A lesbian trapped in a man's body.

Due to a tangled web of book club/philosophy discussion groups I'm involved with, I received an invitation to listen to a talk by Angela Pettit on his/her experience with the transgender experience.

That's a picture of Angela, Angela's daughter and Angela's wife, from right to left. Angela's biography on the PFLAG site reads:

I am a post-op male to female transsexual. My SRS was with Dr. Brassard in January of 2002.

For those of you who care about such things, I was born October 27, 1942. (You can do the math.) I like to say that I now have three birthdays every year: my natal day; the day I started living full time as a woman – June 23, 2000; and the day of my SRS January 7, 2002. Strangely, my family only gets together to celebrate my natal day. No amount of advocacy seems to convince them that I really should have three birthdays each year.

Since the beginning of my transition in 1999, I have been very active in a variety of transgender organizations. I founded the Central Valley Transgender Support Group to serve the Fresno, CA area and began speaking at college campuses, churches, and business conferences. In addition, I am leader of PFLAG-Fresno, and was recently appointed TNET Coordinator for the Mid-Pacific Region. My personal philosophy is that the many battles that GLBT people face can best be addressed through education of the general populace.

I suppose that I am different from most transsexuals in that I have been lovingly accepted by my immediate family, my birth family, and my wife's birth family. My immediate family is composed of Jonni, my wife of 38 years, and our daughter, Audra, and her husband. All have been most accepting and understanding from the first time we notified them of my transition. I am truly blessed.

In 2001 I was notified that I, along with Jonni and Audra, had been chosen to participate in the shooting of a one-hour Discovery Channel special entitled, Changing Sexes: Male to Female. The footage was shot in December and January of 2001-2002 and was finally shown in the fall of 2002. (It is still being shown approximately every six weeks.)

I served in the U.S. Air Force as a navigator/bombardier on a B-52 from 1963 until I retired in 1984. I flew more than 280 combat missions over Vietnam. As a result, I hold 13 Air Medals and a Distinguished Flying Cross. After retirement from the Air Force, I became a teacher of high school math. More specifically, I was department head for both the math and science departments. I taught all levels of math but my greatest love was teaching pre-Calculus, and AP Calculus. Since I taught at a school in a small farming community, I elected to take early retirement when I started living full time as a woman.

It sounds like Angela has made a happy, succesful reassignment.

My sense is that on some level "gender reassignment surgery" is deeply compatible with the post-modern American ethical system. The highest value according to our highest Court is the aiblity to define our own value and seek the good as we find it. Certainly, as modern Americans, we deeply believe that we shouldn't be limited to the role defined by our history, or DNA, for that matter. GBLTism is an organized group that has a recognized place in the alphabet soup of minorities that Democrat politicians must recognize.

Is there, however, any wisdom to the now-distant conventional wisdom that human nature is not infinitely malleable?

Here is the controversial First Things essay by Paul McHugh. McHugh was the head of John Hopkins that shut down the "gender reassignment surgery" that Hopkins had become famous for. McHugh's decision was based on his conclusion that people claiming to be transgendered were not in fact being helped by the psychiatric profession through surgical intervention.

This passage is universally described by proponents of transgenderism as "hateful":

Their regular response was to show me their patients. Men (and until recently they were all men) with whom I spoke before their surgery would tell me that their bodies and sexual identities were at variance. Those I met after surgery would tell me that the surgery and hormone treatments that had made them “women” had also made them happy and contented. None of these encounters were persuasive, however. The post-surgical subjects struck me as caricatures of women. They wore high heels, copious makeup, and flamboyant clothing; they spoke about how they found themselves able to give vent to their natural inclinations for peace, domesticity, and gentleness — but their large hands, prominent Adam’s apples, and thick facial features were incongruous (and would become more so as they aged). Women psychiatrists whom I sent to talk with them would intuitively see through the disguise and the exaggerated postures. “Gals know gals,” one said to me, “and that’s a guy.”

For what it's worth, the same people who see hate in this description, also explain McHugh's putative hatefulness on his Catholicism, as if that dispenses with any need to intellectually engage McHugh's experience.

There is also sad site by a transgendered person for whom things did not go so well, it seems. One wonders how many others are not celebrating their new identity.

There is also the question of why others should be required to participate in what they think is a charade. Did Rene Richards, for example, really become a "women's" tennis player simply because they readjusted his genitalia?

Similarly, can a man formed into the likeness of a woman really understand the female experience of rape or sexual violence? That seems to be a real concern motivating this this post by a Canadian "rape relief center."