reasoned empiricism at its best
by Zhou (Chew) Hong Jie
The University of Oxford has recently blotted out centuries of blinkered tradition for the sake of human progress by allowing transgender pupils their choice of clothes when taking examinations and during formal occasions. Men can now wear skirts and stockings and women suits and ties.
Oxford University changes dress code to meet needs of transgender students
This is reason and empiricism demonstrated at its best. We make rational decisions concerning ethics based on the best of contemporary scientific research. We are willing to butcher any sacred cow for the sake of human progress as defined by what best enhances human flourishing as a whole – upholding the values of human dignity, autonomy, solidarity, equality and progress.
My transgender brothers and sisters are not freaks. They are not disordered people who got their sexuality screwed up. Much of up-to-date research on human sexuality suggests an ambiguity when it comes to gender identity more than previously thought of. We are not males just because we have penises and scrotums. We are not females just because we have breasts, vaginas and uteruses.
The christian and muslim bigots (ultra orthodox jews included) would want us to think so, equating our birth genders with the divine will. They don’t realise that it is this excrementitious logic which led to premodern bans on interracial marriages. God created the different races for a purpose, which interracial copulation ruins. Race distinctions are pixelated when white and black gives chocolate and black and yellow gives what-have-you. Chicken droppings, I tell you.
There are many blindspots in the limpy argument that any sexuality other than hetero is not natural. The most lowbrow is the notion that god made pussies and not anuses for the cocks to bulldozer through. Anuses are for poo, period. The premise behind this claim is that what is natural is good and what is unnatural is bad.
This makes spectacles, contact lenses and eye-correction surgery bad. This makes condoms, birth control pills and viagra bad. This makes in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) bad. This makes prosthetic limbs bad. This makes vaccination bad.
There are many things in modern society that is unnatural. But they are beneficial to humankind and to society. There are many things in nature that is not beneficial, like infertility, congenital diseases, cancer, the smallpox virus, etc. If I go by the religious logic, it means that I have to accept whatever god accords me at birth even if I may become myopic, infertile, impotent or incapacitated in the future.
Besides, the fact that homosexual intercourse occur in other animal species is cannon enough, at least by simple me, that it is not something that is learned or chosen as an “alternative lifestyle”.
The religious, upon discarding the nature argument, will have nothing else to stand on except the incredulous authority of their sacred documents, of which literary and historical criticism have already rendered mythic and aesopian.
When all fails, they resort to our vestigial reptilian ways of violence and extirpation against the infidels and “enemies of god”.
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