Thank you Pharyngula!

And thank you PZ Myers!

For those that don’t know, Pharyngula is one of the premier blogs for people interested in science and reason. I would highly recommend reading the blog for its scientific reason, skeptical philosophies, and political commentary. But now I would like to add one more reason to the mix. PZ Myers has just commented on California’s proposition 8.

As I would expect from anyone capable of thinking outside the narrow philosophy of repressive religions, PZ has spoken for the rights of everyone that wants to marry in the state of California. If we only had more people capable of using their God given (Ha! I couldn’t help it) minds, we might truly reach equality for all in the land of the (partially) free and the home of the brave (but bigoted).

As a final note to all my gay friends: when we can finally secure your freedoms, please don’t forget about those of us in the gender community.

Transsexual “Bones”

I must admit that one of my favorite television shows is “Bones”. For those that aren’t familliar with the show, it is about a forensic anthropologist and a FBI agent solving crimes.

In the show, one of the first things the forensic anthropologist does upon discovering a body is give the sex and rough age of the deceased. I always wondered, however, what would happen if they found a transsexual instead of someone that meets all the stereotypical expectations of sex and gender. Well, it looks like I might be about to find out.

While I was looking at the catelogue of shows, I noticed this: (here is the site it was taken from)

• 65. Season 4, Ep 7: The He in the She

  Booth and Brennan go to investigate a body found in the Chesapeake Bay. After arriving, they find only the upper torso, giving the team little to work with other than remnants of the victim’s breast implants. Brennan and Booth are led to a small church in Maryland, where they find that the victim was a pastor. When the team finds the lower half of the body, they learn that their initial assumptions may not been incorrect.

  Aired: 10/8/2008

While this show hasn’t aired yet, the description indicates to me that it is going to be a show that I really want to see. If it is anything like I expect it to be, I imagine it is going to be a tough night for me when I watch it. I just hope they handle the show with the grace and understanding they handle their other shows with; if not, I fear I will be curled up in the fetal position crying for quite some time.

Are we, as GLBT, better than Christians?

I really enjoy when I read something that gives me a different insight on what causes other people to act the way they do. It is difficult to burrow down into their inner thoughts to see what causes their outer actions. Often, it seems, people assume that everyone feels and believes the same things; then, when people act differently than we would, they assume it is because there is something “evil” about people that don’t see things their way.

Recently P. Z. Myers desecrated a communion wafer taken from the Catholic church after it was consecrated. While Mr. Myers doesn’t seem to be a member of any minority (other than being an Atheist), the recent incident he was involved in served as an example to me of ways to be a better person.

Let me back up a little for the people that might not be familiar with the story:

It seems that Webster Cook took one of the communion wafers from a Catholic service. (Description of incident here) He was able to liberate the wafer from the service despite other people trying to prevent the wafer from leaving the premises. What followed was accusations, complaints, and counter complaints — at least officially. On an unofficial level, e-mails were written to Mr. Cook threatening his life over what many of us outside the Catholic faith believe to be just a cracker.

This is the point where P. Z. Myers entered the picture. Mr. Myers anguished about the absurdity of actually threatening a human being’s life over a cracker. He decided that, if he could get his hands on one of the consecrated communion wafers, he would draw the ire of the people away from Mr. Cook by desecrating the wafer. (full Pharyngula entry here)

(snippet from the entry):

So, what to do. I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I’ll send you my home address.

I’m not sure exactly who sent him the communion wafer, but he did get his hands on one and followed through with his threatened actions. As you might imagine, there were people that weren’t happy at all about Mr. Myers “desecrating” something they held sacred.

While some might hold the communion wafer sacred, I wasn’t among them. Actually, until I researched into this story, I didn’t even know what a Eucharistic miracle was. Being raised in a Protestant church, I was familiar with communion, but no one ever even eluded to me that it was anything other than symbolic: and if it was symbolic, then it was just a cracker. Other people didn’t agree, and they weren’t interested in keeping silent about their dissatisfaction.

Mr. Myers received a flood of e-mail, most apparently containing either death threats or telling him what a godless, anarchist he is and how he would surely burn in hell. Over time, however, even the hottest temper begins to cool. But even as the flood of e-mails became a trickle, there were still some people deeply wounded and willing to write.

Mr. Reich was one of the people that wrote to P. Z. Myers after the the majority of people had moved on to other things. (fulll Pharyngula entry here)

(snippet from the entry):

Scott Reich has been writing repeatedly.

… (two hateful e-mails omitted)

But then he apologizes. Sort of.

I wrote you a letter in anger, and I need to apologize for my rudeness and ask your forgiveness. I am sorry that I called you a hillbilly and said that you must live in a trailer park. While I hate what you did, I don’t hate you. In fact, when you did that, I realized that I was seeing Jesus’ sufferings all over again: the mocking, the contempt,the diabolical hatred, the torture and awful death. I know he didn’t die again, but I could witness his sufferings again in what you did. I also learned that I don’t comprehend his love for us. He really does love his enemies. I didn’t respond to you like he does. I responded like a disciple who does not comprehend his teacher. I got an eye opener about how to love as Jesus does in the way he responded to you. He let you handle him and hurt him, but he didn’t resist. A lesson for me. I hope you will let him in one day. He exists.

Mr. Reich is the one that changed my mind. While I still can’t believe that the communion wafer was anything other than a cracker, he was able to open my eyes to the feelings underneath the hatred. He was able to do this, not by threats or telling other people how “evil” they were, but by explaining how someone else’s actions were effecting him. He was able to put his innermost thoughts and feelings to the public, risking ridicule from people he might see as monsters, in the hopes of being true to his own sense of inner self. He was able to use something that he saw as almost a personal attack on him through his religion, yet he used that to learn something about himself and grow in the way that he wanted to grow as a person.

How many times have I faced prejudice, bigotry, and discrimination and let them turn me bitter? I have lost count of the times I have watched a television program and felt hurt by the filth spewed forth at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered community. But was I able to use these events to learn something? In most cases, no. I was falling into the same trap that they found themselves in. I couldn’t see their point of view, and it was beginning to poison my soul. While I was never much of a religious person as an adult, the hatred I saw emanating from organized religion pushed me about as far away from church as one could become. It’s ironic: the people that professed a desire to save me were actually driving me away from their view by their hostility.

But the important question to ask is: are we any better? Have we become as jaded as the preachers on television? I hope not. The people that can’t get hatred out of their minds are doomed to an existence dictated by their hatred of other people. Their moments of peace are stolen by their passionate hate, destroying family and pushing friends away. The only kind of people attracted to hatred are other people that hate, each feeding on the other and reinforcing their own bigotry.

I hope I am better than that. I hope we all are.

On, and as for Mr. Cook, (read here)

Probably not sexual attraction

I this post ( Should sexual attraction cause suffering? ) I wondered about a feeling I have periodically. But just like that, the feeling is gone. Because of the way that it comes and goes, I have to doubt that it is really sexual attraction. It’s strange. It seems that whatever the feeling is, it seems to be more closely tied to a need for protection or comfort that to actual sexual attraction.

Recently I have been reading a blog My Hetero Gay Life. The author of the blog seems to be gay. I have pondered whether he is bisexual, but the way he describes his feelings, I can’t help but wonder whether he might be right. I must admit I don’t think that there is enough room in the heterosexual / homosexual black and white way of thinking to allow for the rainbow of people and their feelings. I believe that the Kinsey Scale is a more workable framework, but even it is too limiting. Still, the things he describes, especially in the post Why Not Bi? just sound like someone either in the Kinsey 5 or Kinsey 6 range.

Visualizations about having sex with a man just don’t happen to me. In my mind (and dreams) it is always a woman. So what is this feeling that comes over me every so often? I wish I knew.

Should sexual attraction cause suffering?

There are days, like today, when the weight of the world feels like it is crushing me. It seems that everywhere I turn, the anguish only increases. There is no help from religion, at least the religion that can be found on the Internet; instead, the Internet’s religion only makes it worse. It seems that religion is systematically trying to remove any safe place there is for me. It seems that my sexual identity doesn’t match the majority of the population: or does it? It is in this confusion, and the prejudice that goes along with it, that the weight seems to be unbearable.

There aren’t even any agreed upon words to describe my situation. If I say that I am a transsexual, it causes people to view things through one set of filters. If, on the other hand, I say that I am a woman, people view the same dilemma from a completely different point of view. I don’t really understand how the same dilemma can be seen from two contradicting perspectives when the only difference between them is a word.

I guess that which we call a rose, by any other name, might not smell as sweet. (Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet)

The problem is sexual attraction. I am in a committed relationship with another woman. I have been with her for more than 21 years. I do love her with all my heart and every fiber of my being. The problem comes from sometimes wanting to be with a man. These feelings present themselves periodically and leave me in the situation of feeling like there is just some places where I can’t go. But it isn’t because I can’t sleep with a man, but rather that I refuse to hurt the woman that I love. It feels like just another closet that I have to stay inside.

Does this make me heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or some other combination to which I am not aware of the name? Does it really matter? The suffering is the same regardless of the name.

It would be nice to be able to find someone I could talk to about my feelings. In the past I have looked to religion for insights and help with feelings I don’t fully understand. The problem seems now to be that there is so much noise on the Internet that I can’t find anything but the hatred put forth by people in the name of their religion.

I don’t have any answers. I just know I’m tired of hurting.

The choice to be Transsexual

There are many different facets to being a transsexual, some of them different from person to person. One thing that remains the same, however, is that being a transsexual is a choice. There are many transsexuals that don’t want to admit that there is any choice involved with being a transsexual. Admitting that there is choice involved serves to give fuel to the people that would have us crushed under the heal of society. Making a choice, to some people, means that the extremists are correct in their assessment that we should be hated and ostracized by society. It appears to give credence to the people that think with their phobias instead of their minds. But speaking the truth is important to each of us that identifies as a transsexual. The truth opens the door for positive changes. The truth opens the door to self acceptance. The truth opens the door to people that genuinely wish to understand. The truth spans political parties and ideological divisions. But most important, the truth lets us take pride in ourselves again.

Before I continue, I feel I need to separate the decision to become a transsexual into two parts. First, there are the feelings that drive us to make the transition; and then there is the decision to make the transition itself. It is important to divide the early process into these two parts, otherwise all the talk of choices is simply lost in the noise of one person speaking past another. While I might insist that I didn’t have a choice, I would be referring to the feelings that drove me. Another person, insisting that I made a choice, would be referring to the actions I have taken in response to my feelings.

There are several hypotheses on the cause of the feelings a person has that might lead them to become a transsexual. Some of these hypotheses compete, while others are complimentary. Trying to find a root cause to transsexual feelings is difficult to say the least; and the more scientists look into these causes, the more possibilities seem to present themselves. There is even the possibility that the causes are different between the male-to-female transsexual and the female-to-male. Regardless of the cause or causes, these feelings propagate through a person whether that person wants them to or not. There is no choice whether these feelings will go away; so the real choice is what are we going to do about them?

What we do about these feelings is where the choice to become a transsexual arrives in our lives. I don’t think it is unreasonable, from the stories I have read, to believe that there can be different magnitudes of these feelings. For some people, I don’t think the feelings ever create a bigger problem than they are able to handle in their original gender role. If the pain isn’t more than the person can tolerate, they might make the decision to continue in their birth assigned gender role. For other people, staying in their assigned gender role can be so painful that it is no longer possible to continue functioning in society. There comes a point when it might even be to painful to continue living. But regardless of the extent of the pain our feelings cause us, we need to realize that we are still making a choice. For too many of us, the choice comes down to life or death, transition or suicide. This is the first choice we have to make.

Whether you have to make the choice between life and death or not, you still have to weigh the value of your pre-transition life with your post-transition hopes. Weighing these decisions is a balancing act that shows the magnitude of the pain we face. On one side of the scales is our family, friends, livelihood, home, money, community, safety, health, reputation, religion, and social network: on the other side, our need to be ourselves. It can be one of the most difficult and frightening decisions we will ever face, but it is a decision none the less. Most of us are all too familiar with this decision. We have lived with this decision brewing under the facade we called our lives until the weight of our needs outweighed the sum total of our pre-transition lives.

Transition brings on its own pain. Few, if any, of us are able to make a transition without being the center of attention for months if not years. There are too many mannerisms that need to be relearned, skills that need to be practiced, and prejudices that need to be faced. Often we are put through the very fires of hell for the hope of being ourselves. Often we can’t imagine the depth of the pain we will have to endure to let our true selves surface. Even if we thought we knew all the facets of society that would reject us, more often than not, these weren’t even the tip of the iceberg: but this was our choice. The medications, possible electrolysis, and surgeries are a crippling reality in themselves: but this was our choice. The loss of friends and family breaks our hearts and isolates us from society: but this was our choice. The loss of jobs and income ruins us financially: but this was our choice.

If none of these things sound like a choice to you, then you should consider yourself lucky. Transsexuality is the choice of the spirit over the body: a choice no one should ever have to make. But it is in admitting that we made the choice that we rebuild our self esteem — something that is often a casualty of our transition. By standing behind our decision to become the people we should be, we begin to loose the feeling that we are a victim of life.

There are people that would be our allies, but these people deserve the truth. There is no need to hide behind the victim mentality and claim that we had no choice. Only by explaining our choices can people understand the trials we had to endure, the strength of our character, and the value of the people we have become. We want people to see who we really are, not pretend that we are the poor victims of genetics, or hormones, or whatever the current hypothesis for gender dysphoria is.

A need for inclusion

I have been blogging for a while now; nothing special, just writing about things of general interest to me. Recently, however, I have been reading blogs on sexuality and the trauma other people have been suffering as a direct cause of either their sexuality or the sexuality of a loved one. People are reaching out for help, but often finding no one there. This blog is part of my answer to that problem.

There doesn’t seem to be any shortage of people forming their own independent groups, but often these groups are exclusive, not inclusive. It doesn’t seem to matter what group you belong to, just as long as it is an exclusive club. I have found very few groups that break with this rule. While this may not be a group, I hope to break with that rule here.

I propose to use rationality, understanding, and inclusion as my guides. I’ll admit that I’m not always the most logical person in the world, but there are some things that help guide me, and I hope will guide you too. The most important of these is to avoid logical fallacies. The list of fallacies I like to refer to most is listed on the nizkor.org website here. The main reason I like it is because it has a good list of fallacies, but also has easy to understand descriptions and examples of each of the fallacies listed there.