I have said this more than once: what is going on with our world today? Maslow came out with the hierarchy of needs in the 1940s. This consisted of five tiers of needs that people must fill in order to fully achieve the richness of what makes us as humans unique. Since its original inception, these have been expanded to eight needs. From lowest to highest they are biological needs, safety needs, belongingness and love needs, esteem needs, cognitive needs, aesthetic needs, self-actualization, and transcendence. Towards the end of his life, Maslow stated, “Transcendence refers to the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos.” Funny how things adapt and change.
When I was growing up, a man and woman getting married and having a baby was pretty much the normal way of things. There was no involved conversation of explanation, as what was stated was the way it was. However, there were sadly those individuals who could not have children, and out of that need arose the entirety of fertility specialists. This has led to amazing changes in our lives, but with those changes comes some confusion as well. Thus comes the story in The New York Times by Joanne Spataro entitled, “Adventures in Transgender Fertility.”
The story that Joanne tells is about her attempt to have a child with her husband. Of course, the story is not nearly that simple, even if it is really that simple. See, Joanne is a lesbian, and her husband is a transgender woman (meaning that he is a biological male). Taking away all the nuances, this would make Joanne and her husband a normal couple.
For clarification, Joanne’s spouse is still a completely functioning male, he is just taking hormone therapy consisting of estrogen. However, and unbeknownst to me until now, over time taking the hormone therapy will make someone permanently sterile. So according to the article, this is Joanne’s last chance to become pregnant with her husband’s child.
So, is the purpose of my article to mock Joanne’s relationship or attempts to get pregnant? Absolutely not. Do I find a sense of irony in the fact that a purported lesbian woman and her wife are trying to get pregnant because in the biological process of reproduction they are a completely normal couple? Absolutely. However, that is not the point of the article either.
I am a believer that the most important thing a child can have is two loving parents. I also believe that there is a purpose in having both sexes represented in a child’s life. Maybe we have evolved through the hierarchy to the point where there really isn’t a need for masculinity anymore. Maybe the art of manliness really is dead, and I am not talking about the redneck caricature of manliness. The one with a fat dude on his porch picking his teeth with a peeling of lead paint in his dirty wife-beater tank top while cleaning his shotgun. I am talking about the art of being a protector, chivalrous, and the strength of the family. Leaning on those characteristics that I believe are genetically built into our sex and species. However, is that the most important thing a child needs? The answer is clearly no. Love is the most important thing a child needs.
Therefore, I begrudge no one who wishes to and is able to give that love to a child. I do not agree with the transgender movement just like I do not agree with most of the issues within the liberal community. What I do believe, however, is that it is your right as an American to live your life any way you choose, even if I disagree with how you do it.
What I do believe Joanne’s article speaks to, however, is the lack of consideration that many transgender people give to their future selves. I do believe that there are those individuals who are truly affected by gender dysphoria, just like I believe that there are those individuals who are truly homosexual. Unfortunately, I believe that there are many more individuals who make the choice to be something other than heterosexual. I say choose because I absolutely believe that sex in and of itself is about self-pleasure and societal norms. Look at the peak of ancient Greek culture, or for that matter some tribes in Afghanistan.
Yet up until very recently, only hetero relationships could result in the birth of a child until modern medicine came into the scene. With the advent of modern medicine, we are not only able to treat those who are biologically unable to bear children, but we can give children to those who simply don’t want to go through the normal manner. Or as Joanne said, “The way fertile cisgender people do: They simply couple up, and boom — a child is born.”
It also allows us to decide to simply change our sex at a whim. In our modern world, changing our sexual orientation, gender, or apparently even species is as simple as posting it on a social media platform. However, none of these changes affect anything in reality. These people are simply playing make believe. This is not stated in an attempt to belittle them or their self-actualization; I am simply stating the factual. This allows them to switch from one side to the other at whim and without any consequences aside from social.
Where the real consequences come in is with those individuals who chose to medically alter their bodies in order to become that which they are biologically not. CBS News even posted an article on February 20, 2012 entitled, “Sex-change treatment for kids on the rise.” In this article the author begins with, “A small but growing number of teens and even younger children who think they were born the wrong sex are getting support from parents and from doctors who give them sex-changing treatments, according to reports in the medical journal Pediatrics.”
While I could easily go down the rabbit hole on how egregious it is to allow parents to do this to their children, I want to go back to the point on how we have made these decisions appear to be of no more importance as ordering dinner. We are born a certain way anatomically. This is not something that we should simply ignore, be it for the sake of vanity or those actually suffering from gender dysphoria. As Joanne states in her email, the majority of those out there who are transgender make the decision to start therapy as early as possible. Think back to your own teenage years: How many decisions that you made would you wish to make permanent?
Our society needs to slow down. I am not stating that change is bad, or that we need to go back to the good old days. Each generation comes up and carves out its own nostalgia, and that is a good and necessary thing. What I will caution those who are willing to listen is to remember the age-old adage: The grass is always greener on the other side.
