12th June 2009, 1:44 AM
ABF, this isn't really about that. The issue is this isn't some huge scientific discovery. It's all using the plumbing that person, whatever you want to call it, already has. There's nothing amazing about it and it doesn't deserve to be international news. Whatever this means to that person as an individual, it's extremely misleading to say "man has a baby" in the way they are sensationalizing it to be.
I'm all for the freedom of someone wanting to do such and such to their body, and the fact is it does blur the lines in some ways, but our medical ability is extremely limited when it comes to a sex change. Until research into nanotechnology allows us to more or less reboot the growth process and alter it with hormones, all doctors are really doing is mutilating one gender's genetals to superfically resemble the other's. They are free to do that, but many important biological functions will be lacking, or in this case, will still be very much there and present. If "shim" wants to have a baby, go for it, if he wants to be a man, even say he wans to be called a man, that's his right, but the fact remains he's got a womb and ovaries and is pregnant. There's a lot of possible blurred lines, but this is not a "man having a baby" in the sense of some artificial womb being implanted. Yeesh does anyone here really have to defend against some claim of closed mindedness?
They can mentally be seeing themselves as a man, but that doesn't mean that them having a baby is some medical miracle.
But those who have surgery to do this is just the tip of the iceberg. What about the true transgenders? The ones that are born with genetalia that never developed in either direction? They're the ones that society has the biggest problem with, they're the ones that don't even "fit" in either convention. There's a full range of that sort of thing, and some of them are sadly the unhealthy kinds of disfigurments.
I guess what I'm saying is when a person very much born on the "man" side of the spectrum gets such an effective and true sex change that they get a fully funcitoning set of ovaries and a womb and THAT person gets pregnant, THEN you have a true astounding science thingamajigger. Someone born with a womb ending up using that womb? Not news. Now tell me the story about the dog that bit that man.
I'm all for the freedom of someone wanting to do such and such to their body, and the fact is it does blur the lines in some ways, but our medical ability is extremely limited when it comes to a sex change. Until research into nanotechnology allows us to more or less reboot the growth process and alter it with hormones, all doctors are really doing is mutilating one gender's genetals to superfically resemble the other's. They are free to do that, but many important biological functions will be lacking, or in this case, will still be very much there and present. If "shim" wants to have a baby, go for it, if he wants to be a man, even say he wans to be called a man, that's his right, but the fact remains he's got a womb and ovaries and is pregnant. There's a lot of possible blurred lines, but this is not a "man having a baby" in the sense of some artificial womb being implanted. Yeesh does anyone here really have to defend against some claim of closed mindedness?
They can mentally be seeing themselves as a man, but that doesn't mean that them having a baby is some medical miracle.
But those who have surgery to do this is just the tip of the iceberg. What about the true transgenders? The ones that are born with genetalia that never developed in either direction? They're the ones that society has the biggest problem with, they're the ones that don't even "fit" in either convention. There's a full range of that sort of thing, and some of them are sadly the unhealthy kinds of disfigurments.
I guess what I'm saying is when a person very much born on the "man" side of the spectrum gets such an effective and true sex change that they get a fully funcitoning set of ovaries and a womb and THAT person gets pregnant, THEN you have a true astounding science thingamajigger. Someone born with a womb ending up using that womb? Not news. Now tell me the story about the dog that bit that man.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)