From Jim Brown over at the Agape today:
Transgenders are individuals who have changed their sex through surgery, or at least have tried to.
Hmm… Let’s surf on over to the dictionary at the National Library of Medicine which offers a more accurate and less… how shall I put this? less-madeup definition than Jim.
(It should be noted there is no entry for Brown’s “transgenders,” the plural noun form of “transgender.”)
I’m not sure if there’s any hope of the fundies curing the transgendered when they lack even this level of rudimentary knowledge.
The dictionary definition is just a polite version of the Jim Brown summary.
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Civility is a good thing but which of the following two definitions are gays and ex-ex-gays likely to use?:
Ex-gays are individuals who have changed their sexuality through therapy (and prayer), or at least have tried to.
or
of, relating to, or being a person (as an ex-gay or a gay man who has adopted a “straight lifestyle”) who identifies or expresses a sexual orientation that differs from the one that corresponds to the person’s sexual orientation at puberty.
1630r, as is too often the case when exgay is mentioned… a perspective is offered between only two.
See also classic example of same such thinking:”heterosexual” — someone who has Godly sexuality, lives behind a white-picket fence with an adoring wife (stay at home, of course), and 2.2 adorable children and basks in the glowing repect of all who meet them”homosexual” — a mentally-ill sinner (of type: sexual pervert) who when not drunk or taking drugs is either having sex with one of the 500 partners that year, attempting to molest a child or attempting suicide after the failure of yet another 6 month long “marriage”
But, we can think of any number of possible definitions:
“person who claims in public to achieved what they plainly have not in private”
or
“person who is so anti-gay that they deny being what everyone else thinks they actually are”
or
“person who uses “definitions” to deceive themself and others into thinking something that is not true.”
I’m sure others can come up with a much longer list. Hardly the point. Personally, acknowledging a debt to Occam, we’d prefer a simple:
“Exgay: a person who calls themself exgay.”
The Religious Right has been on about the gender/sex dichotomy for a while now. It’s all just part of the homosexual agenda to separate the two.
In their eyes, sex and gender are one and the same, and they are immutable because they are encoded in our genes.
The word “transgenders” is just a way they depersonalize or at least de-sex trans folk so they don’t have to call them “women” or (when appropriate) “men”, “he” or “she”. “Dana is a transgender” gets the gender police out of having to call me a “trans woman”, because doing so would be recognizing my gender.
Nothing terribly new here, but it’s always good to see this kind of crap pointed out. Thanks for the post, even if it’s not necessarily ex-gay related!
Grantdale, you’re a hoot! I love those last two definitions for “exgay”, they’re bang on.
Per the The International Foundation for Gender (IGFE):Gender is a person’s innate sense of themselves as being male or female, which may differ from their biological sex. Sex and gender are often used interchangably, but they are not the same. People whose sex and gender differ are known Transgender.In the broadest sense of the term transgender (as many transgender activists define and use the term), transgender is an umbrella term that applies to people who don’t fit within the binary dichotomies of sex or gender. Transgender is a self-identification term (much like as gay or ex-gay self-identifications); people who might self-identify as transgender include cross-dressers, drag kings and queens, transsexuals, genderqueers, and intersexed people.”Concered Woman” Robert Knight (Director of the Concerned Women For America’s Culture and Family Institute) equated the term transgender with transsexual in this most recent article in the AgapePress. Under a Concerned Women For America headline (from 2003) that included the phrase “Cross-Dressing ‘Transgenders’,” he described transgenders as made up of men who choose to live as “women” and vice versa. It’s clear that “Concerned Woman” Robert Knight really doesn’t understand the term transgender from either the way the dictionary describes the term, or from how transgender activists describe and use the term.
It seems the RR is just using the “MAN IN A DRESS”(tm) bogey to scare the troops into giving more loot. People aren’t scared enuf by gay people and lesbians anymore.
Per the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD):PROBLEMATIC: “transgenders,” “a transgender”PREFERRED: “transgender people,” “a transgender person”
Transgender should be used as an adjective, not as a noun. Do not say, “Tony is a transgender,” or “The parade included many transgenders.” Instead say, “Tony is a transgender person,” or “The parade included many transgender people.”Daniel: Thanks for pointing out the improper use of the term transgenders by Robert Knight.
Narth has a similar sort of confusion in conflating transsexual with intersexed:
https://www.narth.com/docs/tragedy.html