Monday, November 06, 2017

He's be happy if his daughters changed sex?

Tim Lott is a Guardian columnist. One of his offerings is a piece titled "Why I'd be happy for my daughters to change gender." That's a radical assertion given what a sex change involves, and Lott does acknowledge that there would be significant hurt involved:
How would I feel if one of my daughters turned out to feel she were a male, and wanted surgery to reassign her identity?

I would, admittedly, be worried that this might cause her physical and mental distress.

So why then be happy? He explains this way:
All the same, I am perfectly happy, in the liberal tradition, that people should have any gender identity they want, or any sex that they want...

It is clear that from the hysterical reaction to Can I Tell You About Gender Diversity? by elements of the rightwing press, that transphobia is a real enough phenomena. So to be clear I am not in favour of simply tolerating it – the idea of gender fluidity should be thoroughly welcomed, for all its complications, as an extension of the range of human possibility.

It's Liberalism 101. What matters to Tim Lott is an individual freedom to pursue our subjective wants, i.e. a freedom to self-determine who we are, rather than being bound to predetermined qualities like the sex we are born to or to our natural telos (ends/purposes) as men and women.

However nice it might sound, Lott's liberalism leads to a grotesque outcome. He feels obliged to announce that he would be happy if his daughters went through a shocking medical procedure and spent their lives as biological women identifying as men. It's an extraordinary thing for a parent to announce their happiness at such an outcome.

The emphasis can never be on unlimited subjective wants. That's not how you arrive at the best kind of individual life. It's better to think in terms of a life that is successfully ordered or integrated, which then gives us the opportunity to stand above our desires and to judge their merits and how they might or might not deserve to be acted on.

3 comments:

  1. I was discussing the election results in the state of Virginia with a friend. I grew up in Virginia.
    Part of what I wrote to my friend is about the successful candidacy of a so-called "transgender woman":
    Daniel Roem, legally changed his name to Danica Roem. He is a male who dresses, acts and lives pretending to be a "woman". He has sex with only other homosexual males and never with woman.
    He soundly defeated a social conservative who properly refused to address him as her in his ineffective ads. Roem lawfully ran as a "female'. The state of Virginia altered Roem's sex identity from male to female with words.
    Marshall, who lost, self-described as Virginia's "chief homophobe". Marshal had no irrational fear of homosexuals. But, Roem does. Danica is clearly afraid to live honestly as Daniel, a homosexual. Danica is the actual homophobe.
    Re-writing the words of the natural law, within an inexhaustible mystery that the state can never fully explain; through the power and spirit of the modern liberal, secular state and the instrumentality of man's written law, the state ordained that "the whole of a female is truly present; body, blood, soul and dignity, under the appearances of the male "species" and its substance. This presence of a living female in the substantive flesh and blood body of a male, is real says the state. This "real presence" of Danica in Virginia's state legislature, exists in many ways, but most especially through the sacramental rite of democratic vote in committee and congress.
    The empirical appearance and physical properties (call them sex or accidents) are not actually changed by drug or surgery, but in the view of the state, their reality substantially is; hence the terms transgender, transsexual, and transubstantiation variously describe these phenomenons.
    “The message that I can succeed because of my gender, not despite it, because of who I am without being afraid of who I am is a human message,” she said. “It's something that even if you are cisgender, but you have some reason that you've been singled out in your life, you have some reason that you've been stigmatized in your life, you've had some reason when you've been cornered in your life for being yourself, you can look at me and say, ‘If she can do this, so can I.’”

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    Replies
    1. Man is declaring himself God. This will not end well.

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    2. Man is declaring himself God. This will not end well.

      Agreed. You can see already how this is going to unfold.

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