Funniest Comment of the Month

In response to the posting about how Bradley Manning wants now to be known as Chelsea Manning:

This is additional evidence that reality has been replaced by an extended episode of Monty Python.

UPDATE: One of my readers posted a comment with a link to a CNN video about the complicated situation of the transgendered.  Fair enough.  I admit that there might be a few people with some peculiar genetic or congenital defect who are "trapped in the wrong body."  But what astonishes me is how much evidence suggests that the transgendered are more victims of some other problem.  This article by Dr. Paul McHugh, psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, makes the point that many of those seeking this transformation had much more serious problems.

Most of the cases fell into one of two quite different groups. One group consisted of conflicted and guilt-ridden homosexual men who saw a sex-change as a way to resolve their conflicts over homosexuality by allowing them to behave sexually as females with men. The other group, mostly older men, consisted of heterosexual (and some bisexual) males who found intense sexual arousal in cross-dressing as females. As they had grown older, they had become eager to add more verisimilitude to their costumes and either sought or had suggested to them a surgical transformation that would include breast implants, penile amputation, and pelvic reconstruction to resemble a woman.

I know a guy, who after retiring in his 50s from an urban police department, divorced his wife of more than 25 years, and got changed.  There was nothing even slightly feminine about him before -- he was about as masculine and macho as you could get without being a hyperbolic exaggeration.  But being a police officer, it didn't seem particularly strange.  Now he/she is the least attractive and most implausible looking "female" that you can imagine -- and I doubt that anyone, anywhere, looks at he/she and does not immediately realize that he is a man who has undergone an insane set of procedures to pretend to be something that he/she is not.  This sort of sex reassignment surgery makes homosexuality look positively normal and healthy by comparison.

The July 29, 2004 U.K. Guardian (a Labour Party paper, and hardly traditional or conservative) carried this article about the results of gender reassignment:

There is no conclusive evidence that sex change operations improve the lives of transsexuals, with many people remaining severely distressed and even suicidal after the operation, according to a medical review conducted exclusively for Guardian Weekend tomorrow.

The review of more than 100 international medical studies of post-operative transsexuals by the University of Birmingham's aggressive research intelligence facility (Arif) found no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery is clinically effective.

The Guardian asked Arif to conduct the review after speaking to several people who regret changing gender or believe that the medical care they received failed to prepare them for their new lives. They explain why they are unhappy with their sex change and how they cope with the consequences in the Weekend magazine tomorrow (July 31).

Chris Hyde, the director of Arif, said: "There is a huge uncertainty over whether changing someone's sex is a good or a bad thing. While no doubt great care is taken to ensure that appropriate patients undergo gender reassignment, there's still a large number of people who have the surgery but remain traumatised - often to the point of committing suicide."
Arif, which advises the NHS in the West Midlands about the evidence base of healthcare treatments, found that most of the medical research on gender reassignment was poorly designed, which skewed the results to suggest that sex change operations are beneficial.

As this recent National Review article points out, suicide rates for Britons undergoing sex reassignment are almost the same as suicide rates for those refused the surgery.

Many years ago, my wife knew a young man who had been raped, and he soon became convinced that he was "really" a woman, and needed to have a sex reassignment, because "only women get raped." 

In the early 1980s, my wife and I had what was probably the most gut-wrenching lunches of our lives.  We were talking to a woman whose husband was preparing for sex-reassignment surgery.  Her husband had grown up with an ultramacho Marine father, and a mother who desperately had wanted a little girl.  Since she didn't get her little girl, she dressed up her little boy in girl clothes, gave him girl toys and dolls, painted his nails, and in general, did her best to make her little boy into a little girl.  Ultramacho Marine father did not fully realize what the mother was doing -- and as you might expect, the rejection and contempt were overwhelming.  Yeah, that little boy was born transgendered!  It couldn't have anything to do with this form of weird sexual identity abuse, could it?