You saw the thread and my post; I’m not sure what there is to add. It seems to me there’s a pretty clear line being drawn between transsexual = the other operations.
I’ll boil it down this far, then: if you think they’re talking only about Mr. Garrison, there’s nothing much to complain about unless you didn’t think it was funny. If you get the sense they were trying to make a point about transsexuals in general, as some did, then what they’re saying is upsetting.
You quoted SlyFrog saying they were “delusional.”
It’s the analogy that makes it seem hateful. I don’t know what I would say about the position itself.
I’m still not getting what is upsetting. I took their point to be, in essence, be happy with who you are, because, although you can change, the changes are superficial and not functional (e.g., can’t ovulate, can’t dunk without busting your testicle-laden kneecaps). “Accept who you are” seems like a saccharine moral appropriate for the Teletubbies, not some hate-laden screed.
Parker and Stone are outright denying that transsexuals exist as they describe themselves. The entire point of being transgendered is that one can’t be satisfied with living with their birth sex. That there’s some disconnect between how you are and how your brain tells you you ought to be, and it can’t be dealt with the same way Kyle and his father’s whims should have been. Therefore, surgery or at least taking on an opposite sex identity. This, if my understanding is correct, is the view of both the transgendered community and current pyschology. Parker and Stone are attacking the very foundation of their identity!
How so? They’re not saying one can’t get any sort of surgery done. Hell, they’re not even saying Mrs. Garrison can’t call himself a woman – he’s (pardon my sloppy pronouns here) shown as Mrs. Garrison in every episode after the one in question. They’re just saying that the changes are cosmetic, which, AFAICT, may be up for debate, but isn’t hateful per se.
How is this different from Kyle’s and/or his father’s situation? You think Kyle is satisfied being a short Jewish kid again, when he had, albeit momentarily, achieved his dream?
Why do you call them whims? (Well, I can answer that somewhat, as this episode was the first time that we’d heard about Kyle’s love for basketball, or Gerald’s love for dolphinhood. But surely there are little black kids who want to be white, and vice versa. Are such desires “whims”? What makes wanting to be the opposite gender different from wanting to be a different race?
Wow, I don’t see any basis for that whatsoever. I see (1) you can change your body, but you’ve really just got to accept who you are, and (2) Garrison is fucked up, whatever equipment he’s packing. As I’ve said before, (1) may be debated, but just because you disagree doesn’t mean that anyone who holds said belief is a hatemonger.
“30 Rock” has a black guy running around with an entourage. He steals things. He uses his money terribly. He doesn’t speak properly. He doesn’t stop partying.
It has a bubble headed bleach blond, dumber than a stump who uses her feminine body to get what she wants and rejoices in superficiality.
The males on the show are ugly, fat, dense and shallow, or seriously emasculated (and still dense).
They just did an entire episode ripping on the city of Cleveland.
And Tina Fey has tossed the word “tranny” into a couple of jokes.
Yeah, just maybe you’re being a little hypersensitive.
What you’re missing is that Tracy, Jena, etc. are all there on the show to speak for themselves and challenge any assumptions we might make.
There are several scenes with “the black guy,” “the blonde”…even Jack, the conservative white capitalist…where they reveal qualities that confound stereotypes. Who is on 30 Rock to show us transsexuals are also real people?
If that’s really the moral - and I’ve seen South Park before, so I have trouble believing it is - then it’s so ignorant as to be useless. Sorry, but transgendered people have a complicated problem that goes just a bit deeper than “accept what you look like.”
Which is why I don’t think that’s what Stone and Parker were trying to say.
Back to the question at hand, Tina Fey seems to be just exhibiting lazy writing skills, pandering to the LCD that “transgender” is still a very unusual and therefore weird therefore funny topic for mainstream America. Kinda like “gay” in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
The transgendered community deserves no more protection from parody and satire than any other group.
Oh, no doubt there’s a lot going on in the transgendered. But you seem to be saying, now, “I reject their answer as too simplistic,” not “I reject their answer as filled with unparalleled levels of hate towards the transgendered.” I’d be willing to give you the former – Parker and Stone simplify just about every “moral” in their show to the point of near uselessness – but I still don’t see the latter.
No. I’m trying to walk a line here in saying “this is why some people think the episode is more hateful than a Tina Fey joke,” and not voice an opinion on a show I haven’t watched. I’m failing because what I’ve read about the episode is vile and I’m not an SP fan to begin with. But that’s what I’m trying to do.
I said if they intended the “be happy with who you are” version - which I don’t believe - that would be too simplistic.
I’m gonna play devil’s advocate for a second here. Trans-gendered people have a mental identity that doesn’t match their physical reality, but why is it assumed that the physical gender is where the problem is? If “who you are” (a somewhat nebulous concept, but understandable) doesn’t match your genitals, why are the genitals assumed to be the problem and not the mental state that is denying the reality of your chromosomes? Why can’t the argument go the other way?
The practical answer is, treating transexuality strictly through therapy just doesn’t work. The patient retains the feeling that they are the wrong gender, and the therapy does not make it any easier for the patient to live with that feeling of dissociation, which leads to a much higher incidence of depression, destructive behavior, and suicide, than is found among patients who have SRS.
The medical answer is, there’s growing (although not yet conclusive) evidence that transexuality is physiological in nature, not psychological. There are physical differences in the structure of the brain between men and women, and it appears that transexuality is caused when someone quite literally has the brain of the opposite gender from their body, and thus is no more treatable through therapy than a tumor. If the research ultimatly bears this out to be true, then changing a transexual’s mental gender to match their physical gender would require a surgical process at least as invasive (and probably significantly more invasive) than that involved in SRS.
The ethical answer is, what’s wrong with letting people decide for themselves what they want to be? If a man wants to become a woman, why should we expect him to change his mind to fit how the rest of us view him, instead of letting him change his body to fit how he views himself?
The philosophical answer is, people like to think of their sense of self - their identity - as being invioable. The idea that one could go into a doctor and have their psyche so radically altered that they identitfy as an entirely different gender than they did when they went in is rightly terrifying. That sort of deep-level alteration of one’s basic id opens all sorts of questions about the very nature of who and what we are. If a doctor could convince you, wierddave, that you’re really a woman, then he could just as easily convince you that you’re a communist, or a radical Islamist, or a violent racist, or any number of other factors that you consider essential to your conception of who you are as a person. Absent social pressures to conform, most people are much more comfortable with the idea of altering their body than they are with altering their fundamental view of who they are as a person.
Send your devil’s advocate to the store for a copy of How Sex Changed, and he or she will learn that doctors of every sort spent decades trying to treat transsexuals psychologically, using methods as diverse as talk therapy, shock treatments, and (birth-gender-matching) hormone therapy to convince their minds that they were born into the right sex.
None of that worked. Surgical and (non-birth-gender-matching) hormone therapy were for most of these people the only solution that worked.
This is well-trod ground, Weirddave, and mature, thoroughly investigated medicine. Nobody’s keeping it a secret from any who stir themselves to learn more.
Absolutely. As it is on the show, when Liz Lemon asks Tracy Jordan “Do you think I’m racist?” he can sardonically reply “No, I think you dress black men up as Oprah to celebrate our dignity.”
Or when she decides (for several reasons, some race-based) Tracy may be illiterate, we can see him reading the New York Post editorial page and complaining about how conservative George Will has become.
Tracy and Twofer are both there to speak up for themselves. “Tranny” jokes have no one to push back against them.
It doesn’t? Because I really can’t imagine a better standard than, “Does it work?” What standard would you suggest we use?
As to the efficacy of psychological treatment in general, it depends on the patient and the problem he’s struggling with. Some mental problems are entirely curable. Some mental problems are incurable, but treatable, allowing the patient to live a relatively normal life. And some mental problems are incurable and untreatable. And the same complaint can fall into all three categories, depending on who’s suffering from it.
Ever? No, of course not. Science (and medicine, in particular) never works in absolutes like that. However, my understanding is that the current methodology in psychiatry is to not try to convince the patient that there feelings of gender confusion are “misguided,” but rather to find ways to allow that patient to live comfortably with whatever gender identity they ultimatly decide to assume. This does not always (or even often) include SRS. However, there is a significant population of people for whom their problems with gender identity simply do not respond to psychological treatment, which leaves surgery (or, sometimes, simply hormonal treatments and “passing”) as the only viable option.
Oh, there’s been plenty of self-hating homosexuals and a few people who aren’t even satisfied in their destination sex that have applied for sex changes.
This is why sex-change candidates have to have a year of psychotherapy before they get the operation. To make sure they are really transgendered. But the success rate of people who have SRS after this screening process is much higher than people who are identified as TG who attempt other therapies.
I understand the impulse. We tell girls that it’s okay if they don’t look like supermodels. We tell Black people that they ought to accept their ethnicity, while working to increase their social status. We tell girls that they can be feminine and strong and boys that can be masculine and compassionate.
But it just doesn’t work that way for the transgendered. Their brains look at their bodies and say “wrong”, and no amount of therapy or “acceptance” will correct that.
I suppose, in theory, one could correct the brain to match the body, but why still aren’t sure how the male and female brain differs, nevermind how to switch one form to the other.
