On the surface this is a run-of-the-mill story. Its most notable features are the medical establishment’s beneficence (i.e. offering the surgery pro bono) and the man’s age and occupation (not a lot of old farmers want a face that’s “tender and beautiful like a woman’s”).

But then if you take a deeper look into it, something very strange emerges. Since the 1970s China has been struggling to control overpopulation. Its most notorious tactic has been the implementation of a one-baby policy whose unfortunate side effect has been to lessen the perceived value of baby girls. Boys are thought to be more useful and therefore girls are sometimes abandoned or even murdered.

Place this sex-change story against its cultural background and suddenly you see how weird it is. Chinese don’t want baby girls but the medical establishment helps a man to become a woman? On a societal level this is difficult to understand. And on an individual level it points to even weirder impulses: aside from his gender confusion, does the farmer want to be less useful? Does his sex change form a solitary rebellion against the responsibilities forced on Chinese men? Does it somehow atone for murdered daughters by obliging a man to take on the role of a woman?

This is a long and quite fascinating story about a person who was raised in Saudi Arabia as a boy but always thought of himself as a girl — and, though the article is ambiguous on this point, he may have even had some physical characteristics of a female. Was he a hermaphrodite at birth?

The obvious joke that comes to mind when you read about an Arab male undergoing a sex change operation is that it must not be so bad for women to live under Muslim law. Here in the west, we consider it oppressive to be wear face-to-toe veils and to live a sheltered existence and whatnot. But if it’s so bad, why would any Arab male choose to become a female?

The truth of this person’s story is much more complicated than that. In the first place, his gender identity was simply more urgent than his ethnic or religious identity. In the second place, he chafed under life in Saudi Arabia and ultimately underwent the sex change operation here in America. After 9/11 he ended up returning to Saudi Arabia, and that’s where things got really complicated. Here in America he had been living openly as a woman. Upon returning to Saudi Arabia, he resumed a male identity. Then he tried to come out to his family — and all hell broke loose. His family feared he would bring all sorts of shame on them, and they were also angry that he spent his inheritance to get a sex change operation. His father had, in fact, threatened to cut him out of his will if he did such a thing.

It all makes for a complicated and tragic story. Certainly you can sympathize with the suffering that the “guy” went through. And you could understand how he might use money from an inheritance to remedy his situation. On the other hand, the family has a valid point too. They live in a repressive religious society. When an individual asserts his personal right to happiness, it can end up creating grief for everybody. What is the moral thing in such a situation — the happiness of the individual? Or that of the group? It’s not an easy call to make.

On the other hand, even religious authorities (as quoted in the article) seem to agree that the person did not do anything wrong in the matter of inheritance. He was a man when he inherited, therefore he deserved — under Islamic law — his full share. What he did afterward could not retroactively change that, no matter how much his family might object to what he did with his inheritance.

(Thanks to alanr for the link.)

One of the things the tourist brochures don’t tell you about New York in general and Central Park in particular is that you never quite know when you’ll stumble on an impromptu love nest. Think about it. All you suburbanites have your cars to grope in, and all you people who live in the country can find a corn field or an old hay barn somewhere. But when you live in a densely populated city, where are you supposed to find the space for some spontaneous whoopee? A lot of people turn to the parks. PervScan had some friends who took their young son boating in Central Park. The boat nudged into some reeds — and what sight do you think the poor young boy had to endure? Two men doing what two men do when one of them acts like a woman.

New Yorkers who read the story of this “treesome” will no doubt recognize it for the quintessentially metropolitan tale that it is. Best of all is the sang froid implicit in the reaction quote the reporter solicited from Mr. Mallard. You can practically hear him shrug his shoulders as if to say, “Well, you can see weirder things in the big city… It’s just transvestites.” And that’s about how most New Yorkers react to those little anomalies that dot the urban landscape — with bemused cynicism.

(Thanks to alanr for the link.)

It’s really astonishing — and also a little bit sad — to see the lengths people will go in order to effectuate a change in their appearance. It’s bad enough that some women feel the need to get fake tits. However good they look, silicone implants don’t feel very nice, and the complications of plastic surgery are often unpleasant. Just ask any girl who’s ended up with permanently numb nipples.

If you find fake tits lamentable, though, imagine the plight of guys who want so badly to be female that they perform do-it-yourself breast enlargements with a substance that’s about as sanitary as axle grease. Egad! It’s like being so hungry that you’d eat dog poop.

Apparently there are transgender support groups that are putting out the message that these pumping parties are dangerous. But probably the poor guys know that already. They’re like baseball players who take steroids, fully aware of the insane physical complications, just to have their moment of glory. One guy is willing to take the risk in order to be a home-run king, another guy to be a homecoming queen.

In a way it seems like stacking the deck to allow a transsexual to enter a beauty contest for women. Especially today when height, straight hips, and long legs are considered attractive, a former man would seem to have the edge over his naturally female competitors. If they won’t allow steroids in baseball, why allow testosterone in a beauty pageant?

To be fair, maybe the thing to do is to fling open the gates. Rather than have beauty contests be the exclusive preserve of women and their simulacra, you could stage contests that are essentially beauty free-for-alls. They could be the aesthetic equivalent of those free-style fights that pit boxers against sumo wrestlers, black belts against street fighters, and so on. You could pit women against men, pre-ops against post-ops, dykes against queens, trannies against he-men, people against animals, robots against clones. Rather than Miss Universe you could call the contest Universal Beauty or maybe just Hot Thing.

In a different era, this “boy” — as s/he prefers to be called — would have undergone intensive psychotherapy, leading up shock treatments or possibly lobotomy. Today, rather than cut up his brain we can cut off his breasts, maybe attach a kind of floppy dildo to his crotch — but is it the right thing to do?

Any moral question is complicated, but this one seems particularly so. Of course, it may only seem so complicated because it strikes to the very heart of so many of today’s gender issues, and because it is absolutely unprecedented for a parent to decide on whether a minor can undergo sex-altering surgery. Still, as you think about it, several issues come to the fore.

First, the story treats at great length all the pain the poor “boy” has undergone as a result of his maladjustment to his given gender. And naturally you’d think that the proper course of action would be to alleviate his pain — and yet aren’t teenagers angst-ridden creatures anyway? Why sex-altering surgery and not Prozac? What teenager doesn’t feel an absolutely overwhelming immediate need for some weird life change that he wouldn’t end up regretting later? Youth is impulsiveness, and how can you be sure, in spite of the girl’s lifelong insistence that he’s a boy, that you’re not allowing him to do something to himself that he’ll bitterly regret later?

Second, the age of consent in most places is sixteen. If a child can’t legally engage in sexual activity before the age of sixteen, how can the child be competent enough to determine something so irreversible as his gender?

Third, once you allow a parent to give a minor a sex-change operation, what’s to stop parents in the future from grooming children for such a procedure? It may sound far-fetched, but parents are often disappointed by the gender of their children. There are fathers who want a son but have nothing but daughters, there are mothers who clothe their sons in pink dresses, and so on. Take such a frustrated parent, give him a touch of psychopathology — and who doesn’t have at least a touch? — and it’s not hard to imagine the parent grooming the child for a sex-change operation.

Taken together, these would suggest that a parent should not be able to grant a minor child a sex-change operation. The child should have to wait until he can make the decision for himself… But then again, if you force him to wait, won’t he only become one of those unfortunate self-castration cases?

Although the women’s lib movement broke down a lot of gender barriers, at least in America and Europe, bastions of sexual distinction remain. Public toilets are the most notable example of this. No one has separate toilets for men and women in the home, and yet in public the separation is maintained. Here in New York, in fact, new legislation even proposes doubling the number of women’s bathrooms, so that there are two ladies’ rooms for every one men’s room. The theory is that this will shorten the inevitable traffic jams that pile up outside women’s bathrooms. But maybe they should just integrate all the bathrooms instead? Wouldn’t that really be the fair thing? It will force men to wait longer, as women adjust their hosiery and paint their faces, but it will shorten the lines for women. And that’s fairness, isn’t it?

Anyway, another bastion of gender distinction is the prison. Women go to one, men to another, and never do the twain meet. And yet, as this case demonstrates, it is going to become increasingly difficult for societies to separate the sexes when the distinctions between the sexes themselves are beginning to blur. Gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transvestites, cross-dressers, pre-ops, transsexuals, hermaphrodites — should criminals from the gender-bending classes really be forced into prisons designed to isolate heterosexuals? Isn’t that putting a square peg in a round hole?

Justice would demand either that you develop specific prisons for each subcategory of gender — not just one for men and one for women, but one for each type of in-between too — or that you just throw everybody together in an incarcerary free-for-all. After all, here on the outside we all live together in a great big jumble, and it more or less seems to work. Why not throw them all together on the inside too?

Somehow it is only too fitting that Ernest Hemingway’s enormous machismo should become a psychodrama for at least one of his children — in this case his youngest son Gregory, who ultimately underwent a sex change and renamed himself Gloria. It must have been the ultimate rebellion against his father, who tended to view gays askance. Or perhaps it was a form of self-punishment: if he felt guilty at not being able to live up to the image of machismo, then becoming a woman might have been a way of expunging his guilt by punishing and degrading himself. Either way, it’s hard not to lay the sad psychopathology of Gregory/Gloria at his father’s feet. It reeks of intergenerational conflict.

That being said, the lawsuit arising from the death of Gregory/Gloria had the potential to be epochal. G/G planned to bequeath his assets to his (apparently female) wife. However, his heirs claimed that he had already undergone the sex change before marrying his wife, and thus he was a woman trying to marry a woman. Since Florida does not recognize same-sex unions, the marriage was not legitimate and therefore G/G couldn’t leave his assets to his “wife.” It’s a pretty brilliant legal strategy, even if it smacks of kids looking for any excuse not to leave the dough to the widow. The judge said that it would require him to determine whether G/G was, for legal purposes, a man or a woman. And what was he? As a father and longtime male, he was a man. As a transsexual, he was a woman. So what should the law consider him? Are you the gender you were born as? The gender you died as? The gender you spent the bulk of your life as?

These are tough questions, and their resolution would have set a powerful legal precedent. However, the parties ultimately avoided the decision by settling out of court, thus leaving G/G in gender limbo — which no doubt has his father turning over in his grave.

There is probably a very simple explanation why this sleepy transvestite would have a bomb in the back of his car. Maybe he’s a domestic terrorist who was going to blow up some government building. He was just changing into his disguise when he fell asleep with his shorts around his ankles. Or maybe he’s a suicidal crossdresser, a man so deeply conflicted about his proclivity for women’s panties that he was contemplating blowing himself up — but then fell asleep before lighting the fuse.

Those are the obvious explanations, but wouldn’t it be great if it was something completely outré? Cynics like to say that everything has been done before, there’s nothing new under the sun, and so on. But what if this guy had conceived of some crazy sex practice that had never before been done on earth? “I’ll dress up like a woman, expose myself, light the fuse, masturbate, then explode and ejaculate at the same time!” After all, the male orgasm is so similar to an explosion or eruption that it’s not odd to think somebody might envision scaling it up, so to speak. Why not? Bigger is always better. If you have a pistol, you dream of a canon. So too with a cock. It can make you dream of a bomb.

Every week the conjunction of medicine and technology seems to raise some new ethical dilemma: cloning, stem cells, assisted suicide, reproductive technology, etc. What’s clear is that, after the industrial revolution and the information revolution, we’re at the precipice of a kind of biological revolution where hitherto “natural” processes such as birth and death are becoming an art — which is to say that they are becoming completely unnatural.

No matter how many novel ethical issues are raised, it is also clear that what can be done will be done. If scientists refrain from some procedure out of moral concerns, then a renegade freak or group somewhere will figure it out for themselves and give it a try. That alien cult in Canada may not have really cloned a human last winter, but no doubt their basic story is something you’ll see a lot of in the future: independent researchers of questionable sanity performing radical experiments on human nature. “Welcome to the future,” says Dr. Jekyll.

Given this admittedly cynical proposition (ie that what can be done will be done), scientists might do just as well to push back the moral limits to an absolute of some kind — only forbid themselves experiments of obvious cruelty, and to hell with the rest of squeamish second-guessing. Better to determine the results of obviously inevitable experiments in controlled circumstances than to allow alien cults to perform them in the wild. Make clones and she-males and people with tails. Why not? The first test-tube baby created a furor, and now in vitro fertilization is commonplace. Society has an increasing tolerance of, if not outright fetish for, extreme differences. If you crossbreed the embryos of a human and, say, a boa constrictor, you’ll end up with a wild new creature that everyone envies and admires. He’ll have modeling contracts and talk show appearances and a Hollywood agent. Teenagers will look up to him and try to get epidermal transplant surgery so they can have scales like their idol. Women will want to sleep with him to find out what boa constrictor genes did to his penis. He’ll be a big, big star, unless of course the snake part predominates in him, in which case we could always release him in a forest or swamp somewhere.