Speaking of Degradation of the Language…
This is a post that might get me in trouble, but here goes. From the NY Times today:
The Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund filed suit in October in State Supreme Court in Manhattan against Caliente Cab, asserting that she was the victim of gender discrimination.
While Ms. Farmer has always identified herself as a woman, the defense fund took up the case because it touched upon many issues that transgender people commonly face and could set an interesting legal precedent, representatives of the group said.
Emphasis mine. And here we come upon one of my biggest pet peeves: men are men, and women are women. There are clear biological differences between the two. I feel an intense amount of pity* for folks who consider themselves transgender, but wanting to be a member of the opposite sex doesn’t make you one, and no amount of cosmetic mutilation to your genitals will cause you to become one.**
Remember when there was all that hubbub a few weeks back about the “man” who was pregnant? Yeah, that wasn’t a man. She was a woman–one who has taken hormone therapy and had radical surgery to look more like a man, but a woman nonetheless. I’m something of a pedant when it comes to words–they have definitions for a reason–so why don’t we look at the dictionary definitions of male and female:
male: a person bearing an X and Y chromosome pair in the cell nuclei and normally having a penis, scrotum, and testicles, and developing hair on the face at adolescence; a boy or man.
female: a person bearing two X chromosomes in the cell nuclei and normally having a vagina, a uterus and ovaries, and developing at puberty a relatively rounded body and enlarged breasts, and retaining a beardless face; a girl or woman.
Our “pregnant man” clearly fits under the second definition, so it’s really not much of a story: just another woman giving birth. Anyway, coming back to my original point about the New York Times‘s article: Ms. Farmer has always identified herself as a woman because she has always been a woman and can never be anything other than a woman. No amount of PC indoctrination will get me to change my beliefs in this regard, and I refuse to call the transgendered by any sex other than the one they were born with. Feel free to call me an unenlightened bigot in the comments.
*Pity inspired, largely, by Paul McHugh’s piece in First Things back in ’04 on sex change operations and why he urged putting a stop to them at Johns Hopkins, where he was psychiatrist in chief.
**South Park nailed this issue in the first episode of season nine. You can watch the full episode, “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina,” here.