I'm sorry, but I just don't understand "transgender"

If you read my posts related to the subject, you realize that I'm all for equal rights for gay and lesbian people. But one group that is usually grouped with them I can't understand. When someone like Bruce Jenner says he is now a woman, and wants to be called “Caitlin,” it just puzzles me. I am certain that every cell in his body still has the same XY chromosome inventory it did when he was “Bruce.”

Now I think Mike Huckabee's comment, as reported by CNN, is a little nasty:

Mike Huckabee says there's a time he wishes he could've been transgender: When it was time to hit the high school showers.

If he “could have felt like a woman,” the Republican former Arkansas governor joked earlier this year, then he could have seen his female classmates without their clothes on.

“Now I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE,” Huckabee said.

“I'm pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, ‘Coach, I think I'd rather shower with the girls today.’ You're laughing because it sounds so ridiculous doesn't it?”

I think Bruce Jenner must have more serious reasons than to be able to see naked women in a shower — after all, he's been married and fathered children! — but I cannot figure out what he hopes to gain by being considered a female. He cannot function as a biological female, bearing children and such; even if they cut off his genitalia they cannot implant functioning ovaries into him. If he wants to marry a man, there are a lot of states (not all 50 to be sure, but the majority, by now) which would let him do so, even as a man; I suspect the others would not, even if he calls himself a female. If he just prefers dressing like a woman and using make-up — as he does on that magazine cover, I think he's free to do so, though I think it's weird.

But I guess he'd still have the right to do so — not all crossdressers even want to be called female — and so I can't really understand what is in his head. And you will notice that (as in the case of Bradley Manning) I still refer to him as “him.”

Bradley Manning wants to be called "Chelsea"

A post entitled “He Is Not Bradley Manning. She Is Chelsea Manning. Deal With It,” by Ryan Kearney on The New Republic's site says that Bradley Manning, the WikiLeaks leaker, wants now to be called “Chelsea.” Kearney, of course, has the right to call him anything he wants to. But he will always be Bradley Manning on this site.

I have no problem with people being gay, lesbian, or bisexual. We don't know how much is heredity, how much is environment, or even if there is some third cause, but whatever it is, people feel attractions to different people, and regardless of the Religious Right's railing about “unnatural” sexualities, it is truly natural for them. I'm willing to accept even stranger sexualities, though I can't fully understand them; I won't go into all the details. But the one group I can never understand or make sense of is that of the transgendered: men who think of themselves as women or vice versa.

A man who falls in love with another man just has his sense of what he finds attractive different from the majority. We are all programmed to eat, but many people eat, every morning, foods that it disgusts me just to contemplate. Sex is like food — the species could not survive without each of them, but how desires manifest themselves in different people varies. (Yes, gay sex does not procreate; but people have been known to eat non-nutritive foods as well!) And now, as gay people are getting more and more accepted (a lesbian has a good chance at being the next Mayor of New York!), there is less and less reason to consider a same-sex attraction as “unusual.” People can simply love whomever they want to love.

But transsexualism is another story. Bradley Manning will never be able to have a cell in his body (other than the sperm cells in his testicles) that has anything other than an XY chromosome type. Even if they cut off those testicles and his other male organs, and give him all the estrogens he asks for, he will still be genetically male, and he will never be able to function sexually as a female. He will simply be a castrated male, dressed in woman's clothes. No act on earth is possible that will make him anything other than that. So what does he get by adopting a female identity? I suppose, the right to go around in a dress. It's not the right to marry a man — twelve states already give him that, and more will follow, while the others probably would not even if he undergoes the sex-change operation.

Kearney's policy is “call someone what they want to be called.” Mine is “call them what they really are, if I know it.” And what they really are is in their genes.