21 Reasons Why Gender Matters
Warwick Marsh and others, Fatherhood Foundation, Unanderra, NSW, 2007, www.fatherhood.org.au
This document lays out the case for the importance of male and female genders and examines the evidence that shows men and women are different. An excerpt:
"We live in an age of gender confusion. Much of this is a result of the deliberate attempt by various social engineers to convince us that gender is not fixed or static, but fluid and changeable, that there are not two genders, but many genders, that gender is really a social construct, that gender roles are interchangeable, that humans are really androgynous, and that gender is not important in human relationships."
Full paper is available at www.fatherhood.org.au.
The Psychopathology of “Sex Reassignment” Surgery
--Assessing Its Medical, Psychological,
and Ethical Appropriateness
Richard P. Fitzgibbons, M.D., Philip M. Sutton, and Dale O’Leary, Spring, 2009, National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 9.1 (Spring 2009): 97–125. Full text of article
Abstract.
Is it ethical to perform a surgery whose purpose is to make a male look like a female or a female to appear male? Is it medically appropriate? Sexual reassignment surgery (SRS) violates basic medical and ethical principles and is therefore not ethically or medically appropriate.
- SRS
mutilates a healthy, non-diseased body. To perform surgery on a healthy body
involves unnecessary risks; therefore, SRS violates the principle primum
non nocere, “first, do no harm.”
- Candidates for SRS may believe that they are trapped in the bodies of the wrong sex and therefore desire or, more accurately, demand SRS; however, this belief is generated by a disordered perception of self. Such a fixed, irrational belief is appropriately described as a delusion.
SRS, therefore, is a “category mistake”—it offers a surgical
solution for psychological problems such as a failure to accept the goodness of one’s masculinity or femininity, lack of secure attachment relationships in
childhood with same-sex peers or a parent, self-rejection, untreated gender
identity disorder, addiction to masturbation and fantasy, poor body image,
excessive anger, and severe psychopathology in a parent.
- SRS does not
accomplish what it claims to accomplish. It does not change a person’s sex;
therefore, it provides no true benefit.
- SRS is a “permanent,” effectively
unchangeable, and often unsatisfying surgical attempt to change what may
be only a temporary (i.e., psychotherapeutically changeable) psychological/psychiatric condition.
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