"I would ask, are you gay or heterosexual, and they would say, no, I’m
waria, I’m a woman. What they’re most adamant about is that they’re not gay."
Said David Brian Esch, who studied the Pondok Pesantren Waria in Indonesia. Pondok pesantran means prayer school, and
waria means transgender.
“One fascinating aspect of the pesantren is that it went along without any harassment from hardline groups for years and we all wondered why extremist groups were shutting down churches and ‘gayish’ nightclubs and leaving the pesantren alone,” Esch said.
“God created his creatures and I want to live as I am,” Oki, one of the waria at the pesantran, told Esch on camera. “It is my fate. Sometimes I feel sad because I want to pray at the mosque, but people look and talk about me.... Others have told me that being waria is a sin. I told them that we do not know God’s gender. We do not know if God is a man or a woman or waria.... I pray as a man because I want to face my god as a man. And I learned as a child to pray as a man, with the male dress, the sarong, and when I die I want to be buried as a man, even though I am waria,” Oki said. “I will be asked by God what my original family name is.”
Because this belief is prevalent, many waria say they don’t want gender confirmation surgery....
If you're slapping your head over that last line, know that the linked article is in The Daily Beast, in a section — I'm not kidding — called "PROGRESS," and the headline includes the phrase "Indonesia is more progressive when it comes to gender fluidity than the West." There's some mind-crushing obtuseness about the terrible oppression of gay people here:
Transgender people have been acknowledged throughout Islamic history, and the Prophet Muhammad’s wife is even said to have had a mukhannath (effeminate) servant who was only banished from the women’s quarters when the Prophet realized he was attracted to women. Even today in Iran, the Islamic government will pay for gender confirmation surgery for transgender people, making the country second only to Thailand in the number of such surgeries performed. (Homosexuality is punishable by death in Iran, and activists worry that some gay people may be forced into such surgeries to escape that grisly end.)
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Gender Confirmation Surgery.
The newest cray in focus group progressive terms
Progress on the development of a Holodeck continues apace.
Once this appliance is finally perfected and available at a consumer level, people will be able to walk in and pretend to be whatever they want to be, without risk, for the duration of the program they purchased.
Oculus Rift is going to be selling its VR headset soon. The Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois has been working on a functioning Holodeck (called "the Cave") since the mid 90s. New York University's multimedia labs are hard at work on the software and story telling programming paradigms.
An ant farm of thousands of tech people all over the world is working night and day on each Holodeck component. For good reason. The first perfected Holodeck will net the winners billions in profits.
Once this all comes together, the foolishness disseminated by this article can be properly addressed in the right place.
The real issue here is technological development responding to a consumer demand for a product. The rest is BS.
Did I miss the boat on "gender confirmation surgery?" Since first hearing it on the Oscars (repeatedly) I've seen it everywhere. When did it replace gender reassignment surgery?
Gender confirmation surgery. Ah, so they've dropped the whole sex change lingo since they recognize that you can't really change sex and its confusing to talk about gender when you then ask for surgery to Change your sex.if you got some fake boobs and a dildo from a sex store, and had a doctor sew them onto your skin, would there really be a difference? Maybe the actual surgery looks better, but it's still fake parts.
Attraction to and interest in female private parts makes no sense to the men who are so attracted. Indeed, at moments of clarity, men see that it's ridiculous. That's an important component of fellow-bonding in the war of the sexes. Nevertheless, there they are, attracted.
It's not hard to see that with a little different wiring, attraction to any other object is equally sensible. The survival of the species depends on its not being too frequent, that's all, so it isn't.
It's still the attraction of a male, though. Females are attracted to males in a different way entirely.
I don't know why a government would invest in gender confirmation surgery. You end up with mutilated genitals incapable of reproduction. And don't most of these "confirmations" end in suicide?
B said...
Did I miss the boat on "gender confirmation surgery?"
Google ngram doesn't show any ""gender confirmation surgery", so it's a new fad.
The curve for "gender reassignment surgery" looks almost exactly like the curve for "gender", except the latter had a low level of occurrences going back to the 1800s. Both "take off" around 1970.
In the Muslim world they are called Eunuchs and have been around for thousands of years. It's best if they are castrated before puberty so their voices don't change,
"You end up with mutilated genitals incapable of reproduction. "
That's why eunuchs were the guardians of the harem.
Louis XIV had a black servant working near the queen and, when she had a black child, the black servant was put to death for "frightening her during her pregnancy" and therefore causing her to have a black child.
"We used to hold rallies against Global Warming, but now we're rallying for Climate Confirmation."
"The body modifications that do take place come from taking female hormones (usually birth control pills), and injecting liquid silicone into their faces to give them a more feminine look."
No insanity here, nope, none at all . . .
This is Manichaeism, the Christian heresy that says the spirit is pure and sexless, but the material body is corrupt.
There is no such thing as a normal adult human being. If you stop the male or female hormones from kicking in at puberty, you don't freeze the body in a child-like state. The hormone infusion slows physical growth, for one thing. Men who do not go through puberty end up freakishly tall, with brittle bones.
Men cannot be women. We are what we are. We can't be anything else.
The blindness to the plight of these gay men is appalling.
It's too bad the author (Katie Zavadski) didn't delve a bit deeper into the wider culture of those parts of southeast Asia. If she did she would have discovered that there is, at a popular if not at a theological level, the same sort of "intolerant tolerance" displayed towards people with blurred gender identities in Thai Buddhism.
Islam is a faith that is deeply suspicious of the tendency of every religion to become more syncretic as it expands. Unlike Hinduism, which celebrates its syncretic aspects, Islam worries over them. Thus, Sunnis are aghast at traditional Shia rituals in Iraq which are obviously imports from Nestorian Christianity.
I think the same thing is going on here. Not only are the Salafist Muslims in Indonesia against what they consider deviant sexual expression, they also probably see this idea of a stable transgendered identity within a religious context as an import from Buddhist Thailand.
"The Sissy Song" by Billy Briggs
When I get sissy enough to wear a moustache and a bow tie,
wear those pretty suede shoes that a lot of them sissies buy,
smoke cigarettes and drink iced tea,
and hold my little finger up high,
I’ll go out behind the old red barn
and let a grey mule kick my brains out.
When I get sissy enough to wear a dad gum old wrist watch,
sleep in pyjamas and drink sweet milk,
you’ll know I’m on my last notch.
When I get sissy enough to go with my shirt-tail hanging out,
I’ll go out behind the old red barn
and let a grey mule kick my brains out.
When I get sissy enough to say dinner instead of supper,
and eat those salads with carrots and lettuce,
and toast without any butter,
and drink my coffee with sugar and cream,
and chase my liquor with water,
I’ll go out behind the old red barn
and let a grey mule kick my brains out.
When I get sissy enough to wash the dishes for my wife,
and hang out diapers and make up beds,
you’ll know I’m ruined for life.
When I get sissy enough to take a dad gum bath each day,
I’ll go out behind the old red barn
and let a grey mule kick my brains out.
What's are Western Gays such desperate apologists for Islam? It's truly bizarre. If you want to fight your corner, God bless. But if you want to surrender, you deserve every fucking thing that happens to you.
@Cracker,
What's are Western Gays such desperate apologists for Islam? It's truly bizarre..
It's not bizarre if you understand that the real enemy of the modern Western Left is Christianity, and anything that makes Christianity look bad by comparison ("oooohhhh, even Islam has mosques for gays/transgenders. Christianity doesn't do that....").
And an anti-Christian animus is really just a piece of the puzzle. The Post-Marxist Left has it in for the Western Metaphysical tradition(s) in general. The Marxists opposed faith in general because it was the opiate of the masses. The post-Marxists oppose Christianity because it's the low-hanging fruit of western onto-theology.
It is very difficult to get folks to see, especially moderate lefties, that lefty post-modernism is a reaction against the inheritance of the Enlightenment. But it is, & they make that very clear.
Same sort of thing is common in India, which is probably where this came from.
All SE Asia has a traditional "gay" customary accommodation. The Philippines has always had "bakla", going back to pre-colonial times, same thing really.
Thing is, this was an accepted if not entirely respectable social role for surplus males, second, third, fourth sons. In many cases, if they became head of the house, they were expected to marry and produce heirs.
In Christianity one would find the gays among the clergy...
There's some mind-crushing obtuseness about the terrible oppression under the pro-choice religion that established selective exclusion and discrimination following politically favorable winds driven by special and peculiar interests.
Gender confirmation replaces reassignment to reorient a failing campaign to normalize transgender/homosexual and transgender/crossover behaviors, while arbitrarily, hypocritically excluding politically unfavorable orientations and behaviors.
Ironically, it moves from a progressive to a conservative model. I guess it depends on what you are trying to conserve.
The social liberals (i.e. unprincipled or variant) are characteristically, singularly conservative in pursuing their special and peculiar interests to the exclusion of all others in generational frames.
YoungHegelian:
There can be only one orthodoxy, however selective it may be, which historically poses the greatest risk to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
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