I believe the Wall Street Journal used to–perhaps they still do–have a section called “When Life Imitates the Onion.”
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Rebecca adds: “We accept as a basic truth the idea that everyone has the right to marry somebody.”
Excuse me? Since when? Children don’t have the right to marry somebody. People in jail, in most jurisdictions, don’t have the right to marry somebody. The certifiably insane don’t have the right to marry somebody, nor does Canadian law accept proxy marriages, or plural marriage, or marriage between first degree blood relatives.
Marriage is a stamp that society puts on a relationship. Not all societies have the same rules about marriage, but they all have rules, formal and informal, and they have by and large been served well by them. If your society declines to put its stamp on your relationship, you’re not married. In Israel, which has no civil marriage, you can only be married by clergy, and almost all clergy there insist on marrying within the faith, so Jews have a great deal of difficulty marrying non-Jews, Muslims non-Muslims, and Christians non-Christians. This could be a good thing or a bad thing but it’s consistent and coherent.
“Jennifer Finney Boylan is a professor of English at Colby College.” Of course. Some things are so preposterous only an academic could believe them, to mutilate, er, sorry, re-assign a phrase.
I’d say the legal status of his/her marriage is about the least of Professor Boylan’s problems.
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As my dear late grandmother would say, “That makes me a headache.” No kidding about life imitating the Onion.
The article raises some interesting points, but as an argument for gay marriage it has issues.
Rebecca, please don’t be mean about people who have sex-change operations. From the time they’re young kids they feel like they’re trapped in bodies that aren’t really theirs. I’d rather have them have surgery and be happy than not have surgery and feel miserable and alienated from their own bodies.
Marauder, no meanness intended, but I dispute the premise of your argument, namely that it is a form of kindness to help people get sex-change operations and be supportive of them in that endeavour. The fact that many of them feel trapped in the wrong body and alienated from their own bodies does not lead to the conclusion that they will be happy and healthy once they’re had a sex-change.
Anorexics feel that they’re trapped in a fat body, often from the time they’re young kids. They believe they will only be comfortable and truly themselves, and worthy of happiness, when they lose five more pounds, even as they are literally starving themselves to death. Do we say “very well then, let’s do everything in our power to help you lose weight, no matter what the consequences to you,” thereby buying in to their delusion, or do we use whatever tools we have to help them adjust to reality and function and thrive within it? Should people be able to have healthy limbs amputated because that is their paraphilia?
I’m not proposing that we empower government to stop people from disfiguring their own bodies, whether through needless surgery, tongue forking, or whatever, although my reluctance stems from an unwillingness to grant the state this power, not a conviction that people ought to do whatever they want to their bodies. But I also won’t play along that it is an empowering thing, to permanently alter your body in a most unnatural way, nor do I want it done at taxpayer expense.
How does sexual reassigment surgery have anywhere near the health consequences that anorexia does? I don’t see the comparison to amputating healthy limbs either. Changing your gender does not make your body essentially unhealthy.
I could see where there might be some kids who, for various reasons, would want to be the other sex. (My grandma used to pray that God would make her a boy because boys got to do things she wasn’t allowed to do.) But if we’re talking about people who have spent their entire lives feeling as though they are the wrong gender – not feeling as though there’s anything wrong with people of their biological gender, just that a person of that gender is not who they are inside – I think trying to get them to change would be about as useful as trying to get gay people to change their sexual orientation.