Transgender Games
Babette Francis
No, this is not about a new category of Olympic sports
though it may very well be in the future. This is about a
new frontier in "Diversity" brought to us courtesy of the
New York Times, and it is about how to eliminate prejudice
against transgender people who want to have children. I
didn't know transgender people wanted to have children; I
thought that by altering their gender biology with surgery
and hormones, they eliminated the possibility of having children,
if they had not already had them while in the gender
they were (mistakenly?) born in. But it seems transgender
people do want to have children and here's an example.
Andy Inkster, (probably not his birth name) a transgender "man" had always wanted biological children. So when aged 18 "he" started on the transition from female to male by changing his name, taking testosterone and having surgery to remove his breasts, he kept his female reproductive organs. In his mid-20s he stopped taking testosterone and started trying to get pregnant.
Baystate Reproductive Medicine turned him down explaining they did not have enough experience with transgender people to provide the hormones and donor sperm required. Andy Inkster found another clinic that helped him conceive via IVF and donor sperm, and in 2010 he gave birth to a daughter, Elise. A month after her birth he sued Baystate Reproductive Medicine for sexual discrimination. The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination agreed with Inkster - he won his case.
When writing this article I started putting quote marks everytime I typed "he" or "him", but it became too tiresome so I decided to be very polite to "Mr" Inkster and refer to him as in the gender he prefers. But it still felt weird to be typing "he gave birth to a daughter...."
Role of Universities I am also perplexed by the role of universities - aren't they supposed to be teaching arts and science and stuff like that? Why are they so obsessed with courses on gender identity, queer theory, lesbian gardening - truly I didn't make that up, there really is such a course. Shouldn't students be studying Shakespeare or physics or history?
And then there are the bathroom gestapos. In California - and coming to a school near you - transgender students (or those who think they are transgender) are allowed to use the girls' bathrooms even if they haven't had the hormones or surgery to "transgender" from male to female, i.e. any male student who claims to be a female "trapped in a male body" can use the girls' bathroom.
Some schools offered transgendered students the option of using the teachers’ bathroom but in court cases that has been rejected as “discrimination”. Transgendered students must be allowed to use the bathrooms appropriate to their inner feelings about their gender. I may be old-fashioned but I don't really want 18-year-old males who think they are females using the same change-rooms at my local swimming pool as I do.
But back to Mr. Inkster - I don't think he or anyone for that matter, male, female or in-between, is "entitled" to a child. But I do think a child is entitled to a mother and a father, and preferably not both in the same body.
“I’m a guy again!” Another strange story comes from an American Broadcasting Company staffer who having switched genders wants to switch back. He thought he was a woman trapped in a man’s body — but, according to the New York Post, it turns out he’s “just another boring straight guy.”
News editor Don Ennis strolled into the American Broadcasting Company newsroom in May 2013 wearing a little black dress and an auburn wig and announced he was transgender and splitting from his wife. He wanted to be called Dawn.
But now he says he suffered from a two-day bout of amnesia that has made him realize he wants to live his life again as Don. “I accused my wife of playing some kind of cruel joke, dressing me up in a wig and bra and making fake ID’s with the name ‘Dawn’ on it. Seriously,” Ennis wrote in a memo he posted to the newsroom bulletin board Friday, explaining his shock after he woke up from what he called a “transient global amnesia” last month. (The memo was first obtained by the website NewsBlues.com)
“It became obvious this was not the case once I took off the bra — and discovered two reasons I was wearing one,” he said, referring to his hormone-induced breasts. “I thought it was 1999 . . . and I was sure that I was a man,” Ennis said in an e-mail titled “Not Reportable, Very Confirmed.”
“Fortunately, my memories of the last 14 years have since returned. But what did not return was my identity as Dawn,” said Ennis, who had been wearing lipstick, skirts and heels. “I am writing to let you know I’m changing my name . . . to Don Ennis. That will be my name again, now and forever. And it appears I’m not transgender after all.
“I have retained the much different mind-set I had in 1999: I am now totally, completely, unabashedly male in my mind, despite my physical attributes,” he said. “I’m asking all of you who accepted me as a transgender to now understand: I was misdiagnosed. “I am already using the men’s room and dressing accordingly,” he noted.
In view of the confusion caused in the minds of those who consider themselves transgendered, it is tragic that “diversity” programs in our schools encourage primary school children to ponder on whether they are homosexual or what their gender identity is.