Recently, I wrote and posted a blog article designed to illustrate what I believed, and still believe, to be the absurdities of the claims of transgendered people, who essentially argue that God mistakenly placed their brains in bodies belonging to the wrong gender. Some transgendered people are willing to try to learn to live with that discrepancy (sometimes because they have little choice, since they can't afford to pay the high costs associated with sex "reassignment", which is seldom if ever covered by insurance companies, which correctly regard it as cosmetic and medically unnecessary surgery). Others argue that it is the duty of surgeons to correct God's whopper of a mistake by surgically altering their bodies so that they have what they believe to be the correct genitalia, more or less.
(I say "more or less", because I've never heard of a person getting a sex change from male to female and then successfully getting pregnant and bringing the baby to term. Also, I seem to recall hearing or reading that men who get sex change operations retain their "Adam's apples" because that part of a person's anatomy is not subject to easy surgical revision. If you see a person dressed like a woman, with big breasts and an Adam's apple, you can be fairly sure that when that person was first born, the birth announcement said, "It's a boy!")
Anytime one writes about a controversial subject, one has to expect criticism. In response to the aforementioned blog post, a person named "Joe" wrote to me and said, "Your ignorance knows no bounds."
Wow! I have boundless ignorance. That means that my ignorance is pretty much limitless or infinite. And here I thought that only God had traits which could be described as infinite.
If my ignorance had no bounds, then that would pretty much mean that I knew absolutely nothing, and maybe even less than nothing, wouldn't it? So here's a question: If I know absolutely nothing, how did I manage to turn on my computer, log into Blogger and then write and post an article which was apparently so aggravating that Joe felt that it cried for a rebuttal? It's a wonder that an infinitely ignorant person such as myself could even finish writing a single sentence.
There's a word for such exaggeration. The word is hyperbole. Since Joe is prone to hyperbole, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised when he went on to say that "modern science" had proven that transgendered people did in fact have brains belonging to the opposite gender.
I would like to meet this "Modern Science" and ask him some questions. But of course, I can't. There is no single entity named "Modern Science". There are modern scientists, for sure, but they have been known to disagree with one another from time to time. I would be willing to bet that there are at least a few people who could be described as modern scientists even though they strongly disagree with the premise behind the idea that transgendered people are what they claim to be.
Presumably, when Joe says that my opinions are at odds with the views of "modern science," he's not talking about the American Psychiatric Association, which still lists Gender Identity Disorder in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Of course, there's pressure from liberals for the APA to legitimize yet another sexual aberration by removing that listing, but it hasn't happened yet. So unless Joe is prepared to argue that psychiatrists aren't scientists, it's more than a little bit specious for him to argue that my views on transgendered people contradict the views of "modern science".
Reading the Wikipedia article under the heading of "Transgender", I find that I am inclined to marvel at the incredible variety of sexual variations which currently can be found in our population. We now have transsexuals, cross-dressers, transvestites, androgynes, genderqueers, drag queens, drag kings, transvestic fetishists, homosexuals, bisexuals, pansexuals and asexuals. The list seems to go on and on and on. I'm surprised that there isn't a special category for people who prefer sex toys to people.
I'd rather just simplify matters and call them what they all are: Perverts.
Now, that might sound hateful to you, but it's not. I myself went through a brief period of time, shortly after puberty, when I experimented with cross-dressing. There was some guilt associated with the activity of dressing in women's clothing, but I didn't really understand my own motivations at the time, and there was a period of time in which I felt powerless to control my own behavior and thoughts.
Fortunately, I became a Christian. The dysfunctional behavior did not cease immediately, but I began to realize over a period of time that what I was doing was morally wrong. So I asked God to help me to conquer my compulsions.
You know what? God did help me! Through a combination of prayer and self-denial, I eventually got to the point in my life where I not only didn't do what I'd done in the past, but I didn't even have any desire to do so. I looked back on that period of my life and I wondered how I could ever have done anything so ridiculous. I eventually came to realize that my sexual dysfunction had been a symptom of my overall unhappiness with my life, and my lack of gratitude to God. I didn't need any therapist in order to reach those conclusions. The Holy Spirit was my therapist.
Years later, I read an article (in the Boston Globe) by a so-called "expert" in human sexuality named Beth Winship. Her column was entitled "Ask Beth". In response to a reader's question, Winship claimed that one might as well abandon the idea of changing the behavior of cross-dressers, because they could never change.
Having had some personal experiences of my own along those lines, I took umbrage at that claim. I wrote to her and told her so. She wrote back to me and assured me that all the "experts" agreed with her. Essentially, in her mind, I didn't exist. The "experts" said that what I had done could not be done, and that was all there was to it. It reminded me of an old saying: "I know what I believe, so don't confuse me with the evidence."
Do you see why I'm a little bit skeptical when I hear similar claims with regard to the idea that gay people can't change? When a person is motivated more by ideology than by a genuine desire to learn the truth, contrary evidence is simply ignored, as it was in my case.
In general, there seems to be a trend among some people towards a view of people which negates the existence of free will. In the minds of some people, we are not human beings capable of controlling our thoughts or actions. We are sex machines, programmed to act in ways we can neither control nor fully understand.
Such people often talk about freedom, but the reality is that they believe that people are slaves to their genetic programming. How sad and pathetic!
