Glenn Stanton Is (Gender) Confused

With apologies to Cole Porter:

"Birds do, bees do it, even ignorant Yankeeeees do it...."

I love Dakota Voice, just when you think they've dredged into the deepest, darkest trenches of Conservative idiocy, they come with something new - this time it's Glenn Stanton. It's quite a short post, so you can see the video and Bob Ellis' comments here.

Stanton has been invited onto the Dr Phil show to discuss "Gender confusion" which Ellis has confused with homosexuality in his tags. Homosexual folks aren't confused about their gender - that's transsexuals you dolt! Homosexuals are attracted to people of the same gender.

Says Ellis:

"Due to a variety of environmental factors, children can become confused about their sexuality, what their proper role is and how they should act."

Which is bullshit, of course. Since Ellis is a God-fearing throwback, he cannot accept that. Even Stanton has this to say about gender dysphoria in children (the full article is here).

"Is it normal and healthy for young children to participate in cross-sex behavior? Of course! The whole world of a child is exploration. The role of the parent is to make sure their children explore and learn about their world in safe and directed ways."

Which is fair enough, but regrettably Stanton doesn't really understand what he's actually burbling about so this advice is misguided and wrong. The behaviour he alludes to is perfectly normal in normal children. His religiously formed guidance won't work in a truly dysphoric person. Our own NHS has this to say:

"The symptoms of gender dysphoria usually appear at a very young age. Children may refuse to wear typical boys' or girls' clothes, or dislike taking part in typical boys' or girls' games and activities. In most cases, this kind of behaviour is just a normal part of growing up, but in cases of gender dysphoria, it persists into later childhood, adolescence and adulthood.

"The exact cause of gender dysphoria is unknown. It is currently classed as a psychiatric condition (relating to the mind), but many recent studies have suggested that it is more to do with biological development (relating to the body). There is ongoing research into what causes it."

Key here is the observation that a person with true dysphoria will refuse to wear clothes "appropriate" to their gender even at young age. (I did myself as a very young child. Children often dress up in alternative outfits - from the opposite sex to their favourite superhero - yet when they do, we don't assume they will grow up and go around dressed as Batman.)

Normal children just grow out of it! Biology and sexual identity will take over. Parental guidance (as promoted by Stanton) is a good thing; but our parents can't really influence our ultimate sexual identity: any more than zombie-worshipping plonkers can make God appear out of thin air.

Stanton says, Dr. Kennth Zucker:

"...one of the world's leading authorities on gender confusion in children, calls this dynamic "family noise" which he explains as unhealthy relationships between mother and father, parents and child, as well as sibling to sibling. He says allowing a boy to live as a girl might solve the immediate anxiety of such a child, but it would ignore the larger problem driving such desire, and it fails to serve the child and the family."

Does he indeed? Actually, we're not told what, precisely Dr. Zucker said that Stanton hasn't manipulated into his own words and since there is no real citation, there is no way to check, but googling does reveal why Zucker was chosen. TSRoadmap.com (who represent the opposing case) describes him thus:

"Ken Zucker is a psychologist at the Clarke Institute (aka "Jurassic Clarke") in Toronto. Zucker is famous for forcing gender-variant children into reparative therapy to conform to his expectations for male and female behavior in children. He considers transsexual women a 'bad outcome' for gay men."Zucker is a darling of the 'ex-gay' movement because of his work 'curing' gender-variant children. "

Now I won't go as far as alluding to Zucker as a quack, but shit, I'm sure I can hear ducks around here somewhere. Now, I think I'll go and pop some sheer stockings on. Oooo that feels soooo gooooood.

Pope: "Catholicism Must Save the World From Gays and Trannys!"

In his end of year dribble speech to Vatican staff the 81 year old pontiff has suggested that saving the world from gay folk is as important as saving the rain forests.

Funny how they can freely and openly attack people for being naturally programmed a particular way and yet when someone criticises their unquestioning belief in the invisible, they cry blasphemy.

Homosexuality may be abhorrent to these folk, in fact it offends many atheists and agnostics too - unless they are red-blooded males watching a two or more 20-somethings getting all steamy together. Erotic lesbianism is OK... But that's homosexual sex.

So what's wrong with two dudes falling in love?

I know the problem. Folks can't get their heads around the way gay men make out. This has nothing to do with reproduction of the species (although that's what the religious would have you believe.) It's because they can't abide what goes on in the bedroom (or in George Michael's case - somewhere else).

Like or not, accept it or not, but being gay is part of the human condition - and it's not just restricted to humans.

Sexual attraction involves many parts of the brain and for the most part we don't fully understand it, what we do know is that some people are sexually attracted to members of the same sex. They can't help it because they are made that way; they didn't consciously choose to nip into the closet one day never to return.

Sexual orientation is determined in the womb.

If you believe in God, it's God's fault that some men and women are gay. If you believe in science on the other hand, it's natures fault.

Either way we have absolutely no right to try and rid the world of them: and the organised churches have even less right than that; and what really grinds with me is that a bloke who has, by definition never even experienced an orgasm, is considered a suitable person to tell the rest of society how to think.

As Rodney Carrington observed, "I think I'll go in the closet now. I'm tired of all that pussy, gonna get me some dick now."

UPDATE:

Now I'd missed this, but the Christian post reports:

the Pope said, “It is not man who decides who is a man or woman but God.”

Clearly, and as typically usual, the intellectually challenged corpse worshipper, has missed a fascinating point about transsexual behaviour: and since one of my best friends was afflicted this way (and even confessed to me before telling his then model girlfriend) I do feel a little better informed than he is about the subject.

We'll call him Dave - not his real name.

Dave and I were computer programmers and pretty good mates. He was very handsome, articulate and well-mannered. But he wasn't in the least bit camp.

He came to my birthday party and made me feel like a true guest of honour. We (the small selection of office staff, including Dave) wined and dined while I did my "Siadwell" impression and drunkenly put pinhole burns all down the front of my favourite shirt: that I'd just received that very evening.

Some weeks later, we were talking at his place and he explained that he had a secret and over the next few hours poured out the details of his feeling like a woman trapped in a man's body. He hated his penis and longed to wear woman's clothes: he'd already bought himself some stuff which he delighted in showing me. We went into a lot of detail including the pictures of the operation he eventually planned to have where his penis and testicles would be reformed as a vagina and vulva. Although they were in monochrome and early versions of today's op., they were enough to make me wince a little inside.

I was the first person he'd confided in and I felt honoured: to this day, I feel honoured that I was the person he "came out" to if that's the right word.

Dave was probably in love with me and although I considered him a trusted confidante, I had never considered him anything else than just one of the lads - yet here he was confessing the need to become a woman.

You may be wondering why I didn't feel phased by this. (Many hot-blooded males in their 20s would take serious offence or horror to be told by a friend that they were gay - but this was even more earth-shattering.)

No that was just, Dave. If he wanted to be a woman, then that was fine with me and as blogger is my witness, he never made a move on me. We understood each other. I looked at him and saw another guy, he looked at him and saw a woman - trapped in a man's body.

This is key.

Transexuals are not gay, indeed the condition is recognised in psychiatry as a gender dysphoria. It is not homosexuality but an entirely different condition the causes of which remain unclear.

As far as Dave was concerned, he was a woman. He had the outward physical characteristics of a man including the musculature, Adam's apple and so on, but inwardly - his sense of self - told him he was female.

So what's God got to do with this?

Ancient people had very strange ideas about sex. In Jesus's day, for example, it's widely considered that they believed that men ejaculated some form of embryos and that the woman only acted as an incubator. This lends some credence to acceptance of the virgin birth myth: god just appeared and planted the "seed". What those people didn't know was that a pair of gametes are required to create an embryo - one from each parent. Gametes are involved when plants reproduce sexually to - but in plants, the seed is an analogue of the embryo.

However, even though modern Christians cannot ignore modern biology (unless it suits them to) they still consider that life is a divine creation. This leads into to some horrid arguments about the sanctity of life versus a woman's right to choose which I'm not going to address here. My opinions should be clear from my other writing.

So let's work from their teaching: in the book of Ecclesiastes, if memory serves, it is written that it's wicked and sinful for a man to lie down with another as if it were his wife.

Make love, in other words.

However, from what I can recall, there's nothing in the bible that actually says you can't remodel a man (or woman's) body into the opposite sex.

This is not really the issue.

The simple people who wrote those words, so alien to thinking people and so precious to modern evangelical Christians, simply thought that gay folk (and transsexuals) had a choice.

WRONG. WRONG. WRONG.

When comedian Rodney Carrington cracks jokes like:

"I think I'll go in the closet now. I'm tired of all that pussy, gonna get me some dick now."

He's alluding to precisely this. We can't chose to be gay, any more than we can choose to be black, white, indigo, man or woman - and we can't choose to be transexuals either.

So if we can't choose to do something (using the free will, they are so fond of telling us God gave us) then the decision was made for us.

God made gay people and God made transsexuals.

I didn't work out this logic, the Bible does in concert with what we know now.

Crap - looks like I'm stuck with pussy after all.