>> I love the little stories, it's the underlying bigotry that tells me my personal hell isn't relevant that causes me to question your intellect.

Pardon me if I fail to quite see what you're talking about, for I cannot seem to detect either anger or bigotry in any of the thoughtful posts which comprise this thread.

I'm terribly sorry that you feel your life to be a "personal hell," but you must realise that it's *people* who make it so, and a very few people at that, not anything within you nor anything so universal that better venues for self-expression and happiness are impossible to find.

I gather from your reference to "stories" that the closely-coupled reference to "intellect" may well refer to me, and I wanted to assure you that you should feel quite free to question my intellect all you want, and please feel equally free to quote me where I said I was an idiot. So many of us are. But I'm a happy idiot, all in all, and possibly not quite as bigoted as you seem to think.

I comfort myself that you may be angry in general, not in particular, and certainly don't know me very well.

Be of good cheer. Better days are coming for us all,

Puddin'
------------------------
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity;
and I'm not sure about the universe.
--- Albert Einstein

'You are old, Father William', the young man said,
'And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head --
Do you think, at your age, it is right?'

'In my youth', Father William replied to his son,
'I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.'
--- Lewis Carroll

What is tolerance? -- it is the consequence of humanity.
We are all formed of frailty and error;
let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly --
that is the first law of nature.
--- Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)

>> In fact, I have never understood why transsexuals and homosexuals (male and female) ended up in the same group.

I have a theory about this, that it's because in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim (J-C-M) ethos, they're all defined against the same thing, which is stereotypical masculine behaviour. And indeed, one of the arguments made by Ms. Bindel (albeit indirectly) is that they share an etiology.

Homosexuality, transsexuality, and other gender variance has been with us since before we became human, but the heroic medical interventions are fairly late, other than castration, which has a long history. In other societies and times, what we now call transsexuality (an entirely modern medical term) has been called other things, been rejected or admired, quite often in perfect synchrony with homosexuality, all along.

The Talmud (years 50-500 of the common era) has a lengthy discussion of what they called an "androgyne" or "tumtum" of which this is a short precis:

http://www2.phreak.co.uk/dana/haaretz_ts.html

This seems to refer to the intersexed, but there are some progressive rabbis who consider that it extends to transsexuals as well, based on modern genetic studies not available to the Rabbis.

Several American First Nations had variations of what they termed "Two Spirit" people, who might be homosexual, or transsexual, or both, without adverse judgment or consequences, and some tribes had specific roles for the transsexual, quite often positions of honour, in recognition, perhaps, that people with different viewpoints can be very valuable in a small tribe, so the tribe wants to make these roles attractive.

There's ample reason to believe, for example, that colour blindness in males is a useful trait, since colour blind hunters can see right through many animal and plant camouflage strategies. The best effectiveness comes with a mix of normal and and colour blind hunters that's surprisingly close to what we see in humans, around one in twenty, a relatively high value seen in no other primate.

Likewise, a tetrachromic female is probably of extraordinary value to a tribe, since such women (very rare) can distinguish a fourth range of colour, completely invisible to all males and most females, which might allow them to discern clear differences between the skin colour of sick and healthy people, for example, perhaps the origin of the "wise women" and "healers" so treasured by many tribes, or detect the subtle variations in plant colour that might mark those with a higher degree of moisture or nutrients, allowing the women so blessed to find good places to dig wells, or select the most valuable seed crops to save for next year's planting. It's notable that the "witch" is usually female in ancient societies, and the so-called "Second Sight" is likewise sex-specific. Could it be that these women could *actually* see what others could not? Could the Oracles and Pythonesses of antiquity be women with a perfectly normal, but for most of us incomprehensible, gift?

What Bindel says, and it's hardly arguable, is that it's only since the early 20th century that the *status* of the gender-variant has changed from a societal problem long since solved in most non-J-C-M societies in an more or less amicable manner, and in J-C-M societies in a vicious and hostile manner, to a medical one solvable only by technology.

In Iran, male homosexuality is a capital offense, but if the supposed "homosexual" is actually a *transsexual*, a few snips makes that individual back into a valued member of society. Many make that choice, political correctness being properly seen as somewhat less important than survival. What could be simpler, and what could illustrate the conflation of the two statuses more clearly?

The J-C-M model of the perfect human is a heterosexual male, with no kinky desires to do anything besides drink beer, watch football and scratch his arse, commanded to be fruitful and to fill the Earth with children through heterosexual intercourse with his wife (or wives).

To the extent that any man doesn't do that, he sins. The punishments for this particular sin were draconian, but no more so than other "crimes" against the cultus. Women are an afterthought, defined primarily by what they aren't, that is, men.

So lesbianism is perfectly fine, not specifically prohibited in Torah except as a general issue of "obedience," so if, and only if, the husband, or father, or other male having control of the woman objects to her lesbian affairs, she can be lashed, just as she would be for any other defiance of male authority.

Our common law follows the same pattern, with sodomy (homosexuality) and cross-dressing being specifically prohibited since antiquity, but lesbianism being added into the mix only in modern times, when the "sexologists" "discovered" the female "invert."

And if one looks at behaviour rather than self-assigned labels, one can see a pattern.

Let's draw an imaginary cross on a dartboard.

We can label the vertical axis "Desire" and the horizontal axis "Affect" then placing "Male" at the ends of two axes, and "Female" at the other, forming two continua of "opposites".

Now let's throw a human dart at the board. Most of the time, because our aim is good, we can place Blue darts into the quadrants that have "Male" affect and "Male" desire (whatever that means) and Pink darts into the quadrant with "Female" affect and "Female" desire (whatever that means). But sometimes we miss and our Blue dart goes into one of those three pesky "other" quadrants with varying degrees of pink, or our Pink dart goes into the corresponding "other" quadrants with a tinge of blue. I'll leave it to your imagination to guess which quadrants correspond to modern ideas of transsexuality and/or homosexuality.

We can all agree that, in antiquity, all these dart people "made do," they landed in their "proper" quadrant or did not, their societies either did or did not make it easy for them, whatever quadrants they wound up in, and life went on.

We can also consider that on the real dartboard, there are no quadrants marked, and everything is a gradation between abssolute pink and absolute blue. Many of us, perhaps most of us, are not poised at the very extreme of any of these ranges, but float somewhere in the middle.

What Ms Bindel argues is that our definition of the extremes can, and has, changed, and that *the* solution for one era and location make look very different at another place and time. We've got a hammer, MtF surgery, and suddenly an awful lot of problems look like nails, but the very same problem has been solved in other ways, some perhaps less invasive than surgery, or requiring surgery only on society itself, which is inherently more flexible than bodies.

Let's do another thought experiment.

Female A prefers females
Male B prefers females

For whatever reason, call it either a blessing or a curse, it seems desireable that Female A and Male B marry.

What can we do with surgery?

We can transform Female A into a rough approximation of a Male, which turns out to be the most dystopian solution, since no one gets what they want.

We can transform Male B into a close approximation of a female, thereby allowing both to achieve their approximate desires.

Note that personal desire doesn't enter into this experiment, and the intervention might be initiated by either party, or by a third party.

Is formerly Male B a transsexual? Transgendered? Does it matter whether A or B initiated the intervention? One can, after all, find examples of all of these scenarios on this very site.

What can we do without surgery?

Assuming that the advisability of marriage come from within the two parties, there are all sorts of fairly reasonable compromises that might be made.

Male B might voluntarily approximate femininity, without surgery, taking on those attributes that most satisfy Female A and work out a compromise.

Female A might sacrifice some part of her own desire, asking for corresponding concessions from her future husband, but again working toward a reasonable compromise.

Does Male B "become" a transsexual thereby? In either solution?

Does Female A "become" heterosexual thereby? In either solution?

It turns out that this same general transaction can be performed between society and individuals as well, and in fact this sort of bargain is what allowed "two spirit" people in some First Nations tribes in the Americas to take on the roles and marriages they desired, rather than the ones foisted upon them by biological and religious fiat.

These peoples considered the spirit, or soul if you will, more important than mere bodies, in fact disregarded the body in favour of the soul, and we must presume that people thus regarded were happy, having the love and community of their tribes and chosen partners.

So what's more important, souls or bodies?

Ms. Bindel argues essentially and, unfortunately, not terribly coherently, that it's possible that our modern mania for *fixing* things, twiddling with the *body* of "guilty" sinners, might better be replaced with an approach in which society bends, and lets people be whatever they damned well please *without* making them jump through hoops.

This is what Delany argues as well, albeit in the form of a novel, that "transsexuality" is a construct of oppression, and it's the formerly oppressed and prostituted Bron who "discovers" his transsexuality in the midst of a society which values personal integrity. The people of Triton have the technology to change sex, sexual orientation, appearance, and many other variables that our own society considers either innate or divinely-ordained, and it seems difficult to discern the difference, here on Earth. But on Triton people make these choices for what we might consider trivial reasons, like the woman who prefers a masculine appearance and sex-life, but retains one breast so he can help his many girlfriends nurse their babies, like the man who decides that a particular party would be an ideal venue in which to wear a ball gown, and changes his body to female so he can wear it without spoiling the line of the skirt with a bulge. What Delany says is that sexuality and gender don't carry capitals, are not, in fact, divinely-ordained, and that they don't matter in any existential sense, but are mere choices, like choosing the red shoes or the blue. If you want to wear the bra, by all means get breasts as well, but don't agonise about it. If you want to have sex with men, just do it; you don't need to sign up for a lifetime membership in an exclusive club.

Cheers,

Puddin'
---------------
Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance and none can say why some fields will blossom while others lay brown beneath the August sun. Care for those around you. Look past your differences. Their dreams are no less than yours, their choices no more easily made.
--- Kent Nerburn