Reflection 16

Transsexuality is when someone feels that they were born in the wrong body; for instance a biological male may feel that he is indeed a women. Inter-sexuality is someone who is born with a mixture of male and female parts and there's three kinds; true hermaphrodite (a person with both a testis and an ovary), male pseudohermaphrodite (someone who has testis and female genitals but no ovaries), and female pseudohermaphrodite (someone with ovaries and male genitals but no testis). I don't think there necessarily more cases of people being transsexual or inter-sexual but I do believe that people are talking about it more. In older generations, subjects like this were avoided. If someone had a child who was born inter-sexual I strongly believe that child would have been disposed of right there in the delivery room and the parents wouldn't have felt any remorse. If a parent had a child who was transsexual, I doubt the child would come out for fear of being reprehended. I think the parents would sense that something is 'wrong' with their child and they would have tried to correct it or would have felt forced to put them in a mental institution. But in our day people are starting to become more aware of things like this and that can go either way; you have the people who say "oh okay, that's fine" and you have the people who will say that this is morally wrong and a sin. On talk shows you see young people who were transsexual but their parents felt the need to help to child become who they really felt they were. Like this one young lady who always complained to her parents about feeling wrong, "like she was born in the wrong body." Her parents sought a specialist in the field who evaluated their daughter and then with everyone involved go ahead, the daughter got hormone treatments and is now a son. Their new son is thrilled about the change and says he now feels normal. Now of course a lot of people criticized this mom for letting her child go through this before even hitting puberty. But for me the important thing is that the child is happy. This also says that people can sense these things at an early age. As time progresses, I think we're going to see more kids with similar stories; its important that as educator we are knowledgeable about the subject and can present this to our classes, bias free.