BTW... if any of you DON'T GET THE JOKE HERE, please let me know and I'll explain in my next post. Yeah... it WILL mean admitting that you don't get it, but if no one says anything, I'll assume that you're all clever enough to figure it out.
Which... I don't know... might suggest that you're all good liberals and not any of those bad conservatives? Does that correlate? I jest. I'm refering to the fun I had frsutrating the hell out of three conservatives over on MediaMatters yesterday and today. Here's the link. It was such a blast! Seriously, I LIVE for this stuff. This is what I was talking about a few posts ago when I THANKED these guys. What a blast. Makes me feel ALIVE!
Yeah... they REALLY DIDN'T like the implication that pedophiles seem to all be Republicans. Oh well. I just go where the evidence takes me. If they were so sure that there was no relationship between pedophilia and conservatism, they really should have been able to produce even a tiny list of counter-examples.
Oh well, enough of THAT.
I want to revisit my last post RE transgenderism. I gave a lot of thought to what David in NYC posted, and he's absolutely right. The same tired arguments that were once used to exclude gays, blacks, jews, and many others, are simply wrong-minded and not worth considering. To spell it out, I realize that you can't wait for society to DECIDE when they're confortable with a given sub-group and that they deserve equal rights, because if that group is never allowed into the mainstream, society will NEVER be comfortable with them. That why things like civil right HAD to be legislated. And once they were, racism began to disappear. (Or at least diminish and evolve.) It exsisted unchanged for thousands of years, and yet every generation since the 1960's (including the one that came of age in that time) has grown up LESS bigoted than there parents. And racial justice no doubt lent it's momentum to the rethinking of gender equality, and helped out the women's rights movement. THAT momentum kept on rolling and things like Atheism, Homosexuality, different Religions, etc... came to be accepted as well. Although I still believe that Gay Marriage will HAVE to be federally mandated, and that it SHOULD BE. The Right will bitch a ton at first, but over time it will be just like civil rights: The sky won't fall, and everyone will get along... eventually. ;)
So back to TRANSGENDERISM. Again, I reiterate: I have nothing against any transgendered PEOPLE. This is not about whether it's right or wrong. It does not harm, so it CAN'T be wrong. Period. There's no victims here, except the TG'd victim of society's prejudice. So I hope we're all on the same page there.
My struggle now is in trying to figure why I STILL think that transgenerdism is different from homosexuality in my mind; why I stop short on one, yet completely accept the other. OK, I accept both... But in the case of homosexuality, I do so naturally and unequivcolly and can't even figure out what everyone's problem is! But with transgenderism, my acceptence is more a consious decision than my natural inclintaion... well... that's not quite right... The issue is that I can SEE homosexual issues from their POV. I can totally get inside their stylish shoes (sorry!) and relate. With transgendered people... I just can't relate. I can't seem to see this from their perspective. And that frustrates the hell out of me! It's usually something I do as a matter of course, but... I don't know! Something about it just makes me think about it... differently.
And I THINK I may have figured out what/why. Maybe one of the more elightened readers out there can reconcile this for me...
Accepting one's own homosexuality is about accepting WHO THEY ARE. It is a total acceptance of one's self.
Transgenderism, OTOH, involves a rejection of at least some part of yourself, no matter WHICH WAY you decide to take it. Either you reject who you are physically, or you reject who you are... mentally? Spiritually? Not sure what the right term is there, but one way or the other, you are chosing to NOT ACCEPT some part of yourself. And THAT'S the part I can't wrap my head around.
And I'm familir with the idea tha there's more to gender than what's between your legs. Yeah: I get that. I accept it. But XX versus XY chromasones and indoor vs. outdoor plumbling still have SOMETHING to do with it, no? So whether you try to embrace your birth gender (if that's the right term) or decide to embrace your trans-gender... well... either way you're forced to reject some part of who you are!
And... that sucks!
And THAT'S the part that I don't get. ACCEPTING one's self... that I'm all about. I can totally relate to that. But deciding what to accept and what to throw out? Wow. I can't even imagine what that must be like. And thus: I can't see the world from their POV. NOt directly anyway, only though clumsy paralells and metaphors.
That doesn't justify bigotry, discrimination, etc... and I'm not saying it does. I'm justing trying to understand something here that is completely foreign to me. Something I cannot relate to in the first person. Shoes I simply have not figured out how to put myself into.
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