'Burb' 'Burb' is the sound I make just before a good projectile vomit.

So, I'm visiting an old friend here in Chicago for a couple of days and will travel to Lawrence tonight. She lives with her husband and newborn in a Chicago suburb. I know that it is a tendency for someone who has been living in Europe for such a long time, like me, to come over and only see the negatives about living in America. But, something about living in Germany since 2003 has done nothing but make the contrasts between lifestyles even more apparent. I took a long walk yesterday to shed some of the lethargy that jet lag brings. I walked for an hour through this suburb, and, like some kind of undying mantra, kept repeating to myself, almost against my own will, 'How could someone live like this? How could someone live like this?'

This probably seems funny, really, because there is so much about living in a 'burb that is idyllic, almost perfect. The lawns are well kept, the streets are enormously wide, the plots are giant; the houses are giant; everything is like some kind of steroid 60s version of Americana. It's really weird. And horribly mundane. And every house has aluminum siding. And the neighborhood is quiet, almost dead during the day as the children are at school and the parents at work. And I walked through it, a weird, yet prim, ghost town—a society put into stasis until 5 when it will become exuberantly alive once again.

Somehow, back in the 60s, there must have been a great shortage of architects. There couldn't have been more than 2 used for the entire district. Every house is some kind of Stepford version of the same model house that must have, sometime ago, stood at the center of this great undrama and was used as the Ur-design for every new house to pop up as far as the eye could see. Aliens, unfamiliar with earth, probably came to study this suburb, thinking that we did it all intentionally, to show that we were all from the same clan. But this clan was obviously very patriarchal as we were unable to branch out from our kin, only able to express ourselves with a green split-level instead of a baby blue one.

This aliens' official story anyway, embarrassed to admit that they were confused at first and thought that the houses inhabit the earth, instead of people. It was this great sympathy for the houses and their great plight of the "human infestation" that brought on the great Glendale Heights massacre of ought 9, where, as a goodwill gesture, the aliens "cured" the houses' disease, triumphantly landing before the oldest house on the block to announce this great purging, a gift of friendship. The houses were disturbingly unresponsive, though, putting the official translators through a week of hell as they sought to interpret the creaking of shutters and general whinings of people-free timber to mean "thank you." Yes, they were later shot, but that's not the point.

How can someone live in suburbia? How? It is vanilla in a world of chocolate fudge swirl with pralines, caramel, candied cherries and chocolate sprinkles. And, what's worse, knowing the possible taste sensations that the broad palate of the world could bring, these people CHOSE vanilla. Ok, I respect that. It is their choice to make and they made it. To me, though, it is a horrible commentary on what the "normal guy" wants or understands. All in all, people want everything that a suburb can beautifully provide: their own house, with plenty of room, in a nice, secure neighborhood, no noisy neighbors, no great weekend challenges of any kind Even the lawns are all mowed by the same person, who, ingeniously, lets the new residence know who they are expected to use in a version of miniature signage places delicately at the corner of every pristine and uneventful lawn. The suburb sustains perfectly for a man what he really cares about…work, family, and rest, not necessarily in that order.

Do you ever get the feeling that you are just not normal enough to understand normal?

Faux-intellectuals

I just couldn't help writing another author. So this habit is repetitive. Who cares? It's better than Karen's boring memes! Article first. Response second.

The Sacrifice of Reason

Humanity has had a long fascination with blood sacrifice. In fact, it has been by no means uncommon for a child to be born into this world only to be patiently and lovingly reared by religious maniacs who believe that the best way to keep the sun on its course or to ensure a rich harvest is to lead him by tender hand into a field or to a mountaintop and bury, butcher, or burn him alive as offering to an invisible (and almost certainly fictional) God.

In many ancient cultures whenever a nobleman died, other men and women allowed themselves to be buried alive so as to serve as his retainers in the next world. In ancient Rome, children were sometimes slaughtered so that the future could be read in their entrails. The Dyak women of Borneo would not even look at a suitor unless he came bearing a net full of human heads as a love offering. Some Fijian prodigy devised a powerful sacrament called “Vakatoga” which required that a victim’s limbs be cut off and eaten while he watched. Among the Iroquois, captives from other tribes were often permitted to live for many years, and even to marry, all the while being doomed to be flayed alive as an oblation to the God of War; whatever children they produced while in captivity were disposed of in the same ritual. African tribes too numerous to name have a long history of murdering people to send as couriers in a one-way dialogue with their ancestors or to convert their body parts into magical charms. Ritual murders of this sort continue in many African societies to this day.

It is essential to realize that such impossibly stupid misuses of human life have always been explicitly religious. They are the product of what certain human beings think they know about invisible gods and goddesses, and of what they manifestly do not know about biology, meteorology, medicine, physics, and a dozen other specific sciences that have more than a little to say about the events in the world that concern them.

And it is astride this contemptible history of religious atrocity and scientific ignorance that Christianity now stands as an absurdly unselfconscious apotheosis. As John the Baptist is rumored to have said upon seeing Jesus for the first time, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). For most Christians, this bizarre opinion still stands, and it remains the core of their faith. Christianity amounts to the claim that we must love and be loved by a God who approves of the scapegoating, torture, and murder of one man—his son, incidentally—in compensation for the misbehavior and thought-crimes of all others.

Let the good news go forth: we live in a cosmos, the vastness of which we can scarcely even indicate in our thoughts, on a planet teeming with creatures we have only begun to understand, but the whole project was actually brought to a glorious fulfillment over twenty centuries ago, after one species of primate (our own) climbed down out of the trees, invented agriculture and iron tools, glimpsed (as through a glass, darkly) the possibility of keeping its excrement out of its food, and then singled out one among its number to be viciously flogged and nailed to a cross.

The notion that Jesus Christ died for our sins and that his death constitutes a successful propitiation of a “loving” God is a direct and undisguised inheritance of the scapegoating barbarism that has plagued bewildered people throughout history. Viewed in a modern context, it is an idea at once so depraved and fantastical that it is hard to know where to begin to criticize it. Add to the abject mythology surrounding one man’s death by torture—Christ’s passion—the symbolic cannibalism of the Eucharist. Did I say “symbolic”? Sorry, according to the Vatican it is most assuredly not symbolic. In fact, the opinion of the Council of Trent still stands:

I likewise profess that in the Mass a true, proper and propitiatory sacrifice is offered to God on behalf of the living and the dead, and that the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ is truly, really, and substantially present in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist, and that there is a change of the whole substance of the bread into the body, and of the whole substance of the wine into blood; and this change the Catholic Church calls transubstantiation. I also profess that the whole and entire Christ and a true sacrament is received under each separate species.

Of course, Catholics have done some very strenuous and unconvincing theology in this area, in an effort to make sense of how they can really eat the body of Jesus, not mere crackers enrobed in metaphor, and really drink his blood without, in fact, being a cult of crazy cannibals. Suffice it to say, however, that a world view in which “propitiatory sacrifices on behalf of the living and the dead” figure prominently is rather difficult to defend in the year 2007. But this has not stopped otherwise intelligent and well-intentioned people from defending it.

And now we learn that even Mother Teresa, the most celebrated exponent of this dogmatism in a century, had her doubts about the whole story—the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the existence of heaven, and even the existence of God:
Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love — and now become as the most hated one — the one — You have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. I call, I cling, I want — and there is no One to answer — no One on Whom I can cling — no, No One. — Alone ... Where is my Faith — even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness — My God — how painful is this unknown pain — I have no Faith — I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart — & make me suffer untold agony.

So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?

— addressed to Jesus, at the suggestion of a confessor, undated

Teresa’s recently published letters reveal a mind riven by doubt (as it should have been). They also reveal a woman who was surely suffering from run-of-the-mill depression, though even secular commentators have begun to politely dress this fact in the colors of the saints and martyrs. Teresa’s response to her own bewilderment and hypocrisy (her term) reveals just how like quicksand religious faith can be. Her doubts about God’s existence were interpreted by her confessor as a sign that she was sharing Christ’s torment upon the cross; this exaltation of her wavering faith allowed Teresa “to love the darkness” she experienced in God’s apparent absence. Such is the genius of the unfalsifiable. We can see the same principle at work among her fellow Catholics: Teresa’s doubts have only enhanced her stature in the eyes of the Church, having been interpreted as a further evidence of God’s grace.

Ask yourself, when even the doubts of experts are thought to confirm a doctrine, what could possibly disconfirm it?

www.samharris.org

And my response:

Mr. Harris, you said in a recent article, "In fact, it has been by no means uncommon for a child to be born into this world only to be patiently and lovingly reared by religious maniacs who believe that the best way to keep the sun on its course or to ensure a rich harvest is to lead him by tender hand into a field or to a mountaintop and bury, butcher, or burn him alive as offering to an invisible (and almost certainly fictional) God."

I am curious why you say "and almost certainly fictional"? I understand your intention in your article the "Sacrifice of Reason," that, by pointing out crazy things that are done in the name of religion, you hope to "illegitimize" it. I have no problem with that.

I do know, however, when one seeks to address the conundrum of God's existence/non-existence with reason, one always falls short. The existence of God is not provable, but neither is it disprovable. That's kind of the point.

So, considering the evidence neither legitimizes not "illegitimizes" the existence of God, how can you say "almost certainly fictional"?

Trannie-lein

My friend Amie sent me this interesting article from the Seattle Times. Following the article is my opinion on it:

"Whoever he becomes, that's OK because that's who he is"
By Rosette Royale
Special to The Seattle Times

Five-year-old Zach stands barefoot in the middle of his bedroom, faced with a dilemma: Should he wear the pink dress or the powder blue? Both are long princess-style affairs, the first displayed on a hanger held by his mother, Rebecca, the second, slightly wrinkled, pulled from the top of a dresser by Zach himself.

"Or would you rather wear your witch's outfit?" his mother asks him, nodding at a black polyester costume in the closet, its neckline trimmed in orange.

"No," Zach says. "I think I want the blue one." He dashes out of the room with dress in hand, returning half a minute later, his pink T-shirt replaced by a tight crushed-velvet bodice. Zach bounds around the room, smiling, wisps of blond hair breaking free from the French braid that trails down his back.

It's that playful exuberance that Rebecca and her husband, John, hope their son never loses. "But we're concerned that this piece of him will get lost, if other children aren't able to respond to him well," says Rebecca, 39, who asked that her family's real names not be used.

Of course, most parents dream of the best for their children. But Rebecca and her husband are a certain kind of parent: They're raising a boy who wants to dress in girls' clothes. And that places them in largely uncharted territory. Is this a passing phase or something central to Zach's identity?

A compass of sorts may await the family this weekend, when mother and son participate in a local conference called Gender Odyssey Family. The event at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center will be Seattle's first conference for parents raising "gender-variant" kids, or those children who fall outside what's traditionally defined as "boy" or "girl."

The conference will offer 23 sessions over the course of the weekend, some geared toward entire families and others focused specifically on gender-variant teens.

One family workshop, titled "A Dad's Place," will provide a forum for fathers to discuss the feelings brought about by raising such children. Another family workshop will help parents determine how — and when — to disclose their child's gender variance to others.

Experts in such fields as pediatrics, endocrinology, psychotherapy, gender studies and communications, and parents of gender-variant children will lead workshops.

The conference was conceived by Aidan Key, a transgender man who has produced national conferences for female-to-male transsexuals in Seattle called Gender Odyssey. His twin sister, Brenda Chevis, of Bellingham, and Bay Area author and gender researcher Stephanie Brill are also organizers for the premier event, which is expected to draw a small gathering of 25 families.

Rebecca, a stay-at-home mom in Seattle, says she's looking forward to the conference. "It'll be fun to have him see other families who are like us," she says, "and to learn more about how to navigate the world with a child who's different in this way."

Addressing the dress issue

For the family, their journey into the fuzzy realm of gender variance began last summer when Zach first asked his mother if he could have a dress. He was 4 ½ at the time. Rebecca remembers that, while acknowledging his request, she never got around to buying one.

A week or so later, he brought up the subject again. With his second request again falling on deaf ears, Zach became persistent. "After the third request, I thought, 'I'm not going to put him off anymore,' " Rebecca says.

She drove him to a neighborhood Goodwill, where she bought him three items: a long, handmade dress with a floral pattern, a knee-length blue velour dress and a skirt. Back home, he rushed upstairs to change. A baby-sitter showed up, and Zach, wearing a dress, asked if they could go play in the park.

"After that afternoon, there was just no question that he would wear a dress, to school or wherever he wanted," Rebecca says.
While there was no question what Zach wanted, his father's emotions were mixed.

Intellectually, John had little difficulty supporting his son. "But emotionally, it was more complicated," he says.
Those complexities lay, for the most part, in the visual. "It's still jarring sometimes" to see him in a dress, John says, his voice cracking.

Yet he's proud of Zach's self-confidence, a quality he feels would be wrong to squash, whether at home or in school.
"Why would we tell him that he can't wear a dress?" he asks. "It would hurt him."

Rebecca says she spoke to school directors to ensure that Zach would be safe in the classroom. They assured her he would.
Karen Campbell, one of Zach's teachers last year, says the other pre-K students accepted him. Because he progressed slowly from wearing floral print pants to skirts to dresses, she says, his 20 classmates were able to view Zach as he was — another kid — and not by a grown-up's definition of a girl or a boy.

"It might be a big deal to parents or adults," Campbell says, "but for these guys his age, it was, 'Oh, that's who he is. Let's go ahead and play trucks.' "

Defining dilemmas

So what makes a boy a boy, or a girl a girl? Dr. Edgardo Menvielle, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., says the answer is not simple.

For most people, the difference between male and female feels obvious. "But it's not necessarily obvious all the time for those who don't fit what we expect the person to be," he says.

Such can be the case for gender-variant children, whom Menvielle defines as any young people who, whether comfortable with their birth sex or not, display behaviors that cause people to question societal distinctions of masculine and feminine.
To date, there are no hard numbers for how many gender-variant children exist in the country, and Menvielle doubts there ever will be. "We could look at this category in a number of ways," he says, "so how would we count them?"

To some, it may be easy to view a boy who opts for dresses as one who's passing through a developmental phase, on par with a boy who wants to spend every waking moment in his Batman costume. But such a comparison, says Menvielle, is "a bit like comparing apples and oranges."

Most of the young boys who parade about in a bat suit and utility belt, he explains, will cease to wear them at some point. For the boy who likes to wear skirts, Menvielle says, it's impossible to predict the types of clothes he'll fancy as he ages. He may give up dresses; he may not.

Menvielle suggests that attempting to label someone based on the type of clothes he chooses is unreliable, as it focuses on the superficial. "Dress," he says, "does not make the person."

For parents raising gender-variant children, he stresses, "We need to hear what they tell us about how they feel about who they are." But just as important, Menvielle says, is taking pains to never put the child at unnecessary risk.

"Parents need to be aware of the potential dangers from others," he says, "but also about the psychological danger of forcing the child into a mold that is unnatural for him or her."

Shows of support

For Zach's parents, protecting their son takes many forms. At a weeklong summer theater camp Zach attended, Rebecca asked counselors if the camp had room for a boy who wore dresses. It did. It also instilled in him a yearning to receive a bouquet of flowers, the same as a number of girl campers, once they'd taken post-show bows. The day after the show, Rebecca watched as Zach picked out an arrangement of stargazer lilies and deep-red dahlias.

She's also begun contacting the administrators of the kindergarten program Zach will be attending to ask that his difference be respected.

But, unlike those days when she dragged her feet in responding to his first request for a dress, she's more apt to respond supportively to his desires these days. When he told her recently that he wanted to pierce his ears, she suggested stick-on earrings instead. While in a store to get them, she says he eyed a rhinestone tiara. Next to it, he saw another. He wanted them both. She bought them.

At home, he matched each tiara to one of his two princess dresses. Rebecca says he was elated — and so was she, to see her son so happy, even if it's something most people don't understand.

"Whoever he is and whoever he becomes, that's OK," she says, "because that's who he is, and he has our unconditional love."
Rosette Royale is a writer living in Seattle.

My opinion:

Chris and I were at a dinner last night with a lot of our gay friends, and, of course, the theme of homosexuality and the church came up. At some point, someone asked me why it was, in spite of the teachings of Christ, that the Catholic Church had always been so adamantly against homosexuality. I responded that I believe that it has very little to do with the church itself, but that it has more to do with living in a misogynistic society. My argument was simple, if anti-homosexuality is a simply Christian phenomenon, why is it that, until recently, almost no place on Earth permitted homosexuality? The reason seems clear, when societies are based on the man being the head of the household, the head of government, and even the head of religion, it is either explicitly said, or at the least, understood that a woman is lower down in this hierarchy. In a misogynistic society, it is always better to be more masculine that feminine. America is a very good example: lesbians in America enjoy a much broader acceptance than gay men. One is more likely to see a lesbian couple holding hands on the street in America, unprovoked, and, for the most part, without any danger to them, than seeing two gay men doing the same. But, if two men were to do that, they are in distinct danger of getting gay-bashed. This is because it is always ok for women to be more masculine but almost never ok for men to be more feminine. Why? Because in a society where we are conditioned to believe that there is nothing better than being a man, it is always ok to be more man-like. But, if a man would ever "choose" to be more woman-like, that would simply be unacceptable. Besides, men, the ruling class, don't mind lesbians; they often even think it's sexually desirable. So, because the men permit it, it is ok. Women may look at other lesbians with disdain, but, because their opinions do not carry much weight in a misogynistic society, they either do not express their opinions of disgust, or their opinions are deemed as invalid because the man does not agree.

Have you ever considered that a young girl who would be in the young man's position in this article would be considered completely normal, and just be called a "Tom boy"? Even girls who don't truly grow out of this phase are considered completely normal in a patriarchal society. Why? It is always better to be masculine than feminine.

I agree, in this case, with the parents' stance. The boy should be able to express himself freely with what he wears. The only problems that I can see arising from this have to do with the lack of acceptance in the overall society. He may have trouble as the younger children with whom he goes to school, begin to delineate the world more starkly because of their social programming. At some point or another, the young boy will feel a distinct pressure to conform to being a boy like the other boys. He may ignore this, and continue wearing dresses in spite of the many ways that society will punish him for this. Most likely, though, as he grows older, and the importance of being accepted becomes more prominent, he will simply shed his dresses for pants. Then, later in life, he may decide that he really does feel more comfortable as a woman than as a man, and will, perhaps, become a transvestite. This does not necessarily mean, by the way, that he will be gay. What most people don't realize is that transvestite's are often heterosexual. (The Kinsey website say that Tapestry Magazine did a poll and that 75% of transvestites say that they are heterosexual.)

There is so much of us that is based on genetic instinct. With each passing day, science is learning to what extent our personalities are influenced by genetic disposition. I am reading a book called Moral Minds by Marc Hauser, which explains that much of our understanding of morality is actually genetically encoded within our brains. More and more, the concept of "nurture" is being disproved by science as being the primary effect on an adult's behavior . So, the parents of this boy from the article are doing the right thing, in my estimation. They are not discouraging parts of his natural personality just because it is slightly out of the norm. If my up bringing had encouraged even more my natural traits, I would have had a happier childhood. When people get forced into an area in which they do not belong, it causes discomfort and unhappiness. These parents see the joy on the boy's face as he tried on his new dress or tiara. They are right to not try to squelch it.