“All body mutilation is a tragic joke, except for gender mutilation, which is a wondrous thing”

Daniel Harris, as quoted by Bookworm on a post titled Sex and State Power - What's Behind Obama's Transgender Push.  (via Instapundit)

. . . TGs (transgenders) have ambushed the debate and entangled us in a snare of such trivialities as the proper pronouns with which to address them, protocol as Byzantine and patronizing as the etiquette for addressing royalty. They insult us with the pejorative term “cisgender,” which they use to describe those of us who accept, however unenthusiastically, our birth gender, as opposed to the enlightened few who question their sex. Moreover, they shame us into silence by ridiculing the blunders we make while trying to come to grips with their unique dilemmas, decrying our curiosity about their bodies as prurience and our unwillingness, or even inability, to enter into their own (often unsuccessful) illusion as narrow‑mindedness.

[snip]

While I fervently support TGs’ rights to transition and to do so without fear of reprisal, I believe that the whole phenomenon of switching one’s gender is a mass delusion. For one, the physical manipulation involved in transforming oneself into a man or woman is apparently different in kind—or so the transgender community presumes—from the nips and tucks undertaken by the trophy wife or celebrity, anti‑heroes of a materialistic culture with whom the TG, having taken advantage of the same merchandising of the body promoted by commercialized medicine, bears a strong and unfortunate resemblance. The general public almost universally disapproves of plastic surgery and laughs derisively at celebrities who present a face “different from the one they rode in on,” as one commentator referred to their futile—and often ruinous—efforts to roll back the hands of time. The obscene trout pout of Donatella Versace, the misshapen nipples and oblong breasts of Tara Reid, the Joker’s grimace of Kim Novak, are all fair game for that most American and democratic of blood sports, the desecration of the rich and famous in tabloids and gossip blogs.

And yet what is the actual difference between Michael Jackson whittling his nose down to a brittle sliver of bone and whitening his skin with alpha hydroxy acid and arsenic in order to efface his blackness and the TG sanding down her brow bone and hacking off a sizeable chunk of her mandible in order to efface her gender? Why is the one decried as a racially reprehensible instance of self‑mutilation, self‑denial, and self‑loathing and the other extolled as a celebratory instance of self‑liberation? Why is it not only okay but valiant for Caitlyn Jenner to liberate her inner woman through rhinoplasties and laryngeal shaves while it is deplorable and pathetic for Michael Jackson to liberate his inner Caucasian through bleaching and cleft chin augmentation? When Rachel Dolezal goes to the Palm Beach tanning salon for her weekly $30 dip, she is committing the unconscionable crime of appropriating blackness (or, in her case, as the Gawker put it, not blackness but “Medium Brown Spray Tan”), but when Laverne Cox, one of the breakout performers on the television show Orange Is the New Black, slaps on a transdermal estrogen patch, she is lauded as a hero and role model. All of the arguments against plastic surgery—that it is dangerous, even fatal, often botched, and symptomatic of either extreme body dysmorphia or a lamentable effort to accommodate Hollywood’s chauvinistic ageism—can be leveled against those who transition from one sex to another. The trophy wife and the TG swim, it seems, in the same surgeon‑infested seas.

It's a long article, but if you really want to understand what is at stake, what the push is really about please read the whole thing. I found it eye opening.

A lesbian's daughter speaks out

Brandi Walton speaks out at the Federalist 

Linked to this from the sidebar at Ace and momentarily entered a surreal space. The page on Federalist looks like an advertisement and I had not heard of this author nor care to look further. She's probably legit. I don't know and I don't care.

The story is anti LBGT. It is a story about a girl raised by lesbians but not feeling a part of LBGT community nor a supporter of their cause and as I reader I fall into line thinking, "We all knew there will be cases like this. Do tell." So, I'm open for a description of her experience and continued. And then at about 1/4 or 1/3 way through while reading her life experience a thought formed alongside it and rode along as I continued reading, "Were I a social conservative against SSM this is what a surface description would look like."

I could no longer pretend to read the rest wholeheartedly nor completely openly. What a predicament, to want to know and get at intimate truth but question the verity of its author. It was ruined by the sense I am being tricked by a writer not quite sufficiently clever. Here's why. I've spoken with people raised by lesbians at length because I'm curious and they're open. It's interesting. They are interesting. They have interesting lives. The unique details of their lives are quite something to keep conversation going. The things that they will tell you are entertaining and gripping. Now I'm reading suspiciously. Were I to contrive such an experience I'd have to come up with intimate anecdotes of how it affected my life profoundly and negatively. Not cite studies about me and my type. My story would be intimate with unusual details not a general surface argument, rather, a deep personal argument from the point of view of a child. The closest she comes to this is, and listen to how surface skimming this is,  "I spent a lot of time in my friend's homes that had dads." And, "I wanted to know what it was like to be loved by a man. My uncles tried to fill the gap but I always knew they were substitutes." That sounded a bit like bad romance book writing. That rings as surface feelings imagined by conservative more than it rings heartfelt feelings of a girl grown up talking to me about her unusual life.

I am not going to question her story anymore. Nor the author. I like these real people raised by real lesbians too much to do that. Let's say she and her story are true. Fine. Okay? You're all very real. There.

What I am telling you is this, Brandi Walton, the page produced over there at the Federalist has the feel of an advertisement to it and your story sounds like you're selling something, and your description is a surface description of the product you're selling, anti same sex marriage. That's what I'm saying.

And it occurred to me while reading your page, no matter how valid and true, were I to produce a fake page to advocate such with a fake author and fake bio it would look like this except with a lot more intimate and unusual details and not surface descriptions that are common girlish feelings and with less obvious straight up advocation citing studies.