There Are So Many Things Wrong With This

I’ve been reading about transgendering kids on the net, and it’s pretty easy to work out where this is coming from. A couple of white male docs. One is in charge of the committee about gender identity stuff, for the DSM. He thinks that if your young son wants to play with dolls, you take away with dolls. And if your young daughter wants to play with trucks, you take away the trucks. That’s Kenneth Zucker. He’s a conservative jerk. The gay and transgender people hate him. Some of them want transgender stuff out of the DSM entirely. Others want it kept in so they can get treatment covered.

The other doc is Norman Spack. He’s the guy behind promoting sexually reassigning adolescents. He works for the Boston Children’s Hospital. He has admitted on NPR that sexually reassigning adolescents sterilizes them, because it goes like this: kids can’t handle their sense of what gender they perceive themselves to be, even when very young. So as they get older, and of course subjected to schoolyard bullying and mainstream media, they get more and more upset about this.

And there is no other cure for their now-suicidal tendancies, than to encourge them to go for the goal of first blocking puberty, so they can “think about it some more.” So they can think a bit more about how they can possibly avoid being murdered by our culture that will not allow non-conformism to gender stereotypes.

Kitten Update

The three foster kittens are all about a month old now. Isobel, who had the eye infection, seems to be navigating well. I was concerned because she had trouble opening her eyes and we weren’t quite sure how old she and her siblings were. The other two were starting to open their eyes around April 25th. Issy had trouble, and I started cleaning her eyes with a damp warm rag, and they’d start to open, but then they’d be gummed up shut again the next morning. This went on for a few days and then one morning when I cleaned them, some grey green pus leaked out, and I realized that I had an eye infection on my hands. 

I contacted Angela in something of a panic, and then remembered that I still had part of a tube of eye ointment stuff around from last years’ foster kittens. Neomycin and Polymyxin B sulfates and Bacitracin Zinc Ophthalmic Ointment USP.

I used as little of this as possible on last years’ foster kittens and I used as little of it as possible on this year’s kitten, who recovered overnight.

Angela suggested that since this did not involve steroids, it would be appropriate to use. I totally agree. There it was, and I hadn’t worked how to fix this kitten’s eye problem, and they do need to get their eyes open at some reasonable point in order for their eyesight to develop properly. I was at this point really worrying about that. Here I am trying to help these little lost ones, and what if I inadvertantly blinded one because I made a poor judgment call? I would be horrible forever.

Except not. People like Angela who work for many years at animal shelters, make mistakes that lead to sad outcomes. This happens. It’s what happens if you are seriously committed to an endeavour that involves living beings.

You make mistakes. People, human or non-human, sometimes suffer from your mistakes. 

I lucked out this time, but it reminded me that I could have thought this through further, and faster, and been less reluctant to gently intervene. Maisy was abandoned to the shelter while due to deliver, and her kittens were euthanized because they were hopelessly deformed. Then Angela successfully hooked her up with similarly abandoned kittens, and then everybody was moved over here to my place. That’s a lot of shock to handle for everyone involved.

I should have addressed the eye problem sooner. I’ve read that they need to get their eyes open by eighteen days for proper ocular development. I think we got close to that.

But mostly, I should have been more pro-active. I shouldn’t have kept it to myself. I suspected there was a problem, and I should have asked for advice sooner. 

I learned from this. 

I’ve been doing a lot of reading, and I identify as a social-constructionist hopeful as to gender, because if men are inherently violent, we’re all fucked.

 I see transgender people as believing gender is innate but not linked to body sex, and various other people thinking it’s innate and and linked to body sex. I see people suffering from gender dysphoria, which may be some kind of idee fixe, or an extreme fetish, or some other result of social conditioning. I don’t think the brain studies will prove anything because brain neurology is plastic. 

I see these philosophies about gender being diametrically opposed and irreconcilable. Transgender people who want to get involved with DGR attempt to confront them about these philosophical differences.  This wastes everyone’s time. But a social constructionist view of gender that argues that we should disabuse ourselves of the notion of gender roles can be extended into arguing we should get gender out of the legal system, including most specifically marriage and adoption rights, which would be a rising tide that would lift the boats of all people oppressed because of perceived sexual orientation and gender. Why is gender legally defined at all? is the question we should be asking ourselves.

Sexual reassignment surgery doesn’t work all that well, and it has a plethora of side effects. What bothers me most about this is that it’s being done to children. This is unconscionable. 

But so is murdering transwomen and leaving them in lakes, and so is the medical establishment’s inability to help the gender dysphoric, since they kill themselves in droves anyway. 

Anarchists appear to be something of a mixed bag. I worry that predatory males are leading on confused kids. Social responsibility is not the same thing as “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

Beautiful Justice: The Sexist Radical Left Versus Women.