{"id":315,"date":"2015-01-30T09:31:38","date_gmt":"2015-01-30T14:31:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/?p=315"},"modified":"2015-03-02T21:32:32","modified_gmt":"2015-03-03T02:32:32","slug":"sexual-transformers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/?p=315","title":{"rendered":"Sexual Transformers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"two<\/a>No, this is not a review of an X-rated version of the Transformers movie which, felicitously enough, I have never seen (the Transformers…there is no X-rated version, so don’t go looking). \u00a0Rather, a comment on a report I heard last Monday, January 26th, 2015, that Ontario’s Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services (how’s that for a handle?) decreed that so-called ‘transgendered’ inmates could be placed in a correctional facility of their choice, whether or not they have had ‘reassignment’ surgery (oh, the euphemisms!).\u00a0 Of course, the Globe and Mail’s law professor columnist Kyle Kirkup<\/a> was gushing in his approval, as a matter of advancing human rights.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Before we discuss rights, I wonder first how that’s going to work out on a practical level?\u00a0 Let me guess:\u00a0 This will by and large be men who ‘think’ they are women (i.e., a woman somehow accidentally in a man’s body) being transferred into female prisons.\u00a0 There may be a few women who think they are men permitted into men’s prisons, but that, I would imagine, be rare, and would create a lot of, shall we say with our own euphemism, ‘problems’.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Of course, they will be permitted to bring their prosthetics with them, to complete this fantasy, rubber and all.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Some<\/a>

Will the real woman please stand up?<\/p><\/div>\n

I am not sure one would have even thought of making a comedy along these lines in the eighties, or even the nineties.\u00a0 There have always been cross-dressing ‘transvestite’ movies and shows:\u00a0 Of Shakespeare’s 38 surviving plays, one-fifth purportedly involve cross-dressing in the plot.\u00a0 \u00a0Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis pretended to be girls (alongside Marilyn Monroe, who did not need to pretend) way back in the innocent apple-pie days of 1959 in Some Like it Hot\u00a0<\/em>(which, curiously enough, was one of the only American movies to receive a ‘C’ or condemned rating by the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency…boy, how times have changed);\u00a0Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie (1982), the lamentable early-eighties sitcom Bosom Buddies<\/em>, with a young Tom Hanks; and the then-avant-garde The Crying Game<\/em>, with its infamous ‘reveal’ at the end, that the black woman with whom the Irish I.R.A. protagonist falls in love is, get this, actually a man!\u00a0 I am still scarred (no, not ‘scared’, for I am no homo-phobe, but scarred, yes, I will admit to that).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

One reader has warned that I should add a note of caution on the last movie, which crosses a kind of rubicon: \u00a0In every other cross-dressing movie, play, novel, we generally know the protagonist’s real sex. \u00a0I mean, just look at Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in the poster above: \u00a0It is obvious<\/em> that they are men dressed up as women, and that is part of the joke. \u00a0Who would actually be convinced? \u00a0And we laugh at those who are. \u00a0Not so in The Crying Game<\/em>, where we are led to believe all the way through the film that the ‘female’ lead is in fact female, and the movie tries to draw us in to the attraction felt by the tough IRA man, in a sort of a paternal, \u00a0only slightly sexual way. \u00a0She is revealed in the end as really a ‘man’ in a rather explicit, graphic scene, a humiliation for the tough Irishman, and I would warn any reader to avoid having that image in their memory; indeed, just avoid the entire movie. \u00a0(I usually mention in class, when referring to a movie, or any media, as an example that I am in no way recommending them).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Now, after the now-quaint innocence of the Bard, the hidden-gay eighties and the more-publicly-gay nineties,we are entering realms of idiocy that only governmental bureaucracy could devise.\u00a0 Their decisions are beyond satire which, I lament with others, is dead or dying swiftly.\u00a0 As soon as you make a joke, you realize the next day that it is actually true.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Oh, how quaint the term ‘transvestite’ now even seems!\u00a0 I recall dimly that some of the Roman emperors and mediaeval kings engaged in this practise.\u00a0 I even recall a photo of one of my brothers as a child dressed up as a woman for Hallowe’en one year, many moons ago, and all in fun, of course.\u00a0 Underneath the clothes, like the she-male in The Crying Game<\/em>, they were as male as you could be.\u00a0 Now, with ‘advancements’ in transgender surgery (who said anything about a health crisis and waiting lists for surgery?), one is never quite sure.\u00a0 Not, of course, that I check (that reminds me of a scene from the first Crocodile Dundee<\/em> movie…), but, since it came up, just wondering.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Such transgenders (I will stick to the men ‘becoming’ women, as the norm, by and large) are now permitted into all-female colleges, female washrooms, and, now, female prisons, for how dare we discriminate?\u00a0 Would not that be imposing our own paternalistic, heterosexual, two-sex worldview upon these questioning individuals, who prefer to exist on a ‘spectrum’ of gender?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I am all for mercy and compassion, but these two oft-misused-and-abused terms cannot be used to violate the more fundamental virtue of justice, which is giving others what is owed to them<\/em>.\u00a0 We owe to the other inmates of the uni-sex prison, or the other co-eds, or the other users of the washrooms that dot the restaurants of our fair land, at least some modicum of privacy and decorum.\u00a0 To have a middle-aged ‘man’ walk in to a female change-room, claiming he is a ‘woman’ is, not to be too punny, a travesty.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Here is the rub:\u00a0 Our sexuality is determined by our body, and our soul grows and develops along with the body.\u00a0 We are body-soul composites, and there is no ‘inner’ person-soul hiding within the body, an error stemming from a certain reading of Plato, and Descartes’ subsequent ‘ghost in a machine’ version of human ensoulment.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rather, the soul and body cannot be separated (except in death), and we are a unitary ‘person’, composed of this unity between soul and body.\u00a0 When we are conceived, there is a genotype that determines what sex we will be (XX or XY as our 23rd pairs of chromosomes).\u00a0 Our hormones, the development of our bodies, and all of our psychosocial attributes, flow from this genetic determinacy, shaped in turn by our environment and our social interactions as we grow up and mature.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Thus, we go from being ‘male’ and ‘female’ to being ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, a husband and a wife, a father and a mother, under parental and societal tutelage. \u00a0\u00a0At least, it used to be so.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There are very rare physiological disorders that disrupt this process, most of which can be ameliorated by modern medicine.\u00a0 One may have a genetic disorder in the sex chromosomes (too many or too few), or one may have a hormonal imbalance, both of which may lead to some kind of hermaphroditism.\u00a0 These are usually corrected at birth, or at some stage of early development, after determining the true sex of the individual (based on genetics).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But these rare disorders are just that, medical anomalies, and cannot be used as a norm to justify, in the present case, expensive, irremediable and maiming surgeries, nor social experimentation of the most radical kind.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The transgenders, almost to a ‘man’, do not suffer from these rare physiological conditions.\u00a0 They are confused individuals, suffering from psychosocial maladjustment of complex etiology, who for such a variety of reasons, have never fully accepted their sexual role.\u00a0 Of course, this disorder is a ‘spectrum’, in the sense that our society is confused in general on what it means to be a man and a woman.<\/p>\n

\"Marine<\/a>

One down, two to go…<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Our culture is dismantling the complementarity of the sexes, man and woman, both top down and bottom up.\u00a0 We are denying philosophically that there is such a thing as masculine<\/em> and feminine<\/em>, and that one’s role in life is whatever one makes it.\u00a0 If there are parts of army training, for example, that women cannot do, such as climb over a wall fully encumbered, or the requisite three chin-ups for women in the Marines<\/a>, then such obstacles are quietly removed; so much for Private Suzie escaping from ISIS on a tactical retreat.\u00a0 The National Post reported<\/a> recently on the problem of transgender (or, as some put it, ‘transitioned’) athletes competing in sports.\u00a0 How do female athletes compete with females-who-were-once-males, and who still have male upper-body strength and endurance?\u00a0 As one transitioned athlete put it, “the flaw with gender testing is that it attempts to put everyone in one of two boxes”.\u00a0 No kidding. \u00a0The all-gender Superbowl may be next…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Washrooms are now being labelled ‘unisex’ to avoid discrimination.\u00a0 I am not sure if it is connected to this tendency, but our new local Tim \"transgender<\/a>Horton’s has two one-person-only washrooms for either sex.\u00a0 Gone are the days, it seems, of men’s communal washrooms with their convenient urinals.\u00a0 That, dear boy, would be discrimination, for a transgender may not be able to use a urinal. \u00a0We will soon see signs like the one at the left, with perhaps even more ‘images’, so that no one feels left out.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The claim is made that although we are born with bodies of a particular sex, this must not determine our, well, our ‘sex’.\u00a0 Must we live under the constraints of our 23rd chromosomes?\u00a0 Now our bodies can be surgically modified, at public expense of course, to fit any point on that spectrum that fits in with our desires, our proclivities and our sexual imagination.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I will predict, here and now, disastrous consequences for such a course, not least in the short term for the confused individuals who ‘question’ their sex to the point of trying to change it (most need spiritual and psychological counselling, not surgery and hormonal therapy), but also for society striving to re-form itself to accommodate their disorder.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Queer times indeed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

January 29th, 2015<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No, this is not a review of an X-rated version of the Transformers movie which, felicitously enough, I have never seen (the Transformers…there is no X-rated version, so don’t go looking). \u00a0Rather, a comment on a report I heard last Monday, January 26th, 2015, that Ontario’s Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services (how’s that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,6,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=315"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":433,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions\/433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}