By now most of you would have heard of convicted traitor and agent provocateur Bradley Manning’s decision to spend the rest of his days in the company of women. Manning, who is a homosexual, has now decided he is not a male, but a female, and desires to be known as Chelsea, and spend his 136 year sentence not with other men, but with the ladies.
The Army private was found guilty of espionage and of ripping off and passing on 700,000 confidential documents to WikiLeaks. Now he wants to add gender-bender to his resume, and sexual suicide to his list of accomplishments. Of course sex-changes and transgenderism seem to be all the rage nowadays.
Little of it is based on biology and hard science – most of it is based on ideological propaganda and the militant homosexual agenda. As I document in my book Strained Relations there are some exceedingly rare cases of genuine gender confusion, as in cases like Turner Syndrome or Klinefelter’s Syndrome.
These cases involve ambiguous genitalia, chromosomal imbalances – eg, having an extra sex chromosome – and so on. They are, as I said, very rare, and have nothing to do with homosexuality or the gender-bending craze we now are witnessing.
Yet plenty of folks, even adolescents and children, are getting into this game, demanding their “rights” to undergo gender reassignment, etc. This is part of a society which has lost its way, and has allowed sexual suicide and gender madness to redefine biology and personhood.
Indeed, confusion abounds here. The sexual revolutionaries are blowing gender out of the water, and along with it common sense and basic biology. I was told that two Melbourne newspapers ran with differing takes on this, with the Herald Sun referring to Manning as a he throughout while the Age referred to Manning as a she throughout.
Perhaps we can just flip a coin – or better yet just refer to Manning as an it. And all the sexual activists are coming out of the woodwork on this, demanding that the military (read: US taxpayer) pay for this bit of gender PC. Their demands to turn society upside down always come at a cost – ordinary citizens are always forced to foot the bill as they watch society collapse around them.
Wesley Smith comments on all this in a recent article: “Manning’s lawyer, David Coombs, told ‘Today’ that he hopes officials at Fort Leavenworth military prison will provide his client the hormone therapy. ‘I’m hoping Fort Leavenworth would do the right thing and provide that,’ Coombs said. ‘If Fort Leavenworth does not, then I am going to do everything in my power to make sure that they are forced to do so.’
“Coombs threat to sue is essentially a claim that there is a civil right to become the sex one believes oneself to be, and moreover, that the government must provide that treatment to a prisoner under its authority–just as it would have to pay for cancer treatment or any other necessary ‘medical’ service or procedure. I would be shocked if the courts so ruled, but I have been shocked a lot the last few decades.
“We are heading in that general direction. The Obamacare birth control mandate was at least partly put into place–according to DOJ legal briefs–to ensure legal equality for women. LGBT advocates could logically make the same claim for required coverage for sex change procedures. San Francisco’s public health insurance already does.
“Transsexual rights, if that is the proper term, is moving forward. California just enacted a law requiring public schools to allow children to use bathrooms and locker rooms of the opposite sex when they identify with that sex. In other words, one no longer requires a legal ruling reassigning sex. The DOJ took the same position in a lawsuit that was filed by parents upset that a school did not allow their son to use the girl’s bathroom. The case settled in favor of the parents.”
Kevin D. Williamson has also written on this and is well worth citing in part. “Mr Manning,” he says, “is what he is, and no amount of pronoun play, psychotherapeutic doublespeak, or wishful thinking can make it otherwise.” After looking at some recent infamous cases, he writes:
“We have created a rhetoric of ‘gender identity’ that is disconnected from biological sexual fact, and we have done so largely in the service of enabling the sexual mutilation of physically healthy men and women (significantly more men) by medical authorities who should be barred by professional convention if not by conscience from the removal of healthy organs (and limbs, more on that later), an act that by any reasonable standard ought to be considered mutilation rather than therapy.
“This is not to discount the feelings of people who suffer from gender-identity disorders — to the contrary, those feelings must be taken into account in determining courses of treatment for people who have severe personality disorders. But those subjective experiences do not render inconsequential the biological facts: A man who believes he is a woman trapped in a man’s body, no matter the intensity of his feeling, is no such thing. The duty of the medical profession is not to encourage and enable delusions, but to help those who suffer from them to cope with them.
“It is worth noting here that as a matter of law and a matter of social expectation, the fiction of sex change is treated as the paramount good: We are not expected to treat those who have undergone the procedure as men who have taken surgical and hormonal steps to impersonate women (or vice versa) but as people who have literally changed sex, which they have not — no more than Dennis Avner, the famous ‘Stalking Cat’ who attempted to physically transform himself into a tiger, changed species.”
After examining a somewhat related and equally disturbing trend, Body Identity Integrity Disorder, which is “characterized by a burning and incessant desire to amputate an otherwise perfectly healthy limb,” he returns to the subject at hand:
“As with the invention of ‘personhood’ in the abortion debate, we have created a metaphysical category — ‘identity’ — in order to avoid talking about physical reality. In the case of sex-reassignment surgery, it is gender identity; in the case of those who want their left legs removed, it is body-integrity identity. The latter may seem shocking and exotic, but the former is no more defensible.
“But the question of sex reassignment is linked rhetorically and politically to the question of gay rights, though homosexuality is an entirely distinct and separate phenomenon under the emotional shadow of civil rights. It is a measure of the intellectual degradation of our times that the physical reality of these cases is considered, if it is considered at all, a distant second to the subjective impressions of people who are, not to put too fine a point on it, mentally ill and in need of treatment.
“We cannot think because we cannot speak. Having lost the words for things, we lose the things themselves. The word ‘gender’ as a replacement for the word ‘sex’ is a new development in the English language, dating from the early 1960s, not coincidentally the period during which the normalization of sex reassignment began to gain real momentum. ‘Gender’ is a linguistic twin of the word ‘genre,’ the two descending in parallel from the Latin ‘genus’ via the Old French ‘gendre.’
“This was partly the natural evolution of the language — as the word ‘sex’ began to denote erotic acts themselves, there was an opening for a word to describe the categorical differences between the male and the female. But it is not an accident that a literary term received the promotion over a scientific one: ‘Gender’ overtook ‘sex’ linguistically at the same time that ‘gender,’ which denotes male-female differences that are, in the debased language of the time, ‘socially constructed,’ overtook ‘sex,’ which denotes male-female differences that are biological, as a guiding consideration. Every battle in the war on reality begins with the opening of a new linguistic front.
“That leaves us in the unhappy position described by Dr. McHugh: ‘The zeal for this sex-change surgery — perhaps, with the exception of frontal lobotomy, the most radical therapy ever encouraged by twentieth-century psychiatrists — did not derive from critical reasoning or thoughtful assessments . . . [but from] the “illusion of technique,” which assumes that the body is like a suit of clothes to be hemmed and stitched to style.’ And not just the body: The family and society are as much the products of evolution as the body is, and attempting to reconstruct them in the image of the Venus de Milo — arms optional — with contempt for the underlying reality will yield ghastly results.”
But the sexual anarchists do not care in the least how much damage is done, be it to society, to individuals, to reality itself. As long as the sexual revolution can run its full and bitter course, everything is allowed to be steamrolled underneath.
http://www.nationalreview.com/human-exceptionalism/356455/civil-right-government-provided-sex-change-wesley-j-smith
http://m.nationalreview.com/article/356501/bradley-manning-not-woman-kevin-d-williamson
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