Mesaba, perhaps you misunderstood me slightly when I was talking about cancelling the desire to have a sex change operation by "taking a pill". What I meant was that maybe in the future, instead of some people growing up feeling like their spirits inhabit bodies of the sex they are definitely NOT, making them very uncomfortable, and necessitating sex change operations, we could engineer instead some medication that would cause people to feel comfortable in the bodies in which they already live.
I think that this might be practical at some point in the future, when we have figured out what all the causes are of transsexual feelings. Obviously, the medication would have to be given in childhood, so that long-term psychological disturbance did not occur. This would mean that parents necessarily be more aware of their children who did not act like typical boys and girls do, and instead acted more like the opposite sex. Because there is so much denial in parents, and so much insistence that children change, which damages them emotionally, a massive public education campaign would need to take place first.
I am not saying that I want to butcher people's senses of themselves, or dishonor their instincts. What I am saying, instead, is that after having watched two transsexuals go through hormone treatments, extensive electrolysis, required psychological counseling, a year or so of acting like the sex they wanted to be, and extremely expensive surgery which is painful and is not covered by medical insurance, and does not even create a fully functional sexual organ in female to male transsexuals, it simply seems less traumatic if we could get to a place where, instead of carving up the body that does not suit, we could cause the feeling of being whole and right in the body of birth. |
