No.
Don’t encourage children.
There’s no reason the kid couldn’t refuse treatment himself if he was 18. He’s not. Since he’s a minor, the government has a legitimate duty to ensure that his condition is treated. It’s no different than if his parents decided not to feed him anymore.
Morphine can be supplied in measured dosages. Substances directly extracted from a poppy cannot, which makes negative consequences (addiction and/or overdose) a virtual certainty. Marinol/cannabis is a bit different, and as you’ve no doubt noticed, there is a large (and growing) chorus of voices calling for the legalization of marijuana for medicinal purposes, as the direct risks involved in self-medicating with it are negligible.
The government cares an awful lot about babies, since they are totally defenseless people. The government doesn’t care about foetuses, since they’re not people yet. A foetus cannot survive if separated from the mother prior to about the 22nd-28th week, so it by definition cannot be an individual. That’s why you can’t get an abortion after the second trimester.
Because playing with dolls and wearing his/her hair in pigtails is not going to kill or maim the 8-year-old, while “treating” cancer with a Bible and a herb garden most certainly is going to kill the 13-year-old.
I was unaware tranny was consider offensive.
That’s another topic… why are people so easily offended? People can hurl insults at me all day, call me the most offensive things they can think of, make fun of my crooked teeth… whatever… and I’d just laugh with them. They could even make fun of my family, friends, children… whatever! Whatever you could think of to offend me would not offend me. I don’t know why but I just don’t get offended… and this is the only thing about me that I think “If all people were like me and didn’t get offended”, then yes, the world would be a much better place.
…anyway… that’s way off topic.
Calling it “absurd” over and over does not constitute an argument. With “natural herbs,” the cancer patient would die a painful death that would almost certainly be avoided if he takes a few courses of chemotherapy. Since he’s a young child with some mental issues, it makes sense that his parents aren’t being allowed to deny him treatment.
Based on your posts in this thread, this is hard to believe.
Yes, majority DOES equal normality. I’m sorry if that statistical concept evades you.
Again, that doesn’t make the child bad or whatever, just that this individual doesn’t fit the normal pattern of development. Elite athletes aren’t statistically normal, either, but in that case we value their abnormalities for what they enable them to do.
Really, would you call a child born with a birth defect like a missing limb or spina bifida normal? Is a deaf child normal? No. A child born with a mismatch between brain and body isn’t normal either, no matter how normal he or she initially appears to be. That is why such people go to therapists and seek medical treatment, they have a condition that causes suffering and, thank Og, has some form of treatment these days. If they were normal they wouldn’t have to go through that.
Perhaps you should consider why you place such a value judgment on the recognition that someone is outside the norm.
Sorry, as someone who had a close relative commit suicide, and who believes you don’t have a right to hurt other people, I can’t condone that stance. Suicide causes intense pain in those who are left behind, you don’t have a right to do that. While there are a very few exceptional instances where it could be justified the vast majority of the time I have to view it as a moral wrong.
No, it’s not illegal. If you attempt suicide no one is going to haul you into court (unless you committed a crime while attempting it). Where did you get that from?
Actually, in Washington state I believe it is now legal for the terminally ill to commit suicide, and for others to assist them, but I’m not an authority on law in that state so I may not be entirely correct on that.
Actually, harvesting opium from the poppies is a fairly labor-intensive process. I question whether someone terminally ill from cancer would be capable of putting in the required time in order to properly extract the medication from the plant.
My father is a pharmacist that pre-dates a lot of modern pharmaceuticals. His feeling is that modern, pure, consistent pharmaceuticals are a godsend allowing much more precise treatment of disease than what was available back when he was learning his trade. That’s from someone who really does know how to extract medicines from plants.
I realize that you may be of a religion that regards a fetus as a human being with the same rights as a fully grown adult, but most of the rest of the world does not share that belief. I suspect your objection is “babies” killed before they’re born, not before their first birthday.
And I don’t think that the government cares that the 13 year is cured as much as caring that the 13 year old doesn’t die needlessly. There’s no guarantee the kid will get better, but the odds of a long term remission or cure with modern medicine is something like 90% where, with your “natural cures”, the odds of that drop to about 5%. I fail to see how anyone can regard withholding such treatment from the 13 year old as anything but child neglect.
Yes, you are in the minority in your viewpoint. I think you should accept that. I also will defend you right to speak your viewpoint, even as I disagree with it.
Yes, actually I do see your point - I just don’t agree with it. Is that really such a hard thing to understand? You remind me of a devout Christian I used to work with who just couldn’t comprehend that I had read the Bible and I still wasn’t a Christian. Yes, I read it - but I still don’t believe Jesus Christ is either God or the son of God. If you don’t believe that you can’t claim to be a Christian, can you? Well, that’s what’s happening here - we’re all looking at the same situation and coming to different conclusions about it.
OK, here’s where I see a difference - the boy with cancer can be treated with modern medicine for a 90% chance at a normal life afterwards whereas the “Bible and chia pet” cure only gives him 5% chance of that. Therefore, it is immoral to prevent him from receiving medical treatment. For transsexuals, those who are denied gender-changing treatment - and I’m not even talking surgery and hormones, but just being forced to live in a gender role they aren’t comfortable with - have a horrifically high incidence of dysfunction, up to and including suicide whereas those who are permitted to live as they gender they feel they are function much better and are much less likely to harm or kill themselves. On that basis alone, saving human lives and allowing people to function better, I can justify gender transition treatment. I came to that conclusion decades ago, before there was any evidence of physical difference in the brain - do these people function better, live longer, are they happier with treatment, even if that treatment might squick me out? Yes? Then not only should they be permitted such treatment, it would be immoral to deny it.
Not this woman! I want to be with a man - not another woman. If I wanted another female mind in my house I’d have a female roommate instead of a male husband.
Society has a problem with it.
Why does them changing their body upset you? Do pierced ears upset you? Does circumcising baby boys upset you? Does liposuction upset you?
I don’t know why they can’t just be happy, but as I pointed out, there’s ample evidence they can’t just accept things they way they are. Transsexuals forced into the gender role of the bodies they were born with are unhappy people prone to self-destruction and suicide. Those that are allowed to live as the gender they feel themselves to be are much less prone to these things. And it doesn’t have to include surgery - not all transsexuals have surgery, some are content with changing their attire and taking hormones and being allowed to live as the gender they feel they are, even when their bodies don’t match it. I think perhaps you are focusing a little too hard on the surgery and not enough on the rest of what is done during transition.
There were laws against suicide in many places, and in fact Cecil did a column on it years ago. I poked around a bit yesterday and I think almost all of those laws have been repealed in the U.S. They were not often enforced anyway.
Why allow exceptions for polar bear attacks? I don’t really see a difference between that and being transgendered, really. Both are the result of an event that has serious physical and mental consequences for the victim - except that the event that happens to the transexual is pre-natal. If a transexual should have to suffer in a body that they feel is wrong, I don’t see why the person who had half his face clawed off by a bear shouldn’t have to suffer the same way.
I can tell you that living with someone ‘as both male and female’ is not a picnic. If a child identifies differently internally from the external shell, why not let them pick which gender makes them happy? It’d sure be a lot easier to do it when they are younger then say after 22 years of marriage and 3 kids. I applaud the parents who recognize that one of their primary jobs in life is to raise a happy and sound child. I know my soon to be ex wishes he had had that opportunity.
I find Lacunae Quell not debating at all and not supporting anything said in this ‘debate’ with anything of substance. Kudos to those who are trying to fight the ignorance, but I fear it’s lost on LQ.
Hell, why allow any changes for vanity? Where do we draw the line? Should I not be allowed to dye my hair? Because, you know, I’m not actually a natural redhead!
gasp
Sinner.
I hope you at least notice my line of questioning has changed. I’m trying to understand transsexualism… and with people explaining things to me I feel as if my line of questions is less hostile then when I started. I’m not a heartless beast who wishes harm on people who are different or not normal. I just want to understand better the way other people’s minds work and why they make the choices that they do.
I still believe people should try to live they way they are born with little to no change… but I can’t make choices for people, nor would I want to because I know I wouldn’t always make the best choice for someone… I don’t always make the best choices for myself… but I learn.
These two cases have almost nothing to do with each other. The only similarity is that they both involve how parents treat their children. Most of us believe that all children should receive the best available medical treatment for their condition. There is nothing inconsistent or contradictory in believing that both transsexual children and children with cancer should receive appropriate care.
*Your “point” is nonsense. If you’re going to allow something so absurd and dangerous as to let a mother deny her child medical treatment that would probably save his life, then why aren’t you okay with other parents letting their male-bodied child live as a girl? You’re fine with parents making decisions that will cause their children to suffer avoidable pain and illness and likely die young, but letting a child born with a penis wear a dress and be called “she” is totally unacceptable to you.
That would be ridiculous if it weren’t so horrible. You aren’t even consistent in your beliefs. You’ve said that the cancer patient’s parents have the right to decide what care he should receive, even if the methods they choose are pure quackery that will do nothing to treat his disease, but you don’t believe that the parents of the transsexual child have the same right to choose which treatment they feel is best for their own child.
*What kind of answer would you consider acceptable here? Given your other posts in this thread, I think this must be a purely rhetorical question.
*An interesting question from someone who said in the OP that any son of his is playing with trucks and GI Joes whether he likes it or not.
But none of us live the way we are born. Since then, we’ve had our heads filled with all sorts of knowledge and nonsense. We’ve exercised, or not, or selected our diet, which has altered our bodies, let alone what aging has done. Not only are we not the same people are we were when we were an hour old, we’re not even the same people as we were a year ago.
Why should we live the way we’re born? Our fates aren’t cast in stone.
I’ve a question for you; would you see genetic engineering as being acceptable under your concerns noted here or not? We can alter (to an extent) before conception, let alone birth; would that be more reasonable?
I have no doubt that some people are secret transexuals but have coped with it. And some people aren’t particualy “genderized” one way or the other, either mentally or physically. Often they appear adrogynous. Or they just conform to society (maybe they become priests and nuns) and no one would any better.
But that doesn’t mean EVERYONE should be like this, though.
In this society, where the gender roles are loosening and sexual identities are become more fluid, I could see more people being liberated enough to admit to transexuality. I see this is a sign of progress, not a decline. Imagine all those people from back in the day who couldn’t “come out” and were forced to live a lie for sheer survival. I wish a transexual had been there to touch the hem of Jesus’s robe so that he could show him the same compassion that he did with the never-ending-period lady. Maybe then his followers would shut the hell up about morality and choices.
Let’s say a transsexual did touch the hem of Jesus’ robe… would this person be “cured” of their transsexualism? If so, would their brain be changed to match their body or vice-versa?
This makes me wonder… what would a transsexual rather change? If a transsexual man (a person with the mind of a female but the body of a male) had the choice between a perfectly normal functioning female body or a male mind to match their male body, which would they want?
Most, if not all, people’s concept of self is the mind. We wouldn’t have a personality without a mind. So I’d wager that Jesus would give them the body they want. Either that, or self-acceptance.
But he didn’t give the lepers or the blind man self-acceptance. He made them whole. So I don’t know why we should expect anything different for a transexual. It’s kind of like if someone chopped off your genitals. You wouldn’t want the shaman healer to make feel better about the no-penis thing. You’d want him to do some magic to make the penis grow back.
Since it appears to not be obvious, the answer is to change the body to match the mind. The mind holds one’s identity. The body is a shell.
Oh go on, talk about gays. We all know you want to.