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Transgender Man’s Pregnancy Roils Family Members
The title above was not a headline in the National Enquirer; it was the title of an Ask Amy column, from March 9. In reading the column I shifted between shock and confusion; the letter writer was in distress because her son’s decision to become pregnant as a transgender male had created a rupture in her family that she didn’t know to heal.
I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I know that gender and sexual identities have been tampered with and distorted for many years, but I wondered: how in the world does a transgender man become pregnant, and more importantly, how does this kind of insanity take place in today’s society?
Let me explain briefly how transgender pregnancy usually happens: either a woman who has decided to change her identity to a man becomes pregnant because she still has all the biological tools to do so, or a he/she has a female surrogate carry the baby. If you want to know more about these situations you can go here or here. For this post, I would rather spend my time exploring how this bizarre and depraved situation has developed.
Secularists have spent centuries trying to distort and eliminate gender distinctions. In the last 50 years in particular, their focus has been on gender equality and equal rights. Their efforts were rewarded by society and in some cases by the government’s insisting that women should not be deprived of the rights extended to men. Unfortunately, to meet their agenda, the secularists insisted that men and women were the same. To many this declaration was preposterous, since common sense and innumerable studies counter this premise. But the argument persisted. Without recounting all the distortions and lies the secularists used to perpetuate their ideas, we have arrived at a point where women can now die on battlefields, and men can wear make-up, earrings and even women’s clothes. (In Thailand these men are called lady-boys; our Thai friends admired the courage of these men in owning up to their preferred sexuality.) If the arguments for the exchangability of genders were so ridiculous, how did they come to be accepted? The destruction of the credibility and sacredness of the Judeo-Christian traditions has been victorious.
I was studying the Torah this Shabbat and reflected on what a profound treatise it is. Although secularists try to argue that it is a book of myths and violence, G-d created a way of life that not only provided rules and laws to follow: He also designed a framework and foundation that identifies, through the creation of Adam and Eve, the genders of male and female. He made it clear that there are only two genders, which meant that we didn’t have to spend our lives figuring out what we are. Instead, He gave us free will to fully explore who we are, how we can be loving and compassionate human beings, and how to serve our friends, family, society, and of course, G-d. We have not been forced into gender roles; rather, we have been blessed to discover what it means to be a man or a woman.
The devastation that the secularists have wrought, in trying to distort and confuse what it means to be a man or woman, has destroyed what it means to pursue the sacred, too. Instead they have stated that gender identification doesn’t guide us in deciding our roles to be fully realized human beings; it has become a field of experiment, mendacity and the mundane. Instead of pursuing ways to elevate ourselves and realize that we are created in the image of G-d, we can re-create who we are. Instead of our focusing on how to serve others, we become obsessed with how we can best satisfy ourselves. And if that means degrading ourselves in the eyes of heaven, trampling social mores and desecrating our bodies, then why not do it? In fact, the acronym for LGBT has been expanded upon to accommodate this exploration. “At full throttle, the letters wind up something like LGBTQQIP2SAA.” (You can go to the article to get the latest definitions.)
As a last effort, I thought I would check on how medical ethics approaches the questions of transgender male pregnancy. The National Health Service in Great Britain has stepped right up to support transgender and sex change requests. To fund a patient through their sex change and fertility treatment, the NHS spends up to £34,000. On average, it costs women £29,975 for a sex change and men £13,867.
The abstract from a report generated by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists states the following:
Transgender individuals face harassment, discrimination, and rejection within our society. Lack of awareness, knowledge, and sensitivity in health care communities eventually leads to inadequate access to, underutilization of, and disparities within the health care system for this population. Although the care for these patients is often managed by a specialty team, obstetrician–gynecologists should be prepared to assist or refer transgender individuals with routine treatment and screening as well as hormonal and surgical therapies. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists opposes discrimination on the basis of gender identity and urges public and private health insurance plans to cover the treatment of gender identity disorder.
Although it doesn’t explicitly support transgender male pregnancy, wouldn’t refusing to assist this type of patient be discriminatory?
In a June issue of Scientific American, the main concern was not about the appropriateness of pregnancy for transgender men, but the risks involved. In fact, there was a discussion of uterine transplants for their patients.
So here we are. Transgender men can bear children, regardless of the impact on the children or society. The distinctions between men and women are meaningless.
Secularism has won.
Published in Culture
Depraved? Susan, I thought better of you.
We need a way of flagging a whole OP by a contributor on the Main Page.
Thank you for this post.
This gender-bending is a denial of reality. Even if a man or woman mutilates their body and ingest hormones, they are still a man or a woman. The chromosomes are the same. The only question is how long and how far this denial of reality continues.
My entire life has been centered around one principle: Don’t mess with me or mine, and we’ll get along just fine.
But the reality of my surroundings (again, greatest Fishbone album ever) is best summarized by what you aptly had:
“I shifted between shock and confusion”
Really, the best tolerance is ignorance. The more we hear, the more people want to be heard, the crazier it all gets, with God knows who speaking for God knows what.
Which is why I changed my avatar.
Sunless Saturday by Fishbone from the album: The Reality of My Surroundings:
I see the pestilence outside my window
I see the dung heaps piled at least a mile high
I see the shards of shattered dreams in the street
I face the morning with my customary sigh
I hear the sounds of children laughing aloud
A stumbling wind has attracted quite a crowd
My breakfast finished now i brave the outside
But clouds have hidden all the warmth inside
Chase these clouds away
I hate this sunless Saturday
Freedom come
For us now
Light our sky
Burn away these clouds
Perhaps the charcoal grey and brown around me
Is just the mirror image of tainted soul
I think the sun will never visit my sky
Until the truth is seen by each and every eye
I see the helpless and i see the insane
I see a pauper singing in the pouring rain
I see the means of help elude us again
I think the sun will never visit me again
Or you could offer arguments to refute her conclusions.
Jeremiah Johnson had a light-saber? Who knew?
The pregnant “man” is a woman pretending to be a man. The husband is a straight man pretending to be gay. It is as simple as that.
If there were ever a match made in heaven, this has to be it. I cannot imagine two people better suited for each other. It underscores my belief that the Almighty has a sense of humor, a curious one.
Seawriter
Wait: a woman decides she wants to be a man and then wants to have a baby anyway? ! Perverted=depraved, no?
To the extent there was an argument in the OP, it was premised on religious scripture, and since I don’t accept the premise – the “authority” of that scripture – I don’t accept the conclusion. But there is no “refuting” the authority of a scripture, any more than there is any “proving” it. It is taken on faith, so I don’t engage in arguments with someone who is premising their claims on one. It is pointless to do so.
I can, however, have a viscerally negative reaction to a judgmental tirade by someone who chooses to denigrate another because she obviously simply can’t imagine what it might be like to be in that other’s shoes. That is what you see reflected in my first comment. That, and surprise, as I’ve always previously thought Susan a fairly considerate and empathetic person.
This is the problem exactly. The ultimate rejection of God is rejection not only of His moral authority as Lord of all but rejection of His role as Creator as well. Not content with the centrality of free will in Judaism and Christianity as one of our Creator’s greatest gifts, modern secular philosophies refuse all boundaries.
Definition requires boundaries. One cannot identify what a thing is without clarifying what it is not. Human nature has limits that no desire, behavior, or surgery can undo.
It’s alarming when you think about it, isn’t it? I don’t know how it can get much worse . . . well, I can, but I won’t go there. Thanks, PJ.
The first victim of progressive, materialist, scientism was objective truth. The Marxists have always known they had to destroy the body/spirit integrity of the person in order to tear down the “system” and rebuild it in their image.
This is only the latest resultant debasement — not the last.
Especially this. Thank you, J.
And they can do that only because they are women, not men. Biology wins out over delusions and mental illness . . . Political correctness can’t change some facts.
That is a wonderful shift in perspective for me, Seawriter. Thank you.
I wasn’t sure you were serious, Cato. I don’t think a person needs to be religious to accept the argument, but it helps. My consideration is for the society that has to bow to the perceptions of those want to make up social norms as they go along. And my empathy goes to the poor family members and the children who will be born who will struggle to find a way to live with these decisions.
I would be very interested to hear from people who are not religious, whether or not you agree with me, and your reasons.
This,
This,
This,
and this,
Says it all.
Although I believe there could be some emotional/mental disability involved in the denial of reality/truth.
Now that I know you are serious in your comment: I’d be very interested in reading your thoughts on why you find these actions and ideas acceptable, as I assume you do. Is it simply live and let live?
Cato – see comment #10 – a world without moral law and boundaries would be a world in chaos, which we have seen proven over and over and over. Without getting into the argument of having you prove there is no God, for the sake of Susan’s argument, please stick to refuting her claims. The Judeo-Christian principals she alludes to create a respect for both sides of the story – secularists only see their side.
Actually I was confused by one of the professional organizations I quoted, about whether this was considered a mental illness or whether it was simply an option or choice of how one can live one’s life. I don’t think some people can make up their minds.
And then there’s the comment that calls to mind the idiom regarding pots and kettles.
I’m going to focus on the word “acceptable” in your question. There’s more to say than I get words for in a comment, but let’s start there.
I don’t believe that it’s for me to tell someone else what is or isn’t “acceptable” in their life choices, at least where they’re not harming others. So yes, it’s very much “live and let live.”
Going slightly further though, I don’t believe I understand exactly how transgendered people experience life, themselves, sexuality, relationships, and identity. I refrain from judging, and certainly denigrating them, because I acknowledge my ignorance.
I also see a close relation between your and my ignorance of what it is to be transgender and the ignorance of what it is to be gay that is so common. And in the latter case, I know how hurtful and harmful the expressions that come from that ignorance can be. My awareness of that harm, which affects me personally, makes me particularly skittish about the risk of hurting and harming someone else who might — very much like me — have come to understand — as they grew up — something about themselves that others had trouble understanding and were viscerally averse to.
Thanks for your concern, TT and others. I’m okay with what Cato said, although I would like him to elaborate on this own views. He is correct–I can’t imagine myself precisely in the others’ shoes. But I certainly know what it feels like to be torn in my self-perception in other ways. That’s about as close as I’ll get.
This is well-written Susan. Secularists, in an effort to create an anything goes culture, does not see value in God or your argument. The problem lies in their suppression of where moral law originated. Every government created their system from something. The secular governments who look to the state to determine what is good/bad, right/wrong saw (see) the results by the fruits: communism, fascism, fanaticism of any kind leads to the discrimination of the very people and situations you describe. Only in a free society, governed by a foundation of morality and boundaries do we find freedom for all. Believers know that God doesn’t make mistakes – we are created in His image. The Roman Empire fell into ruin when all boundaries were removed – it imploded. How far does it go? Multiple spouses, pregnant men, 55 genders and counting? The health (and sickness) of a society as a whole has been proven to include moral boundaries.
I am so tired of the use of gender with reference to biological sex. There are 2 sexes, yet according to SJW’s 10’s of genders. So I clicked on gender and got this definition:
1 the state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones): traditional concepts of gender | [as modifier] : gender roles.
• the members of one or other sex: differences between the genders are encouraged from an early age.
2 Grammar (in languages such as Latin, Greek, Russian, and German) each of the classes (typically masculine, feminine, common, neuter) of nouns and pronouns distinguished by the different inflections that they have and require in words syntactically associated with them.
I don’t really know where to go with this comment other than all this nonsense about gender is depressing.
Only women can have babies. Why is that so hard to understand for this family?
And I would say that it is a huge human rights issue to deny a child a mother and a father.
What a sad state of affairs.
Lord have mercy.
Proving that we are enlightened today seems to involve the acceptance of all sexual circumstances; it has not been an easy journey for many of us. In years past homosexuals were shunned and subject to legal penalties as society didn’t recognize the fact that they were born that way. When my oldest daughter was ten years old we had a pool party for the kids in her youth group at church. One of the boys immediately stood out to me as gay. He and my daughter were close friends all through school, including college, so I saw a lot of him and got to know his parents. He tried to fit in with the guys, but it just wasn’t in him. After college he got married, and I’ll never forget him sitting at our kitchen table enthusiastically talking about the bridesmaids’ and the bride’s dresses as though he were the bride. He chose everything for that beautiful wedding including insisting that my daughter was maid of honor despite the fact that she barely knew the bride. The marriage was brief, of course. He’s now 45, extremely successful financially and in a long and loving relationship with a man. His sexuality was never a choice for him. He said to me one day after his divorce: “Who, in their right mind, would choose to be so different from the other guys? My life has been miserable.” I’m glad he’s finally found happiness and acceptance.
It is not. The sister and brother have figured it out. I think they are wise to stay clear of this train wreck. My bet is the “gay” son also knows in his heart of hearts he is straight. (Homosexual relations between two men precludes the possibility of pregnancy, so it is pretty obvious they have been indulging in the same type of sexual relations men and women have been practicing to keep the species going since the human species emerged.) It is only mom who is in real denial.
Seawriter
The world is and always has been a world in chaos. And to the non-believer the moral laws (pretty clearly religious in the case of comment #10) are little more than diktats issued by human beings, dressed up in moral (or religious) garb in a quest for legitimation by human beings seeking power. Wishing there was order in the universe does not make it so.
Thanks for the follow up, Cato. So let me respond in a couple of ways. I think what they are doing does harm society. In some ways, there are ways that life preferences cross genders: that’s why we have women in the military and men who are ballet dancers. But I would suggest to you that the agony the mother was experiencing about her son and the rest of her family was real. And those hurts will radiate out into society based on their friendships, loved ones and colleagues. It isn’t whether or not people who call themselves transgender feel the way they feel; it is rather the actions they take that violate social and cultural norms, particularly in our Judeo -Christian society, in order to feel better about themselves. (Keep in mind that this country’s founders included Judeo-Christian values.)