I happened to be watching the beginning of A Clockwork Orange when I read the quote below, especially the music "Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary - March" by Henry Purcell. Very surreal reading the extract below whilst listening to the track. Perhaps if Kubrick were alive and directing today, he'd have shot an iconic film about gender, which probably would have been both beautiful and terrifying and genuinely made people think. Or, perhaps its best he didn't :-p But, personally, I'd prefer something iconic & forward thinking, then yet another depressing cliched melodrama about a unpassable transexual with aids/cancer/a criminal record, etc.
QuoteAbout this business of her being a boy. It didn't matter ... that genetically she was male. ... Through techniques which are not only complex but haven't yet been discovered, these people were able to determine a great deal about the aptitudes and easements of babies quite a long time before they were born—at about the second horizon of cell-division, to be exact, when the segmenting egg is becoming a free blastocyst—and then they naturally helped those aptitudes along. Wouldn't we? If we find a child with an aptitude for music we give him a scholarship to Juilliard. If they found a child whose aptitudes were for being a woman, they made him one. As sex had long been dissociated from reproduction this was relatively easy to do and caused no trouble and no, or at least very little, comment.
Anway, got side-tracked there. It makes more sense to match someone to what they're suited at, as opposed to just what genitalia you have. We live in a weird world, where the human race distorts and bends nature to its ends in order to live longer and prosperously, yet bizarrely we humans hold onto birth gender and sex with an iron grip. We can go to the moon, create nuclear bombs, have surgical implants, amend DNA and build what we want, yet modify one's gender? Noooooo. That'd just be playing God! And humans have never played God, of course ;-)
