http://news.aol.com/health/article/pregnant-man-is-expecting-again/247348?icid=100214839x1213375086x1200828764

A woman who underwent sex reassignment therapy was legally redefined as a man and married their lover. After the female spouse was unable to conceive, the "man" was inseminated and had a child. They are pregnant again.

Sorry, I can't find the normal in this. I feel sorry for the kids who will have to grow up in this circus sideshow.

Why is it your job to find the normal in it? Personal freedom, right? I feel a lot less sorry for these kids, who are clearly being born into a loving family that wants them and will care for them, than I do for the many unwanted kids born to supposedly healthy and "normal" men and women who go on to beat them, abandon them, or fail to educate or care for them. I'm not saying you need to applaud this couple and their methods, but your pity might be misplaced.

Time will tell whether the children need sympathy. Neither you nor I can possibly know the long term impact of their origin and formative circumstances.

It does not require Nostradamus to predict that the schoolyard interrogations will be very interesting for the young ones.

As for my "job", there are many who would say that it is to happily accept any parody of a nuclear family that two or more people choose to assemble, and applaud it as normal and healthy, or accept the abuse and ostracism they feel free to heap on people they inevitably label as judgemental pr*cks if they don't jump on the Joy Bandwagon without hesitation.

But no one is asking you to make a judgment, positive or otherwise. I just don't understand. I think it's so far outside your realm of experience that you think it must be some shameful abomination. I'm not asking you to do a 180 and celebrate it as miraculous and wonderful, just to acknowledge that you have no basis on which to assume these kids deserve pity. I think there are plenty of kids actually deserving of pity out there--why invent more out of mere prejudice?

It reminds me of people who pity children raised by two mommies or two daddies. Studies have shown that those kids do just as well as those raised by a mommy and a daddy. So again, I simply think your pity is misplaced. Are these kids guaranteed to be normal and healthy? No more than any other kid is. But they're not necessarily any LESS likely either.

Most people seem quite happy to accept "studies" that reinforce their predisposed beliefs.

As the below link notes, dispassionate researchers acknowledge that the studies on same sex childrearing are a very recent phenomenon, have often been conducted in highly unscientific ways, and often by advocates of gay parenting with an agenda to advance.

The long term consequences of same sex childrearing will not be evident for decades, when the children of such unions reach adulthood. At this point, it's undeniably a "wait and see" situation. Unfortunately, we are tossing the dice with the lives of children, not their parents- who unlike their offspring, had a vote in the situation.

I'm not saying my reservations are definitive. But after tens of thousands of years of human existence, I may be excused for having some pause over the idea of turning biology on its ear and expecting that there be no repercussions. It seems odd to me that progressives sound incessant alarms over the human race's interference with the natural order of things by their actions (see "global warming", etc), but insist that we accept drastic reversals of natural behavior without any hesitation if they involve personal behavior.

It's not a moral issue. It's biology. To expect that we can ignore the dictates of biology and expect no unusual consequences would be an abnormal expectation. To see us do so with no dramatic consequences, good or bad, would be a happy surprise.

http://www.slate.com/id/2097048/

Just to be clear, is your alarm due to the sex change? Or the ensuing pregnancy? Or the idea of homosexual parenting?

Which affront to biology are you most wary of?

Can't give you a short answer on that one, Dora.

Guess I'd have to vote for the original link of the "pregnant man".

I'm perfectly willing to stand corrected, but I've read numerous items on transgender and sex reassignment histories, and most of them seemed to be accompanied with extremely unstable personal lives and nonstop psychological drama. Throw a spouse and children into the mix, and we're in totally uncharted waters.

Straying from the topic for a moment here. I saw this recently, but didn't know how to introduce the subject.

I read an article about a "transgendered" child on the Net recently. The child's mother told a number of stories about how the child, between the ages of 15 months and 2 years or so, expressed a number of times how he considered himself to be a girl, wanted dresses, and wanted to be relieved of the burden of his penis.

Sorry. Unless this child is some kind of Conversational Savant, it is DEVELOPMENTALLY IMPOSSIBLE that the child was having the kinds of sophisticated conversations with his mother that she was attributing to him. She quoted him at length in extreme detail, and little children simply don't talk like that.

I'm not saying the kid doesn't have gender identity problems. But it's pretty clear that the mother was fabricating the conversations she claims to have had with the child. So it begs the question- are we dealing with a true gender identity issue, or a psychologically unbalanced mother who is seeing and hearing what she wants to hear? I've personally known men whose mothers wanted a girl, and began dressing them in female clothing at an early age. All they really accomplished was to plant a vicious anger towards females in their sons, from what I observed in the resulting adult. If memory serves, serial killer Ted Bundy had a childhood something like that.

True gender identity problems are a terrible cross to bear. Just can't help wondering if all the psychological baggage is really just due to how people treat transgenders, or if it's a natural part of the package when you're born with the wrong plumbing and can't do anything about it.



Last edited by thrice on Fri Nov 14, 2008 11:57 am; edited 3 times in total

thrice wrote:

Can't give you a short answer on that one, Dora.

Guess I'd have to vote for the original link of the "pregnant man".

I'm perfectly willing to stand corrected, but I've read numerous items on transgender and sex reassignment histories, and most of them seemed to be accompanied with extremely unstable personal lives and nonstop psychological drama. Throw a spouse and children into the mix, and we're in totally uncharted waters.

This has not been my experience. I have several transgendered people in my life, including the father (now "parent") of a good friend of mine. Their family is close and beautiful and loving. Another is the aunt (now, I dunno, "relative") of another friend of mine. His name used to be Jessica, now it's Jay. After the change, he married the woman he was in a lesbian relationship with for years. I stayed with them in D.C. for a few days when I was traveling through, and they're about as apple-pie normal as they come. Another is Debbie Douglas, a prominent local spokesperson for trans issues, who worked on Looking For Normal with me, a show I did last winter about a family dealing with these issues. She was inspiring, and one of the most spiritual, balanced, kind people I've had the pleasure of meeting.

I think it's probably more comfortable to assume that havoc ensues when you mess with something so many consider to be fundamental, like gender. But gender is really much more fluid than many would like to acknowledge, in terms of it being simply a way of interacting with the world. Yes, the biological parts are more concrete and harder to change, but I don't see this same outrage or confusion over people who want bigger breasts or a smaller nose. Live and let live. That's all I'm suggesting.

"Yes, the biological parts are more concrete and harder to change, but I don't see this same outrage or confusion over people who want bigger breasts or a smaller nose."

Not even comparable. Bigger breasts or smaller sniffers are just enhancing or decreasing what's already there. You can accomplish the same thing on your hairdo with a comb.

When kids in the schoolyard see a child with two mommies, they know damn well that they didn't come into the world in the same way they did. And kids being what they are, they will pounce on that, and I don't care how much diversity training or anti-bullying lectures you give them. Kids in my childhood couldn't get by with a funny looking haircut or wearing some way-out-of-style clothing, and I doubt that aspect of the world will ever change. Chickens in a barnyard act the same way, and they similarly ignore lectures on being nice to each other.

So let's all be the same because anyone who's different will be mocked? I just don't think that's compelling motivation. Bi-racial kids, kids with disabilities, kids with divorced parents...they're all different too. Everyone is going to be teased for something eventually. I was called a "Holocaust Victim" because I had absurdly skinny legs. Would it be better if I had never been born at all? I don't think so.

And the first step in countering other people's intolerance is to work on your own.