::Cracks knuckles::
I understand Stephanie's point of view, in that these question's shouldn't have to be justified, but there are people that exist in my life that don't understand, but might be capable of understanding, and I'd like to do whatever I can to help them. In the end, I don't really expect any of my close family to really understand, but at least I wil know I tried, and maybe they're a little more open now, too.
So, clumped into one huge statement, this is what I would say:
"Transsexualism is not normal?" I say... But my friend, normality is not absolute. Normality is constantly changing; always in flux. It not only changes over time, but it changes from place to place... Every culture is different, and in the majority of Western culture, we do have what most people would consider a "standard of normalcy". It caught my eye what James said about 90% of the world probably not understanding what transsexualism is, but in fact, either 40% or 60% (I can't remember which) of the worlds cultures have an accepted concept of a third sex. In the United States, Many North American plains Indians had something called a "berdach'e" (sp?).... if a man didn't like going to war or hunting, and in fact had an aversion toward "womanly duties", he was often made an "honorary woman", and was treated as such. Looking in Africa and South America, accepted positions for "third sex people" abound. In fact, anthropology has 4 or 5 classifications of sex/gender in culture (depending on which professor you ask). In any culture, it's not uncommon for men to dress as woman during certain times of year, for example during one of the Spanish festivals in the smaller towns of that country. Geography aside, concepts of normality and sex/gender have changed countless times since humanity's existence. If you could travel a thousand years into the future, and dig a deep whole, miles down, and look at the individual layers of dirt that each represent a period in human history, you would find that the layer that represents the time and "values" of now take up an infinitesimaly small layer that would represent less than a percent of all the strata in that hole! All the current commonly held values of Western culture like "transsexuality is abnormal" represent such a small piece of our history that spans many 10s of thousands of years back. Yet, what most people consider the natural state of humans is a person who has a family unit, married to the opposite sex, who goes to work, who has kids etc etc, and this is considered by most to be the "natural state" of humans. But the term "natural state" is so misleading and subjective as to be completely useless. For the vast majority of human existence, humans have not formed family units, they have not gone to work from 9-5, and they did NOT have a concept of transsexualism as being bad. Of course, I am taking into account unrecorded human history, but that is a BIG part of out past, and, I might add, a time before religion even existed!
Religion (read: NOT spiritualism) is the source of so many misconceptions about transsexualism, but so many humans didn't even know the meaning of the word! (or had the capability to speak it, for that matter). So what happened to those people who existed before religion? Did they all go to hell because they were godless heathens? Well I should hope not! They couldn't help there lot in life. They were born the way they were, when they were. That kind of reminds my of someone... me. Us. The transgendered community, who by a mistake in our prenatal life were born with opposing mental and physical genders. "But God doesn't make mistakes!" you say. And I say the dinosaurs, and the mammoths, and another 1000 or so extinct species that don't exist anymore would beg to differ! If God doesn't make mistakes, how do you account for all those (apparently) failed species? What about when someone is born with a missing lung? Or simply, bad eyes? Are these not mistakes of birth? God doesn't individually sculpt each person, evolution does that. I give God a lot more credit than to think She would have it so that every person must be made manually, by Her, and thus infallibly... Doesn't it make a lot more sense that an all knowing, ever-present being like God is responsible for evolution? That She would put this amazing, beautiful system in place to let life play itself out? We know evolution exists, and we know mistakes happen, so doesn't that make a lot more sense? Evolution, in fact, depends on mistakes! A mistake in a genetic sequence will yield a mutation, and evolution depends on the fact that, every once in a while, by chance, that mutation will be a good thing, and that animal will thrive and (hopefully) reproduce. Without an unthinkable number of physiological mistakes since the beginning of life on Earth, we humans would still be swimming around in a puddle of mud somewhere. Unfortunately, most mistakes aren't good, and when they happen, we fix them! If someone is born with bad eyes, we don't say "it was God's will, so this person shouldn't suffer and have bad eyes, because to fix it would be an abomination". We DON'T say that! Why? Because we have technology to fix it... it's called glasses. Just as we have the technology to fix a broken arm, or to mend a faulty heart. We have the technology, so we fix these things. So why the hell would we let a person who was born with the wrong physical gender go on suffering like that?
We are humans, we are the only one's on this beautiful planet that have technology. Technology is our legacy... We improve our lives with our brains, because we were lucky enough to be able to use them. So we continue our evolution where our biology stops, and continue with medical technology. The human being is incapable of evolving any farther by chance. Evolution depends on mutation, and we have reached the point that we don't allow mutations... they are considered abnormal, and we use our brains to fix them. If a baby is born with a mutation, we do our best to fix it! Because we don't allow mutations, (and thus we don't allow further evolution), any further evolution of the human species will be borne of our minds... in machines that can give an amputee a leg back, and maybe someday give them a better leg... because we can! That's what we are capable of... to deny that (the ability to fix and improve ourselves) would be to deny our humanity.
There are many examples "unnatural" behavior in nature. The Bonobo chimps of Asia are known to engage in lesbian love! "Oh my God! An animal doing something 'unnatural? But they define our concept of nature!" say the idiots. I guess their concept of natural isn't right... surprise surprise.
Life is far more complex than any number of words in the Bible... no matter what anyone would have you believe, you cannot think of ANYTHING in absolute terms. Normalcy? Inconstant. Blasphemy? The accusation of someone with a gross misunderstanding of existence. Threatening? Only to those incapable of thinking for themselves. Birth into the wrong gender? Another thing to be fixed with our technology.
