The first year I went to Rites of Spring. I had a wonderful conversation with with a beautiful woman about my ink. I have tattoos wrapping my torso In a series of flowing lines that is somewhere between tribal and art nouveau. I’ve never regretted getting them. The ink allowed me to claim my body in a way that had not been possible before that. The woman I was speaking with, had had her nipples pierced. She told me that she had been struggling with mental illness, and voices telling her to harm herself. Having gotten the piercings, the urge to self-harm went away.
A trans woman of my acquaintance has a similar story. Casey had never felt good with who he was. [Don’t accuse me of dead naming anyone, because he doesn’t care and has said so. He’s happy with who he is and feels at peace.] Casey is also an adult who lived with his problems for decades before coming to this decision.
As a libertarian, I should be fine with the idea of what any adult wants to do with their body.
As a Massage Therapist who pays close attention to medical ethics, I have to question what trans hormones and surgeries do to the body. Those consequences have been little discussed in recent years and the effects are serious. These treatments look like a serious breach of medical ethics to me.
As a Pagan, who holds the natural world as something to respect, and as a source of the sacred, I can’t see how to justify Trans medical interventions. They are counter to evolution, counter to our ancestor’s understanding of life, and counter to the gods.
[There are essays about how some of the Greek gods were something other than male or female. I’ll write a post about that later.]
Male and female are fundamental to the natural world and I accept evolution as a perfect and magnificent structure created by the gods. We don’t screw with that without consequences. If we stare at screens all day and don’t go outside, it interferes with our sleep because we evolved under the sun, moon, and stars. If add chemicals to our diet that our ancestors never ate, they change our moods, memory capacity, energy levels, gut bacteria, and myriad other things. If we remove genitals, we cannot reproduce.
There’s no religious argument for that.
Sexual reproduction is 500 million years old, so it had to have been useful from an evolutionary standpoint. The other method of reproduction is cloning - using 100% of your genes. This guarantees short-term reproduction but it’s not a good hedge if the environment changes. Perennial plants still routinely use cloning, for example when my irises grow new corms [which I then have to hand out to the neighbors.] The plants that come up in my neighbor’s yard are genetically identical to the ones still in my plant beds. But they can still reproduce sexually. If I don’t cut off the dead flowers, the plants will form seeds.
However, without sexual reproduction, if your species ceases to fit into the niche where you first evolved because the climate changed, your species is done. Extinct. Sexual reproduction increases the likelihood that at least half of your genes will be passed on to future generations because the organism is more likely to adapt to changing conditions.
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Earth has changed drastically, and many times since the beginning of life. Without sexual reproduction, none of us would be here. Nearly every multicellular being on the planet reproduces sexually. In animals, one part of the species produces eggs and one produces sperm. If something produces both, then something has gone drastically wrong with its development. We are not ‘evolving away from sexual reproduction.’ Evolution doesn’t work that way.
Nearly every organism on the planet has male and female. Specialization is more efficient and is what allowed life to adapt. There are only two types of gametes – reproductive cells: egg and sperm. To reproduce sexually, you need DNA from two different individuals and a cell where that DNA can mix. Females produce eggs and males produce sperm and even at this level there is specialization.
The working organelles of a cell are big and bulky compared to DNA alone. That means the egg cell isn’t going to be lively because it’s full of the heavy machinery needed for the cell to start reproducing. It doesn’t make sense for both partners to try and contribute such a big cell because that would be incredibly inefficient. A cell that contained both the necessary components for division and that could move to find another cell to share gametes wouldn’t have enough cytoplasm to create life, and/or couldn’t move well enough to find another cell. Specialization is how life evolved in the first place. It’s why we have organs, and organelles inside our cells. Specialization makes things work better.
Since egg cells are sessile [slow and heavy] the DNA contributed by the other partner needs to be zippy and active. [That would be sperm, or in plants, pollen.] Sperm is gametes in a stripped-down cell. They’re good at moving.
Or have a look at the books I write under pen name Sabrina Rosen [On Amazon] or subscribe to my fiction blog.
But it’s not just about eggs and sperm. Hormones are so thoroughly integrated into our bodies that the wrong balance causes myriad problems. Just ask a woman in menopause how she feels [or guys for that matter.] Sex chromosomes control for things like pain response, neurological anatomy, and the size of various brain regions, including the cerebral cortex.
In the vast majority of species, females are the limiting sex because growing a baby is physiologically expensive. Males compete for access to females and females get to choose between their suitors. Therefore, males tend to be larger, stronger, gaudier, louder, or more melodious [depending on species.] Sex role expression varies tremendously; from direct battle with competing males, to building a bower, dancing, or a song. But in general, Males display, and females choose. Males put more effort into what happens before conception, whereas females put more effort into what happens after.
Now it is true that there are roles in various cultures that are divided by sex: women do one job and men do another. In the roles that don’t specifically require physical strength, either men or women might do the job. For example, weaving is done by men in some cultures and by women in others. But some jobs are necessarily sex-specific. Women - people who produce eggs and are born with a womb, ovaries, and a vagina - are the only sex that can grow healthy babies. We are also the sex that communicates better because we’re better at observation. That comes with caring for infants. If you don’t pay good attention to the baby, the baby will die. Female care and attentiveness have a sound evolutionary basis. So does our tendency to be more agreeable.
In general, women are more prone to illness, are more altruistic, trusting, and compliant, as well as being more prone to depression and anxiety. In general, men prefer working with things, are more aggressive, taller, stronger, and more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. If a female or male person happens to not have some of these traits, it says nothing at all about population-wide statistics. Sex role reversal is not the same thing as changing sex. Humans are the most changeable of all the mammals. However, population level differences aren’t the same as individual differences.
I’m outside the average for women. My shoulders are wider, which means I have more upper body strength than the average female. I like solving problems and building things. I was a tomboy and had/have male friends. I am still female. I have a womb. I menstruated and produced eggs. I am not as strong as a man. [Although some of my female friends seem to think so because of that upper body strength.] If I’d grown up later, someone [likely a teacher] might have tried to convince me I’d be better as a man. In every known language, there are words to distinguish between male and female.
Unlike characters in mythology, we cannot change sex. Perhaps in some SciFi world we could grow a new body from scratch and transfer our consciousness into it [and then it’s debatable whether it would be us.] But there is no surgery that can turn a penis into a vagina. It’s not a vagina. It’s not attached to a womb and the tissue is all wrong at the cellular level. There is no surgery that can turn a chunk of arm flesh into a penis. It’s not a penis. It won’t get erect without help and there will never be any sperm coming out of it.*
One of the many things I love about Paganism is that there are numerous goddesses that model how to be female. I can be sensuous and seductive like Aphrodite. I can be a teacher of fighting arts like Scathach. I can be dignified and matronly like Hera. Then there is virginal Artemis and Hestia, or brainy like Athena, or nurturing like Demeter. Even among deities, there was no one way to be female.
However, all of these were female. They might have had some male roles, but they were female. The same can be said for the male gods. Apollo might have had male lovers, but he was male. Sexual preference isn’t changing one’s sex. Dionysus was a protector of women and in later times portrayed as a beardless youth. He was still male. [He was married to Ariadne of Crete, and happily so.]
The idea that we can ignore the sex chromosomes and genetic potential that we were born with - whether or not we use it - isn’t something our ancestors would have recognized. Our ancestors developed philosophy - a way to think about the world with our rational minds. It was intended as a practice that would bring us closer to the divine. But philosophy is the mother of science. Science describes the world as it is to the degree to which we’ve observed it, and no one has come up with a good argument opposing evolution.
If we hold the natural world to be a source of divinity, shouldn’t we be respecting the limitations nature lays down?
*While no one likes being yelled at, feel free to yell at me. Just be aware that spewing venom doesn’t change the world as it is. The point of religion is to help us deal with the boundaries of our world, not to ignore them.
If you’re curious about Paganism/Heathenism/Wicca, please feel free to message me and I’ll be happy to answer questions.
Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been Pagan since she was 14 [which was a long time ago] and been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. She has direct communication with her gods and they’ve always given her answers when she asks. [One does have to ask.] Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. Be warned.
You are so right. Nature doesn't lie. Women's mysteries are for biological women. Men's mysteries are for biological men. Trans ideology is unnatural and an insult to nature, to the sacred and the mysteries themselves.