Friday Philosophy: On Whimsy

Sometimes it all seems futile.  I teach and teach and teach, wondering if one day, even some day soon, I will get the opportunity to talk about the things which really matter, about the way the world is and how to make it better for some of us who could use the improvement.

Then I run into someone who puts me back to square one, wondering if anything I have taught has survived…or how many other people are out there who feel the same way as the culprit.

So what do I do?  Go back to the beginning and start anew?  Maybe with some variation on the theme?  

What else is there?

The topic was universal health care and someone brought up health care for transgender people.  Specifically mentioned was sex reassignment surgery, though not by that name since those discussing it were lacking that bit of vocabulary.  [Note:  Transsexual people have surgery.  Most transgender people, of which transsexual people are a minority, do not.  Please, please, please…at least learn that much.]

Someone (a new DK member) proudly proclaiming himself to be a republican offered the following:

Sex change operations are just plain wrong. We all have issues, EVERYONE. Some people drink too much, some people eat too much, some people have abnormal fetishes. 99% of us learn to deal with whatever issues we have.

Because someone wakes up one day and decides I am a woman instead of a man they should be able to get a sex change operation and on top of that we should pay for it!?

Setting aside the issue of whether sex reassignment should be included in coverage as a topic for another day, the disrespect needed to be challenged by someone.

I realize that many people disagree with that point of view, preferring that I just STFU, but that, too, is maybe a subject for another day.

I wasn’t the only person who felt this guy needed to be challenged.  

People don’t get transgender surgery on a whim, and it’s not something that you just schedule and it’s done. It’s very involved, and sometimes as necessary as breast reduction or reconstruction….or are those also not “basic needs”?

If not, put a bra on and hang fifty pounds off it, and wear it all day, and see.

—Alexandra Lynch

My own response was very much along the same line:

You act as if it is a whim engaged in at the drop of a hat.

A little etymology might start this piece off.

From Etymology Online:

whim — 1641, “pun or play on words,” shortened from whimwham “fanciful object” (q.v.). Meaning “sudden notion, fancy, or idea” first recorded 1697, probably a shortened form of whimsy.

Learning is never wasted.  I’m betting most of us did not know that whim comes from whimsy rather than the other way around…or that they both come from the obsolete word whimwham.

whimwham — “trifle,” 1529, of unknown origin; perhaps from Scandinavian (cf. Old Norse hvima “to let the eyes wander,” Norwegian kvima “to flutter,” or an arbitrary native formation

From another source, more knowledgeable about words of Scandinavian origin:

whim — A freak. Icelandic hvima (to wander with the eyes, as of a silly person), Norwegian kvima (to whisk about, to trifle). Compare Swedish dialect hvimmerkantig (giddy in the head) allied to Norwegian kvimsa, Swedish dialect hvimsa, Dan vimse (To be giddy, to skip about). In modern Standard English, the meaning is a sudden desire or notion to do something without a great deal of thought, as in ‘she did it on a whim’.

Transsexual people do not change their sex on a whim.  We don’t wake up some day and decide, “Oh.  I’m bored.  I think I’ll try being a different gender from now on.  And I’ll even go so far as have a sex change.”  I don’t know why I even have to say that.

No, we are talking about something deeply ingrained, something from very far back in our development, so far back that it doesn’t matter if we were born with this condition or not.

Let me snatch a bit, as I have done before, from Gender Development, by Susan Golombok and Robyn Fivush (1994):

At the very beginning, children do not use gender to categorize themselves or others at all…essentially, they do not have any understanding that gender is an unchanging characteristic of an individual.

At about 2 years of age, children enter stage 1, called gender identity.  Children are now able to label themselves and others consistently as female or male, but they base this categorization on physical [???-Ed] characteristics [length of hair, attire, etc-Ed].  If these superficial physical characteristics change, then gender changes as well.  At about 3 to 4 years, children move into stage 2, called gender stability.  They now understand that if one is a female or male at the present time, then one was a female or male earlier in life and will remain a female or male later in life.  Little girls will grow up to be mommys and not daddys and little boys will grow up to be daddys and not mommys.  Thus stage 2 children understand that gender is stable across time.  However, they do not yet understand that gender is stable across situations.  If a male engages in female-typed activities, such as doll play, stage 2 children believe the male might change into a female.  It is only at about age 5 when children progress to stage 3, called gender constancy, that they understand that gender is constant across time and situations.  Now children claim that gender will not change regardless of the clothes worn or the activities engaged in. They have come to understand that gender is an underlying, unchanging aspect of an identity.

Research has confirmed that children do indeed progress through Kohlberg’s three stages of understanding the concept of gender…”

The research confirms that most of you do so.  Maybe 98 to 99 percent.  But not some of us.  Some of us fail at one or more of these stages.  And while we may have been statistically insignificant in any research study which started out with the assumption that we didn’t exist in the first place, we do indeed exist.

Does it really matter why?

I can tell you one thing:  at under five years of age, this was not a moral failing.  It was just part of who we grew up to be.

We may have spent varying lengths of time hiding those failings, because we learn every early on that it is not acceptable to feel the way we do, but make no mistake:  it is very rare to find transpeople who have had no inkling of being different from about as far back as we can remember.

And we do indeed exist.  And goddess help us, some of us think there should be a place for us on this planet and in this society.

And some of us have the gall to think that we deserve equal consideration…and even equal rights.

Some people drink too much, some people eat too much, some people have abnormal fetishes.

We are not equivalent to alcoholics or binge eaters.  We reject being having our condition classified as a paraphilia.

And guess what?

It’s not.

We’re just different.  And that should be okay.  And it could be, but that’s up to you, not us.

Life Storm Rift How strange that such a small easily stated . difference . between us could open such a vast . . . chasm . . . of distrust mystery confusion misunderstanding even hatred How sad that the variation occurring so early in our lives could affect so much for so long Can such a breach ever be healed? –Robyn Elaine Serven –January 30, 2009