Two interesting stories hit the media last week: In one, a 71-year-old was granted permission to continue substitute teaching at an elementary school. In another, a firefighter filed a grievance against his department chief for discrimination.
What kinds of people are the firefighter and substitute teacher?
That’s the problem. No one is entirely sure. They’re transsexuals. The two cases involve men who changed their sex to women.
In the first case, parents complained about the individual coming back to substitute teach because it would confuse the children. In the firefighter case, the individual says the chief treated her/him differently and used incorrect gender terms when addressing the individual.
My gut reaction in both cases is the same: “You’re a freak, and you’ve chosen to be a freak. Take your medicine like a man, so to speak.”
But on serious reflection, both individuals merit pity and compassion. They’re obviously tortured individuals. Who else but a terribly unhappy and psychologically imbalanced person thinks lopping off his genitals and taking female hormone supplements are going to make him happy?
Perhaps most tellingly are their pictures. They look like men wearing wigs. They are frightfully — comically — ugly. Although I can’t help snickering a bit (pray for me), it really is sad.
I think a strong legal argument can be made that such individuals should be accommodated in the workplace. The Federal Americans with Disabilities Act requires employers to make reasonable accommodations for a person with a disability who can perform the essential functions of a job. The ADA includes psychological disability within the orb of afflictions that must be accommodated.
Now, I’m not a big fan of the ADA, but it is the law of the land, and these people are psychologically disabled. Unless the ADA exempts transsexuality from the list of disabilities that it doesn’t protect, it seems these folks could seek protection under it.
Thing is, they don’t want to. They don’t want to be considered disabled. They want to be considered 100% Grade A normal human beings.
And that’s where the problem is.
We all suffer from imperfection, whether it’s a tendency to drink too much, fall into depression, fly into rages, whatever. Some imperfections are more severe than others (I’d much rather suffer from an inordinate love of beer than a desire to mutilate myself). We shouldn’t deny the imperfections, and we ought to be compassionate toward people who suffer from greater ones.
But we shouldn’t deny that they’re imperfections or celebrate them. We shouldn’t bring imperfections into the open and say, “Isn’t this great?” any more than we should prop up a wino and compliment him on being who he wants to be.
Yet that’s exactly what the transsexuals want.
Instead of facing up to their tortured existence, these former men sought to escape into the body of a woman. Instead of leading their tortured existence in silence, stoically and manfully, they sought the aid of surgery and hormone treatments. That was bad enough, but now they’ve taken another step: a demand for societal acceptance, including the acceptance of third-graders who cannot even fathom what has taken place.
With every imperfection, there are three alternatives: accept it, remediate it, normalize it. The first two alternatives are largely a matter of individual preference. The last one involves society as a whole.
In both transsexual cases, the transsexual declined to accept his imperfection or failed to remediate it through conventional methods, so he sought to remediate it through surgery. But that’s not enough. S/he now wants the third alternative, too: for society to normalize it.
We ought to be asking them a lot of questions, like “Why do you demand societal acceptance of your imperfection? Other people suffer from imperfections, but they tend to keep them hidden. They don’t flaunt them, and they don’t ask society to bless them. Why are you behaving so differently?”
I suspect I know the answer: the sex changes didn’t work. If I suddenly had my biggest imperfections cured, I wouldn’t give a rip what other people think. I’d be too busy rejoicing.
The sex change didn’t make the people happy, no matter what they say to the contrary. That’s my strong hunch. If it did, they wouldn’t be seeking the third alternative for dealing with imperfection: societal acceptance.
I suspect the transsexuals will win all such cases, by the way, because they have won the first step: denial that their state is an imperfection, with the result that society — or at least parts of it — is willing to normalize it.
Imperfections mark our human existence. They’re a somewhat minor, because so ordinary, thing. But on our attitude toward them revolves the public policy and social mores of our entire culture.
It after all involves nothing less than a debate regarding original sin. And original sin is the issue on which every other issue turns.
© Copyright 2006 Catholic Exchange
Eric Scheske is an attorney, the Editor of The Daily Eudemon, a Contributing Editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine.
