​To pee or not to pee — that is a question?

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Maybe we will have a transgender insurrection at the capitol on Jan 6

About 3.18 million years ago an adult female chimpanzee eventually named Lucy (after that famous Lucy in the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”) fell out of a tree in Ethiopia, stumbled, and walked away on two appendages instead of four. Lucy is a relative of ours, a representative of the hominin species called Homo sapiens to which we belong. Although only 3.5 feet tall and only 9 or 10 years old, she was considered an adult because chimps mature much faster than modern humans. She most likely had LGBTQIA+ and transgender chimp mates.

Over 20 years ago genetic scientists observed that the top 1,500 animal species, including Homo sapiens, demonstrated elements of homosexuality. So why did the Trumplican Party spend hundreds of millions of campaign dollars on campaigning against transgender folks passing anti-trans legislation in 28 states? Power politics — and it worked. Now, Trumplicans want to eliminate trans people by attempting to “erase” transgender people from the list of citizens.

Kansas Senator Roger Marshall has introduced a bill called “Defining Male and Female Act of 2024” in Congress to legally erase transgender people. He said he did it to “replace the Biden administration’s attempt to replace biological sex with dangerous radical gender ideology.” The bill contains this definition of male and female: “An individual who naturally has, had, will have, or would have, but for a congenital anomaly or unintentional disruption, the reproductive system that at some time produces, transports and utilizes (sperm or eggs for male and female, respectively) for fertilization.”

Clear as mud, right? Imagine the years politicians, lawyers, judges, and courts will spend arguing what this one sentence means!

I wonder how many transgender workers live and work in the D.C. area

Nothing surprises me anymore. A crypto billionaire just bought a piece of “art” at Sotheby’s in New York composed of a banana duct-taped to a wall for $6.2 million. The artist is Maurizio Cattelan who is better known for creating a solid gold toilet. A vendor outside of Sotheby’s entrance door sells bananas for 25 cents. Let’s move on.

In the last election, Delaware elected Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender member of Congress. Right-wing Republicans immediately opened the bathroom wars in the nation’s capital by restricting the use of thousands of bathrooms to the biological sex people possess at birth. Thousands of transgender federal workers work at their stations every day while thousands of transgender people visit and protest in Washington each year.

First, I would guess that McBride is not the first transgender Congressperson elected to Congress. The population of the D.C. metro area is approximately 6 million. That means there are about 600,000 of the LBGTQUIA+ community, including 60,000 transgender people, living in the area with many thousands working in public and private buildings — with many bathrooms. Each year thousands of trans people visit Washington and the Capitol to visit and lobby. How many bathrooms are in the White House? How many are in the Pentagon? How many trans people are working as interns on Congressional and agency staff? How many trans reporters have written about trans people testifying before a Congressional committee that may have a trans member? So, all of a sudden, we have new rules about peeing and defecating, a rather natural function for all Homo sapiens. Let’s hear from a couple of transgender people.

A short autobiography from an award-winning trans opinion writer

Masha Gessen is the Russian-Jewish author of 11 books on various subjects and won the 2017 National Book Award for “The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia”, and won the George Polk Award for opinion writing in 2024. Gessen is trans and nonbinary and uses the pronouns they/them. “They” (Masha) knew at age five she wanted to be a girl, but they didn’t transition until they were 50 years old. They fathered one child and have adopted two other children. In order to transition, either legally or medically, most European countries required people to be sterilized, which was also true in many university-based clinics and hospitals in the United States. Trans people were often considered to be mentally ill and unfit to have children.

Gessen explains how trans people feel about transitioning: “Anxiety about trans people and reproduction, and the laws and rules that it produces, cut both ways. On the one hand, these rules are to stop people born with female reproductive organs from forfeiting their ability to get pregnant (anxiety about trans people not having babies) and on the other they aim to ensure that people who do transition will not reproduce (anxiety about trans having babies). In both cases, the objective is to control the means of reproduction. That’s usually the goal of movements that purport to protect women and girls.”

Senator Marshall is an OB/GYN physician who claims he has delivered 5,000 babies in his medical career. He says in supporting his bill: “I can confidently say that politicizing children’s gender to use them as pawns in their radical woke agenda is not only wrong, it is extremely dangerous. We must codify the legal definition of sex to be based on science rather than feelings. With our legislation, we can fight back against the Biden-Harris Administration’s assault on our children.” I wonder if the senator realizes that he must have delivered 500 members of the LBGTQUIA+ community which would include 50 transgender people. I wonder what he did with a couple of babies born with both sets of genitalia, with several who might have been born with untreatable syndromes, or asexuals who would spend a lifetime completely bored with sex, or a girl born with just one usable arm. Another politician muttered an important phrase “Stuff happens!”

Why does Senator Mace of South Carolina hate Senator McBride?

Is it because she is a “conservative” Trumplican and McBride is a liberal Democrat?

Senator Nancy Mace has always been known as a transphobic extremist. She presently has posted more than a hundred negative posts about Senator McBride, and, of course, is the legislator who developed and presented the “bathroom” law that puts the LBGTQUIA+ community and transgender McBride somewhere way down on the “humanity” list. What is the basis for this total disrespect? Could it be promoted by two thousand years of “Christian” religious bigotry and ignorance? How about “manufacturing” an anti-trans culture war to win elections?

Queer and trans people at this moment in history aren’t accorded the same respect and deference that other Homo sapiens take for granted. We have people raised in religions and heteronormative cultures that expect that every person is assigned certain roles at birth, that gender identity, sexual orientation, and gender expression must all align in one of two set ways— Adam (male) or Eve (female). In our society, at this point, a gender-nonconforming person in the LBGTQUIA+ community doesn’t have the same “humanity” as “straights” who sinned their way out of the Garden of Eden.

Will Senator McBride be welcomed by colleagues? Remember, they were elected by people in Delaware because they thought a person in the United States Senate might be able to help them improve their lives. Senators have power and a platform. They are given offices, a bathroom or two, staff experienced in government, and resources to do the work of governing a country. Evidently our Homo sapiens society is not quite ready to welcome our LBGTQUIA+ community to full-fledged human status. Senator Mace wanted Trumpistan to ”disrespect” Senator McBride. We are in a world where only children, prison inmates, and transgender people are told when and where they have to use the bathroom. Normally human waste and genitalia are private matters except for medical problems such as constipation and urination.

Yuen Huo and Kevin Binning of the University of California state that disrespect is used to dehumanize trans people: “Feeling respect is a human need. It serves a critical function by communicating information about a person’s inclusion within a social group. These findings are consistent with the idea that respect is rooted in a fundamental need for acknowledgement that one is an accepted member of the group and that one belongs.” Amen.

More testimony from a transgender writer who covers politics and media

“As a trans person myself, I’m really worried about where this is headed (the bathroom law),”Parker Molloy wrote for her newsletter, The Present Age. “I spend each day worrying about whether or not the healthcare that keeps me alive will remain legal, whether I’m going to face new restrictions on where I’m allowed to exist in public, what would happen to me if — god forbid, I wound up in a prison for some reason, and whether or not my identity documents like my passport will be retroactively made invalid. Now, more than ever, I feel alone.”

In the most famous soliloquy ever written, Shakespeare in his play “Hamlet” could have been writing about the lives led by transgender people in the Divided States of America in 2024. I changed a couple of words in the column title to fit modern life.

Hamlet: “To be, or not to be, that is the question”

“To pee or not to pee, that is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer’

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing them. To die — to sleep,

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to: ‘tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there’s the rub:

For in that sleep of death what dreams can come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.

Must give us pause — there’s the respect

That makes the calamity of life so long.

For who would bear the whips and scorn of time,

The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin (knife)? Who would fardels (burdens) bear.

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But the dread of something after death,

The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn

No traveler returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and moment

With this regard their currents turn away

And lose the name of action.