Maybe we should remind them how lucky they are to have what they've got
When I ruminate, as I am wont to do (Regrets—Oy’ve had a few-ah as Sid Vicious put it) and I need to stop self-obsessing, I consider those who’d do anything to live the sane, routine, boring, often tedious post-pandemic forever-changed life I am privileged to live.
After all, no one’s bombing the shit out of my country in an effort to regain the alleged glory days of forty years ago, nor do I leave my apartment every day wondering if I’m going to wander into a mass shooting. I have good, mostly steady, freelance sales work that keeps me off the streets and out of the pool halls, and I have good healthcare available - much of it covered by the province of Ontario.
I’ve begun to appreciate my previously taken-for-granted and oft-unappreciated body. I don’t know how many of us don’t value our healthy, functioning bodies until they’re not.
At sixty, I’m feeling my age more, although not like my parents did. While I hefted a heavy bundle buggy of groceries off the bus the other day I considered how my parents might have done it more carefully, how my mother would have asked a stranger for help. My parents’ generation didn’t do physical exercise like we do. My dad’s ‘exercise’ was volleyball once a week followed by a big bowl of ice cream in front of the TV, and, as fathers have done for millions of years, fell asleep in front of it.
A friend in his late fifties told me how his doctor expressed surprise he wasn’t on any medication. Nothing to manage a heart condition, cholesterol, depression, anxiety, blood pressure, excess stomach acid, or the heartbreak of golfer’s elbow, mostly because he doesn’t play golf. I’m not on any prescription meds either. Our healthy lifestyle isn’t the whole story; we just got lucky with good genetics. So far, anyway.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
I have a friend in Australia with body dysmorphia. She wishes she hadn’t been given the body she has.
She would happily trade it for someone else’s as long as it didn’t hurt all the time, if she could go back to having a normal life, like she did before her manageable, but not curable, physical conditions set in.
If only she could change her body.
I have another friend closer to home, whose life is a constant stream of health issues. She lives in doctors’ offices for herself and her senior mother. She hates living in a regularly malfunctioning body.
We joked a few years ago about a woman we knew who managed Type I diabetes.
“I’d happily switch bodies with her,” my friend said. “Only having to manage diabetes would be a cinch.”
How is it so many aren’t happy with the bodies they’ve got, especially if everything works in accordance with the way our physiology has evolved?
The gender-blending movement is only the most recent iteration of a millennia-long campaign by humans to improve bodies never good enough for us. The dissatisfaction is too often between the ears rather than in physical well-being. Nothing hurts, everything works—so how does it not ‘feel right’?
Humans have tattooed, body pierced, and otherwise adorned themselves with body ‘enhancements’, the same we engage in today, not to mention modern body mods we criticize and debate - bigger boobs, surgically-enhanced pecs for those too lazy to go to the gym, cheek implants, tummy tucks, liposuction, and many other medical treatments to ‘fix’ bodies that may otherwise be seen as ‘imperfect’.
Boob Jobs & Butt Bleaches & Brazilians, Oh My!
Sometimes our body mods are more practical and life-affirming, done to treat a painful condition or disability that reduces quality of life.
But mostly, people look in the mirror, frown, and think, “My life would be so much better if I just changed blah blah blah.”
Body doctors for brain ailments
A lot, but not all, children are born in fine, healthy bodies.
Or their bodies are fine but their brains, like all human brains, can become depressed, anxious, stressed and delusional. Today they’re directed to body doctors when what they need are brain doctors. They’re told if they’re unhappy, they were born the wrong sex, and if so, why not fix it? Why should you have to live in a body you don’t want? Wouldn’t you be better off with different one?
(I wonder if some black people were born with skins who’d be ‘better off’ white. Just a devil’s advocate thought.)
Adolescence is a rough time for everyone, but also a ridiculously human life transition everyone must pass through if they’re lucky enough not to die from leukemia at age four, as a childhood playmate of mine did.
It won’t be much longer now before the U.S. and Canada are whacked upside the head with a clue-by-four coming from Europe that there’s near-zero science behind ‘gender affirming care’.
We resist, but in the immortal words of The X-Files, ‘the truth is out there’.
Like, on a plane leaving right now from Stockholm.
The North American medical profession lies to people of all ages about what’s known about the long-term effects from puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and adolescent surgery. (Answer: Fuck all.) Much more research needs to explore the short- and long-term effects of transgender healthcare, but not only is anything that threatens the trans narrative career-destroying, it’s also a punch in the ol’ Bulgari wallet, since the industry is estimated at $2.1B USD in 2022, projected to $5B by 2030.
Parroting debunked kiddie suicide threats, these doctors wonder why they get compared to Josef Mengele.
We don’t even know what percentage of patients have de-transitioned after regretting their previous decision. Estimates range from 1-1.5% by the medical profession that’s making mountains of cash off troubled people, to 25%, based on the small assortment of clinical studies. It’s a big, vague football field of a spread.
Many detransitioners don’t tell their doctors what they’re doing out of a sense of embarrassment and shame, and they don’t go public; that’s as socially destructive as conducting non-transactivist-approved scientific research.
As I watch this medical-scandal-to-be unfold, I wonder why the hell so many ‘progressive’ parents who worry about anorexic daughters otherwise teach their kids at ever-earlier ages that they’re ‘imperfect’ and that somehow evolution, which has brought our sexually dimorphic species to apex biological dominance over millions of years—has somehow horribly fucked up with so many newer humans.
The kids who don’t grow up
Do these parents ever thank God, Darwin or their lucky stars that their children aren’t suffering from real health problems?
I don’t remember Dorothy much - my only memory is standing in her bedroom, as she regarded me cross-eyed, a consequence of the chemotherapy to treat her leukemia. I don’t remember actually playing with Dorothy before she got really sick but I remember regretting she was no longer there to play with. She lived in the hospital while we visited her mother. My mother provided as much moral support as she could to a grieving parent.
Dorothy passed away on Christmas Eve, 1967. She never got to open her presents. I don’t know if her parents talked to her much about Christmas. I sort of hope Dorothy passed not regretting the presents she’d never get to unwrap.
Christmas Day was a particularly joyous one for my parents as they had a new baby son. While they celebrated my brother’s first Christmas and my fifth, Dorothy’s parents planned a funeral.
Do today’s ‘progressive’ parents ever read or hear about kids whose childhoods are a series of painful medical treatments, often restricted to homes or hospital beds to keep them alive? Do they ever read about some child who bravely fought cancer or a heart condition or a blood disorder to the very end, bravely smiling and bald, withered, with tubes stuck up her nose and think, Thank God my child is healthy?
Is ‘self-acceptance’ an obscene word? If it’s okay to be fat, is it okay to be thin? If it’s okay to be gay, is it okay to be straight? If it’s okay to be trans, is it okay to be ‘cis’?
Are parents trying to perpetuate a toxic culture of self-hatred and body dysmorphia? It’s the very apex of privilege to just schlep them off to the doctor, instead of exercising parental authority (Does it even exist anymore?) saying No, you can’t be a boy, you’re a girl? Or take away their phone, so Johnny and Janie can’t compare themselves to others on Instagram or learn the newest goofy identity label.
Will privileged parents allow Barbie-obsessed eight-year-olds to get boob jobs? I mean what the hell, she can cut ‘em off when she’s sixteen and decides she hates how much boys like big boobs.
There was an old Bloom County cartoon from the ‘80s in which some stupid college student interrogates Cutter John, the Vietnam vet in a wheelchair, about what he really wants to do. Is he angry? Does he want to kill people? What does he really want to do?
“Walk,” Cutter John replies.
I wonder what people with real disabilities, leading limited lives in a society for whom they are always a burdensome afterthought, think when they look at grown-ass adults running to the doctor. “Fuck, I’ll take any body, no matter the sex, no matter the race, if only I could (walk, see, hear, move, bathe myself, pee in a bathroom rather than a plastic bag).”
I try to ‘fix’ my ‘imperfections’ too. I lose weight, but I’m not Jack Skellington. I dye my hair. I wear makeup. But that’s it. I’ll age naturally, like Brigitte Bardot.
The wrinkled face of old age: It’s a privilege!
I have so many school friends who weren’t as privileged as I. I miss them. A lot.
Plastic surgery carries real risks and complications but gender transition ‘healthcare’ is performed too much on the young and with uncritical acceptance of whether the patient truly knows what s/he wants. It may eventually teach a horrifying, no-backsies-allowed lesson about just how good they had it when their worst problem was what every human being longs for - whatever they don’t have. Before 2014, transition for all ages involved a much lengthier process. Now you can get your McTopSurgery done practically as a drive-through.
Yeah. Just wait until you want a baby.
It strikes me as singularly ungrateful to not cherish the luck of the birth lottery for a well-functioning body rather than for t’other side of the fence where there’s a dick or a vagina you don’t have.
I read recently the searing story of a mother’s pain caused by her transgender son. What had once been a lovely, happy little girl got recruited by the ‘trans cult’ and turned into an angry pseudo-man, hooked on anabolic steroids and prone to intense rage against all those who loved her. The mother says she screamed in horror and cried to see her daughter’s breast-less chest. She raged silently for her own sister, dead from breast cancer, who would have given anything for two healthy breasts.
I don’t begrudge those who really are gender dysphoric, who may require medical intervention to change their sex. Some gender dysphoria may be real in ways we don’t yet understand. I support gender-affirming care for adults, but I believe it should be a long, slow process like it used to be, with lots of self-evaluation with the help of mental health professionals required, and mandatory screening for autism.
It will not kill progressive parents to tell their ‘trans’ kids, “No,” or at least “Wait, you can’t transition now. The law requires you to be 18. You can live how you want until then.”
Their kids won’t kill themselves, either. It’s just not happening in Europe, or America’s red states. It didn’t happen prior to 2014 when gender transition moved from slow and steady to fast-track.
Not happening.
If there’s one word missing from public discourse, it’s ‘authenticity’. I note it’s least common in trans discussions on social media. I wonder why.
I’m appalled by the horrific thanklessness of neurotic adult patients, and parents who don’t value their beautiful children as they are, who refuse to challenge their sick mental perceptions the way they would if their daughter was a 60-pound Instagram influencer with millions of fellow ‘Ana’ followers.
What if they said, “No. You’re fine the way you are. Why don’t we go visit a pediatrics sick ward at the hospital so you can see how goddamn lucky you are to have the healthy, mobile, functioning body you have?”
Robin Williams killed himself because he was suffering from dementia and Parkinson’s and didn’t want to be a burden to others, or suffer the horror of a slowly paralyzing body that would have left him like a babbling baby in a cradle.
I can’t say I blame him. How can you live a life of freedom and fulfillment, then be told by your traitorous genes, “That’s enough, no more fun for you! One day, you will only be able to stare at the ceiling.”
Now how bad is your life, trans-gender-queer-non-binary whateverthefuck?
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