Gender Affirming Care

GENDER AFFIRMING CARE certainly is an innocuous enough term, seemingly implying simple acknowledgment of a person's sex, biological, mental, and social, which unto rather recently had all been widely believed to be essentially the same thing. In fact it seems to be a modern invention, referring to the willingness or requirement that all citizens, presuming equal justice under law, be treated in a manner appropriate to the gender by which people identify themselves. This complicates matters. Anybody is perfectly free under this principle to self identity as any gender of his or or its choosing, and it has become obvious in today's culturally diverse world that folks are quite capable of and willing to designate themselves as any number of different genders, often of their own invention. It remains vague, for example, as to what precisely the term "gender queer" means. It encompasses many more specific sexual orientations than mere "traditioal" homosexuality, we can be certain of that. It would be difficult to imagine any sane, rational person not insisting on gender self identification. Those of you who accept the designations given us at birth are, it turns out, quite fortunate, that our personal preferences are in alignment with choices made by our parents and our society concerning who we really are. Ultimately, we all want to be who we, and not others, say we are. We are now accepting the apparent reality that there is something more than genitalia which determines our gender. Gender identity, it turns out, is a deeplly personal, emotional, spiritual affair. The conservative notion that all human beings are confined to the gender which they are assigned on their birth certificate seems reasonable, until the complications begin. It is difficult for people who do not have gender dysphoria, as we call, it, to imagine what it feels like. What we can take for granted is that it is not pleasant. Stressful, ridden with anxiety, extremely unpleasant. And, as is so often, all too often the case with our modern medical distinctions, the shame and alienation people often experience becaue of having "abnormal" sexual proclivities, these debilitating feelings are magnified, reinforced, and arguably engendered by our intolerant, morally moribund culture. It may be, and probably is, that there are as many possible personal gender identifications and sexual orientations as there are people to self identity, as many personal gendrs as there are religions, which is to say, one per person. Any person who is sufficiently motivated to change gender identification to actually change gendrs physically through surgery must be credit, if nothing else, for sincerity and certainty of purpose. We admire people who choose their own destiny and pursue it unreservedly, right? Don't we ceaselessly admonish people experienced self doubt to "just be yourself?" At least, we say we do. Moral values predicated on traditional religions are highly resistant to change. I once knew a well educated person who said that she believed that all human beings are fundamentally bisexual. That sounds doubious at best, Maybe she is, and thinks everyone else is, or should be. She was, after all, a psychology major... We humans are apparently hard wired to projection. We make a human being out of the universe itself, in our never ending anthropomorphization of nature. We do much the same as infividuals, as if asking ourselves: "How can anyone possibly be different than I?" Answering that question honestly, for once, may well be a key to our continued civilized survival on Earth.