I'm not normally one to focus on social issues or make an effort to wave a flag, however...
Over the last few months I, like so many of you all before me, and so many to follow after, have been thinking deeply on the issues of gender dysphoria.
Amongst all the negatives there are also many positives, particularly with regards to the (slowly) changing view of western society to gender dysphoria. Therefore the article in yesterday's Guardian is perhaps reason (for many of us) to be grateful that we were born in the West and to have profound sympathy for those less fortunate who are caught up in this backlash.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/06/gulf-gen...
Persephone
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as a manor of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne
Comments
Amen
As one who has had an opportunity to meet and work with people from other cultures, I second Persephone's view. It has become all to common these days to denigrate our cultural heritage. While it is far from perfect, I have yet to find any other that is superior to it.
So, like my Anglo-Saxon co-conspiritor, I celebrate the culture that has allowed me to be all I can be, and then some.
Nancy Cole
"You may be what you resolve to be."
T.J. Jackson
Meanwhile in India...
OK, not strictly related to Persephone's post, but another example of unhelpful attitudes to gender taken to the extreme:
Indians pay surgeons to turn girls into boys
Admittedly the research has only identified about 300 girls who were given GRS as babies / toddlers, but given the prevalence of female foeticide and the fact there are now seven million more boys than girls aged under six in the country, it wouldn't surprise me if those 300 are the tip of the iceberg among wealthier families. Perhaps the most worrying aspect of both practices is that it is apparently more prevalent in wealthier, more educated families.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don't...
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!
I hate to bang the feminist drum
but the emancipation of women generally allows acceptance and enfranchisement of minority groups. Most of these countries have strict patriarchal societies which view women as possessions of men. To expect them to respect minorities like transgender folk or even gays when they don't respect females as humans, is always going to be disappointed.
Quite how we've allowed this to happen over the millennia is perplexing, and shows a massive societal imbalance in these cultures, sadly often reinforced by narrow views of religion.
Angharad
A feminist and proud of it.
Angharad
It's as well to remember ...
... that many of these attitudes and freedoms in the 'west' are very recent and still subject to reactionary forces. Lots of them have happened in my own lifetime since the end of WW2 and owe much to the fact that, with the men away at war, women had to do many jobs formerly done by men. Even then, once the men were home there were attempts to put women back in their domestic box.
When I was a teen in the 50s, homosexual acts in the UK were illegal and that would include transsexuals and others with any degree of gender dysphoria.
Don't forget that all 3 countries in the sub-continent (India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) have had female leaders and Thailand has just elected one. In Europe there is only Germany. The UK has had just one and the USA has yet to elect a female president and lags both Australia and New Zealand in that respect. There's a long way to go all over the world. The west has no room for complacency.
Robi
Be thankful we are who we are where we are.
Here in our Western Cultures, we have more freedoms than others which is our blessing as we can achieve our desire.
May Your Light Forever Shine
May Your Light Forever Shine