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Her Brother’s Pregnancy

America 2016: Defiling the icon of fatherhood, motherhood, and family -- and calling it progress
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This is what American liberty has wrought: Time magazine’s story “My Brother’s Pregnancy and the Making of a New American Family”. Excerpts:

My brother Evan was born female. He came out as transgender 16 years ago but never stopped wanting to have a baby. This spring he gave birth to his first child

Well, sure. Why should Evan be denied anything he wants? As long as the will is present and the technology enables it, anything is possible, right? More:

Now that gay marriage is legal, the social battleground has shifted to new frontiers, frontiers that include the most private aspects of people’s lives. Transgender Americans have gained greater visibility and acceptance as stars like Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox have trained a pop-culture spotlight on trans issues. Corporate leaders across the Fortune 500 have moved to protect their transgender employees. And in May, the Obama Administration declared that all public schools must treat students equally regardless of their gender identity, classifying inner feelings of maleness and femaleness as protected by the government. We have come to the point where the President of the United States can candidly and comfortably discuss gender fluidity.

We have also come to the point where the backlash against these rapid changes has manifested in sometimes surreal fashion, as it did earlier this year during the so-called battle of the bathroom, when about half of all states joined lawsuits against the Obama Administration.

Notice that the adjective “surreal” is used to describe people who don’t believe biological women should be compelled to share the restroom with biological men. Surreal is not the word used to describe a man (“man”) suckling the baby that passed through his vagina (see the photo accompanying the essay). More:

In 2013, when Evan made an appointment with his primary-care physician at the Boston LGBT health center Fenway Health, he was the first prospective birth father his doctor had seen. Several years earlier, a few trans men who, like my brother, had undergone hormone treatment but kept their reproductive organs, had begun consulting physicians about pregnancy and speaking openly about wanting to give birth. In 2008, Thomas Beatie posed for People magazine, bare-chested with a rotund belly, and went on Oprah to talk about his pregnancy. Trans men began to trickle into fertility clinics more frequently. When Andy Inkster was turned away from a Massachusetts clinic in 2010 because he was told he was “too masculine” to have a baby, he sued for gender discrimination. The case settled a few years later; Inkster sought out another clinic and later gave birth to a daughter.

You should understand that we are fast moving towards a time when physicians and physicians’ assistants who do not wish to participate in procedures like this will face lawsuits and possibly the loss of their professional licenses. This is not a joke. This is coming. More:

There is very little research about trans pregnancies. One of the only medical papers addressing the topic was written in 2015 by the University of California, San Francisco’s Dr. Juno Obedin-Maliver and Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Harvey Makadon. They noted that, in form and function, getting pregnant as a trans man is not that different than getting pregnant as a woman. Most of the time, trans men stop taking testosterone, and their bodies begin ovulating again. (Testosterone doesn’t necessarily preclude a pregnancy. Some trans men may have unintentional pregnancies while taking it.) If their partner is biologically male, trans men may try to conceive without medical intervention.

My brother has a female partner, so he inseminated using donor sperm. It took a while. The first time Evan tried, five years ago, he was unsuccessful. He took a break before starting again three years ago. He stopped his T shots, Kowalik prescribed two medications to trigger ovulation and monitored Evan’s body throughout the process to get the timing right.

“Very little research about trans pregnancies,” but by all means let’s put the pedal to the metal on them in the clinics, and celebrate them with a long essay in Time. Do you see how freakish this is, a female who has tricked her body to some extent into thinking it’s male by hormone injections, trying to trick it back by ceasing hormone injections?

Here’s one more:

My brother has a good friend, also trans, who’d gotten pregnant a year earlier. He’d had a rough pregnancy because he felt a traumatizing disconnect between his masculinity and the female attributes of his body. He took medical leave from work for much of the time and was relieved to restart testosterone immediately after his child’s healthy birth. I spoke to another trans dad who had given birth to his son at age 20. He said the pregnancy catapulted him into depression. “It was as if all the things I’d hated about my body were re-emerging, and I felt awful about myself,” he told me. Evan didn’t have this experience. “It was a gamble,” he said. “I didn’t know how I’d feel, but it turns out I just feel like it’s really cool that my body can do this.”

Really cool. Read the whole thing.

 

The photo of the bearded man-woman nursing “his” baby, and that image appearing in a celebratory context in Time magazine, is about as powerful an icon of the spiritual and moral state of 21st century America as you could imagine. It put me in mind of this satanic mockery of motherhood from The Passion Of The Christ (fast-forward to the 1:00 mark). In 2004, director Mel Gibson explained the symbolism to Christianity Today:

When asked why he portrayed Satan—an androgynous, almost beautiful being played by Rosalinda Celentano—the way he did, Gibson replied: “I believe the Devil is real, but I don’t believe he shows up too often with horns and smoke and a forked tail. The devil is smarter than that. Evil is alluring, attractive. It looks almost normal, almost good—but not quite.

“That’s what I tried to do with the Devil in the film. The actor’s face is symmetric, beautiful in a certain sense, but not completely. For example, we shaved her eyebrows. Then we shot her almost in slow motion so you don’t see her blink—that’s not normal. We dubbed in a man’s voice in Gethsemane even though the actor is a woman … That’s what evil is about, taking something that’s good and twisting it a little bit.”

But what about the ugly baby?

“Again,” said Gibson, “it’s evil distorting what’s good. What is more tender and beautiful than a mother and a child? So the Devil takes that and distorts it just a little bit. Instead of a normal mother and child you have an androgynous figure holding a 40-year-old ‘baby’ with hair on his back. It is weird, it is shocking, it’s almost too much—just like turning Jesus over to continue scourging him on his chest is shocking and almost too much, which is the exact moment when this appearance of the Devil and the baby takes place.”

There is no more tender scene in the world than a mother nursing her baby. What we see in Time magazine is a symbol of a society and a culture that is so far gone into decadence that it will defile what is most sacred in the human experience. It will use technology to transgress all natural boundaries to impose man’s will — and will call that freedom, will call it progress, and will punish anyone who dissents. And it will teach its children that there is no such thing as man, no such thing as woman. It destroys in the hearts and minds of the people the icon of fatherhood, of motherhood, of the family — and it intends to do this! As the writer of the Time piece points out, the “social battleground” has shifted. There will be no peace. No peace is possible with this thing, even if we want peace.

This morning I heard the story of a particular family here in south Louisiana whose middle school daughter came home from (public) school one day and said, “I am trans. Here’s the name I want you to call me. From now on, I will be wearing boy’s clothes.” Et cetera. The blindsided parents went to the school counselor for help, but found that the counselor was 100 percent on the side of this confused 13 year old girl. The system is lined up against the parents. This is not in California or Massachusetts. This is in one of the most culturally conservatives states in the US. You might think you’re safe, but you’re not.

Now is a good time to brush up on your Jeremiah. And your Benedict, in the MacIntyrean sense. As David Gushee, who is on the side of these anti-family, anti-Christian, anti-metaphysical revolutionaries, warned, “Neutrality is not an option.”   Believe him.

 

 

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