replacement therapy - refusing to prescribe the estrogen that Spencer wanted.

Separate from the issue of Spencer's problem--"Gender Identity Disorder" (GID)--this reporter has decided to go along with Spencer's definition of himself as "her" in a sentence that refers to one of the most clearly male defining parts of one's body.

I shudder to think what will happen when the psychiatric profession recognizes "Species Identity Disorder," and reporters can't figure out whether to refer to someone as he, she, or it. I was going to observe that once SID is recognized, how will a "former-human-who-now-identifies-as-a-lizard" have the right to sue in court? But I'm sure by then, law professors will have rationalized that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the rights of non-humans as well as the transspecied.

Transgender Politics

I can't claim to be surprised. I don't know if Professor Bailey's book is junk science or not--but I do know that the fact that certain people get offended by it doesn't make it wrong. From the August 21, 2007 New York Times:

Earlier this month, members of the International Academy of Sex Research, gathering for their annual meeting in Vancouver, informally discussed one of the most contentious and personal social science controversies in recent memory.

The central figure, J. Michael Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern University, has promoted a theory that his critics think is inaccurate, insulting and potentially damaging to transgender women. In the past few years, several prominent academics who are transgender have made a series of accusations against the psychologist, including that he committed ethics violations. A transgender woman he wrote about has accused him of a sexual impropriety, and Dr. Bailey has become a reviled figure for some in the gay and transgender communities.

To many of Dr. Bailey’s peers, his story is a morality play about the corrosive effects of political correctness on academic freedom. Some scientists say that it has become increasingly treacherous to discuss politically sensitive issues. They point to several recent cases, like that of Helmuth Nyborg, a Danish researcher who was fired in 2006 after he caused a furor in the press by reporting a slight difference in average I.Q. test scores between the sexes.

“What happened to Bailey is important, because the harassment was so extraordinarily bad and because it could happen to any researcher in the field,” said Alice Dreger, an ethics scholar and patients’ rights advocate at Northwestern who, after conducting a lengthy investigation of Dr. Bailey’s actions, has concluded that he is essentially blameless. “If we’re going to have research at all, then we’re going to have people saying unpopular things, and if this is what happens to them, then we’ve got problems not only for science but free expression itself.”

To Dr. Bailey’s critics, his story is a different kind of morality tale.

“Nothing we have done, I believe, and certainly nothing I have done, overstepped any boundaries of fair comment on a book and an author who stepped into the public arena with enthusiasm to deliver a false and unscientific and politically damaging opinion,” Deirdre McCloskey, a professor of economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and one of Dr. Bailey’s principal critics, said in an e-mail message.

The hostilities began in the spring of 2003, when Dr. Bailey published a book, “The Man Who Would Be Queen,” intended to explain the biology of sexual orientation and gender to a general audience.

“The next two years,” Dr. Bailey said in an interview, “were the hardest of my life.”

Many sex researchers who have worked with Dr. Bailey say that he is a solid scientist and collaborator, who by his own admission enjoys violating intellectual taboos.

In his book, he argued that some people born male who want to cross genders are driven primarily by an erotic fascination with themselves as women. This idea runs counter to the belief, held by many men who decide to live as women, that they are the victims of a biological mistake — in essence, women trapped in men’s bodies. Dr. Bailey described the alternate theory, which is based on Canadian studies done in the 1980s and 1990s, in part by telling the stories of several transgender women he met through a mutual acquaintance. In the book, he gave them pseudonyms, like “Alma” and “Juanita.”

Other scientists praised the book as a compelling explanation of the science. The Lambda Literary Foundation, an organization that promotes gay, bisexual and transgender literature, nominated the book for an award.

But days after the book appeared, Lynn Conway, a prominent computer scientist at the University of Michigan, sent out an e-mail message comparing Dr. Bailey’s views to Nazi propaganda. She and other transgender women found the tone of the book abusive, and the theory of motivation it presented to be a recipe for further discrimination.

If only it stopped with being compared to a Nazi and ferocious criticism!

Dr. Conway and Dr. McCloskey also wrote letters to Northwestern, accusing Dr. Bailey of grossly violating scientific standards “by conducting intimate research observations on human subjects without telling them that they were objects of the study.”

They also wrote to the Illinois state regulators, requesting that they investigate Dr. Bailey for practicing psychology without a license. Dr. Bailey, who was not licensed to practice clinical psychology in Illinois, had provided some of those who helped him with the book with brief case evaluation letters, suggesting that they were good candidates for sex-reassignment surgery. A spokesman for the state said that regulators took no action on the complaints.

In an interview, Dr. Bailey said that nothing he did was wrong or unethical. “I interviewed people for a book,” he said. “This is a free society, and that should be allowed.”

But by the end of 2003, the controversy had a life of its own on the Internet. Dr. Conway, the computer scientist, kept a running chronicle of the accusations against Dr. Bailey on her Web site. Any Google search of Dr. Bailey’s name brought up Dr. Conway’s site near the top of the list.

The site also included a link to the Web page of another critic of Dr. Bailey’s book, Andrea James, a Los Angeles-based transgender advocate and consultant. Ms. James downloaded images from Dr. Bailey’s Web site of his children, taken when they were in middle and elementary school, and posted them on her own site, with sexually explicit captions that she provided. (Dr. Bailey is a divorced father of two.) Ms. James said in an e-mail message that Dr. Bailey’s work exploited vulnerable people, especially children, and that her response echoed his disrespect.

I can't say that I'm surprised by stunts like this. I've written about a lot of controversial stuff over the years: gun control; free markets; capitalism; why racism (all kinds of racism) are bad. But there's only one topic that has produced obscene phone calls to my kids, attempts to get me fired from jobs, threats of violence--and my expulsion several years ago from the Volokh Conspiracy blog (for remarks that I had made eight years earlier). That topic is homosexuality. There is no tolerance for certain points of view in the academic world today, and anyone who questions whether homosexuality is really just an "alternative lifestyle" is outside the pale--unlike anti-Semites, people that believe the CIA blew up the World Trade Center, and whatever else passes for acceptable leftist wisdom these days.

Transgendered Bathrooms Again

I mentioned yesterday the "transgendered" crowd at Colorado University demanding more public restrooms for the horribly confused. I am impressed with the response from readers on this. Whole Wheat Blogger pointed me to an article by him in 2003 about this insanity at the University of Chicago:

Members of Feminist Majority, Queers & Associates, and the Center for Gender Studies organized the panel as part of the Coalition for a Queer Safe Campus. "Going to the bathroom is a moment where definition is very important in choosing a door," said Mary Anne Case, one of the panelists.

Whole Wheat Blogger went on to quote one of the participants in this conference about the lengths to which the "transgendered" will go--to go:

Red Vaughan Tremmel, another panelist, said that she knew someone who was making a cross-country road-trip and bought an RV to avoid using public bathrooms. "At first, my reaction was, 'Oh wow, what a great idea,' but then I thought, 'Wow that's sad that someone would have to go to such lengths to feel comfortable,'" she said.

There was a time when that sort of overreaction would be properly recognized as a serious emotional problem. Now, it is part of the homosexual movement--a group whose concerns and sensibilities are far more important to judges than those of the majority of Americans. What used to be mental illness is now a political movement--and a powerful one, at that.

Oh yes, and then there's this piece of craziness from Britain:

he Lord Chancellor is facing accusations of political correctness after banning the word “homosexual” from official documents in his department.

Lord Falconer has ordered for the word to be removed on the grounds that it “may be considered offensive.”

The ban comes after a report commissioned by the Department for Constitutional Affairs to analyse how well diversity rules are obeyed when selecting judges.

Academics from the Queen Mary college compiled the report and concluded, “It is important to recognise that the term homosexuality is considered inappropriate by many gays and lesbians today.”

They claimed that gay charity Stonewall regards the word as derogatory, “It originates from a medical definition when same-sex attraction was construed as mental illness.' The report said “it should no longer be used in official documentation. Stonewall recommends that ‘lesbian, gay and bisexual’ is a more appropriate term.”

Transgendered Bathrooms Again

Everytime I hear a homosexual activist insist that they are just like straight people, except for who they love, I see a news story like this one:

BOULDER, Colo. -- A transgender task force wants to bring more "all-gendered" bathrooms to the University of Colorado-Boulder campus, the Boulder Daily Camera reported in its Monday editions.

"It's about creating more welcoming spaces," Bryce Abelson told the newspaper.

Abelson identified himself as "gender queer," a person who is neither male or female. He said he doesn't feel comfortable in the men's bathroom and gets strange looks when he walks in the women's bathroom.

Task force members believe the costs of changing current male and female bathrooms will be minimal because only the signs need to be changed on existing bathrooms. One bathroom already exists outside the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center.

Can you imagine the uproar if straight people started to complain that they didn't "feel comfortable" using the same bathrooms or locker rooms as homosexuals?

Is there anyone that thinks this "transgendered" garbage is anything but an indication of a pretty serious psychological problem?