I'm not the only one fighting them. And some people manage not to just use words, but actions.
Case in point,
this comment at
TRANScend Gender :
At the urging and with the help of the Arizona ACLU, Central Arizona Shelter Services, Inc., the largest shelter service provider in Arizona, recently changed its long-standing policy of refusing to allow transgender people to be housed according to their gender identity. In addition, the Prescott Area Women’s Shelter, on whose board I serve, is in the process of adopting a similar policy. I am saddened by Jennifer’s death, and the deaths of all the other homeless people in Austin and elsewhere, who die every year due to our society’s refusal to provide them with the basic necessities of life.
For those interested in urging their local shelters to treat trans people with dignity, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Coalition have created an excellent resource titled Transitioning Our Shelters: A Guide to Making Homeless Shelters Safe for Transgender People.
Not just talking the talk, but walking the walk. It rather puts my own poor efforts to shame.
Still. I will continue, to write the Right. Another (hopefully) informative
comment over at
God's Politics in reply to a comment that said (amongst other things) this:
Sexual identity, as expressed overtly, is entirely self-defined. So it is with most of the "transgendered" whose mutilations, amputations and massive hormonal drug usage does not erase the male/female chromosomes they carry that identifies them, a priori.
And a comment over at the
Grauniad on the Pope's recent statements on Ecology:
Oh well, it took the Church 400 years to rehabilitate Galileo. They usually get it right in the end. I just wish the pope had some better scientific and medical advice, because his pronunciamento is going to kill some of us. It doesn't just lack knowledge, it lacks charity.
...and much more besides. I fear his words will be (mis?)understood. Or understood all too well, nudge nudge wink wink.
The pope was not talking about "transgender" or even "gender theory". He was talking about the concept that gender is distinct from physical sex. He denied this concept as merely an artifact of Man's Pride (for want of a better term), the same urge that led to the Tower of Babel.
Theologically speaking - and how else could the Pope speak, he professes that there are men, and women. Nothing else. Men are attracted to women, and women to men. That is the natural order of things. There is no "gender", only sex.
He states that all other things that appear to contradict a strict Male/Female binary, such as Homosexuality, or "women born in a man's body", "post-operative transsexuals" or any body not obviously male or obviously female, are all against the natural order of Creation, and dangerous. All such are artefacts of Human origin, perfect Divine creations spoilt by Man. Intersexed people may be explained away as the result of Man's tampering with the environment, with chemical and possibly spiritual pollution.
They can only be described in a purely ecological sense as human-created vermin, though that word in merely implied, not stated. Something undesirable and dangerous to the Ecology, the product of Humanity's prideful nature in wishing to be in sole and exclusive control of his own destiny. He does not go so far as to say that such (purely ecologically speaking, no pejorative meaning is implied) "vermin" should be exterminated, he leaves the question of what to do with them open. He merely states that they are a danger to all Humanity, and against the Natural order as ordained by God.
*sigh* No Dog Whistling there, is there?
Yes, this does contradict both Matthew 19:12 and Isaiah 56:3-5, 1500 years of Theological contemplation of Intersex, including the arch-conservative Peter Cantor of C12, as well as most of biological science. It returns us to the days of the Church's founding, and the Emperor Constantine, where Intersexed infants where sealed in boxes and cast into rivers as being against God's Creation. It was recycling the material of defective products to be remoulded into perfect ones. Ecologically sound practice, that's all.
Finally, sometimes in looking at the "Big Picture", we lose sight of the individual issues. Here's one
important salvo, which I hope lands on target in wintry Quebec.
