Dec 27 2008

Friday Philosophy: Pope decrees transpeople seek to destroy humanity

The pope has spoken.

Who am I to disagree?

Being one of those who are determined to be as dangerous as global warming, who the hell am I to disagree?

Sweet dreams are made of this

Who am I to disagree?

Travel the world and the seven seas

Everybody’s looking for something

Some of them want to use you

Some of them want to get used by you

Some of them want to abuse you

Some of them want to be abused

I’m all with Benedict rehabilitating Galileo after 400 years, just in time to honor him for improving Jacob Metius’ new-fangled telescope and thinking to use it to look at the heavens.  If he hadn’t done that, some of my academic ancestors might have had to find something else to study.

But almost simultaneously this pope decided that some people are unworthy of study.  In fact, he pretty much decided that none of us were worth studying when it comes to our gender.  Not me.  Not you.

We should probably start by censoring Juvenal.  Clearly this passage from the Satires has to go:

But why

Are they waiting? Isn’t it now high

time for them to try

The Phrygian fashion and to make

the job complete

Take a knife and lop off that

superfluous piece of meat?

Men are men and women are women and all that studying that will do is upset the natural order of things.  Because, apparently, transfolk are less than deserving of the phrase “natural.”

And current and future generations of scholars shouldn’t study gender.  Ever.  Wrapped inside that study, apparently, are the seeds of destruction of humanity.

Says the pope:

The Church speaks of the human being as man and woman, and asks that this order is respected.

[Note:  Most transpeople I know identify as either men or women.  Where we disagree is that men must be born male and women must be born female.]

The pope fears “self-emancipation of man from creation and the Creator.”

Does anyone truly think transsexual people have that power?  Does anyone truly think that when we pursue our lives, and search for who we are, it opens up the doors for you to free yourselves?

Can someone tell me how freeing yourselves for millennia of proscriptions is a bad thing?

What keeps the pope awake at night is the idea that human beings might be able to seek out their own sexual identity in a bid to have a happy life.

–Franco Grillini, Gaynet

Whenever I get to this place, there are folks who want to turn the argument on its side and ask me why we should worry about what the pope or James Dobson or any other religious leader says.  The answer ought to be clear:  these people determine how a great majority of the people we are going to encounter in our lives respond to us.  They set the tone for how we are greeted and treated…or, in most cases, maltreated.

In order to open a dialogue with them, we are forced to concede, if only for the duration of that discussion, the existence of God.  And that would be not just any god, but their specific God.  

So let’s give it a try.  Assume the existence of the God of your choice.

I’ve heard some transfolk say something akin to “God made a mistake.”  But it has been rare and usually before they have given more thought to it.  Most of us claim (if we concede the existence of God in order to be able to defend ourselves) that God made no mistake.  And we wonder how anyone else cannot be blasphemous by claiming that God erred in our creation.  Who is it who thinks they know the mind of God?

We are not errors.  We are people.  Do we not have, like any other people, the right of even a modicum of self-determination?  Are we not allowed to know who we are?  Are we even to be shut off from the investigation?

To some of you, it is probable that you are thinking to yourself, what is the harm?

Here’s what one of your fellow Daily Kos members thinks:

Pumping someone full of medication for the rest of his life, destroying perfectly good and working parts of his or her body and ignoring all the underlying psychological issues in the name of a political position does not make much sense to me. I am very doubtful that we do the majority of transgendered persons any good if me make this treatment publicly and socially available to anybody who asks for it. But the data on that is still scarce, so I reserve definitive judgement on this until we know more about it.

On the other hand, the Pope’s suggestion (stick with nature) seems like a good general rule. YMMV.

This is the harm.

How much lack of understanding about transpeople does this display?  Let me count the ways.  

To this person we have become “a political position” rather than human beings.  What makes sense to this person is more important than what improves the chances for happiness of some of your fellow citizens.  Somehow attaining that happiness is bad for us…not just bad for society, but actually bad for individual transfolk.  And because this person has done no research, he or she believes the data is scarce.  And in supporting the pope, he or she would opt for accumulating no data.  

Instead we should bow down to a pope, who reads his speech through his prosthetic glasses as he tells transpeople to “stick with nature.”

If it were just the pope and this individual, this wouldn’t be a problem.  But the pope has, in this statement, given the imprimatur to the banning of knowledge about a certain group of people, a group to which I belong.  He has, in effect, declared the words I am writing and you are currently reading, to be sinful.

How much damage is that going to do to people who will discover that they are like me?  How many people will interpret his words as saying we are less than human…and  fair game?


Hanging by a Thread

Weed Control

The man says

we don’t matter

except in the ways

that we do harm

to the human ecology

When can I expect

the gardener

to stop by

to pluck me out

of this garden?

–Robyn Elaine Serven

–February 17, 2008

129 comments

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    • Robyn on December 27, 2008 at 00:04
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    …three days before a Christmas than being condemned by the leader of one of the world’s major religions.

    Is the Legend of Pope Joan at long last so disturbing to the winds of history that transfolk must be punished for it to this day?

    We are not new.



    Ferron:  Misty Mountain

    • Edger on December 27, 2008 at 00:10
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    The pope fears self-emancipation of man from the pope and the roman catholic power pyramid.

    Religions are divisive and quarrelsome. They are a form of one-upmanship because they depend upon separating the “saved” from the “damned,” the true believers from the heretics, the in-group from the out-group. Even religious liberals play the game of “we-re-more-tolerant-than-you.”

    Furthermore, as systems of doctrine, symbolism, and behavior, religions harden into institutions that must command loyalty, be defended and kept “pure,–and-because all belief is fervent hope, and thus a cover-up for doubt and uncertainty-religions must make converts.

    The more people who agree with us, the less nagging insecurity about our position. In the end one is committed to being a Christian or a Buddhist come what may in the form of new knowledge. New and indigestible ideas have to be wangled into the religious tradition, however inconsistent with its original doctrines, so that the believer can still take his stand and assert, “I am first and foremost a follower of Christ/Mohammed/Buddha, or whomever.”

    Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, open-ness –an act of trust in the unknown.

  3. people would still die from ear infections since antibiotics would be an unnecessary interference.

    Yes. But who gets to decide what is “natural”? The pope whose church has collaborated with questionable regimes and paid off countless victims of abuse? Religious leaders with other political agendas? Insecure TV pundits who mask their intense self hatred by lashing out at others?  

  4. …we have somewhat different views of the essay…and likely Stryker herself views it differently, these many years later…I’m reminded of her peice “My Words to Victor Frankenstien Above the Village of Chamounix”.  For those who haven’t read it (it requires MUSE access, or a willingness to hit Anne Lawrence’s site, and I’d rather go to Free Republic) she argues, in heavily postmodern terms, that the perception of trans being against the natural order is key and liberation for transsexual rage; that in essence, our rage is an inevitable consquence of exactly the distinction Pope Putz is making here.

    Personally, I’m way too hippie chick engineer type to get on board with that much pomo, but I think there’s a grain of something there.  The problem I had with it is that I think that while we screw with the natural order, ultimately we smooth ourselves back into it, and are smoothed back into it by the nature of trans process.  But I think there will be more and more examples of different embodiment,  who will still seek to claim their humanity.  

    • Alma on December 27, 2008 at 00:50
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    I couldn’t cede this:

    In order to open a dialogue with them, we are forced to concede, if only for the duration of that discussion, the existence of God.  And that would be not just any god, but their specific God.

    I’d need to find a lower common denominator.

  6. Pope John Paul II endorses murder. He, too, knows the price of discrimination, having declared anti-Semitism a sin, having just canonized a Jewish-born nun who died in Auschwitz. He knows that discrimination kills. But when the Pope heard the news about Matthew Shepard, he too worried about spin. And so, on the subject of gay-bashing, the Pope and his cardinals and his bishops and priests maintain their cynical political silence. Rigorously denouncing the abuse and murder of homosexuals would be a big sin against spin; denouncing the murder of homosexuals in such a way that it received even one-thousandth of the coverage his and his church’s attacks on homosexuals routinely receive, this would be an act of decency the Pope can’t afford, for the Pope knows: Behind this one murdered kid stand legions of kids whose lives are scarred by the bigotry this Pope defends as sanctioned by God. None of these kids will ever be allowed to marry the person she or he loves, not while the Pope and his church can prevent it; all of these kids are told, by the Holy Catholic Church, and by the Episcopalians and Lutherans and Baptists and Orthodox Jews: Your love is cursed by God.

    To speak out against murdering those who are discriminated against is to speak out against discrimination. To remain silent is to endorse murder.

    A lot of people worry these days about the death of civil discourse. The Pope, in his new encyclical, Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), laments the death of civil discourse and cites “ancient philosophers who proposed friendship as one of the most appropriate contexts for sound philosophical inquiry.” It’s more than faintly ludicrous, this plea for friendship coming from the selfsame Pope who has tried so relentlessly to stamp out dissent in churches and Catholic universities, but let’s follow the lead of the crazies who killed Matthew Shepard and take the Pope at his word.

    Tony Kushner, Matthew’s Passion

    This Pope, who is more reprehensible than John Paul, plans to canonize John Paul as a saint.  Who gives a shit what the last gasp of the world’s most bankrupt institution has to say?

    • Robyn on December 27, 2008 at 01:30
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    …here.

  8. Some folks above are saying “fuck the pope.” EWWW! No thanks.

    However I’d happily drop a few hundreds mics in his communion wine, and maybe, just maybe, he’ll begin to see that his understanding of god is completely wrong.

  9. LOL!

  10. did you ever read any of John Varley’s “Eight Worlds” science fiction?  The Ophiuchi Hotline, or any of the stories in The Persistence of Vision or The Barbie Murders or Blue Champagne?  Steel Beach?  The Golden Globe?

    What did you think of Varley’s depiction of gender?

    • Edger on December 27, 2008 at 14:20
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    Christ, I hope the pope is waking up this morning, learning something, and making fucking notes.

    Maybe?

    We should remind him he’s going to quizzed on this stuff. Every day. Forever. And he can make that forever hell or heaven, depending on his attitude. And on whether he took notes and learned something. Otherwise, he’ll be crucified.

    • Edger on December 27, 2008 at 15:06
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    From Yellow Dog at They gave us a republic:  What Bigots Don’t Understand About What’s Natural

    Hilzoy has a great piece on the pope’s latest bigotry-based rant about what’s “natural.”

       More to the point: so what? Lots of things that we find immoral are widespread in nature. Spiders eat their mates, for instance, but that doesn’t imply that it’s OK for us. Lots of things we think are just fine are unknown in animals — number theory, for instance, or blogging. If you want to argue about what we learn when we “listen to the language of creation”, you need to explain how we distinguish it from, say, the language of prejudice. Does the fact that the purpose of eating seems to be nourishment imply that it is immoral to drink diet soda? Does the fact that we ‘naturally’ get around using our legs imply that we were wrong to invent the bicycle, or, for that matter, the wheelchair? Does the fact that we are born vulnerable to a whole host of diseases mean that we should not develop vaccines and cures?

       Personally, I think that the idea of defining what’s “natural” for human beings is generally confused. What’s natural is often contrasted to what’s cultural, but human beings are social animals. If anything is natural for human beings, it is being raised by other human beings, and learning things from them: if we tried to find out what’s ‘natural’ for human beings by dropping an infant into an unpopulated wilderness, we’d have to conclude that what comes naturally to us is starvation.

       One sign that someone is not so much as trying to listen to the voice of creation is getting obviously relevant facts about nature wrong, say by asserting that animals do not form homosexual relationships or change sex. Another is making claims about what’s natural without any apparent awareness that someone might find his life unnatural — say, if he had taken a vow of celibacy, and lectured other people about the unnaturalness of their sexual lives without any trace of irony.

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