Sunday 30 December 2007

Man, I Feel Like a Minority

The Curt Jester links to this disturbing article on the developing legal status of the "transgendered" and then asks the intriguing question, If people can be affirmed and legally recognised as being a woman when they are biologically male simply because they 'feel' like one, could a person also be affirmed and legally recognised as black if they were in fact white for the same reason?

Can we invent a category of transraced? Or would that bring two cultural taboos into an unwinnable conflict? Or, let's take another example, what about those who feel older than their biological age- the transaged? Can I be given a senior's card and get discounts in shopping centres because I get on better with folk over 50 than with people my own age (and like to wear waistcoats, to boot)? The list goes on.

I read somewhere a little while ago (I forget where) that if abortion had nothing to do with sex, it would still be seen as horrific and barbaric. I wonder if the same principle applies here. Its all about sex. If these things had nothing to do with sex, nobody would have gotten up to try to normalise them. Same principle as with homosexuality and the gay agenda. Our culture's relativism happens in very few other places.

Mind you, one question that does intrigue me is what the ratios are with these "transgendered" folk of men who 'feel' like women and women who 'feel' like men. Are there more of one than of the other? One usually only hears about the former. A related question: why is it that gay men are almost always effeminate (thankfully with the exception of Ian McKellen) whereas lesbians don't act more masculine? I've often wondered about that. What is the reason behind it and is it significant? Good luck getting someone to do research on that though. They'd probably be sued.

Saturday 29 December 2007

Feast of St Thomas Becket


Oh, incidentally, I'm back.


And it seemed not inappropriate, after a long hiatus of no-blogging, to recommence on this, the feast of St Thomas Becket, the man whom I went to England in large part to encounter and to venerate. And so I did.


After two weeks and one day of walking across English farmland, up Downs and down Downs, through villages, towns and cities, woods and fields, I entered the ancient city of Canterbury, mother of English Christianity, and made my way to the cathedral like the pilgrims of old. There, I knelt and prayed on the spot where Thomas was united with Christ in death, on ground that, 837 years ago today, was stained with his blood and brains.


I have been back in Australia for a couple of weeks now, but today I wore my pilgrim's badge to work with a certain amount of pride. Also a certain sense of unworthiness. One thing about martyrs is they stand as a reproach and challenge to one's temporal attachments. The desires in us that have not been purified, that still seek after worthless things, or even seek after good things but make them an end in themselves rather than a means and signpost to the glory and beauty and goodness that are in God and Him alone- while sometimes we can ignore or excuse these, the martyrs show them up with monochrome starkness by living and embracing the alternative. And that alternative is the Cross.


I shall no doubt say more about the numerous events and epiphanies of my pilgrimage in the near future. For today, however, it is enough for me to recall the awful and numinous experience of kneeling in the place where an English archbishop completed his journey to Calvary, and thence to Heaven.