Chaz Bono is on Dancing With the Stars this season. Big deal. Jesus Christ himself could be on DWTS and you still couldn't pay me to watch that piece of shit show. I don't care if Chaz can dance or not, I don't care if anyone on that show can dance or not. Sure, some of the female dance partners on there are hot and nice to look at, but that's not going to get me to tune in and suffer through the constant fear of another Nancy Grace nip-slip just to look at the tanned legs and almost-beav shots of some random dancer chick who's trying to springboard into celebrity status from being a glamorized dance instructor.
However, I find myself somewhat interested in DWTS this season, not because I have any desire to watch it, but because the conservative react-o-sphere seems to be all up in arms over the fact that Chaz Bono has the audacity to crawl out of his trans-gender bat cave and inflict his new identity on the public. It's been a big deal for a little while now and I had been waiting patiently for the notoriously short attention span of the media to focus on the next shiny object and forget about Chaz and let him go back to living a normal life like everyone else, but the right-wing media just doesn't want to let this go. The dinks over at Fox & Friends have been making the most juvenile jokes since the boy's bathroom in 6th grade about Chaz, which is kind of expected. Those guys are the epitome of dumbing down for the incredibly low expectation of their audience's intelligence and maturity level. Gretchen Carlson might just be the stupidest-acting holder of an advanced college degree in the entire media industry. However, where it starts to really get under my skin is when "legitimate" news and opinion shows start bringing out "experts" to talk shit about Chaz and hide behind the human shield of children to do it.
Case in point, Dr. Keith Ablow. I officially hate this guy. I used to sort of kind of like him and think he was a reasonable guy, until he became this weird morality expert for Fox News and his opinions went from being rational and reasonable to being absurd and downright irresponsible. Never have I heard a practicing psychologist make such blatantly false statements and leaps in logic to justify a flawed social agenda. He went on Fox News and claimed that letting Chaz Bono participate on DWTS "legitimizes" his gender reassignment and "promotes" it as a viable alternative for anyone who just gets a wild hair up their ass and decides they aren't happy with themselves right now, "Hey, I'm gonna go change my sex because Chaz Bono did it and he's on Dancing With the Stars!"
First of all, it's not that easy to just "decide" to change your sex. Chaz Bono has been working towards his gender reassignment for years. It takes extensive psychological evaluations, counseling and hormone therapy before any legitimate center will proceed with the surgery. You have to basically "live" as the sex you wish to become, through the use of hormones, while being evaluated constantly, for a good length of time, to make sure it's not just a passing phase and that you're absolutely positive you want the surgery before any legitimate doctor will ever agree to perform the procedure.
Second, Chaz Bono has publicly stated over and over again that he was never happy as a woman. He became a lesbian because he always felt like a man on the inside. He had masculine feelings, a "normal" male attraction towards women and for all intents and purposes was the definition of "a man trapped in a woman's body". He struggled with his identity confusion his whole life. He suffered severe depression and anxiety and a host of other emotional issues as a result of never truly being comfortable with who he was. This is a real and legitimate issue that affects many people in the world. Granted, few of those people ever take it to the extreme of getting a sex-change operation, but that's because it's a serious procedure. It's not something that you just do on a whim, it's not something that any gay person just runs out and does because they want to see what it's like to be the opposite sex. It's not something you can do, change your mind, and switch back from. It's not getting implants that you can just remove when you want your boobs smaller again. To marginalize gender reassignment as something so trivial shows either a severe lack of education about the subject or a willful attempt to purposefully mislead your audience. Since I have to assume Dr. Ablow - being a doctor and all - is educated enough to know the entire procedure behind gender reassignment, the only logical conclusion is that he's intentionally misleading the audience by purposefully misstating the facts and reality of gender reassignment surgery. And for that, he's a scumbag and a shitty human being.
However, the final insult was when he invoked the same card that the conservative right loves to play every time a moral issue they disagree with comes up. He played the "And how do we explain that to our kids?" card.
Yes, how do you explain to your kids why a man isn't really a man? How do you explain to your kids why the husky guy with a full beard that they're seeing on tv used to be a woman 10 years before they were born, but started living life as a man and just a few years ago, when they were still in diapers, decided to get a complex series of operations to change himself into a male? Here's a better question, why the hell would you have to explain that to your kids? In what scenario, exactly, does your young child ever need to have Chaz Bono's gender issues explained to them? To any little kid, Chaz Bono is a guy - he's got a beard, he sounds like a man, he looks like a man, he likes girls... why do you need to tell your young, naive children that he's anything other than exactly what he appears to be?
The answer is, you don't. That's not something a little kid needs to be taught about, it's not something they even care about. No parent I know is struggling with how they break it to their young children that Chaz Bono was born a woman. No kid I know who is too young to understand what a sex change is even cares if Chaz Bono used to be a girl before they were even old enough to remember anything.
The only reason to teach your children about trans-gendered people at such an early age - unless it's because one of their parents or immediate family members is trans-gendered - is to instill a fundamental prejudice in them towards those people. It's the same reason why parents go out of their way to tell their young children about gays, it's not to "educate" them, it's to indoctrinate them, into their own prejudice.
This is why you see so many people reacting negatively to the new CA law that mandates teaching the accomplishments of LGBT people in history. People like Harvey Milk, Billie Jean King and other Americans who have contributed significantly to our society and broken down stereotypes and who also happen to be gay, lesbian, bi-sexual or trans-gendered. It's not about teaching them that they should choose one of those lifestyles, it's just about teaching them that being different doesn't make you a bad person. That it's the things a person does that determines their value, not what they look like or who they're attracted to.
Of course, that hasn't stopped the react-o-sphere from jumping to conclusions, making up imaginary scenarios and projecting their own hatred and prejudice onto others. People have misconstrued the law to be everything from teaching kids to be gay to teaching them how to have gay sex to teaching them that gay people are better than straight people and every ridiculous, laughable scenario in between. They've even decided to re-write the law - which clearly states that this education will take place in Social Studies classes, that aren't taught until the junior high level - to infer that kindergarten students will be taught about being gay. This is just plain stupid. I can't sugar-coat it, I can't be even-handed in my criticism here. If you think that this law allows schools to indoctrinate your kids into the homosexual lifestyle then you're either a complete idiot, a blatant homophobe or both.
You know what, don't teach your kids about gay people. I'm sure they'll learn all about "faggots" from the bully in school while he's beating them up between classes. That is, of course, unless your kid is that bully because daddy taught him all about beating the shit out of those "faggots" in the hallway. Don't teach your kids that someone who doesn't think like them, look like them or act like them is still a person who deserves respect and to be treated like you would treat everyone else. You know, that whole golden rule thing? Yeah, don't teach them to have compassion for their fellow man. Teach them that people who aren't like them are bad, that they're "broken" or that they're "evil" people. That won't fuck them up at all...
If you're going to do that, though, have the balls to admit that it's because you hate gay people. Admit that you have a problem with homosexuality and you want to make sure your kids grow up with the same hatred and prejudice that you have.
Don't hide behind your kids. Don't pretend you're looking out for their well-being. Kids aren't affected in the least by the presence of gay people on this planet. Kids don't understand gay or straight. When girls still have cooties to boys, they aren't thinking about whether they want to marry a boy or a girl, they're thinking about playing with their toys and watching cartoons. Kids learn their attitudes towards people who aren't like them from their parents and their families, the people who are a constant presence and influence in their development. If daddy hates fags, then so will junior - at least until he hits puberty and realizes that he likes guys, then he has to go to college across the country, never visit home and wait until he's ready to be disowned by daddy to finally tell him the truth. If parents are prejudiced, their kids will most likely inherit that prejudice. You don't have to worry about schools teaching your kids that being gay is ok, you've already spent their whole lives teaching them it wasn't. Your parental indoctrination is going to be intact for a long time, maybe even their whole lives if they never wise up and realize what ignorant pricks their parents are.
So, all I'm saying is, if you hate gay people, then hate them proudly. Be like the skinheads and walk around wearing your homophobia on your sleeve for everyone to see. Don't be like the KKK and hide behind hoods that protect your anonymity so you can still work around gay people during the day and hate on them in your free time like some wishy-washy pussy. Come right out and say "I hate fags and I want to raise my kids to hate fags too!" Shout it out! If you believe it so much, then tell the whole world! TESTIFY!!!
Don't blame Chaz Bono for "forcing" you to have to explain a sex change operation to your 8 year old, blame yourself for thinking your 8 year old actually needed to know that shit in the first place.
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