Ok, the whole 'transgender rights' thing has shown up in front of the Supreme Court, so I'm going to start seeing articles and discussions and accusations and justifications on the subject, left, right, and center. I've spent some time thinking about it, and would like to present an alternate view. It starts with a question that is going to seem odd, and will probably need a small history lesson and slightly larger science lesson. I'll try to avoid being pedantic about it. So strap yourselves in...
What rights should society give to hysterical women?
I don't mean women who are laughing hysterically, or acting hysterically in grief. The term "Hysteria" used to be a genuine medical term with a genuine medical definition. Technically speaking, Hysteria was a psychoneurosis marked by emotional excitability and disturbances of the psychogenic, sensory, vasomotor, and visceral functions. (The term 'visceral' means 'involving the inner organs'.)
In practice, this became something to diagnose women with if they seemed to show emotional 'excess' (or too much restraint), sleeplessness and irritability, 'excessive' interest in sex, or even such vague and dangerous symptoms as "arguing/causing trouble with others". In short, there was this view of what women should be within society and, if they didn't meet the expectations, they had Hysteria.
So what rights should we give women who have been diagnosed with this condition? I am sure that the early Women's Rights groups would have had several ideas to offer. How about the right to not be involuntarily committed to a mental institution for the diagnosis? How about retaining the right of ownership to your own property, whether that be a house or simply a bag of trinkets? How about the right to talk about politics, read about religion, and other such activities that suggested, in that time period, a disturbance in a woman's brain?
Well, actually, Hysteria was often treated by masturbation, or by high-pressure cold water showers. So should they be asking for the right to masturbate in public?
Imagine that. Imagine a group of women before the Supreme Court, demanding the right to masturbate in public, as a necessary accommodation to their medical condition of Hysteria. Since they're actually arguing for their rights in front of a court, you know they all have to have it by the old historic definition. Ridiculous, right? Well, let's take a moment and divert from history into science.
What is the difference between a man and a woman. The transgender argument must start here. If we can't define the boundaries they want to cross, how can we discuss their efforts to cross them and society's proper reaction? So let's talk biology. I suspect that many people these days believe that the only difference between the male body and the female body is the reproductive system. Let's dispel that myth. Did you know that archaeologists can unearth a single part of the skeleton and know whether it belonged to a man or a woman? The pelvic bones are noticeably different, but there are other differences throughout the entire skeleton. The male skull has a taller and narrower brow and a more pronounced jawbone; the man's arms and legs are longer, and the bones tend to have more pronounced corners.
So let's put the skeleton aside for a moment. Did you know that every single internal organ has a different size and efficiency in a man than in a woman? Some are larger, and some are smaller. One of the complaints of feminists is that most medication dosage and effectiveness has been derived from studies on males. The female, in the pharmaceutical world, is often treated like a smaller man. I have sat in on several discussions among women with ADHD, for instance, and they all agree that all ADHD medication becomes ineffective during the few days before the onset of menstruation.
That doesn't mean that the reproductive system isn't part of the picture, of course. The body is fully interconnected, with each system supporting and affecting the others, and that's the point. A woman's heart beats at a faster resting rate on average than a man's. Her heart is smaller. That's okay, though, because her blood has less hemoglobin and more water in it by volume. It moves more easily through her circulatory system. Now here's where it gets interesting: a sex hormone is responsible for this difference. Testosterone prompts higher production of hemoglobin, making the blood thicker. In a woman, higher testosterone makes the blood more like a man's.
See, the entire body is affected by the sex hormones in various ways, and the entire body is optimized for the changes made to the body by the sex hormones. The heart, lungs, liver, spleen, kidneys, stomach and intestines - all of these changes by gender, larger or smaller, more slow-twitch or fast-twitch muscles, blood volume and ideal heart rate/blood pressure - it's all geared towards the health of the male body or the female body as a whole. Once you change part of it, like the sex hormones, you are giving your body all sorts of conflicting instructions to produce certain muscles, deposit fat in certain areas, change your blood composition, change the chemical content being processed by your liver etc. in a way that puts a great deal more wear and tear on your body. Transgender/transsexual transition surgery is done only on the reproductive organs; the transgender person is not given the heart, liver, kidneys, adrenal glands, or skeletal structure of the other sex.
Back to Hysteria, just for a second.
We now know that Hysteria isn't a thing, not really. It's a catch-all for a variety of medical conditions, many of which actually do affect the female reproductive system (such as endometriosis or fibroids) or brain differences (such as ADHD or autism, both of which present differently in women than in men). It would seem bizarre to us to diagnose a woman with autism and then explain that this meant she had to try to masturbate regularly and thus seek accommodations through the Supreme Court to pleasure herself in the workplace. In fact, to divert from that a little, autistic people are now speaking strongly against the application of ABA therapy in the 70's, 80's, and 90's, causing trauma and, sometimes, lasting physical damage, in order to force autistic people to mimic 'normal people' instead of the newer, gentler, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which focuses more on coping techniques and self-advocacy.
But instead of asking ourselves if there is treatment for the differences in the brain that seem to set apart many transgender people, whether it be chemical or cognitive behavioral therapy, we seem caught in the Dark Ages of trying to treat thoughts in the mind by throwing every single other system in the body out of whack. The activists and their insistence on 'transgender rights' are advocating a type of ABA for these people, with the only 'natural' endgame being a chemical and surgical process that belongs back in the annals of Medieval and Victorian medicine along with Hysteria.
Transgenderism starts with the belief that your thoughts and emotions and patterns of behavior do not fit into that of your birth sex. Hysteria starts with the belief that your thoughts and emotions and patterns of behavior do not fit into that of your birth sex. Can't we do better than fighting over whether the government should be able to order a business to allow a 'transitioning male-to-female' person to wear dresses to work in a formal-attire environment?
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Thursday, October 10, 2019
Wednesday, August 22, 2018
Kneeling for the flag: A different perspective
Here we go again. Football season is nearly upon us. With it comes a batch of politics that the fans, in general, do not want. Attendance is lower. Ticket sales are cheaper. Pretty soon the players who are protesting their unfairly bad treatment at the hands of their customers are going to find that their customers aren't paying enough money to give them those multi-million dollar salaries.
Ok, that was a bit of a dig at the process, and perhaps an unfair one, considering the point I've come to present today. We seem to have two sides to this issue. One side says that these players are doing something utterly necessary and justifiable, because of the problems that those who share their ethnicity face every day in this country due merely to being of that ethnicity. The other side says that no amount of problems justify disrespect to the country itself and its national symbols, as if the players are protesting, not their problems, but the very fact that America exists. They also may downplay or deny any problems being faced by this ethnicity and point to the powerful and wealthy football players themselves as proof that these one-percenters have nothing to complain about.
But let's step to the side for a bit and look at this through a different lens.
There's no denying that there is still injustice for black people, particularly black men, in this country today. A very carefully-done bit of research shows that they are less likely than whites to be shot by police (the very thing that the football players mention the most) in equivalent situations. However, in equivalent situations, police use unnecessary force on blacks, especially black men, more than upon whites. They are more likely to be searched, more likely to be stopped, and more likely to be treated poorly when they are stopped. Now many whites have one, maybe two "this policeman was an idiot" stories to gripe about. Blacks have more, and I can see how a tipping point is reached in which "this policeman was an idiot" becomes "policemen themselves have it out for me".
I can understand this because one of my great-grandfathers lived the same life, only worse. Because of his ethnicity, he lived in the poorest parts of town. Because of his ethnicity, he faced violence as a daily possibility. In a world that was getting electricity into regular homes, he lived in a dwelling no more sophisticated than an African tribal hut. He and his family often lacked for the simplest necessities - food, clothing - and faced, at best, a level of threat from others that was similar to the worst threat faced by blacks from the KKK. Even more so, his was the first generation that, due to government reforms, was actually permitted to go into town and learn a trade so that he could actually have a job; his parents worked very hard to sell a few meager supplies here and there, but were not allowed to be actual legal employees, due to and only due to their ethnicity.
Now that's notable. The country was changing. The threats were beginning to wane. The opportunities were starting to come in. Things were improving. But he wanted more and better, and he started engaging in protests against the government. Instead of working within the system to secure further liberties, he chose to speak against the system and wish it to be changed to a new one. Like the football players' message - and if they want to convey a different message, they really need to find a different method - he wanted a change of government rather than for the government to use its existing powers to bring about the change he wanted.
Ok, granted, I don't know to which extent this specific man wanted this specific goal. But I can tell you that, whether he wanted it or not, he got it - and the same people who are pushing the black football players' protest got into control in his own country. The same ideology that leverage black racial struggles into fuel for the revolutionary fire leveraged his racial struggles into fuel for their own revolutionary fire, and he twigged on very quickly (a survival trait, in this case) as to the purpose and eventual fate of fuel.
He fled Eastern Europe, Russian territory, for the U.S. right 'round the neighborhood of 1905.
I'm not going to praise the Russian Imperial Government. I don't have a strong favorable or unfavorable opinion of Tsar Nicholas II, though I question whether his children really deserved to be hunted down and shot in the dirt like dogs. I'm not even sure if the rights my great-grandfather was looking for would have been attainable through the system, though I have to say that it looked like they were on the right track. But I can say this: the Bolshevik Communism that replaced it had no inherent human rights (even during periods when the government temporarily conceded privileges that we in America would call 'rights'), and had no love for Jews. My great-grandfather and his people were tools, and fools, for a political system that didn't care about them beyond what could be profited from their blood, sweat, and tears.
It is from that perspective that I see the football players kneel. I don't try to minimize the struggles of their people or claim that they have no grievance. (Though I include a few grievances that they seem uninterested in, like the government funding of an organization originally created to target their babies for death due to despising their ethnicity.) Neither do I believe that their particular form of protest is good and honest and totally justifiable. I believe they have the freedom in this great country to engage in their protest, just as they have the freedom, should they choose to leverage it, to use this system to correct the problems they face. My issue with their behavior is that they are targeting the system itself, and looking for changes that remind me strongly of my great-grandfather, the tool, the fool, for a political party that neither favors nor esteems them.
About ten years after my great-grandfather fled to New York City with little more than what he could carry, in hopes of avoiding the fire that would have burned him up, the young woman who would become my great-grandmother joined him. Her family had actually been, despite her shared ethnicity, as wealthy, powerful, and esteemed as those football players who are kneeling on the field. She had learned quickly what the football players will learn if they succeed in their protest; the new system is no kinder to them than to the people for whom they kneel.
Ok, that was a bit of a dig at the process, and perhaps an unfair one, considering the point I've come to present today. We seem to have two sides to this issue. One side says that these players are doing something utterly necessary and justifiable, because of the problems that those who share their ethnicity face every day in this country due merely to being of that ethnicity. The other side says that no amount of problems justify disrespect to the country itself and its national symbols, as if the players are protesting, not their problems, but the very fact that America exists. They also may downplay or deny any problems being faced by this ethnicity and point to the powerful and wealthy football players themselves as proof that these one-percenters have nothing to complain about.
But let's step to the side for a bit and look at this through a different lens.
There's no denying that there is still injustice for black people, particularly black men, in this country today. A very carefully-done bit of research shows that they are less likely than whites to be shot by police (the very thing that the football players mention the most) in equivalent situations. However, in equivalent situations, police use unnecessary force on blacks, especially black men, more than upon whites. They are more likely to be searched, more likely to be stopped, and more likely to be treated poorly when they are stopped. Now many whites have one, maybe two "this policeman was an idiot" stories to gripe about. Blacks have more, and I can see how a tipping point is reached in which "this policeman was an idiot" becomes "policemen themselves have it out for me".
I can understand this because one of my great-grandfathers lived the same life, only worse. Because of his ethnicity, he lived in the poorest parts of town. Because of his ethnicity, he faced violence as a daily possibility. In a world that was getting electricity into regular homes, he lived in a dwelling no more sophisticated than an African tribal hut. He and his family often lacked for the simplest necessities - food, clothing - and faced, at best, a level of threat from others that was similar to the worst threat faced by blacks from the KKK. Even more so, his was the first generation that, due to government reforms, was actually permitted to go into town and learn a trade so that he could actually have a job; his parents worked very hard to sell a few meager supplies here and there, but were not allowed to be actual legal employees, due to and only due to their ethnicity.
Now that's notable. The country was changing. The threats were beginning to wane. The opportunities were starting to come in. Things were improving. But he wanted more and better, and he started engaging in protests against the government. Instead of working within the system to secure further liberties, he chose to speak against the system and wish it to be changed to a new one. Like the football players' message - and if they want to convey a different message, they really need to find a different method - he wanted a change of government rather than for the government to use its existing powers to bring about the change he wanted.
Ok, granted, I don't know to which extent this specific man wanted this specific goal. But I can tell you that, whether he wanted it or not, he got it - and the same people who are pushing the black football players' protest got into control in his own country. The same ideology that leverage black racial struggles into fuel for the revolutionary fire leveraged his racial struggles into fuel for their own revolutionary fire, and he twigged on very quickly (a survival trait, in this case) as to the purpose and eventual fate of fuel.
He fled Eastern Europe, Russian territory, for the U.S. right 'round the neighborhood of 1905.
I'm not going to praise the Russian Imperial Government. I don't have a strong favorable or unfavorable opinion of Tsar Nicholas II, though I question whether his children really deserved to be hunted down and shot in the dirt like dogs. I'm not even sure if the rights my great-grandfather was looking for would have been attainable through the system, though I have to say that it looked like they were on the right track. But I can say this: the Bolshevik Communism that replaced it had no inherent human rights (even during periods when the government temporarily conceded privileges that we in America would call 'rights'), and had no love for Jews. My great-grandfather and his people were tools, and fools, for a political system that didn't care about them beyond what could be profited from their blood, sweat, and tears.
It is from that perspective that I see the football players kneel. I don't try to minimize the struggles of their people or claim that they have no grievance. (Though I include a few grievances that they seem uninterested in, like the government funding of an organization originally created to target their babies for death due to despising their ethnicity.) Neither do I believe that their particular form of protest is good and honest and totally justifiable. I believe they have the freedom in this great country to engage in their protest, just as they have the freedom, should they choose to leverage it, to use this system to correct the problems they face. My issue with their behavior is that they are targeting the system itself, and looking for changes that remind me strongly of my great-grandfather, the tool, the fool, for a political party that neither favors nor esteems them.
About ten years after my great-grandfather fled to New York City with little more than what he could carry, in hopes of avoiding the fire that would have burned him up, the young woman who would become my great-grandmother joined him. Her family had actually been, despite her shared ethnicity, as wealthy, powerful, and esteemed as those football players who are kneeling on the field. She had learned quickly what the football players will learn if they succeed in their protest; the new system is no kinder to them than to the people for whom they kneel.
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
Flags and Issues
On March 19, 1777, Capt. Moses Dunbar was hanged for being a Loyalist. He had not only joined the King's army, but he was caught trying to recruit others to the cause. He was the only man in Connecticut ever hanged for treason. It is said that his own father gave them the rope that made the noose.
His (second) wife gave birth to their youngest son, also named Moses Dunbar, almost exactly nine months later. I am directly descended from that youngest son.
Am I proud of ol' Moses Dunbar? Well, no and yes. I don't support the ideals that he appeared to the patriots to endorse by joining the soldiers who were fighting them. I definitely don't advocate taxation without representation, or other methods by which the monarchy refused proper governance to its territory in the New World. But honestly, I admire his willingness to stand up for what he believed, and he wrote a fascinating letter which he read at his execution, in which he forgave all involved and asked forgiveness for his own sins from anyone affected by them. He went to his death expressing confidence in God, and that is something to be proud of.
I wonder what the reaction would be if Connecticut insisted upon flying the British Flag from the State Capital in order to proudly declare their deep and abiding appreciation for the old British Colonial Empire. I wonder, furthermore, what we might think if the people who supported this action used the British Flag as a symbol to explain their distate for post-Christian government-forced social issues such as abortion and gay 'marriage'. What should such people say to those who question the wisdom of flying a flag of colonialism while claiming to be the only group in America who are truly interested in freedom?
This is a problem that we are facing now, with the Confederate Flag being flown by people who insist that it is all about "states' rights" and that anybody who is squeamish about Confederate history must be a big-government liberal. I can't help but wonder if, when the Southern States pushed through the Slave Fugitive Act, if they told abolitionists that it didn't have to affect them because "if you don't want to own slaves, just don't buy any slaves - nobody is forcing you to be part of it", while making anything but the whole-hearted pursuing and capturing of fleeing ex-slaves punishable by government action. In short, my point is this: Yes, it is possible to be in favor of deregulation and lowering taxes without flying the "Stars and Bars", and the Southerners would do well to remember that.
This said:
I can't say I like the push to remove the Confederate Flag from Civil War memorials in the South, or ending re-enactments, or basically pushing it 'under the rug' the way that Germany has done with the swastika. I also think that any choice to remove it from a state building should be the decision of the state itself, not the Federal Government, though I also see nothing wrong with The People pushing to make it happen through popular opinion. Granted, I don't think personally that the Confederate Flag belongs with the "Flags of the Present" on government buildings meant to administer the Present - tax collection, license renewal, etc. - but I would be about as 'shocked' at seeing a Confederate Flag at a Southern Civil War memorial as I would be to find a cross in the chapel of a college. (I would, however, encourage all who want to fly the flag personally to read the Reasons for Secession historical documents. You may find the modern perception of the Civil War, as being primarily about "states' rights" or "economics" rather than slavery, challenged... strongly.
And now that I'm on the outs with both sides, let me say what I want most to say about the issue.
This is not as important as keeping the government from imposing further gun control laws upon us. It is not as important as keeping the government from redefining the sexually-dimorphic pair-bond to exclude sexual dimorphism and pair-bonding. Every single Confederate flag in the nation is not worth the life of one baby destined for abortion. And killing Obamacare dead will save many more lives than are affected by that particular piece of cloth.
So debate it all you like, work it out all you like, choose sides... but don't let this issue make Southerner Republicans hate Northerner Republicans. The Democrats are weak. This is our country to win or lose, and breaking out into virulent hatred over this particular issue could leave us with Four More Years... of Clinton, or even worse, Sanders the Full-Out Avowed Socialist.
Ask yourself this: What means more to you? What do you think will do more damage to this country?
The Stars and Bars?
Or the Hammer and the Sickle?
Better the Stars and Bars in South Carolina than the Hammer and Sickle over all of us. That's my stance on the issue, as a Northerner Conservative Republican who has no love for the Confederate Flag.
His (second) wife gave birth to their youngest son, also named Moses Dunbar, almost exactly nine months later. I am directly descended from that youngest son.
Am I proud of ol' Moses Dunbar? Well, no and yes. I don't support the ideals that he appeared to the patriots to endorse by joining the soldiers who were fighting them. I definitely don't advocate taxation without representation, or other methods by which the monarchy refused proper governance to its territory in the New World. But honestly, I admire his willingness to stand up for what he believed, and he wrote a fascinating letter which he read at his execution, in which he forgave all involved and asked forgiveness for his own sins from anyone affected by them. He went to his death expressing confidence in God, and that is something to be proud of.
I wonder what the reaction would be if Connecticut insisted upon flying the British Flag from the State Capital in order to proudly declare their deep and abiding appreciation for the old British Colonial Empire. I wonder, furthermore, what we might think if the people who supported this action used the British Flag as a symbol to explain their distate for post-Christian government-forced social issues such as abortion and gay 'marriage'. What should such people say to those who question the wisdom of flying a flag of colonialism while claiming to be the only group in America who are truly interested in freedom?
This is a problem that we are facing now, with the Confederate Flag being flown by people who insist that it is all about "states' rights" and that anybody who is squeamish about Confederate history must be a big-government liberal. I can't help but wonder if, when the Southern States pushed through the Slave Fugitive Act, if they told abolitionists that it didn't have to affect them because "if you don't want to own slaves, just don't buy any slaves - nobody is forcing you to be part of it", while making anything but the whole-hearted pursuing and capturing of fleeing ex-slaves punishable by government action. In short, my point is this: Yes, it is possible to be in favor of deregulation and lowering taxes without flying the "Stars and Bars", and the Southerners would do well to remember that.
This said:
I can't say I like the push to remove the Confederate Flag from Civil War memorials in the South, or ending re-enactments, or basically pushing it 'under the rug' the way that Germany has done with the swastika. I also think that any choice to remove it from a state building should be the decision of the state itself, not the Federal Government, though I also see nothing wrong with The People pushing to make it happen through popular opinion. Granted, I don't think personally that the Confederate Flag belongs with the "Flags of the Present" on government buildings meant to administer the Present - tax collection, license renewal, etc. - but I would be about as 'shocked' at seeing a Confederate Flag at a Southern Civil War memorial as I would be to find a cross in the chapel of a college. (I would, however, encourage all who want to fly the flag personally to read the Reasons for Secession historical documents. You may find the modern perception of the Civil War, as being primarily about "states' rights" or "economics" rather than slavery, challenged... strongly.
And now that I'm on the outs with both sides, let me say what I want most to say about the issue.
This is not as important as keeping the government from imposing further gun control laws upon us. It is not as important as keeping the government from redefining the sexually-dimorphic pair-bond to exclude sexual dimorphism and pair-bonding. Every single Confederate flag in the nation is not worth the life of one baby destined for abortion. And killing Obamacare dead will save many more lives than are affected by that particular piece of cloth.
So debate it all you like, work it out all you like, choose sides... but don't let this issue make Southerner Republicans hate Northerner Republicans. The Democrats are weak. This is our country to win or lose, and breaking out into virulent hatred over this particular issue could leave us with Four More Years... of Clinton, or even worse, Sanders the Full-Out Avowed Socialist.
Ask yourself this: What means more to you? What do you think will do more damage to this country?
The Stars and Bars?
Or the Hammer and the Sickle?
Better the Stars and Bars in South Carolina than the Hammer and Sickle over all of us. That's my stance on the issue, as a Northerner Conservative Republican who has no love for the Confederate Flag.
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