gender benders

Six months ago I left a political congress feeling quite insulted. I had been assigned to a committee with a mechanic who said he had not felt right in a man’s body. He thought wearing a fussy dress and having a sex-change operation made him a woman. With his ultra feminine mannerisms – reminiscent of a man in a play pretending to be a woman – he looked like a strong, healthy man pretending to be a woman. He said as a woman he understood women’s issues.
Yeah, right. No matter how emotionally uncomfortable this mechanic felt with his gender, he spent his first 40 years as a guy.

As a child he was not told his camp-outs had to be near the house while the younger brothers were allowed to camp in the woods.

He grew up on the other side of the ‘guys play, girls cheer.”

He never had to consider the impact of a pregnancy on his education, career or body. And despite his sex-change operation, he still has no idea how easily the muscle dense, male body lose weight compared to a typical female body.

His understanding of women’s issues is like the middle-aged man who never served in the military but talks about his tour in ‘Nam.

No matter how this man manipulates his superficial appearance, he has the bone structure of a man and each of his body’s thousands of cells flunks female DNA testing.
Although the congress was last fall, it wasn’t until last week I knew I wanted to cross over the politically correct lines of acceptability established by our generation. My decision to say, “I’m insulted” was precipitated by a new word I discovered in a U.S. News and World Report editorial: apotemnophila. It refers to a psychiatric condition of a people with perfectly healthy limbs that they want cut off, because they do not feel right in a body with all four limbs intact. Some are so uncomfortable that they bind up one or both healthy legs or arms in an effort to feel like an amputee.
One surgeon actually accommodated two people who desperately wanted elective amputations. He was stopped before he relieved a third person of two healthy legs and the intense emotional distress of being forced to live in a perfect body.
Bizarre? Sure, but no more bizarre than the healthy men and women who can not stand their healthy body’s gender, want surgeon to change it and then expect others to respond to them as if they had been born that way.
It is ridiculous to say that the adult who calms his or her emotional discomfort with a sex-change operation understand and knows all the emotional, social and political issues of those who experienced the realities from birth. A vocal gender wanna-bee is as fake as a Vietnam-vet-wannabee relating his war experiences. The transgender does not understand anymore than an amputee-wannabe understands the shock of losing a limb through physical trauma or illness.
It is too bad, but in this age of embracing the superficial, emotionally soothing world of the politically correct, we have turned away from the emotional empowerment given to Paul the apostle. He chose to embrace the realities of his life and wrote in Phil. 4:11 “I have learned how to be content in whatever state I am.”


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