Thursday, January 22, 2015

Anti-Islamization or Something

Welcome friends!

The recent murder spree by Muslim religious fanatics in Paris (as well as the efforts of a Muslim hostage to help some non-Muslim hostages escape the aforementioned murderous fanatics) got me thinking a bit more about those so-called “anti-Islamization” demonstrations in Germany and the amusing variety of reactions in the media.  So much confusion and most of it about words as usual.  I wonder; could we all please try to be a little more careful about how we say things so we can spend a little more time discussing the issues that divide us and a little less time talking past one another and getting unnecessarily annoyed?  Is that really too much to ask? ... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Thursday, January 8, 2015

Conservatism Kills Transgender Teen

Welcome friends!

It’s a brand new year!  2015!  Oh, I had a very good feeling about this year.  I was thinking this year might be the best yet.  Alas, the feeling was unusually short lived this time around because no sooner had the new year started than we had that story about those Muslim religious zealots murdering all those journalists and cartoonists in cold blood in Paris because they had the audacity to speak their minds on matters of public interest.  The journalists and cartoonists had apparently been receiving death threats from the substantial population of violent religious extremists living in France (an unfortunate result I suppose of both geography and that country’s historical colonial ambitions) for some time but they continued speaking their minds nonetheless.  They lived and died heroes of free speech and the democratic way of life.  I raise my glass to my indomitable French brothers and sisters!  Maybe I should address this issue in another post because I already had something else in mind for this week, so let me just conclude my little introduction by saying it occurs to me now this year will unfortunately probably be rather similar to the last.  Let the good fight against the two headed monster of global conservatism continue!

Anyway, before I was so rudely interrupted I had meant to continue on from my initial assessment of the new year to say I hoped at least the new year might improve upon the last because the last one here in the US certainly wasn’t anything to write home about.  The big news in the political arena was the conservatives roaring back into power, which is depressing enough, but then I saw recently in the papers they even managed to tie a bow on it by driving a beautiful transgender teen to kill herself in the closing weeks of the year.  Game, set, and match to the conservatives, right?  Wrong!  It’s not over until the fat lady sings and I think I just saw her going into a donut shop so let’s get ready to rumble in the new year!

Let me start by just quickly reviewing the story I’m discussing today in case you missed it.  Which story you ask?  I know, there are many stories like this one.  A study from 2011 apparently found an astounding forty-one percent of over six thousand responding transgender and gender non-conforming people had attempted suicide.  Anyway, the particular story I have in mind involved a beautiful teenaged boy named Josh Alcorn who felt he was really more of a girl as transgender males do.  He chose the name Leelah.  I shall henceforth refer to him by his preferred name and gender.  Find that a bit confusing?  It’s called honoring the dead my friend.

We’re obviously talking about a somewhat difficult situation for everyone involved.  Nevertheless, in some parts of the country and with a certain sort of parents I feel Leelah would have probably muddled through well enough.  In case you’ve been living in a cave the past several decades I should probably explain it’s called gender reassignment and it apparently involves hormones, therapy, and I suppose surgery.  Unfortunately Leelah had the misfortune to live in what the article I read described as a tiny town in Ohio.  Now if you know anything about the US you’ll know Ohio is one of those states in the vast interior of the country known as the Midwest that comprises one of the great strongholds of conservatism and the Republican Party; the other being of course the South.  And as I suppose is the case everywhere the smaller the town the more ignorant and provincial it tends to be.  (I should know; I was raised in a small Midwestern town myself.  If it had gotten any smaller and more backward I probably wouldn’t be here today.)  Of course, one can survive living in a small town in the American Midwest without being a conservative if one has the love and support of one’s family and friends.  Unfortunately Leelah had the additional misfortune to not have enough of those particular commodities either.  No, her parents were apparently of the devout Christian variety so on top of what one might call the inherent or incidental ignorance of a tiny Midwestern town she also had the willful ignorance of the Christian religion to contend with.  To make a long story short after many years of what sounds to me like psychological torture she went for a walk one fine evening and in the early morning hours stepped in front of a truck on a freeway near her home.  She departed this world aged seventeen for what I sincerely hope is a better one.

Leelah explained her decision to kill herself in a thoughtful and sincere suicide note she arranged to publish after her death.  If you have a few moments I feel we should listen to what she had to say.  She started out by explaining she felt she was a girl trapped in a boy’s body starting at age four but only learned about transgender at age fourteen.  She said she “cried of happiness” from having received that knowledge.  Unfortunately her happiness was short lived.  She explained, “After 10 years of confusion I finally understood who I was. I immediately told my mom, and she reacted extremely negatively, telling me that it was a phase, that I would never truly be a girl, that God doesn’t make mistakes, that I am wrong.”  She continued on, “If you are reading this, parents, please don’t tell this to your kids.  Even if you are Christian or are against transgender people don’t ever say that to someone, especially your kid. That won’t do anything but make them hate them self [sic]. That’s exactly what it did to me.”

Get the picture?  Leelah was living under some rather severe mental stress from being transgender and pining to begin gender reassignment but her parents were unmoved.  Leelah’s mother, Carla, explained how they thought about gender reassignment in an interview after Leelah’s suicide, “We don’t support that, religiously.”  So what did her parents support, religiously?  Leehah explained in her note.  “My mom started taking me to a therapist, but would only take me to christian therapists, (who were all very biased) so I never actually got the therapy I needed to cure me of my depression. I only got more christians telling me that I was selfish and wrong and that I should look to God for help.”  She added, “They wanted me to be their perfect little straight christian boy, and that’s obviously not what I wanted.”

At age sixteen Leelah realized her parents would never support her wish to begin gender reassignment and she would have to wait until she was eighteen, a fact she apparently felt was quite significant.  She wrote it “absolutely broke my heart ... I felt hopeless, that I was just going to look like a man in drag for the rest of my life.”  She said she cried herself to sleep that night.  I wonder, did she really feel another year or two would have made that much difference?  I know adolescence is a time of rather rapid physiological change and also that youngsters can be impatient for their adult lives to begin but the pictures I saw showed she was beautiful and would clearly have remained so for many years to come.  I can’t help but wonder if it was really the lack of support from her parents that made the wait seem so unbearable.

Carla piled on the mental pressure when she cut off Leelah’s access to social media because she felt Leelah was looking at “inappropriate” things.  Like what?  Well, that’s an interesting question.  Carla wouldn’t specify in the interview I read about.  I suppose she must have been talking about gay social sites or maybe transgender or gender reassignment sites or I suppose maybe even good old fashioned porn sites but apparently she couldn’t bring herself to utter such abominations in the interview so the exact sites in question must remain a mystery.  The increasing sense of isolation hit Leelah’s adolescent psyche hard.  She wrote, “This was probably the part of my life when I was the most depressed, and I’m surprised I didn’t kill myself. I was completely alone for 5 months. No friends, no support, no love. Just my parents’ disappointment and the cruelty of loneliness.”

Inevitably and I suppose mercifully fate took its course.  Leelah ended her final farewell with the following plea,  “The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights. Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better. My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year...Fix society. Please.”

In what appears to me anyway to be a case of truly monumental psychological denial or maybe just truly monumental ignorance Carla explained tearfully after Leelah’s death that even though they couldn’t support her desire for gender reassignment they “told him that we loved him unconditionally. We loved him no matter what. I loved my son. People need to know that I loved him. He was a good kid, a good boy.”  Except Leelah wasn’t a boy in her own mind, was she?  That was a point Carla apparently wouldn’t concede even after Leelah’s death.  And they didn’t love her unconditionally, did they?  Leelah’s note makes it clear her parents loved her to the extent their religion allowed: the extent to which she was what they considered a proper boy.  I hope I’m not being too tough on her parents here.  They faced an admittedly difficult choice between their religion and their child and they chose their religion.  Now that I’m thinking about it I suppose it’s more accurate to say they loved their religion unconditionally.  They loved it even when it required a blood sacrifice.  They loved it even when it mentally and emotionally tortured and then killed their child.  Well, I hope at least they and their religion are happy together.  It would be such a waste otherwise.

I think this story speaks for itself, right?  But let me just add a few words about what I think was going on for whatever it’s worth.  Hey, it’s my blog; I suppose I should say something.  As Leelah herself suggested one thing I think we’re clearly talking about here is ignorance of gender issues.  Transgender is just a difficult idea to wrap one’s head around.  How can a person come to feel he or she is trapped in a body of the opposite gender anyway?  Hey, I’m in the same boat as many of the rest of you on this one: The Good Ship Dumb Ass.  Does it involve hormones?  Is it psychological?  Are we talking about variations in the physiology of the brain?  The issue of sexual orientation is difficult enough but transgender takes it to a whole other level.  Women can be attractive and men can be attractive so it seems sensible to me a pretty minor psychological or physiological variation might cause someone to become more attracted to people of the same gender than of the opposite gender but having a body with a perfectly good gender and feeling one ought to have a body of the other gender is something that just strikes me as a lot more unusual and perplexing.  Or is it?  Maybe we’re talking apples and oranges.  It occurred to me just now that sexual orientation looks outward and involves what people finds attractive in other people; transgender looks inward and involves one’s perception of oneself.

For some time in my youth I entertained the idea that sexual orientation and gender issues might be related in some way.  If we concentrate for the moment on the outward looking issue of sexual orientation it occurred to me if one is familiar and comfortable with the existence of gay people and one accepts as feasible someone might be in a loving relationship with someone of the same gender then sexual orientation should be unrelated to one’s gender identity.  That is to say, if one were male for example and understood one could enter into a loving relationship with either a female or another male then it is hard to see how sexual orientation might reflect back upon one’s gender identity.  However, if one had been led to conceive of loving relationships in strictly heterosexual terms or even if one were simply living someplace that didn’t have a lot of other homosexual people, such as tiny town in Ohio, might one feel the only path to a loving relationship with someone of the same gender would be to change one’s own gender thus converting what would otherwise be a homosexual relationship into a heterosexual one?  I wonder if something like that might have been going on in Leelah’s case.  She mentioned in her note her fear she was “never going to find a man who loves me” and was “never going to be happy.”   Did she have the resources to meet other gay people in her small town?  Did she know she didn’t have to become a girl and attract one of the local heterosexual boys to find a man who would love her?  Did she realize she could have moved to any big city in any of the more developed parts of the country and she would have had no difficulty at all meeting other gay men and most likely a man who would have loved her?  Did she know that age is not really a consideration and people can fall in love at any age?

It would break my heart to think Leelah died from a combination of social isolation and heterosexual brainwashing.  Fortunately as I’ve gotten older this theory has tended to make less and less intuitive sense to me.  For one thing it occurs to me there are plenty of other inward looking issues of self perception that have nothing to do with how one perceives other people and thus appear entirely unrelated to sexual orientation.  Some people feel they can only be truly happy if they are thin, or if they have cosmetic surgery, or if they wear a wig, or who knows what else.  It seems quite possible to me something more along those lines may lie behind transgender issues.  Leelah noted she had started feeling most authentically a girl at age four, which seems to me a little early for sexual orientation to play a role.  However, I’m not sure about that.  I know they’ve found sexual orientation occurs a lot earlier than most people realize and long before people begin consciously thinking in sexual terms.  But age four?   Well, maybe.  What do I know?

Anyway, the bigger point, and the point I really want to make here, is that fortunately my ignorance of what’s going on in these cases doesn’t really matter under the liberal ethos.  That’s because under that ethos the issue is not whether I understand it or how I feel about it, the issue is whether being transgender or having gender reassignment has a significant adverse effect on other people that lifts it out of the realm of personal liberty and into the public sphere and no, I don’t think it does.  So as far as this issue goes the liberal ethos implies one should do what makes one happy.  I suppose one might say one nice thing about the liberal ethos is it allows for ignorance on some matters in some situations.

Christianity is a whole other kettle of fish in this respect because as Carla’s remarks make clear the Christian religion casts transgender as an ethical issue along with many other issues, such as sexual orientation, that would not be so classified under the liberal ethos.  Converting non-ethical issues into ethical issues and then trying to control people in areas where it is not really justified is bad enough but the funny thing about thinking of transgender as an ethical issue is it presumes one can control one’s own feelings of gender identity.  Isn’t that generally the case for issues we determine to involve ethics or is that just the humanist in me talking again?  If only I knew more about Christian theology-based ethics.  For example, does the Christian church consider tall people more ethical than short people, perhaps because their heads are closer to God, at least while standing?  I don’t know.  Well, anyway, if we reserve ethics for behavior under one’s control the idea that being transgender is an ethical issue is a bit of a problem for me because I doubt anyone chooses to feel they’re trapped in a body of the wrong gender.  They just do.  So in this case the Christian determination to view the issue as an ethical one seems to me to essentially require one to be ignorant of the matter at hand.  Awkward, as the kids might say.

While I’m at it can I also just say a few words about how Christians talk about love?  Because I find that more than a little annoying as well.  Insisting on foisting one’s religious views on people even when doing so obviously causes them pain and even when those people are not significantly affecting anyone other than themselves anyway is not really what the rest of us mean by love.  Withholding support from someone who depends on one for support is not love.  Withholding medical treatment from someone who needs it is not love.  Picking on sensitive youngsters until they throw themselves in front of trucks is not love.  I understand Christians use the term in some weird theological sense but it’s just confusing as hell for the rest of us.  And they’ve been doing it for centuries.  I imagine some horrid medieval gargoyle burning someone at the stake and gushing the whole time about how much he loves his victim and wants only to save his or her immortal soul.  Is it too much to ask that Christians come up with some different terminology?  How about controlove?  Lovate?  Hey, I’m just thinking out loud right now.  I almost prefer the way extremist Muslims talk.  They hate non-Muslims and want to murder them.  Ugly stuff of course but you have to give them credit for at least talking straight.  With Christians you never know where you stand.  One minute they’re talking about how much they love you and the next minute they can’t take you to the hospital because they don’t support that, religiously, but they want you to know they’ll cry you a river once you’re gone.

Well, I suppose that’s the end of that.  Leelah, I’m sorry I can’t fix society on my own, but I’m doing the best I can.  And your death does have meaning at least in this sense: it motivates me to continue fighting the cancer of conservatism as long as I can.  I feel one day we liberals and humanists will succeed and then you can truly rest in peace.  In the meantime, may your spirit go girl! 

References

Leelah’s Farewell.  http://lazerprincess.tumblr.com.

Ashely Fantz.  A transgender teen’s suicide, a mother’s anguish.  CNN.  December 31, 2014.  http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/31/us/ohio-transgender-teen-suicide/index.html?hpt=hp_t2.

Terrence McCoy.  Transgender teen who died of an apparent suicide: ‘Fix society. Please.’  The Washington Post.  December 31, 2014.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/12/31/transgender-teen-who-died-of-an-apparent-suicide-fix-society-please/?tid=hp_mm&hpid=z3.