Students at a high school, Hillsboro, in Missouri, walked out today to protest the school board’s decision to allow Lila Perry, a boy who “self-identifies” as a girl, to use the girls’ washrooms and change-rooms.
Not everyone was against. Apparently some protested the protest.
I have very mixed feelings. Firstly, the whole transgender thing is getting goofy and ridiculous. There are a very, very small number of people who genuinely possess ambiguous genitalia, or who might possess a genuinely ambiguous sexual identity. They have a genuine need and a right to make choices about their sexual identity, however complicated that might be. And there are a very, very small number of people who, anomalously, really do have the wrong genitalia. I think this is a very small number. Very small.
And then there are a lot of people– not really that many, but a lot– who take it into their heads that they would really rather be the other gender. And a lot of people out there associate this with homosexuality, which everyone knows is something you are born with, and therefore decide to be as tolerant as possible and announce that from now on people should be treated as whatever gender they wish to be.
Here’s some facts: the vast majority of these people are males wishing to “identify” as female. The vast majority of these people maintain their sexual orientation after they have transitioned. If they were sexually attracted to girls before the surgeries and injections they remain sexually attracted to girls after. If they were sexually attracted to boys before the surgeries, they remain attracted to boys.
So Lila, now permitted to change in the girls’ locker room, should enjoy herself tremendously. Unless, Lila, as a boy, was already attracted to boys. In other words, gay. In which case, he probably should be in the girls’ locker room anyway. But why would he want to do that, if he was attracted to boys?
It is totally predictable that the opinion of the psycho-social establishment will favor the idea that many people really are the wrong gender and need to be helped and supported in transitioning to their “real” gender. It is predictable not because it is likely to be true but because it is likely to be “psychological” in the sense that it is something that can be uncovered and analyzed and tested and diagnosed and packaged and sold to the public as privileged information that only experts can provide.
It is something that can never be disproved because it can never be proven. How would you go about proving that a boy is a boy? What standards would you use? Would it not be enough, given the assumptions in the field of psychology, for the boy say he wants to be a girl? If you want to investigate it further, see if he has an array of “symptoms”, all of which might also be indications of a troubled, confused child who is obsessed with a really strange idea.
[whohit]Gluten of Sexual Politics[/whohit]